Hollywood even has a double standard for dorks.

Sarah Seltzer  

    Imagine this scene from a comedy: a group of female friends sit around smoking a bowl and working on the Wikipedia page for Lord of the Rings. Their fashion sense is decidedly iconoclastic and several sport thick-rimmed glasses. Without a trace of self-consciousness, they have a hilariously ribald discussion on the relative traits of elves and orcs.

     Awesome as it is, you'll never see this scene onscreen. No mainstream movie or TV series would dare group so many female nerds together, or celebrate them so unabashedly.

The story is not the same for dorks with Y chromosomes, who are have recently ascended to It-boy status thanks to the success of a clutch of slacker-themed movies and the TV series Beauty and the Geek. Two new TV shows, Chuck and The Big Bang Theory, also feature geek-boy main characters paired (platonically, for the time being) with hot women. More than ever before, a man with an mind for useless trivia and a socially inept posse can charm nubile women and audiences alike.

     A pop culture that rewards guy geeks and leaves their female counterparts isolated--and often, asexual--reflects a wider culture where men are still judged for the beauty within, and women for the beauty on the surface. Hollywood's expansive embrace of the geek is just an extension of a classic sexist fantasy.  

    Dubbed a "social experiment" by producer Ashton Kutcher, Beauty and the Geek pairs up awkward, blinking male twentysomethings with spray-tanned women whose career descriptions are "cigar model" and "ultimate Hooters girl," pitting them against their fellow mismatched pairs in contests of rocket science (for the beauties) and romance (for the geeks). They're competing for a cash prize, of course, but the show;s real goal is that both the ditzy and the dorky contestants will end up gushing about how much they've learned from each other.

     Still the show's premise that beauty and brains are mutually exclusive is inherently distasteful. Rubik's Cube proficiency, light saber collections, and mad quantum physics skills catapult men onto the show; BATG's legion of geeks may be laughable when they wax lyrical about Captain Kirk, but they're also enthusiastic and intelligent. Their putative partners, however, seem to have been chosen for their low IQs: "Beauty," in this show's parlance, by necessity equates with "painful stupidity." Several  of this season's contestants couldn't answer the question, "Who wrote Beethoven's Fifth?" On the other hand, one noted that her boobs cost eight-thousand bucks--and were worth it. Based on the dropped jaws and schoolboy giggles that greeted her appearance, the geeks seemed to agree. (Then again, it's worth questioning whether the one-sidedness displayed by both the beauties and the geeks is embellished for the cameras. Potential contestants must be aware that to get on the show, they have to play up their lack of either social savvy or smarts--the more cringe-worthy the contestants, after all, the more likely the audience is to tune in.)

     This season, Beauty and The Geek added a lone female geek and male beauty to their usual lineup. Sam, the male beauty, immediately started getting busy with one the distaff hotties, leaving the bespectacled Nicole without the attention of her partner. Her presence underscored the stereotype of the anomalous female dork. While the male geeks underwent normalcy-training as a mutual bonding rite with one another, her transformation out of geekdom was solo, and all the more pitiable.

     BATG hinges on the expectation that the competition will help beauties learn to appreciate their own competence--even if it's just in hot-oil massage--and the geeks will gain social pluck. But after four seasons of geeky guys and pneumatic blondes, the show�s take-home isn�t, �Hey, don�t be so judgy.� Rather, the message is that modelesque babes will see the inner value of all the men around them�not just the beefcake--and accommodate them. The geek guys, however, aren�t encouraged to see the beauty in one of their own. Apparently, some real-life geeks have taken that message to heart: A computer club at Washington State University recently auctioned off dates with nerds--with makeovers by sorority girls--as a step towards boosting female enrollment. (This plan was apparently more popular than the simple "reach out to girls who like computers" option.)

     For the most part, it�s still true that, even outside the boundaries of reality TV, men are judged by their merits first and their looks second, while for women, unattractiveness is a dealbreaker. There's an underlying assumption that men will have something to offer in the dating pool despite their looks, while women without good looks are essentially removed from the dating pool. This unfair standard is magnified onscreen, so for BATG's producers to reverse genders is commercially risky--and completely necessary. Nicole herself is aware of the hurdle gals like her face, telling the Boston Herald that in real life "a woman would be attracted to a guy geek more so than a guy to a girl geek--that is kind of a raw deal."

If the show's producers let Nicole lead the way for a new season of female geeks and male beauties, or even half and half, the show might end up being truly subversive and retain its sweet message. The original set up has outlived any novelty it may have had: gorgeous women selflessly nurturing awkward but brilliant men is a trope that's already all too common. 

