Or such seems to be the suggestion of this Newsweek article:
As geeks become chic in all levels of society, an unlikely subset is starting to roar. Meet the Nerd Girls: they're smart, they're techie and they're hot.
Translation: It's unlikely that females could be both brainy and attractive, because everyone knows that brainy women are ugly, and attractive women are morons, but we won't hesitate to play up their hotness at the expense of their smarts anyway.
Here's how the piece starts:
It's sweltering in Boston, and a dozen Tufts University coeds are out in shorts and tanks, attracting the usual stares. Only today the stares are for a different reason: the girls are huddled around a 750-pound machine that looks like a spaceship, long and wide with a bubble-shaped cockpit open to reveal a mass of pipes and wires. It's actually a solar car--one they've built from the ground up and hope to race next year. Suddenly sparks fly, and the girls jump back. They may be engineering whizzes, but they know a hazard when they see one. They call a teacher over to help solve the problem, as Alex McGourty, 21, gets ready to take the wheel. A junior with blond hair and freckles, she built her first car engine in high school: a biodiesel "veggie mobile" she ran on McDonald's fryer oil. McGourty revs out of the driveway, and almost immediately dislodges the car's chain. Campus police block off the street, and the baseball team, just returned from practice, lines up to watch. "Look out," a construction worker yells. "It's the Nerd Girls!"
Ohmigod, who wouldn't stare at girls huddled around a weird machine? That's, like, as weird as a bunch of guys knitting or something! Note that we learn what the girls are wearing, and how cute they are when they recognize danger! Yes, they're smart, but never fear: Construction workers still feel moved to whistle at them.
More:
They're trying to break down stereotypes by being as proud of their sexuality as they are of their geekiness. "Just because I get dressed up Saturday night, that doesn't mean I won't do better [than a guy] on a test on Monday," says Nerd Girl Sanchez.... The ideal, of course, is having gender be a nonissue, and for a few, it is. "I consider myself a normal girl who happens to like math and science," Sanchez says.
Breaking down stereotypes by embracing them? I love it! How clever! (They did say these girls were smart!) Not that it's "normal" for a girl to like math and science or anything...
Not that this article doesn't say things I've been saying for years:
Today's girl geeks are members of the first generation to have been truly reared on technology. They grew up on gender-neutral movies like "Hackers" and "The Matrix," and saw the transformation of Willow on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" from awkward geek to smart and sassy sex symbol. They've watched the geeky pursuits of technology and comic books transform from fringe subculture to pop mainstream, and they've capitalized on that geek-chic mentality to elbow their way into it.
...it's the attitude with which Newsweek is declaiming at us that is so revolting. Never mind the idea that a girl would have to "elbow her way" into a geek-chic mentality, which couldn't possibly be a natural place for her to be in the first place. No: It's the "how adorable are they?!" tone that makes me want to puke, as if the only way it is ever possibly worth writing about women as engineers and scientists and geeks is if they're totally "hot" at the same time.
I guess that's what we should start telling our daughters: "You can be anything you want to be, but it won't really count unless you're stereotypically fuckdoll-sexy too."
(Technorati tags: geek girls)
Not that this has everything to do with this post but, it's definitely a man's world and in a man's world, sex sells. You can't even get men to watch, read, or even sometimes listen to anything without some hot bitch mixed into it somewhere.