Matt Stevens (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} kent_allard_jr) wrote,@ 2008-04-15 15:06:00 |
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Hippies, Geeks and Rednecks
I've thought a bit about our image of The Geek since I saw Weird Al Yankovic's "White and Nerdy". Yankovic plays the depiction of the stereotypical geek: The skinny guy with horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a shirt and tie and a pocket protector. It's an old stereotype, which you can see in the posters for Revenge of the Nerds (1984) and dozens of other places.
The weird thing, though, is I've spent plenty of time over the years with hard-core geeks -- D&D players, fanfic writers, Monty Python fanatics, Trekkies, you name them -- and very few of them ever resembled the stereotype. If I had to describe the Typical Male Geek (and when I was a kid the typical geek was male), he might wear glasses but he'd look almost nothing like the Revenge of the Nerd type. He'd be chubby rather than skinny; he'd have long hair and a beard; he'd wear T-shirts and sneakers, and wouldn't get caught wearing a tie if his life depended on it. (If any of you resemble this stereotype -- and I know some of you do! -- please accept my apologies in advance.)
If you want to see people who look like Revenge of the Nerd Geeks, they're easy to find: Go to photographs from the 1950s and (to a lesser extent) the 1960s, and you'll see them all over the place. (See this photo of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, for example.) They were the squares in the 1960s. Who were their enemies? The hippies! And it's the hippies, not the squares, that the geeks most closely resemble.
Now honest-to-God hippies are pretty rare these days, but I've come to think that Hippie-dom didn't disappear so much as splinter and morph into a number of subcultures that are still around. I suspect -- but obviously can't prove -- that Hippie-dom gradually took over large segments of the white working class, especially in rural areas. When you think of the stereotypical crystal meth addict you probably picture a long-haired, bearded guy in a T-shirt -- someone, in other words, who'd look right at home in Gen Con in 1982. (I'm reminded, years ago, of an article which listed the reading habits of Death Row inmates. As I recall, H.P. Lovecraft was by far their favorite author.)
I'm not sure what conclusion I'd like to draw from all of this, but I'd be curious to see what connections we might find among these different strands of American culture.
I've thought a bit about our image of The Geek since I saw Weird Al Yankovic's "White and Nerdy". Yankovic plays the depiction of the stereotypical geek: The skinny guy with horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a shirt and tie and a pocket protector. It's an old stereotype, which you can see in the posters for Revenge of the Nerds (1984) and dozens of other places.
The weird thing, though, is I've spent plenty of time over the years with hard-core geeks -- D&D players, fanfic writers, Monty Python fanatics, Trekkies, you name them -- and very few of them ever resembled the stereotype. If I had to describe the Typical Male Geek (and when I was a kid the typical geek was male), he might wear glasses but he'd look almost nothing like the Revenge of the Nerd type. He'd be chubby rather than skinny; he'd have long hair and a beard; he'd wear T-shirts and sneakers, and wouldn't get caught wearing a tie if his life depended on it. (If any of you resemble this stereotype -- and I know some of you do! -- please accept my apologies in advance.)
If you want to see people who look like Revenge of the Nerd Geeks, they're easy to find: Go to photographs from the 1950s and (to a lesser extent) the 1960s, and you'll see them all over the place. (See this photo of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, for example.) They were the squares in the 1960s. Who were their enemies? The hippies! And it's the hippies, not the squares, that the geeks most closely resemble.
Now honest-to-God hippies are pretty rare these days, but I've come to think that Hippie-dom didn't disappear so much as splinter and morph into a number of subcultures that are still around. I suspect -- but obviously can't prove -- that Hippie-dom gradually took over large segments of the white working class, especially in rural areas. When you think of the stereotypical crystal meth addict you probably picture a long-haired, bearded guy in a T-shirt -- someone, in other words, who'd look right at home in Gen Con in 1982. (I'm reminded, years ago, of an article which listed the reading habits of Death Row inmates. As I recall, H.P. Lovecraft was by far their favorite author.)
I'm not sure what conclusion I'd like to draw from all of this, but I'd be curious to see what connections we might find among these different strands of American culture.
