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1. Embed this notice
   mekka okereke :verified: (mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 02:00:01 JST mekka okereke :verified:

   As your friendly neighbourhood jock-nerd, I'm here to remind you once again that nerds have always been more misogynistic than jocks, and it's not particularly close.

   I said what I said.

   Y'all act surprised every time this gets revealed to be true.

   • Embed this notice
     mekka okereke :verified: (mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 04:00:40 JST mekka okereke :verified:

     in reply to

     • Charles 𝄢 H
     • Christian Kent

     @ckent @celesteh

     1. I think you might be talking about homophobia instead of misogyny? Related and in many ways overlapping, but not identical.

     2. But even still, the gaming industry exists. IRC exists. I've been called the homophobic F word way more times by nerds than by jocks, and it's not remotely close. Let's not pretend that the f-word is not commonly used by nerds and other poasters that think themselves edgy. That same homophobia just transitioned to 4chan / Twitch / YT.

     That said, I spent a lot of my time playing college football arguing with my teammates that football is without a doubt the most homoerotic sport invented by man, and so their homophobia made zero sense. That's like going to a rock concert and complaining that the music is too loud. And I pointed out that the percent of gay people that play football, is almost certainly *higher* than the percent of gay people in the population of men in general. Because football teams are a great place for gay men that don't want to be found out to hide.🤷🏿♂️

   • Embed this notice
     Christian Kent (ckent@urbanists.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 04:00:42 JST Christian Kent

     in reply to

     • Charles 𝄢 H

     @celesteh @mekkaokereke I’m confused. The jocks were throwing homosexual and feminine insults at the nerds, with none in return. Later in life it was always the jocks who revealed to be homosexual themselves, and now are fighting the move from single-sex to co-educational schooling.

   • Embed this notice
     Charles 𝄢 H (celesteh@post.lurk.org)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 04:00:43 JST Charles 𝄢 H

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke

     Evidence: Jocks pull

   • Embed this notice
     Lauren Weinstein (lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 04:01:34 JST Lauren Weinstein

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke As per: "Meet the Guys: The Jerks of Computer Science" - https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/02/27/meet-the-guys-the-jerks-of-computer-science

   • Embed this notice
     Azuaron (azuaron@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 04:19:15 JST Azuaron

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke As a nerd, I can't tell you how quickly I went from full defensive, "No, that's not true, that can't be true!" to "He's totally correct, it's not even close. Why did I even have that initial reaction?"

     I suspect my reaction was caused by my own experience of jocks in high school, but that's not misogyny.

     As an adult, I've literally had to make HR complaints against male coworkers for things like implying a female coworker's value was in being pregnant. And my company is considered better-than-most for this kind of thing.

     mekka okereke :verified: repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Rachel Greenham (strangenoises@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 07:19:03 JST Rachel Greenham

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke i think some of us that were Assigned Nerd At Birth got used to feeling defensive about it. but dammit I'm not a nerd, I'm a geek!

   • Embed this notice
     FoolishOwl (foolishowl@social.coop)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 07:19:18 JST FoolishOwl

     in reply to

     • Azuaron

     @Azuaron @mekkaokereke The little I did high school sports, I was used to teens of both genders expressing mutual respect for each other's performance. Mutual respect and support was a big part of the ethos.

   • Embed this notice
     Remco van Bree (blikkie@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 07:56:20 JST Remco van Bree

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke as someone who was rather awkward in his teens and twenties. I definitely feel like I dodged some bullets here and there where I could have taken a bad turn into full misogyny. I once had a friend parrot some PUA talking points that made me feel so icky that I let that friendship wither..

   • Embed this notice
     JackieM (jackiemauro@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 08:01:16 JST JackieM

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke HM!! Such an interesting statement. In my totally unscientific and spur of the moment opinion, I think this mostly holds, but in a specific sense.

     I think relatively few nerds genuinely *like* women, while a good share of jocks do. But the jocks who hate women do so in perhaps a more actively dangerous way, where they really seek to own and control us.

     1/2

   • Embed this notice
     mekka okereke :verified: (mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 08:01:16 JST mekka okereke :verified:

     in reply to

     • JackieM

     @Jackiemauro

     I agree that a lot of nerds don't even like women, or see them as equal human beings with their own agency.

     But I think the nerd form of misogyny is both more possessive and more dangerous.

     Eg, in my lived experience, nerd answers on these questions are significantly worse than athlete answers:
     * Should women have reproductive rights?
     * Is child marriage OK?
     * Should society "assign" women to men as partners? Or let women choose?

     These are truly dangerous and possessive misogynistic ideas, turning into dangerous and possessive laws and actions. More athletes choose the reasonable answers. Laws eroding women's reproductive rights, and legalising child marriage, and "intellectual" conversations around removing women's rights to even choose a partner, are coming from nerds, not jocks.

   • Embed this notice
     mekka okereke :verified: (mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 08:17:26 JST mekka okereke :verified:

     in reply to

     • JackieM

     @Jackiemauro

     That's a great point, and a great question. And I agree that the answers do change a lot depending on how we define jock.

     I'm talking about jock in the sense of US big revenue, big participation sports, like basketball and football. The athlete cultures of these sports are largely (inextricably?) intertwined with Black American culture.

   • Embed this notice
     JackieM (jackiemauro@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 08:17:27 JST JackieM

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke i mean, a lot of this obviously depends on where you draw the lines around “Jock” vs. “Nerd”. If I had to sort republican congressmen, for example, they would generally fall into “jock” category. If we’re talking serious athletes vs someone working in tech, that’s a different sort of categorization I think.

   • Embed this notice
     JackieM (jackiemauro@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 08:17:27 JST JackieM

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke

     I guess, by “jock” do we mean guys who are naturally athletic and like sports? Or guys whose dads told them they weren’t real men so they started lifting weights and performing hypermasculinity to finally please the hateful men in their lives?

   • Embed this notice
     JackieM (jackiemauro@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 08:36:24 JST JackieM

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke In that case I am in FULLLLL agreement. Some of the spaces I’ve felt *most* comfortable in have been around really serious athletes (esp boxers). But I do love me a warhammer nerd now and then :P

     Some of my least comfortable moments were definitely thanks to the nerds when they started being the main presence in the bars I used to go to in SF. UGH.

   • Embed this notice
     Brian David (bcdavid@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 08:49:55 JST Brian David

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke Anyone who has watched 80s documentary Revenge Of The Nerds is well aware of this.

   • Embed this notice
     BeeCycling (beecycling@romancelandia.club)'s status on Monday, 13-Jan-2025 00:09:53 JST BeeCycling

     in reply to

     • The Animal and the Machine

     @taatm @mekkaokereke That's what I was thinking. They kind of get more of a chance to grow out of the ideas they form as teens, when they eventually form long term relationships with women. Which nerds can do too of course and which some jocks fail to do. It's that growing out of it thing that's key I think. So many misogynistic attitudes of adult men sound so juvenile. Sound like the ideas of boys who haven't learned better by experience of the real world.

   • Embed this notice
     The Animal and the Machine (taatm@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 13-Jan-2025 00:09:54 JST The Animal and the Machine

     in reply to

     @mekkaokereke
     I would guess it’s because the jocks actually talk to the girls.

     Is amazing what actually getting to know people does for your ‘ism’s.

     mekka okereke :verified: repeated this.