For the following reasons, I was not going to address this event on the site:
- I don’t like to feed trolls and/or give negative and archaic opinions more attention than they deserve (which is none, by the way).
- I’d much rather talk about a work of art than the opinion of a creator, be it one I agree or disagree with. It’s just not my bag.
- I am so sick – and this here’s the big one, friends and neighbors – so very sick of the existence of this debate that I could puke blood. I am become Atrocitus, readers.
Over the past few years, the internet has given rise to the “are girls shitty nerds”/”why are girls ruining the things I love” rampage. But I can tell you that as someone who is closer to 40 than not (in robot years, of course), this is nothing new. I own a hat for which I paid an exorbitant amount of money to be made in and shipped from the U.K. It happens to be the single coolest hat in the history of the world, and it declares that I am an officer of the Mos Eisley Port Authority, Tatooine. If I had a dime, né, a penny for every time someone made a smarmy comment about my hat that implied I was wearing it to be trendy or had borrowed it from a man, well, I would probably have about 30 dollars. But that’s three thousand pennies, yo! Sidebar – my favorite incident involved a guffawing bro asking if I even knew what Tatooine was but had to walk away when I asked him what Mos Eisley was. True story.
Anyway, I decided to bring this to your attention because Brian Michael Bendis, in three paragraphs, has surmised the perfect response to any challenge regarding the participation and influence of women in nerddom. What’s even better, he did it with zero name calling.
That’s it, internet. This is checkmate. A gold star and a standing ovation for you, Mr. Bendis.