On Nerd Entitlement. Do young male nerds lack privilege?

Demyx wrote:

The experience of not getting a date / getting laid is, for some reason, often presented as the sole experience of young men, as though young women aren't going through the exact same thing.

I guess my question is whether the experience is the exact same thing, even if the result is the exact same thing. Anyone who can't get laid/get a date gets there through a combination of rejecting other people/being rejected by people they haven't rejected. I really wonder whether the ratios are the same, and therefore, the experience.

Demyx wrote:
burglebup wrote:

So putting this in the context of the young female nerd. The time at which young males are generally not thinking about families and offspring and instead are exploring sexual activity as a pleasure and thrill is going to be the time when he is least likely to be receptive to their advances. So basically throughout puberty they are seeing the dominant alpha female getting all the sex while they are shunned.

You bet your ass that can lead to resentment. :)

The experience of not getting a date / getting laid is, for some reason, often presented as the sole experience of young men, as though young women aren't going through the exact same thing.

Cuz it's normally guys talking about it, and they assume that everything defaults male?

EDIT: And because the assumption is that women aren't trying to get laid?

Random pertinent factoid: The way that mean age of adolescent first sexual intercourse is reported can be highly misleading and a significant minority of people (for Americans, 34-38%) don't have sex until some time after they turn 20.

I would like more perspectives from young women caught in those awkward intersections; I can easily access what young awkward men go through by thinking back to my past self; I want to be careful before generalizing it to young women. I'd guess that the experiences would have a different flavor, if only due to the different set of conflicting gender roles. But that's just my guess, I can't speak authoritatively. (I could speculate, I suppose.)

It'd probably help both genders if they understood each other better; not to mention those who feel like they don't fit their assigned gender roles. I don't just mean the usual LGBT people we think of, I mean that there are millions of people who want to be heterosexual but feel like they're failures at the way they've been taught to be heterosexual.

That's one way that the myths about men can hurt women too: I've read a lot of stories from women who had trouble being rejected sexually because the belief that men are always eager for sex made her feel worthless and like there was something wrong with her when he turned her down, in some cases even though she consciously knew that it wasn't true.

The past couple of posts made me think of an article I read recently in The Atlantic and how it might apply to this entire thread.

A new study of high school behavior finds that young people wildly over-estimate the sex and drug life of their own classmates and even their own cliques.

Popular kids and male jocks aren't having nearly as much sex, or doing nearly as many drugs, as other high schoolers assume, said Geoff Cohen, a co-author and professor at Stanford University. "Teenagers grossly overestimate the amount of substance abuse of [pot heads] and the sex life of jocks," he said. "We knew there were stereotypes, but we were surprised by the level of caricature."

High schoolers assumed that jocks and popular kids drank more alcohol and had more sex than average students. But jocks' and popular teens' self-reported sexual behavior wasn't significantly different from the “brains” or the “others.” (The fact that kids vastly over-estimate popular men's self-reported sexual behavior is particularly interesting, because if men were going to lie about their own record, they would probably “lie up” to exaggerate their romantic successes.) The misconceptions didn’t always skew toward deviant behavior, either. Smart kids reported studying only about half as much as their classmates assumed.

"People thought the popular kids had lots of friends and the brains have no friends, but it turns that everybody had about the same number of friends," said Mitchell Prinstein, another co-author of the paper and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (The other co-authors included Sarah W. Helms, Sophia Choukas-Bradley, Laura Widman, and Matteo Giletta.)

Some of the most severe misperceptions—regarding popular kids' cigarette use and jocks' marijuana habits, for example—were within cliques and groupings. Indeed, not only do less-cool kids exaggerate the lifestyles of high school aristocracy, but also popular kids vastly overestimate the sex and drug behavior of other popular kids. An only-slightly-oversimplified summary of the survey might read: Everybody in high school thinks everybody else is having more sex and doing more drugs than they actually are.

So what if adolescents think their peers are kinkier than they actually are? Prinstein said perceptions about drug use—even misperceptions—can become reality.

article in [i wrote:

The Atlantic[/i]]High schoolers assumed that jocks and popular kids drank more alcohol and had more sex than average students. But jocks' and popular teens' self-reported sexual behavior wasn't significantly different from the “brains” or the “others.”

"This one time, at Band Camp..."

Not just High Schoolers. We had a small bit of that in one of the PAX East threads a couple years ago in regards to what generally goes on at conventions.

At least there's some research out there debunking the whole "everyone's had more sex than me" myth.

shoptroll wrote:

Not just High Schoolers. We had a small bit of that in one of the PAX East threads a couple years ago in regards to what generally goes on at conventions.

Well, high schoolers tend to become adults...

A mate of mine uses high school sex as the analogy for BYOD in enterprise environments.

Everyone is talking about it.
Very few are actually doing it.
Those that are doing it - are doing it poorly.

Bring Your Own Developer?

Bring Your Own Dominatrix?

Build your own doohickeys

Bring Your Own Device.

Banish Your Ontological Demons.

Berate Young Owl Deniers

Be Your Own Dragon

Boy, Your Odor's Detectable

Balderdash, you're obviously dense

Bramblepelt, you obstinate dreamer!

Browbeating your others demotivates...

Broh, you oughta deadlift

Barbarella's Yellow Onesie, Devastating.

Barack, Ye Olde Democrat

Behold Your Oncoming Demise!

You know, I saw a bunch of posts in here and I was like "Oh no, now what?" I'm glad to see you all beating your own drums instead.

Hypatian wrote:

You know, I saw a bunch of posts in here and I was like "Oh no, now what?" I'm glad to see you all beating your own drums instead.

I was waiting for that one.

Bloviating your own drivel.

Hypatian wrote:

You know, I saw a bunch of posts in here and I was like "Oh no, now what?" I'm glad to see you all beating your own drums instead.

Oh, Hypatia. You sly gal.

Hypatian wrote:

You know, I saw a bunch of posts in here and I was like "Oh no, now what?" I'm glad to see you all beating your own drums instead.

Babe, you owned dat!

I found Conor Friedersdorf's summation of the discussion of Aaronson's post an interesting read.

Prederick wrote:

I found Conor Friedersdorf's summation of the discussion of Aaronson's post an interesting read.

Seems like a helpful addition to the dialog.