Argh! This Geek Girl war of authenticity just won’t go away! It has gotten under my skin over the past year to such an extent that it has manipulated my fingers into typing my own, personal take on it. For those of you not aware of how this issue has hit the inter webs again, a well know tweeter/ writer Tara Brown (@tara) wrote an article on Forbes.com titled “Dear Fake Geek Girls Please Go Away”. Now the title was a little bit more inflammatory than the actual post, as her closing thoughts were more of ‘digging deep’ into what interests you in order to call yourself a real geek, but it did talk about those ‘deserving the label’ and ‘exposing the posers’. And this troubled me. For who defines posers and the deserved? Unless there is a Masters of Geek, no one can or should. (A great dissenting article on the Mary Sue site can be read here). I actually thought Tara’s article meandered (I reserve the right to be meandering as I am not being paid by forbes), and never made a strong point as to how geeks should rise above their doppelgangers. But what it did reflect to me was our lack of a true ‘geek’ definition (yes she used the original definition of a circus freak, we’ve all pointed that out in myriad posts). In some instances, it seemed like a geek was a person highly versed in the entire geek canon (Patton Oswalt), in others, simply someone who is passionate and skillfully knowledgable about something (the young girl who knits). So by extension, you can’t call yourself an Avengers geek unless you know the canon intimately. Let me come out of the closet. I don’t. But I will still be going to the midnight showing with a geek flag in hand.
I *wasn’t* a geek in school. I didn’t read X-Men, my dad didn’t give me his Foundation Series books to read (which I give him shit about now). Instead, I read (and liked) Sweet Valley High and Nancy Drew books, I obsessed over clothes and boys. But I was also a competitive skater who trained 5+ hours a day and had to keep straight A’s. Girls especially, liked to ‘hate’ me. Even when I was part of the popular crowd, I never felt comfortable…and that continued all the way through college. I felt different. Had I known that there was a world that I could have found support and solace in, things probably would have been easier. But I survived, as we all do.
Fast forward to today. I consider myself a geek. Would I pass a geek litmus test? HELL NO. (more…)
I know that most of the pictures that I post, that are often associated with me, are ‘Badass’. I am bloodied, bruised and angry, with some form of a weapon in my hand, glaring out at you with angry eyes. My 
