Jezebel put up an interesting post last night about nerds, and what is and isn’t a nerd, et cetera and so forth. I didn’t comment then – I’ve found myself commenting less and less on blogs lately, not that that has anything to do with this – but after ruminating on it last night, I commented on it this morning.

And now I’m posting about it. Because that’s how I roll.

The post and the comments are all about how popular culture examples of female nerds aren’t actually nerds, and something about that bugged me. Rachel Berry from Glee isn’t a nerd. Tracy Flick from Election isn’t a nerd. Willow Rosenberg from Buffy isn’t a “reliable” nerd. And if you ask what a nerd is, you get a fairly stringent list of characteristics, and no list is the same.

That’s the problem with reclaiming a term that’s used as a taunt in adolescence. Each of us who were called nerds or geeks or freaks in junior high and high school have our own experiences and therefore our own mental definitions of what qualifies. I’ll use myself as an example.

I wrote research papers for fun. I had my head in a book anytime I could get away with it. I was the know-it-all who permanently had her hand up in history and English. I was in choir. I was in drama. I was in speech. I was in academic bowl. I spent lunch hiding in the bathroom or the music room.

I’m pretty sure that makes me a nerd.

I didn’t like science fiction and fantasy. I had never seen anime before I went to college. I didn’t pick up a comic book until I was twenty. I never played Dungeons and Dragons. I didn’t like video games. I read romance novels and Seventeen.

According to a lot of definitions of nerd-dom, that makes me very much not a nerd.

I try not to define myself anymore, and it’s easier that way. It means that I can love Chuck and Glee, but find Lost ridiculous. I can love going shopping for both shiny patent shoes and handheld electronic gadgets. I can pick either Sephora or Midtown Comics for my lunch break.  I can write fanfiction and read Elle.  I don’t have to fit in a box. Life is more fun when you don’t try to force yourself into a box, let alone the box you lived in in high school.

Personally, I prefer to live without stringent definitions. I’d rather just be me.

Ginandtacos.com‘s article Pretzels and Spite is a good, interesting blog with excellent points. I enjoyed reading it, but I keep coming back to one thing: The unencumbered free market is only good at one thing: lowering prices.

Perhaps this is true – something that’s certainly up for debate, and something that I, with my degree in economics (with a concentration in finance at that; I know, however do I live with myself) don’t agree with – but it’s not even an assertion that’s demonstrated in the example. The airline industry isn’t unencumbered; in all honesty, the “unencumbered free market” doesn’t exist in this or any other capitalist country. How can I say that? Because we have government regulation. Every capitalist country has some degree of government regulation, and there isn’t an industry that’s untouched by it.

To continue with the airline industry example, yes, price regulation has ended. But after 9/11, it was replaced with a who slew of other kind of regulations that affected airline practices, affected and continues to affect airline customer experience, and undeniably affect the bottom line. People don’t fly as much as they otherwise might. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s also something the airlines can’t directly do a thing about, and thus in order to stay solvent they have to cut amenities.

It sucks, but it isn’t an unencumbered free market.

This is not to say I’m against government regulations – I wrote my economics thesis on environmental regulations and the use of emissions trading to meet said regulations – but simply to say that we don’t have a true free market. Period. And I don’t think we should, but equally, we cannot judge what an unencumbered free market can accomplish when it doesn’t exist.

The sticking point is apparently at :08, where one of the girls does a hip-pop. Now, I can’t dance. I really can’t dance. I can’t dance so much that I took weight training in college instead of a class in modern dance (which was considerably closer to my dorm, I might add), and even I know that hip popping is pretty much a standard in jazz and modern dance, not to mention modern cheerleading. The move itself isn’t sexual. It’s certainly not inherently sexual when performed by little girls in sweaters, tights, and boots.

But about 500 commenters agree with me there, and it’s not the thing that’s bugging me now. What’s bugging me are the comments like this one:

“it’s sick, quite frankly, that little girls would care so much about their clothing– how materialistic.”

This isn’t the only comment of this kind on the post – there are several in the vein of “they’re too young to care about their shoes!” – but this was definitely the most to the point.

Part of my reaction to it is increduality – I was pretty tomboyish after I got over my initial frilly dress phase around age seven, and I spent elementary school dying for a pair of Guess jeans. I got to go to the Gap for my back-to-school clothes for the first time when I was 12 and was so thrilled. I wanted my tennis shoes and sturdy sandals that I ran around to be cute.

