One of the most hilarious and self-defeating memes to emerge in the last year is that of the Fake Geek Girl. Fake Geek Girls are supposed to be women who feign an interest in geek culture for the purpose of attracting men who like comics, science fiction, fantasy, superhero movies, etc., in order to later emotionally mutilate them.
This scheme seems like an awful lot of work to me. In between a busy schedule of blogging about new Star Wars movies and pouring over the authorized Game of Thrones maps with a glass of wine in hand, I don’t have a lot of time to set traps for unsuspecting geeks. And I’m entirely unclear on why any woman would go to such lengths. What’s the payoff?
I do see the payoff for the men who have created this female identity: The Fake Geek Girl allows rejected men to marinate in their resentments and rationalize their romantic failures as the product of some uber mean girls plan, all the while convincing themselves that they’re central to the lives of even the women who ultimately turn them down. Which is why I’m glad to see a man, Patrick Willems, explain exactly how ludicrous the Fake Geek Girl construction is in the above video.
But while the paranoia and anger of the Fake Geek Girl meme are certainly worthy of ridicule, I feel more sorry for the guys who believe it than I do for the women falsely accused. It’s not so much that guys afraid of Fake Geek Girls are angry at women who are trying to ensnare them. It’s that they’re terrified that those women will look at them and find them wanting in ways that don’t have anything to do with the state of their comics collections. And even more terrified that women might actually care about those comics too. If women really do like this geek stuff, the thinking must go, then nowhere is safe.
