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| Nerd Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. From also smarter-than-she-looks romance novelist Sarah MacLean. |
No kidding, man. Why, as far as I could tell, nobody mentioned Sarah even once.* [jump]
*Or invited her, apparently, which the Vixen hints may be more to the point.**
**By the way, where exactly is she working her asses off along with the rest of America on Saturday nights, while the Beltway heedlessly parties, at the moment? Last I heard, she was in unplanned retirement. (Personal disclosure: I'm pretty much of a Monday-through-Friday kind of guy myself, at least since I gave up restaurant work a number of decades ago, and I've never thought twice about taking Saturday night to hang out. Should I be feeling guilty? Likewise, if Sarah's out waitressing or whatever, should she feel guilty for tweeting on the job?)
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| Greta van Susteren's afterparty for the 2011 WHCD boasted Sarah as its "biggest get" (did they mean "git"?). All the girls worked their asses off in those days, if you know what I mean and I think you do, and it was the assclowns who had to go to the office. I knew there'd be a picture like this, but the one who actually found one is Greg Mitchell, to whom hat tips are due. |
The thing that caught my attention was at MSNBC, where the youthful second-stringers holding the microphones (the starting players, obviously, were all at the dinner) began speculating at one point about why and how people had taken to calling it the "nerd prom". They thought it must have had something to do with the event's origins as a C-SPAN program, because "nerds watch C-SPAN". It never occurred to them to wonder why it's a "prom".
Conan O'Brien told a joke in the same semantic field, comparing the journalists in the audience to a high school cafeteria and its clique-divided tables: "the jocks are at Fox, the nerds are at MSNBC..." Certainly some of the meaner Fox women remind me a lot of cheerleader cliques as represented in the movies, but jocks? Doesn't that imply some kind of dedication and skill?
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| Think your spectacles will be a laughing spectacle at prom or your next formal occasion? Think again, doll. Glasses can be a sexy accessory when paired with the right dress. PromdressesDirectory. |
Fact is, the joke betrays an alarming failure to follow through on the analogy:
- If it's a prom, the central and most basic division is the traditional one into girls and boys. Here, the girls are the journalists and the boys are the politicians (while the celebrities represent the frocks and corsages, "arm candy", with which the journalists are made to look desirable).
- If it's the nerd prom, then there aren't any jocks by definition, are there? Everybody's a nerd (except, again, for the movie stars, which just demonstrates further that they are not really guests but attire).
- Just as the "girls" are not on the whole women and the "boys" not exclusively men, so the "nerds" are not mainly nerds in the classically accepted sense—highly motivated people devoting enormous amounts of time to the study of something that everybody else considers like please just shoot me right now, or worse than boring—but in their structural position within the high school hierarchy, that is losers in any crowd that includes jocks or stoners or virtually anyone other than themselves, except for the principal. Even the cops are embarrassed by them.
- The journalists in question are also not the nerds of the world of journalism (those would be students of economics, campaign finance, and the environment, for example) but its cheerleaders.
- This analogy lives in an eternal 1962 where nerd boys have exciting careers ahead of them going to the moon and being on TV quiz shows, while nerd girls have nothing but their inability to get that male law or med student to notice them, at least until they take their glasses off, so don't blame the sexism on me.
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