My Husband's Stupid Record Collection

There's an interesting debate at slate about whether Sara O Holla's tumblr "MyHusband's Stupid Record Collection" is inadvertently sexist because it confirms the stereotype of only men being music nerds.*

In our culture we do tend to associate men with the nerdly characteristic of getting overly enthusiastic about some narrow area and then trying to become frighteningly completist with respect to it. If we didn't have that association we wouldn't have the locution "nerd girl" (for more info, see the funny tumblr "Nerd Girl Problems") If you just call a guy a nerd you don't have to say "nerd boy."

I think that these stereotypes might have a little bit to do with why women are underrepresetned in philosophy. There's not much difference between a music nerd reclassifying his sixteen boxes of LPs and someone organizing the dialectical space around everything anyone has ever said about Fitch's Paradox.

Part of why I'm interested in this stuff is because I'm a father, and I see so many of my students who are afraid to be passionate about anything because of the hegemony of cool.** I don't want my kids to turn out so paralyzed. Michael Chabon talks about this very issue with respect to his four daughters in Manhood for Amateurs. He desperately wants them to be unembarrassed about cultivating passionate interest in aspects of the world. To accomplish this he started "The Doctor Who Project." If he could get his daughters to become Dr. Who completists then they would be willing to cultivate their own interests autonomously. In the book he describes it as having worked. I think I'm going to try the same thing with my son and daughter.

[*For a counterexample, see Robin James' awesome comment on this thread about a reading group, and check out her cool blog.

**There was a brief period during the Clinton administration tech. bubble where just about everyone convinced themselves that nerdiness was the new cool (cf. Richard Florida's "The Creative Class"). The Bush administration (populated by people who beat up nerds in school and felt no retroactive shame for having done so) showed the Clinton thing to have been a work all along. It was just one more way to get people who were doing the actual labor to go along with other people reaping the rewards. Even though it was a work, I'm a little nostalgic for it. When you taught Honors Introduction to Philosophy you'd get all these idiosyncratic people just following their own bliss. Since the tech bust you increasingly get pre-med students just worried about getting an A. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a bummer that our culture doesn't produce as much of the other type any more.]