Fake geek girl

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Fake geek girls is a snarl word developed by men with limited social skills used to describe women who partake in geek culture but are deemed sexually inaccessible to the average male geek; rather than accept that cute girls can geek as well as, if not better than, the basement-dwelling crowd, some geeks assume that these women are faking their geek cred in order to gain status, money or attention.

Outside of the odd paid booth babe (a lot of whom are geeks in their own right anyway), such women do not actually seem to exist. But yet... SURVIVAL HINGES ON CONSTANT VIGILANCE!

The conventional wisdom is that There Are No Girls On The Internet, and there's a strong perception (especially among straight white male gamers) that the core demographic of geekdom is straight white males who work in computing. In practice, of course, geekdom covers a wide swath of artistic and scientific endeavors—computers, gaming, science, music, theatre, fashion, literature, film, photography—and although women aren't always as recognized (and don't always have the same specific interests) as men, there are plenty of geek girls out there.

There's been no shortage of attempts to minimize the contributions of women in the STEM fields; although people like Marie Curie and Grace Murray Hopper can't really be ignored, the ENIAC programmers (almost all women, and almost all anonymous, with Mauchly and Eckert getting most of the credit) were treated as little more than secretaries, and the contributions of people like Hedy Lamarr and Danica McKellar are only recognized because of their much wider fame as actresses. When Miss USA 2011 Alyssa Campanella described herself as a geek (and she does have significant artistic geek cred as a former high school theater nerd[1]), the backlash was muted but significant.

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  1. http://www.womanaroundtown.com/sections/living-around/alyssa-campanella-girly-geek-wins-miss-usa-crown
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