Nerd Mentality
These days Ben Nugent is proud to tell everyone he was a nerd. But thats only because he now feels safely ensconced in an adult world where his proclivities for rules, research and words is respected and praisednot ridiculed. He now lives the cool life in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, dates TV writer and actress Mindy Kaling (who plays Kelly on The Office) and has written a book, American Nerd, in which he revisits his adolescent years when he spoke in perfect Standard English and was obsessed with role-playing games.
I first became aware that I was a nerd when I was about 8 years old. Thats when others started applying the term to me, he says. [When I was 10] I started fantasizing, like a lot of kids do, of writing a record of my life that would show the other children to be stupid and that would show me to be brilliant. And from that very childlike, immature beginning, I think this book germinated. Back then, the way I envisioned it, it was a very stupid book, but then as I got older, when I was 26 or so, I thought, You know no one has actually done a history of the nerd type.
The book plays out as part vindication, part apology, and it relates his personal experiences to a range of social, political and historical images and ideas. Nugent begins by tracing a genealogy of the term nerd through history, including the fomenting prejudices against nerd traits that are, in his view, tied to longstanding racial biases (Jews in particular). In Part 2 he analyzes specific case studies of nerds he recently met (debate club geeks, polyamorous Ayn Rand fanatics) or knew as a child (D&D gamers, videogame addicts) in an effort to show his appreciation for those nerdy friends he left behind.
We met last Friday at Think Coffee by NYU, where Nugent blended in easilyplaid, flannel snap-button shirt, form-fitting jeans and old sneakerswith the other hipsters (or fake nerds). Over a cup of tea, we discussed many of the more divisive ideas raised in the early chapters since, it turns out, nerd is a slippery concept to nail down.
Sure, you may have an image of an MIT guy in your headthick glasses, pocket protector, thin-limbed, buck teethbut theres not one clear definition of what makes that unattractive, awkward dweeb a nerd. Once you begin to create criteria and apply them to a range of individuals, the nerd stereotype becomes even more problematic. Nugent breaks down the nerd into two basic groups: those who are excluded socially for arbitrary reasons and those who are excluded for intrinsic mental reasons because they prefer rational, rule-bound activities over more intuitive or emotional ones.
Id say nerd is a problematic category, Nugent says. The same way various racial categories people have been put into over the centuries are problematic. Obviously the way people have been oppressed by being called nerds doesnt compare to the way people have been oppressed by various forms of racism [But] I think theyre tied together. So what I was exploring wasnt so much the genealogy of something real, so much as the genealogy of a concept and a category. The same way you could write a book about whiteness, which isnt scientifically valid. Like, nerd isnt a psychologically valid concept.
He also devotes considerable effort to recovering the term from those who may romanticize nerddom. Nugent says many female friends have related stories about guys who proclaim nerd status in high school to appear authentic and self-deprecating to their dates. I think people like the idea of being nerds, he says. But I have a suspicion that those arent the people that actually had the experience of being nerds.
Nugent often gets defensive about who is allowed to claim nerd status, since he evidently remembers the sting of those taunts for being a socially awkward outcast and doesnt wish to dilute his own experience. When asked about the focus on Jewish nerds and the lack of more diverse nerd images, he reiterates that many people are excluded as misfits (gay kids, stoners and goths, for example) for various reasons; they may have even been labeled nerds, but they may not fit his definition of a nerd. Plus, being a nerd is something that can be overcome as, in fact, Nugent himself did.
I think if you become self-aware enough to be accepted among people who care deeply about status, fashion and whats cool, then youve probably become something other than a nerd, he says. That doesnt mean you werent a nerd when you were a kid. I think Im a really typical example; I was a really nerdy kid, and then, from the ages of 14 to 20, I gradually became something different.
Nugent explains how he discovered Nirvana and R.E.M. and in 1992 sold his Nintendo to a friend and used the money to buy an amp. I was one of those kids who suddenly, really badly, wanted to become countercultural, much to the amusement of my classmates when I showed up for the first day of 10th grade in some kind of, like, Mudhoney outfit.
Nugent admits to being a hipster (Do I obsess about being cool and knowing what the most recent band is? Yes.) and doesnt appear anxious about potentially being labeled a nerd once again.
Thats one of the interesting things about becoming a de-stigmatized category that people, in theory, think is cool, he says. If people are falsely claiming to be nerds, I shouldnt recoil when Im called a nerd.