Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Are Nerds Really Manginas?

Over at The Spearhead, Ferdinand Bardamu (of In Mala Fide) recently wrote an article about nerds and gamers as manginas who worship women. He cites a new online service called PlayDates where men pay $8.25 to play a ten minute game on X-Box Live or a six minute casual Flash game with a female gamer. The whole business concept is pretty pathetic and Bardamu sums it up nicely:

“PlayDates” is quite appropriate, since the dorks who sign up for GameCrush are basically paying women like prostitutes, but without the sex. It’s like phone sex but just as pricey and only half as retarded.


The sad thing is, there are plenty of losers out there who are stupid enough to partake in this service. I agree with his criticism of PlayDates itself and the loser gamers/nerds who will undoubtedly frequent it.

However, he also makes the statement:

It’s not a stretch to say that most hardcore gamers are nerds, and while not all manginas are nerds, almost all nerds are manginas.


There are a lot of gamers and nerds out there who basically worship women and feminists, as manginas tend to do. However, I disagree with his assertion that most nerds and gamers are manginas.

About once a month on most gaming forums, a topic pops up regarding the presence of female enemies in a specific game or games in general. Female enemies are pretty common nowadays. Sometimes they will be bosses or elite enemies (like in Wolfenstein), but in many games they make up a good portion of the common mooks (i.e. Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Bethesda's games). Predictably, whenever these board topics about female enemies pop up, a few male gamers will write about how horrible it is to have female enemies in games and that they feel guilty about having to kill female enemies (somehow I doubt female gamers feel guilty about killing male enemies while playing as Joanna Dark or Lara Croft).

That's right, there are gamers out there who get sad when they have to "kill" women who exist only as a sequence of 0s and 1s in RAM. But these gamers are the minority. Whenever some manginas whine about "violence against women" in games, they get smacked down by the non-mangina nerds that greatly outnumber them. Also, the fact that most games nowadays have female enemies shows that nerds are not manginas in general. If nerds were manginas, there probably would be no female enemies in video games and female villains would be treated sympathy in order to avoid offending the supposed mangina audience. Additionally, the people who make video games are nerds (see this picture of Bethesda's Fallout 3 development team, for example) and if most of them were manginas, then they would go out of their way to exclude or demonize "violence against women" (a term that manginas love to use) instead of including it in their games.

Mangina nerds are pretty easy to distinguish from other nerds. They worship "ass-kicking women" and think women who can beat them up are awesome. They are the kind of nerds who get upset when his opponent in a game of Magic: the Gathering refers to a creature card depicting a woman as a "bitch," not due to the unsportsmanlike comment but due to its "sexism." He's the kind of guy who complains about how a new video game "glorifies violence against women" because it has female enemies, a female villain, and allows you to hit a woman in a scene played for comedy. Yet he not only has no problem with video games depicting women beating up and killing men, but likes such women because of how "empowered" they are. This is the kind of man who writes a feminist review of Portal.

I've met these kind of mangina nerds before. I've noticed that they tend to be on the less intelligent than the average nerd and perhaps as a result they try to act more "normal" than other nerds. That's the key. The nerds who are normal and the nerds who are not normal but know it are not manginas. It's usually the less-intelligent nerds who try to fit in with normal people who end up as manginas.

I call this the "uncanny mountain of nerdom." The name derives from the uncanny valley theory in robotics that basically states that as an object similar to a human becomes close to looking and behaving like a human, its familiarity suddenly and sharply plumets, then rises again.

In the graph of the "uncanny mountain of nerdom," as a nerd's normalness increases, there is a significant increase in his level of mangina-ness, prior to falling. This uncanny mountain is caused by beta male nerds who try to act cool like everyone else, but have difficulties inherent to their nerdom. And while they are still reasonably smart, they lack other nerd's high intelligence and its accompanying benefits. In order to attempt to attract women and fit in with our emasculated culture, they act like manginas both in person and on the internet.



While there are a lot of gamers who are manginas, I wouldn't say that a majority of gamers are manginas. I think such statements are as inaccurate as saying most nerds are omega males. True, there are some gamers and nerds who exude manginaness, but female-worshipping beta males, gamma males (per Vox Day's hierarchy), white knights, nice guys, and manginas - or whatever else you want to call them - exist in large numbers everywhere.

I think the reason why a lot of people hold such stereotypes about nerds and gamers is that the media portrays them as such. If they are not fat, friendless, omega losers, they are decent-looking but socially awkward betas/gammas who worship the ground that women tread on. The reason for this is probably due to the fact that the media is dominated by feminists and liberal men who act like manginas to appease the feminists. So when they portray nerds, they will either portray loser nerds for women (and non-nerd alpha males) to laugh at or mangina nerds so women can feel smug and self-important.

Unfortunately, these mangina, female-worshipping males tend to be the more publicly visible nerds, especially in the film industry. It probably has to do with the fact that they have slightly better social skills and far less misanthropy than the average nerd so they are better suited for the public eye. Video game industry leaders are closer to the average nerd, which is probably why the mainstream media, politicians, middle-class suburban mothers, and activist groups hate video games: they're not used to dealing with nerds - and men in general - who aren't politically correct manginas.

Note: I wrote about why not all nerds are omegas here.

5 comments:

  1. What's a mook?

    You're right about most all nerds not being manginas. I think Ferdinand was grasping at straws with that one. Nerds, if anything, hate women as much as jocks do. Also, if I had to guess which high school clique had the fewest number of homosexuals, it would be the nerds. Nerds are more concerned with reality and truth than with being socially 'reliable' or 'correct' in their opinions, so obviously they despise the blatantly dishonest dullards that women and lawyers are. End rant.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mooks are the minor enemies that the hero goes through in order to get to a boss or to complete objectives.

    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mooks?from=Main.Mook

    ReplyDelete
  3. As an aside, you actually find quite a few of the alpha nerd types in professions that require both assertiveness and major intellectual capacity.

    Finance and law both come to mind.

    ReplyDelete

  4. Video game industry leaders are closer to the average nerd, which is probably why the mainstream media, politicians, middle-class suburban mothers, and activist groups hate video games: they're not used to dealing with nerds - and men in general - who aren't politically correct manginas.


    Another reason I believe video games are hated by these people is their inaccessibility. One of their favorite hobbies is invading formerly all-male spaces in the name of 'equality'. But the high level of skill and dedication required to play these games creates a barrier to entry and makes them nearly impervious to feminization.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Good point. Also, computer gaming today requires a high-powered computer. Building/buying and maintaining one requires a good deal of knowledge and intelligence - more so than console gaming does. That's another barrier.

    ReplyDelete