And this is from someone who didn’t pay attention to fashion and what really looked nice until sometime in college, or possibly grad school.

There’s nothing wrong with being interested in clothes at the age of 8. There’s also nothing wrong with not being interested in them at that age (or any other). Kids are just as individual as adults, people. Really.

Sigh.

I mean, I’ve already imported my crap into Google – it’s not like I had much choice in the matter – and I realize that Web 2.0 companies need to make money just like everyone else, but it’s a little wearying that every single web app I use and like is eventually either made enterprise-only or dies or is sold to Google, at which point it’s Google-ized. The first time I remember it happening was with Writely, now Google Docs, but in the intervening years it’s happened again and again, at least a dozen times. At this point I’m just wondering when Twitter is going to go enterprise-only, and what Google-owned microblogging service will be recommended to us poor schlubs who aren’t enterprises, just normal people.

(And before someone from Google comes over and perkily evangelizes Reader – I’m sure it’s better than it was. But I hate change, I’m stuck in an airless, humid, stuffy apartment and can’t open the windows lest the dumbass cat I live with decides to jump from the second floor, I just finished the temper-inducing endeavor of paying my bills, and – because it’s worth repeating – I hate change.)

On another note, WordPress. Please. Could you send me my fucking comment notifications. Jesus.

MV: Why should feminists read romance novels?

SW: It’s a 50-plus-year-old industry comprised mostly of women writers operating their own businesses and producing a genre about women’s self-actualization, pursuit of autonomy, and acquisition of sexual agency for an audience made mostly of women, who buy over $1.4 billion dollars worth of books a year. No, no, nothing feminist or even subversive about that.

If more people thought of it in these terms, maybe romance would cease being viewed as the most sexist, anti-feminist literary genre out there.  It’s not even close to being that; science fiction and fantasy, in my opinion, wins that one hands down – this is, after all, a genre where its acceptable for Harlan Ellison to grope a female author on stage and pass it off as a joke.

There’s also some interesting discussion of Mandy Van Deven’s use of ‘smut books’ to describe romance novels.  I kind of agree with people who don’t really like the use of that term, but in my case it doesn’t have anything to do with the ‘derogatory’ connotations of the word – I use smut myself to describe my own erotic/pornographic writing.  My problem with it is that it’s…not accurate.  For one, does any novel with explicit sex count as pornographic now?  If so, I have a long list of more ‘literary’ novels that I’ll now be referring to as smut.

And there’s a second problem with the use of the word – not all romance even fits into Mandy’s own definition.  There’s more than one subgenre where the sex is either nonexplicit or nonexistent.  Where do these books fit?

But all in all, a really awesome article, and I’m glad to be seeing coverage of romance in the feminist press, if only so that the next time the fact that I admit to reading Claudia Dain and Sherrilyn Kenyon, I can have links to send to feminist friends who roll their eyes and accuse me of being counterproductive to the cause.

Yeah.  It happens.

I’m on vacation right now, and after spending this past weekend down in D.C. doing all the tourist crap and eating my way through Penn Quarter, I’m home again finishing with the redocorating, such as it is.  I hung almost all my pictures today, set up my internet after shrieking at Verizon for the better part of a month, and made dinner.  Tomorrow is laundry, hanging the last picture, and making a list of things I need to buy for additional storage.  Thursday is a shopping spree for said storage items, a fun trip to the vet with Dom, and putting all the stuff together and getting rid of all the damn boxes.  Friday is a hair cut.

Then Monday it’s back to work.  Yippee.

It’s making me tired.

She made me furious when she was first selected, not only because her stances appear to be as opposite to mine as you can possibly get, but also because I firmly believe that 2 years as a governor of the least populous state in the country, preceded only by a tenure as mayor of a town of 9000 do not make her qualified to be vice president of the United States, especially VP behind a candidate in his seventies with a family history of heart disease and cancer.  She could be president, and the idea is frankly terrifying.

But I’ve moved on.  I’m ready to do everything I can to make sure she and Senator McCain are not elected.   I just wish everyone else could move on along with me.

Yes, it is a supervillain musical.  Yes, it will kick ass. Yes, everyone must watch it.

Joss has posted the plan of action here.  I’m a geek, so obviously I can’t wait.