Nerdy Girls Have Attained Sexy Status

Tag : Sexy High Heels

After endless amounts of drool over sexy male nerds (like therecent NY Observe r piece about male " nerds of steel ," hailing the arrival of geeks who are buff), many men and womenare cheering about the "revenge of the nerdette" -- the rise of thesexy nerd girl.
Of course, until now female geeks' sex appeal has been roughlyequivalent to that of Napoleon Dynamite . Wikipedia describes the nerd girl as a stock character who wears eye glasses, dressesunfashionably, wears pigtails (and other little girl items likemary-jane shoes and knee high socks), is shy and socially inept andeither overweight or gangly. More recently, they sometimes have apassion for social justice (see Simpson, Lisa) are feminist orpost-feminist (see Granger, Hermione) or come up with the piece ofknowledge that enables the plot to be resolved (see Velma from Scooby Doo ). And sometimes, just sometimes, they get a makeover and becomekinda pretty albeit in an awkward way (see Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer ).
But that's not what nerd girl 2.0 looks like. The new, tech-savvy,sci-fi loving nerd looks more like a cheerleader than a mouse: thisweek's Newsweek introduces us to the new nerd girls , "they're smart, they're techie and they're hot."
Love your pocket protector!
The Nerd Girl group at Tufts University, for example, "may not looklike your stereotypical pocket-protector-loving misfits -- [one]has a thing for pink heels -- but they're part of a growing breedof young women who are claiming the nerd label for themselves. Indoing so, they're challenging the notion of what a geek should looklike, either by intentionally sexing up their tech personas, or bysimply finding no disconnect between their geeky pursuits and moretraditionally girly interests such as fashion, makeup and highheels." An example of the new prototype is Cristina Sanchez: amaster's student in biomedical engineering and a former cheerleaderwho can talk "endlessly" about aerospace.
Newsweek goes on to say that they've modeled themselves after TinaFey, whose character on 30 Rock is a " Star Wars -loving, tech-obsessed, glasses-wearing geek, but who's garneredmainstream appeal and a few fashion-magazine covers. Or on actressDanica McKellar, who coauthored a math theorem, wrote a book forgirls called "Math Doesn't Suck" and posed in a bikini for Stuffmagazine. Or even Ellen Spertus, a Mills College professor andresearch scientist at Google -- and the 2001 winner of the SiliconValley "Sexiest Geek Alive" pageant."
But when nerd girls stop looking like dorks and start looking likecheerleaders, and get more attention for both sexiness and smartsas a result, is that a post-feminist triumph? Or is it a return tothe days of Mad Men , when lipstick, not ideas, was the most important thing to grace awoman's lips?
Gadget fetishes
Clearly, some things have changed. A recent Pew Internet & AmericanLife project found that among users 12 to 17, girls dominate theblogosphere and social networking sites, and outnumber boys increating websites of their own. Women gamers now even outnumber menages 25-34, according to a 2006 study by the Consumer ElectronicsAssociation.
Because of the numbers, sites catering to nerd girls areflourishing. Their must-see-Web-TV is GeekBrief.TV -- hosted by a make-up clad, pigtail-free geek whose recent postssalivate over a Qik private alpha test for iPhones, for example,trialing it, and finding bugs in it that are "exciting" totroubleshoot. And there's a survey polling readers about the bestgadget stores, which ends in a colorful chart.
And of course, there's io9 , a must-read news aggregator (that's part of the Gawker family),all about sci-fi gossip. Five of the 12 staff are women, includingthe top and assistant editors. It features important topics likewhether Battlestar Galactica copied (and improved upon) Star Trek , how dystopian fiction can save the world and five lessons the Hulk should have learned from Hyde .