The nerdy doofus and his comely girlfriend are hardly a new pairing, but filmmaker Judd Apatow has been reinvigorating this strain of male director wish-fulfillment with a vengeance. His movies epitomize what New Yorker critic David Denby calls the "slacker-striver" dynamic, which pairs underachieving, sloppy heroes with ultrasuccessful women. The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up (which Apatow directed) and Superbad (which he produced) all center on  immature guys. The women in these films are put-together, attractive, and have matured to the point of rejecting the college-dude sensibility that the movies themselves embrace. The female leads in both The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up are likable, but they're at the mercy of a narrative that, as critic David Denby points out, "reduces the role of women to vehicles. Their only real function is to make the men grow up."

     Within the universe of Apatow's films, male geeks are occupied by mining cultural annals for comedic material; they're "joke jocks," writes Time's film critic Richard Corliss, constantly trying to top each other with witty references to Cat Stevens and Star Wars.

    And Apatow's women are too bland, too non-nerdy to confront his men at a level beyond exasperated chastisement. We chuckle when they sound off, but they're not trying to make us laugh. So while they're technically successful, they're failures within the reclaimed male confines of comedy (presumably, they�re not smart or funny enough to compete in the joke-jock arena).

     "The Apatow dictum is that women can't aspire to equality in cracking jokes, but guys will indulge them and let them be the receptive audience," writes Corliss. And these nerds do meet with a receptive audience: On media blog Jezebel's thread about Knocked Up, for instance, commenter after commenter gushed about how lead doofus Ben had a sense of humor that overrode his less-than-conventionally-attractive looks. Perhaps what Ben's enthusiastic fans are saying is simply that not all heroes need to look like Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington. But there has to be a way to acknowledge that geeky qualities can be attractive in both genders without fetishizing uneven--and somewhat bizarre--male-female pairings. 

While current films may be a wasteland for the female nerd, a spate of '90s teen movies (Ten Things I Hate About You, She�s All That, Never Been Kissed) featured girl geeks as protagonists. Each of these heroines is a misunderstood eccentric on a journey towards happiness--and the prom. But unlike merry male Star Wars fanboys and hackers, these quirky girls are angry. Julia Stiles in 10 Things and Rachel Leigh Cook in She�s All That both built their characters around don't-touch-me snarls. These two heroines write and make art, but they don�t have the same enthusiasm for pencils and brushes that male geeks might feel towards their calculator or robotics kit. Instead, their pastimes are an outlet for pain.

     In the geeky girls' lives, the subsiding of that pain begins when they realize they are romantically desirable. Stiles begins to melt as she is serenaded by Heath Ledger from the school bleachers, and Cook blooms when she tries on a girly dress and takes off her glasses, appearing wispy and feminine. They literally stop being nerds when conventional femininity comes to the forefront.

"There;s a myth that geeky girls have to be sexually unappealing," says Annalee Newitz, editor of She's Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff.  Unlike Apatow's dudes, who are attractive because of their geekiness, these nerd girls must overcome it to become attractive--after which, we're meant to understand, they can never go back. What's proposed as so bizarre about a girl who willingly chooses sci-fi over stilettos is that she knowingly rejects her prescribed social role. If being an unabashed dork is a uniquely male province, then so are all its perks: being judged for intelligence and wit rather than looks, for one. The female dork chooses her own narrative over the narrative of a conformist society and demands to be accepted for who she is. And as punishment, pop culture robs her of her sex appeal.

     The same social fear that desexualizes female dorks also robs them of friends. Newitz notes that for pop-culture consumers to find actual depictions of women bonding, we have to look for cheerleading or shoe-shopping scenes. And nerd girls in movies like Never Been Kissed and Mean Girls, or TV series like Freaks and Geeks are invariably asked to make a Faustian bargain wherein they trade in their geek-girl pal for a shot at a makeover and the ascent to popularity and dates. "It's very rare that you get a posse of girl geeks," Newitz says. There's a fear, apparently, that if smart, rational girls get together, they will discover that they don't need men. Of course, as Newitz points out, when real-life dorky women gather they're far more likely to discuss iPhones and TV than to plan separatist communes. But the cultural taboo persists, keeping images of female dorks from being celebratory or even benign; they remain moody Cinderellas waiting for that invitation to the ball that will spring them from geek limbo.

     Would the real world look different if the pop-cultural one allowed fictional femme-nerds to embrace their dorkitude, rather than pout about it? After all, Apatow's dudes and the BATG geeks love the things that make them nerdy: They choose to spend all their time comparing action figures, building websites, and running around with swords in live-action role play. Knocked Up contains a pivotal scene in which a man sneaks out�not to cheat with another woman, as his wife fears, but to play fantasy sports with his buddies. Superbad , meanwhile, closes a raucous night with its two goofball leads cuddled  side by side in sleeping bags, remnants of pizza bagels scattered around them. In real life, women geeks have those sleeping-bag parties too, and groups of friends who engage in obsessive pastimes. Those pot-smoking, Wiki-editing, Lord of the Rings-loving girls doubtless exist in more than one dorm or suburban bedroom. But girl geeks are still waiting for the day when pop culture no longer demands that their nerdiness need not be redeemed, transformed, or made over--but can, like the dudes', be what makes them desired.

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