New Video, Geek Conceit, and Geek Misogyny: "Nice Guys"

I am going to start using this blog to catalog media reflects the zeitgeist of the rise of the geek. In particular, the themes that concern me are hidden problems with the rise of the geek. I am definitely a geek myself. However, I feel that a key aspect of the rise of the male geek is its unacknowledged misogyny. The male geek rises while trying to pretend that mysoginy only exists in the world of the male jock.

The geek’s core misogynistic conceit is this: Women are too shallow to recognize the good things about the sensitive, true, honest, and long-suffering, non-dominant males. Therefore, women deserve the pain and emotional torture they experience when they are assumed to get it from dominant males.

I will start this catalog with a freshly viral video made by an Asian American male to highlight the fact that, as an Asian American Geek. I am being critical of a culture I am very much a part of and not sniping from the outside. It is a video by Kevin Wu called Nice Guys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fz3zFqLc3E

It nicely illustrates the geek conceit I outline above. Here are the lyrics of the chorus:

Nice guys finish last,
That's why I'll treat you like trash,
It's not what I really wanna do.
But, you only date bad guys so,
I'll give it my best try to,
Treat you the way you want me to.

There are some theoretical analyses of the nice guy phenomenon which are critical of its mysoginistic conceit but I will not go into them here just yet. Perhaps in a later blog. I will continue to track the zeitgeist of this sentiment in this blog and tag it geek rage.

A key problem in this conceit is the that it implicitly asserts that Geek=Nice Guy.