Part Of The Problem, Not Part Of The Solution

Let’s face it: all teenagers have their own slightly altered version of rebranded uniqueness they sold just last year. And every time, it’s a new type of top, a new cut of jeans, a new place to put a waistline in a dress. But this time it seems to have gone a little far. That is where the “geek” girls come in (and I use those speech marks for an extremely good reason).

It seems that in the last few years of fashion, being entirely your own person (whilst of course maintaining everything magazines told you you needed to do, just like everyone else) took a swing back into style. Whether this was owing to an inextricable link between the amount of coming-of-age Disney movies that were produced in the early 2000s I can’t say, but being an individual, a stylised and mass produced individual, came right back into style. Now I could moan all day about the problems I have with the assembly-line conjured “You need to always be yourself just like everyone else” crap, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. From this grew the tangent that became “geeky girls”, who are, in my opinion, and ultimate symbol of male egotism.

These girls will wear glasses with no lenses (because OhMyGod they’re so nerdy!), and will constantly repeat that one physics joke they heard from The Big Bang Theory (The one about losing an electron? You know it).  Now you may look at this and say hold up; making smart cool? Making smart women an attractive thing to be? Isn’t that better? Isn’t really it more empowering than degrading, that young women and girls are proud to be claiming they enjoy what are always stereotyped as male dominated activities, like video games? Not quite so much.

It would be extremely empowering if these teens were doing this for anything other than the reason they are: because teenage magazines are advertising it as something that will get you a man. And I wish, how I wish, I was kidding. This, not only, is another corrupting influence, pushing the “this is what men want and so this is what you will be” crap down our throats, but much worse: because people who jump happily into these “geeky girl” personas believe that this is genuinely a step forward for feminism; acting like a man to get one. To me, that sounds a hell of a lot more like a setback than a step forward.

There is nothing wrong with being female and being nerdy, and I say that as a true musical theatre buff (and not the cool ones), along with being someone who plays about an hour of Team Fortress 2 online every night (Shooting games are the BEST frustration reliever ever sometimes). So I completely fail to understand how another fashion craze is suddenly some kind of bullshit inspiration. And although you could interpret this as a repeat of the debate on whether dressing in a manner that is considered “slutty” is empowering or worsening the problem, I think sadly this is a little less complicated.

It may seem like a minor issue in the grander scheme of the Feminist movement, but the amount of peddling magazines do already to try and teach young girls how to get a boyfriend is bad enough, without deluding them that it’s actually making them stronger as women to do this, when the real reason they’re doing it undermines that. I’m not saying for a second that girls shouldn’t be allowed to be nerdy or participate in traditionally male activities, I am simply sick and tired of trying to explain that playing Mario Kart once in your life and wearing empty frames from Primark doesn’t strike any blows that would break the traditional image of woman; it’s simply continuing to enforce it under a new guise, because the motivation behind the change enforces the traditional belief that all women want to do is please men.