music, books, love and kindness

I was still awake in the middle of the night and so I picked up something light to read and was just so dismayed to see this passage in an otherwise very well-written and engaging romance novel:


Lauren's second biography had been of Peter Orlosky, the mega-nerd who had brought down the Microsoft empire with his single, non-proprietary operating system...Not only was he unmarried and childless, but Lauren was pretty damned sure he’d never even had sex. With another human being, that is. But ultimately that tidbit didn’t make it into his biography because she reckoned everyone could figure that out just by looking at or listening to Peter. She certainly didn’t need to tell them.--from the novel Madam President by Blayne Cooper and T. Novan


This kind of mean-spirited writing just floors me and is so out of place with the rest of the novel. The character thinking this is regarded as a well-respected biographer and so that alone is jarring as is that she only singles out this particular person to speculate on in such a manner. But it is her attitude about "nerds" and her assumption that you can tell whether someone is having sex based just by looking at them that is really, really disturbing (not to mention who even really thinks about this when they look at someone and what does it say about that person that she does?)

I know why this strikes such a painful chord within me. I consider myself a nerd and I know that people really do make half-assed assumptions about someone else just by what they see at first glance. Someone who is not physically 'attractive' (boy, do I dislike that word and how quick our society is to label whether someone is or is not) and not good with words (especially verbally and in social situations) is so often dismissed out of hand as not worthy of romance, love and friendship and that breaks my heart so, so much :(

And it just really rubs me the wrong way that virginity, especially in adult men, is seen as something to mock and link with being a nerd and/or a computer 'geek.'