Why are geeks the new chic?

Why Nerds Are So Now...
It often takes geeks a long time to peak. Perfect example: Al Gore. “It was one of the things that was so painful about the Bush/Gore election,” says David Anderegg, author of the upcoming book, Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them. “Everybody talking about how geeky Al Gore was.” You can easily imagine them in high school: Gore, a stiff Honors Society student; Dubya, a popular jock, holding court at the cool table.

And yet, back in the future, there’s Bush, the beleaguered outgoing president with a plummeting approval rating, and Gore, who, rather than retreating in defeat, refocused, and, in true Revenge of the Nerds fashion, snagged no less than the Nobel Prize for his one-man mission to save the earth.

Does this mean we’re finally ready to let geeks rule the world? There’s a reason their time has come, says Kevin Anderson, PhD, a cultural anthropologist at Clark University, and it’s the rise of a new breed of geek, different in one key way from types we’ve known before. “These supernerds display a genuine concern for other individuals and their community,” says Anderson. (Bill Gates — who left Microsoft to save Africa — pops to mind.) “This is quite the opposite from the typical portrayal of the nerd as antisocial and myopic, obsessed only with books, chess and computer games.”

I put the question to Adam Rogers. As a longtime Wired editor, and now a correspondent for the new PBS show, Wired Science, it’s his job to keep up with the latest in geekdom.

“The old joke was the nerd joke — the Aspergered-out loser, you know?” he says. “But those people all run the world now. You look up and go, ‘Oh, the richest man in the world is that guy.’ When a piece of equipment on my desk doesn’t work, the only person in the world who can save me is that guy.”

He raises a good point: Don’t look now, but there’s been a paradigm shift, and the very stuff that used to be geeky — gadgets, technology, interactivity — is suddenly sexy.

“The supernerd embodies one of the primary obsessions of our current times: ability to access information,” says Anderson.

So, if geeks are sweet, smart and now hold all the cards, what’s not to love?

Do They Make Better Mates?
In the long run, they might. But there’s one subject that doesn’t come easy to geeks: courtship. That, says Rogers, is because — despite all those IQ points — they just don’t get subtext.

“When [a geek is] invited up for coffee, he doesn’t know if he’s being invited up for coffee or sex,” he explains. “They don’t have that emotional intelligence. They have to get really good at reading the specific clues. How close is she standing? What is her body posture? Is she laughing at my jokes?”

It reminds me of the time I said to a geek ex, giddy while out walking one spring day, “Look how blue the sky is!” Rather than taking my hand, he delivered a lengthy lecture on the Tyndall Effect: Why the Sky Is Blue. And this wasn’t a guy who lacked empathy; he nursed our houseplants back to health and cried during March of the Penguins. It’s just that a geek’s approach to life tends to be if-x-then-y. They don’t get hints.

That said, there is a romantic upshot to all their careful calibration. “The reason nerds and geeks work well [as mates] is that they’re problem solvers,” says Rogers. “They bring these skills that we believe make it impossible for them to carry on normal social relations, to bear on partners.” In other words, to a geek, any problem — even a love-related one — is solvable, making them clutch when the going gets tough. “This is someone who says, ‘You can fix this stuff. How do we get there?’” says Rogers. “In a relationship, that’s something.”

Josh Herman agrees. “Geeks are obsessive about Stars Wars, The Simpsons, comic books — and love,” he says. “And not just in the infatuation stage. The same passion I bring to anything in my life, I also bring to my relationships.”

Case in point: “This girl I was interested in in high school wanted to go to the butterfly exhibit at the zoo,” Herman says, “but she complained that you could never get close enough to them.”

One Saturday, off they went. When they arrived at the Butterfly House, his date watched with a mix of curiosity and horror as he dumped the contents of the water bottle he’d been carrying all over his head and arms.

“It wasn’t water. It was sugar water I had mixed up that morning,” he explains. “Butterflies attacked me.” He, in turn, waved the colorful swarm toward his flabbergasted date, who, lo and behold, soon became his girlfriend.

“Would a non-geek have thought of that?” Herman challenges. “Probably not.”

No, probably not. And in that, lies the Catch-22 of dating a guy who is one: It’s not for the faint of heart, but, in the end, the stuff a geek will cook up to win yours will likely make it flutter. For the long haul.

For more "smart talk about love," visit www.tangomag.com.  

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