Penguin.com (usa)

A charitable alien might say, “How nice! How fair! All the good qualities human earthlings demonstrate are distributed so nicely and fairly! No one gets to be beautiful and smart, and no one has to be dumb and ugly!” A less charitable alien might say, “How nice! They will be easy to conquer because the smart ones all want to mate with the dumb ones, and therefore earthlings will never get any smarter! We won't need much more than a weed whacker to take over this whole planet!”

Whatever the extraterrestrial aliens might end up thinking, they've got a lot to mull over when they watch Beauty and the Geek. But my point is not about those aliens. It is about the little terrestrial aliens already in our midst: our children. Children are just like those aliens; even the cultures they are born into are alien to them. They need to make sense of the adult world, the world of their own culture, and they approach this world with alien eyes. Some of the rules are easy to learn: their native language, what to eat and what not to eat:—things that are simple enough. But learning complex cultural constructs takes time and practice and maturity. And the more complicated a cultural construct is, the more time and growth it takes for kids to get it.

That's what this book is about: how kids learn the complicated constructs “nerd” and “geek.” Even the subtle distinction between nerds and geeks is not easy for kids or grown-ups to learn, as we shall see. But learning the whole complex is an even larger undertaking. American kids are not born knowing what a nerd is, and what they learn and how they learn it says a tremendous amount about them and, of course, about us, the adults doing the cultural transmission. This book is about how we let kids in on the notion that beauty and brains are mutually exclusive…well, sort of. As I said, the notion is complicated. But this book is also about what happens when you send a complicated message to an uncomplicated recipient. What parts of the message are received, and in what order? Because kids are a lot less complicated than we are, they get the message in parts. This book is about the parts: what parts of the message kids get first, what they get later, and what effect it has on them.

If you watch Beauty and the Geek for a whole season (an exercise I wouldn't wish on a dog, but never mind that), you'll see that the message really does get complicated. Toward the end of the season, the “beauties,” all beautiful women who appear to have IQs hovering somewhere on the basement stairs, try to teach the “geeks” something about being beautiful. And indeed, the geeks, people who look like they are allergic to every kind of soap, become somewhat more beautiful. Because all's fair in Kutcherworld, the geeks do the same for the beauties. Toward the end of the season, they try to teach the gorgeous young women to be smarter, and the gorgeous young women do indeed learn a lot of things. So one could argue that the message of the show, even for kids, is that people do not have to be stuck in their stereotypes: People can change and become multidimensional. Whether or not kids get this message is another story, as we shall see later.

Beauty and the Geek is not really so unusual; it has the formal properties of a lot of popular culture. It's actually a lot like the Berenstain Bears books for children or The Simpsons. Papa Bear or Homer Simpson might learn a lesson or two in the course of an episode, but by the beginning of the next episode he has reverted to his old stupid, infantile self. If he didnít revert, he wouldn't be Papa Bear or Homer Simpson. It's not a bildungsroman, and we shouldnít expect it to be, right? So what Beauty and the Geek might teach our little aliens is that some clueless, ugly, smart people can be rehabilitated, and some moronic sex objects can be enlightened. But it takes effort, a lot of effort, and of course when the next season starts you realize there is an unending supply of moronic beauties and ugly geeks in the world. Let's just say that no matter how uplifting the late-stage transformation, it never calls the show's basic premise—that beauty and brains are mutually exclusive—into question.

How Nerds Are Like WASPs, Except When They're Not

So this book is about the process of stereotype acquisition and the nerd/geek stereotype in particular. But anyone writing about stereotypes needs to come clean about his own attitudes and his own positions about a particular stereotype and stereotyping in general. So, being a responsible citizen, I state my own biases here: I don't think the nerd/geek stereotype is particularly healthy for kids or for American society. I don't think kids should have to give up things they really love, even if they are nerdy or geeky things, in order to get a date. I don't think hunky scientists should have to pose for beefcake calendars just to prove there is such a thing as a hunky scientist. And I don't think kids or grown-ups should be so eager to punish “geeky” enthusiasm with shaming, even if the enthusiasm is for arcane things.

