From top left to right: Ada E. Yonath; Ada Lovelace; Christine Lagarde; Johannes Brahms; Euripides; Françoise Barré-Sinoussi; Gabriela Mistral; Gao Xingjian; H. G. Wells; Hedy Lamarr; Leonardo da Vinci; Mary McCarthy; Marcus Aurelius; Nikola Tesla; Virginia Woolf; Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar; Wangari Muta; Octavio Paz; Françoise Hardy; Plato; Youyou Tu; Amenhotep; Dominique Sanda; Linus Torvalds.
In modern culture the iconic nerd talks, acts and looks like a Neanderthal with glasses, like Flug here. But many nerds actually bathe once in awhile and know how to dress themselves. Quite well in fact. They even know how to tie their own shoelaces, when they think it’s worth bothering about. And many of them are real lookers.
Take Steve Jobs, for example. If he weren’t so intensely geeky to the point of being intimidating, most people upon first seeing him would be taken by how good looking he was. Pericles, Mary McCarthy, Virginia Wolfe, