it probably helps that I was told v young that girls could be smart or attractive but not both and I was like “okay well I’m the smart type.” But also COME ON I’ve worked on so much shit since then are you seriously telling me that still drives my choices
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i've heard a couple other women describe stuff like this (iirc and ?) and my impression is it's lodged in *real* deep. like this is really young formative stuff about what gender(s) even *mean* or something like that
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i'm increasingly convinced that there are lots of genders including "nerd guy" and "nerd girl"
at birth you get sorted into one of two teams, but the teams are "default guy" and "default girl," and puberty is when you go from practice to big leagues
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I've talked to my dad about this a lot and he agrees
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say more? I'm not sure I get it
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feels like the norms + expectations + behaviors + clothing conventions + job paths for vanilla genders differ substantially from their nerd counterparts, like if you took an axis from M to F and copypasted it and rotated it 90 degrees youd get nerd M to nerd F
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ohhh interesting. my first instinct is "wait how is that different from just talking about different social types or groups or something" but actually I think there might be parallels to the social push against being gender nonconforming that make this really useful
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ooo do you mind elaborating?
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(also i dont think it actually is drastically different from social types! idk where the line is tbh)
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hm I dunno. so I imagined violating the "nerd girl gender norms" towards "normal girl gender norms" and I felt so much internal pushback. Scary, undermines my sense of who I am in a major way, shakes up what I think I'm allowed to do. Also experimenting feels taboo...
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fwiw i've run into stuff like this and experimenting ended up being just straightforwardly great. like e.g. i had a thing like "nerd boys aren't allowed to lift" but then i started lifting and everyone was really supportive and i heard about other guys lifting too
i could imagine similar girl stuff getting genuinely more pushback but idk i think it would be really wholesome to like, see nerd girls experimenting with makeup or whatever it ends up being, i'd support that anyway!
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got more pushback in like, middle school
afaict people chill out a lot as they age (or I've been filtering for chill friends)
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totally. it's hard to imagine *anyone* caring in reality, but it psychologically feels so big. it's just this idea again / 's idea of doing things you "consider somehow illegal"
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Replying to @grassyfndz and @altbasket
college friend once recommended I make a list titled "everything grasshopper doesn't do" and then proceed to do all of them. it's probably still good advice tbh
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'consider somehow illegal' is 's phrase btw, I'm just getting a lot of use out of it!
also this whole thread is a mood, will read more when I've woken up
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