--A precocious, intoxicated 22-year-old software engineer at a party in September, before petitioning me to take his virginity (I declined)
I've been gloriously single for about eight months, nearly half the total time I've been single since I was 16. The beginning of this period coincided with my resumption of being a giant science dork. Politics is not as endemically male-dominated as the sciences, at least not in the arenas I was working in (not that that's saying much). I have already experienced a little culture shock. To say you work for a non-profit working on universal health care is not so unusual. Saying you're a physics major considering a minor in mathematics or computer science, I have found, strikes some people as a non sequitur. They expect even less for me to say I want to do experimental particle physics, rather than video game design or something.
Maybe part of this is just that people who say they want to go to school for a good chunk of a decade just for a not particularly lucrative career in research is unusual. I can't help suspect, however, that it's partly because I'm a girl. This isn't diatribe about how old white bald men in glasses and ties are keeping me down. Being a female geek affects dating dynamics in ways I hadn't considered when I inhabited the more gender-balanced world of political activism.
Look at this picture of students at the US Particle Accelerator School in 2005:
[Source: http://uspas.fnal.gov/photopage.htm]
What do you see? Dudes! And one girl. This is an arrangement that never occurs in nature.
As a serious and ambitious student, school is my foremost priority. As a multiply-burned hopeless romantic, I'm a little reluctant to consider dating anyone. As a geek, I'm often in groups with severely skewed gender ratios full of brilliant guys I can really relate to. And as a seething ball of barely post-adolescent hormones, I'm horny and tempted as hell.
The problem with most people is that they're almost never as awesome as they seem for the first week. Intellect is often immediately evident and is a huge turn-on (sophophilia is the word for it), but there are so many ways even really smart people can suck and/or be really boring. I've found that simply waiting a couple weeks makes it easier for people to dig themselves into a hole of stupid or asshole or whatever, thus anaesthetising me to the sexiness of their brains.
Maybe my point was not about geek dating after all, if avoiding it is what's really on my mind. And this doesn't even begin to integrate the double-awkwardness of being a geek girl attracted to women while being all awkward around hot ones. I could give Koothrapalli on The Big Bang Theory a run for his money. *sigh*
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