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I recently came across Paul Graham's "Why Nerds are Unpopular" essay and, together with a discussion I had with some of my geek-ette friends about the lack of normal-looking women on the screen, a light-bulb suddenly went off in my head. It was total internet kismet, where two seemingly disparate pieces of information traveled to me from all over the world as electrical impulses and locked like adjacent puzzle pieces in my brain.

Graham posits that "nerds are unpopular because they have other things to think about." They don't work hard enough at being popular because it simply takes up too much mental RAM. He also theorizes that American high schools are such cruel social ecosystems not because kids are inherently nasty or teenagers are inherently crazy but that the typical American high-school is basically a holding pen divorced from reality.

I copy and pasted the essay into Word and made essentially just three substitutions -- "smartgirls" for "nerds" (and "smart kids"), "unattractive" for "unpopular" (and "attractive" for "popular"), and "femininity" for "school". If you'd indulge me and think of femininity not as a state of being but an actual place, smooth over some of the bumps and generally carry the metaphor through in your mind, it is stunning how much of the essay still made sense.

Some totally unedited clips from the search-and-replaced version:

"Smartgirls serve two masters. They want to be attractive, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And attractiveity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary femininity."

"So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in attractiveity, why are smartgirls so consistently unattractive? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be attractive.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unattractive in femininity makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be attractive would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be attractive.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in femininity, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things."

One particular aspect of the essay that really carried well in the search-and-replaced version is Graham's description of popularity as something that is cruel and twisted because it is a hierarchy that emerged out of a vacuum. It is form that emerged without function. It is devoid of connection to genuinely useful qualities that get stuff done in the real world, and as it is hierarchy that exists to be hierarchical, it is a zero-sum game. Just as not everybody could be popular, not everybody could be attractive. The way to claw your way up this kind of hierarchy is to be as conformist to the ideal as possible while pushing somebody else down. If a pill was invented tomorrow that will make all women instantly size zeros, the goalposts will shift to something else that is difficult to attain.

"Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that 'no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.' I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American femininity kids work at attractiveity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being attractive every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists."

Now that I'm older and I can look at things a bit more objectively, I can see that I was not dealt a bad deck of cards, looks wise, by genetics. In fact, my mother was always especially anguished by the fact that I could be pretty if only I tried. If I bothered. Made some minimal efforts to be acceptable.

"The main reason smartgirls are unattractive is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable."

"Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we smartgirls didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others."

One of the thing I find myself doing more and more as I get older is wearing makeup not just for special occasion, but during workdays as well. It was a hefty initial investment in terms of learning how to do this in a way that is becoming. But now, it is perhaps an extra 10 minutes before I head out the door in the morning and an extra five minute at night taking it off. I don't like it because I can't touch my face and the make-up remover always hurts my eyes, but it's OK. But why do I do it? Pure behaviorism. People are nicer to me when I look prettier. They think more highly of me. But do you know what's scary? When everybody starts doing that, then it's no longer enough. Then it becomes the new bare minimum. That's the way it is in some offices...you don't go in to work bare faced. There's no version of professional attire that doesn't involve tricky clothing items like tights and heels. As an individual woman, I can become more attractive. With a little more effort, I can move up the chain. As women, we are collectively spinning the wheels like a hamster in a cage.

"A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American femininity, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison."

The truly depressing thing about this exercise is when it breaks down. Graham talks encouragingly about how nerds find that their lives get better as they enter college and then the real world. The following quote is the unaltered original:

"Few nerds can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of attractive kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after."

Just wait it out, Graham advised. The world you live in is a bubble that is cruel and stupid and pointless. But one day you'll graduate from high school and life will get better. But...I don't get to graduate from being a girl. I am a permanent resident in this holding pen from reality where my Dad wanted me to lose weight so badly he told me once he wished I would develop anorexia ("just mild anorexia."). I don't get to move on from a cruel and stupid world where where few films pass the Mo Movie Measure (movies that pass have (a) least two female characters, (b) who talk to each other and (c) about something other than a man). Heck, I don't even want to live in a world where there is a need for a Mo Movie Measure.

I was always an lousy dieter, even though I would try to lose weight all the time (my mom started telling me aged 8 to start watching my weight). My size would fluctuate according to how active I was, but not (except for the briefest periods) according to how little I tried to eat. I've been frustrated, I've been disgusted with myself, I've been depressed about it (esp. since getting back to Taiwan), I've been resigned (my new year's resolution for 2009 was not to diet because I always fail to lose the weight anyhow.)

But it's not until now that I feel like I'm connected all the dots. As incredible as it seem...I didn't want to be thin. Not enough to give up food, which is a continual source of joy in my life. I didn't want to be chic and well-put-together all the time...because I'm more comfortable in jeans and sneakers. I have more interesting things to do.

Don't get me wrong. I love being a girly girl. I love dressing up for a party. But not every day. Not because I have to.

I weep to think of all the human ingenuity and effort and and productivity lost over a big shell game played with fashion magazines and anti-aging creams. They say that women aren't as competitive as men. But oh we are. We're just competitive over the one thing that we're told over and over again through so many different mediums is the only thing that makes us matter -- what we look like.

-- Battlepanda