It is this last point that is most important, at least to me. I spend a lot of time with kids, and I like them because they are kids. One of the things that makes kids kids is their lack of self-consciousness, and one of the things that most distinguishes nerdy kids from nonnerdy kids is exactly this quality, as we shall see later on. One might say that the kids whom others label as really nerdy are the ones who are the last to develop the self-consciousness of adolescence or, in other words, the last to grow up. The weird enthusiasms, the willingness to cooperate with adults, the lack of social skills—all these things seem nerdy and pathetic to sophisticated, self-conscious teenagers. But nerdiness has its own charms. We might even stop to celebrate the fact that many of our religious traditions recount that we are all descended from Adam and Eve, the First Nerds, who, when they disobeyed, got a lot more self-conscious—and a lot more miserable.

Despite my biases, I don't expect the nerd/geek stereotype to wither away anytime soon. And I certainly don't intend to scold my readers into shamefaced silence and expect them never to use the hated terms again. Contemporary social-science research has demonstrated conclusively over the last twenty years that having stereotypes (i.e., knowing the content of stereotypes) is practically universal. It has also shown that people who wish not to be biased and who do not act in a biased fashion can be shown to act according to stereotypes when those stereotypes are unconsciously cued. Stereotyping is universal feature of human information-processing, probably derived from the need of our ancestors living on the grassy plains of Africa to reduce complex information relatively quickly when survival was at stake. So although I think nerd/geek stereotypes are not generally good, don't worry; this book is not intended to be a sermon. All stereotypes reduce their bearers' humanity, no matter what they are. But there you go: Being human isn't all that pretty.

The nerd/geek stereotype is, of course, a good one for study because it is used so frequently. People have not been shamed into silence about using it, because it is seen as a fun, harmless stereotype: It is negative and pejorative, but it is applied to people who will be just fine, or maybe even privileged, anyway, so who cares if their feelings are hurt? Nerds and geeks will end ruling the world anyway, right? One need only look to nerd Exhibit A, Bill Gates, to get the picture. So taking them down a peg now is only fair, or maybe just an expression of a not-so-unconscious envy, a subject to which we will also return. In this sense nerds are very much like WASPs or “yuppies,” two other complicated stereotypes kids need to be instructed about if they are going to participate in grown-up American culture.

Let's take the WASP stereotype, for example. When you think about it, it's pretty complicated. WASPs are, like nerds, not immediately visible to kids, at least not to white kids. They are not of a different color, so their differences are not immediately apparent to a kid. Kids need to learn how to recognize them; how else to explain the mysterious popularity of The Official Preppy Handbook? Kids do not immediately know that the following things do actually go together: blond hair, madras pants, a passion for wooden boats, attendance at Episcopalian churches, locked jaws, a genuine unironic taste for foods cooked in aspic, riding lessons, playing squash, bad cooking, islands off the coast of New England, gin, and an ethical code the first principle of which is “Never spend capital.” We know who they are, and we mock them freely, even now. For a contemporary example, we might look to Lorelei's parents on Gilmore Girls. We can all use the term “WASP” without worrying about seeming to be prejudiced or mean, because WASPs can look out for themselves. (Indeed, if the stereotype is correct, they are very good at it.) But learning the stereotype can take time, especially if one grows up in Iowa or Arkansas, where WASPs aren't exactly a dime a dozen: it takes practice to learn that when people say “the vineyard,” they mean the Vineyard (as in Martha's Vineyard), not just any vineyard.

Yuppies, of course, are even more mysterious. Yuppies are worse than WASPs, execrable in every way, but who the hell are they? Young urban professionals, okay. The term is used in such a protean fashion that it is almost meaningless; listing the stigmas of yuppiedom, as we can easily do for WASPdom, is a very difficult project to undertake with any degree of certainty. It is easy to insult yuppies, of course, because the membership group is so mysterious that no one quite knows how to decide who is one…and therefore one can deny (at least to oneself ) group membership. Indeed, this term may have come and gone, because its referent is so vague that people just can't understand it or because the implication of conspicuous consumption is so widespread that everyone is one.