All month long, the comics world has been embroiled in a conversation about whether female geeks are really geeks. Yes. This conversation is still, somehow, going on in 2012. The "debate" has been going on for a while now—the "idiot nerd girl" meme took off on Reddit and in other online venues a couple years ago, but things heated up earlier this month, during a conversation between a comics journalist and several women who work in the comics field. Here's a good condensed argument from blogger Squidy Girl:

I’m sure it seems harmless and “fun” on the surface, but memes like this are indicative of a much larger and much more problematic attitude within geek culture. Namely: if we don't like how (specifically) a woman/girl identifies as a nerd, or displays their nerdery, based on rather arbitrary & subjective definitions of what being a “real nerd” is, we can label them a whore/slut/fake. Which, by proxy, indicates that they are not only not a nerd, but are also something of a social/cultural pariah. The word “whore” is pretty specific and, especially in this context, is clearly not meant to be anything other than demeaning and dehumanizing. That you don’t think “all” women are whores is really not the issue. The underlying sexism of the "fake" nerd/geek girl rhetoric is.

White male comics fans replied to these arguments by rationally arguing their points and trying to find some sort of common ground. HA! Just kidding. Really, they just accused nerd women (and the TV show Big Bang Theory) of doing "blackface for nerds." Which opened up a whole other can of worms. And I'm not even going to get into Starman artist Tony Harris's fake-geek-girls rant, which seemed mostly to be about how ugly girls who dress up like superheroines at conventions really piss him off. Instead, let's watch this video, which is done up in the style of an old-fashioned public service announcement and which makes a good case that white nerd-men are living in a regressive world straight out of the 1950s:

Can boy-nerds all just agree to not carry this lame-ass fight into 2013? Can we leave this stupid shit in the past, where it belongs? If you're spending your time worrying about how authentically nerdy someone is, you need to find some real problems. The world doesn't need a Nerd Taliban telling women how they can and can't dress.