I read some depressing news today about lingering sexism in nerd subculture. And it’s not that I was shocked by it, I mean, I knew it was still there. I only had to look at comic book covers or read news about booth bunnies at video game conventions to know that it was still there. But it was depressing for a few reasons:
- It’s the Twenty-first Century, decades past the Stonewall Riots, past Rosie the Riveter, past the assassination of Malcolm X and all the rest of it and shit like this is still happening. I’m reminded of how I felt during the riots in LA back 1992.
- Richard Dawkins was a sexist jerk and now I worry that people, wags and trolls on the Internet mostly, will use that to paint all atheists or skeptics in the same stripe.
Anyway, it’s stuff like this that drives my misanthropy. I’d have us all replaced by Asimovian robots, or something like that, creatures designed to be morally better. But then again, at the age of 49, I’ll probably never live to see something like that happen. I want to be post-human but I probably won’t see it.
Besides, this news has to get out. How else are we going to learn to be better? I just have to accept that this repetitive, two steps forward, one step back, never-seem-to-learn, shit is really about as fast as we silly apes can go.
So it goes. Somehow we’ll sort it out.