This is what pop culture scientists—and the women they date—look like. (Image Credit: FanPop)

Last week found tech titan Peter Thiel complaining about the depiction of technology in popular culture, arguing that movies with the message that “technology is going to kill you,” were slowing down interest in tech jobs, the tech industry, and the skills necessary to achieve in both. Yesterday, it was Sen. Jay Rockefeller who, during a hearing on immigration reform, suggested that what the United States needs to get back on top in the new economy is pop culture. “If, and I’m just positing, that if we lift the whole subject of sophisticated education, STEM, to a very much more visible level,” he mused. “We didn’t have TV programs called Law & Order, we had TV programs called Science and Engineering and Math and Technology, that’s a stretch, I think it really comes down to some of those human factors. What is it that holds us back?”

The witness to whom Rockefeller was speaking, Jeffrey Bussgang, who has the kind of amazing title of senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School, gave an answer that both endorsed Rockefeller’s suggestion that pop culture is a powerful tool to get audiences interested in science, and that underscored how strange both Thiel and Rockefeller’s suggestions are. “Being a geek,” Bussgang said, “is more cool than it’s ever been.”

As I wrote when Thiel first filed his grievance, he has a point in the long term. There are an awful lot of post-apocalypses happening on movie screens because our stewardship of technology has failed in some way, whether through our lax management of technology, or because we wanted too much from it. But nerds are everywhere in popular culture right now, and as they’ve moved to the center of the screen from their peripheral roles as supporting characters, they’ve come to be presented as aspirational figures, not just professionally.
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I was talking to the awesome Chloe Angyal from Feministing a couple of weeks ago about how we need a more specific set of terms so people don’t use Manic Pixie Dream Girl to describe all annoying female character tropes. One friendly person (if it’s you, holler and I’ll provide proper credit, I swear) on Twitter had suggested Paper Dolls for replaceable action starlets. Chloe came up with Insert Girl Here for the girlfriend the male lead dumps so he can fall for the lead woman, and Lesson on Legs for women who exist to provide the male lead with an important lesson before heading off to live the rest of their lives presumably in service of their own interests. In The New Girl, Zooey Deschanel is an archetypal Girltergeist, a character who despite her ephemerality manages to be impressively annoying. She would be a female Peeves if she seemed capable of intentionality.

The thing that’s frustrating about the character is that the show makes her seem stupid, rather than goofily endearing or unsocialized in a way that seems charming because it exposes social rituals as artificial and contrived. No grown-ass person thinks that humping a plant is a way to fulfill a stripper fantasy. It’s not actually charming to spend your first days in a new apartment crying loudly in common areas and totally hogging the TV without any consideration for your new roommates. Going up to someone in a bar and addressing them as “Hey, sailor,” is just weird. As is refusing to do as much as order a glass of wine to hold a table in a restaurant and instead asking if you can have more free things when you are an adult with a job. As is being spacey enough to burn your own hair off. None of these things expose anything about social rituals, or calcified senses of how women ought to behave. They’re just infantilizing and strange.

A long-term commenter suggested that I might like the show because of a scene where one of Jess’s new roommates, Nick, suggests that he can guide her back into the dating market, only to have her reply in a quaver, “Like Gandalf through Middle Earth?” Nick’s game, talking her through it and suggesting “First, let’s take the Lord of the Rings references, let’s put them in a deep, dark cave, where no one’s going to find them, ever.” Instead of laughing, blowing her nose, and returning to the world, Jess keeps going in that baby voice, telling Nick: “Except Smeagol. He lives in a cave.” If this is what nerd girls are supposed to be, people who dodge adult conversations by retreating further into fairyland, count me resolutely out. And it’s not like there’s any sign here that Jess is really a nerd, just that she watched the same couple of movies that all of us watched because hey, they’re awesome. This is nerd-pandering, and I have other options. I’m not so desperate for references to the nerd canon that I have to watch this to get some affirmation that Hollywood knows that I exist.
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