Sexiest Geeks Alive

Something’s really bothering me. I just read this post in Valley Wag inaccurately titled, “How to bed a girl who really loves geeks.” It was written as “a field guide” to those attending tonight’s Hollywood event co-sponsored by PopSugar and TechCrunch. While TechCrunch describes the event as a meetup between the readership of blogs on “fashion, beauty, shopping and celebrity news” and “startups and the geeks who create them,” and PopSugar jokes on the Facebook event listing that it’s about “startup geeks commingling with, well, normal people,” ValleyWag decided to interpret this as “about hooking up maladapted software drones with women who view them as lottery tickets.”

It’s hard to express the numerous ways in which the ValleyWag post irks me. Its assumptions include: all geeks are men; all the women are vapid, golddiggers, or dabblers; aforementioned male geeks are universally weak prey; geeks have little to no appeal beyond their tech talk and cash.

You all know that geeks are sexy for many many reasons so I won’t belabor that point here. You also know that sexism still exists in Silicon Valley and Hollywood (among other places) so I guess I won’t go into that either. I will just say that I think this is an unfortunate piece based on stereotypes, that I’m sad that it was written by a woman, that I’m sure some of the geeks at tonight’s event will be women, that I’m equally sure some of the hot and articulate people at the party will be men, that sexiness and geekiness can co-exist in the same body, and that I hold out the belief that there are girls (and guys) who really love geeks.

Now where did I put my super-cute short dress…?