A Geek Girl's Guide to Spreading Tolerance

Standing up for who we are

While I was at home for Christmas, I went with my sister to Target to return a board game. (Granted, it wasn’t the most interesting of activities, but it’s about the most exciting thing I had to do.)

On the way to the store, my sister asked me if I played a lot of board games.

“Not lately,” I said. “My friends aren’t really into board games. If we’re going to play games it’s usually something like Magic.”

My sister paused and looked at me.

“You play Magic?” she said. From the look on her face, you’d think I’d just told her I was personally a wizard.

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “I thought you knew that.”

She gave me a look. “I knew about the role playing,” she said, “but I didn’t know you played Magic.”

Long silence.

My sister is a musical theater geek, which means she isn’t exactly part of the mainstream, but she’s by no means the kind of girl who would consider playing Magic on a Saturday night an acceptable social activity.

She works in a store at the mall that sells dance shoes, for goodness sake.

“There’s some guys who plays Magic in the space across from my work,” she said, giving me another I-just-realized-you’re-an-alien look. “And I make fun of them.”

I smiled. “Yeah, that’s the kind of people I hang out with,” I said.

She shook her head again, as if she was having trouble understanding. I decided not to mention that not only are my friends people who one might find playing magic at the mall, but I personally am one of those people. Didn’t want her to go into shock behind the wheel.

“But they all have, like, long hair and stuff,” she said. “They’re weird.”

She’s probably right, but you know, weird is cool and stuff.

“Well, my friends are Mormon, so they generally have shorter hair,” I said.

She looked at me. “Wow, Janci,” she said. “That’s special.”

“They’re probably really nice guys,” I said. “Maybe you shouldn’t make fun of them.”

“Yeah,” she said. “You’re probably right.”

I related this story to my best friend a few nights later, over the phone. She had me on speakerphone at the time, and her brother Luke was in the room.

As I finished the story, Melody said, “Luke’s having a hard time accepting this.”

I could hear Luke muttering in the background: “Janci plays Magic: the Gathering?”

It took him about ten seconds after that to beg me to come over and play with him, so I got some practice out of it—even if I did get trounced. It’s hard to beat someone who has your deck memorized.

You’ve got to understand—I was now playing magic with the kid who used to annoy me with his inability to be out in front of the middle school when I drove him and Melody home everyday. Luke is about four years younger than me; I’d known him for something like seven years, and we’d never really had anything in common.

Melody refused to play with us—I think she was a little frightened that I wanted to play in the first place. While we played, I tried to coax her into learning by explaining to her all the benefits of being able to play magic.

“Geek guys love it,” I said. “It makes it easy to pick up on them.”

Luke looked as if I’d justified his entire existence. “See?” he said to Melody. “Did you hear that?”

“Yes,” Mel said, “But did you hear what kind of guys she said?”

“Geek guys,” I said. “They’re the best ones.”

Luke waved his hands at Mel. “Did you hear what she said?” Luke gloated for the next ten minutes. I totally made his day.

Both Melody and my sister were operating off the same assumption—that people who do things like play Magic are geeks, and therefore socially awkward and certainly not prospective friends. I could have let them continue along on their assumption, but to me that seems an awful lot like betraying my friends and hiding the person that I am.

Not an appealing thought.

So geek girls, here is my challenge: don’t hide who you are. When people who know you well realize that you fall into the same social group as people they make fun of, they’re more likely to rethink their social biases than they are to make fun of you.

And if not, you can always threaten to sick your Mortipede on them. Then they’ll know where the real power is.

Besides that, you never know who you might end up finding things in common with. Yes, I lost miserably in my magic game, but I had fun, and I now have something to talk about with my best friend’s brother, and that can’t be bad. He’s practically family, after all.

I’m not sure that I actually convinced Melody or my sister of anything, but then again, the fewer girls who know about the great secret that is geek guys, the better the odds are for those of us who know.

They are, after all, the best ones.

Discuss it in our forums.

Written by MsFish on January 19th, 2006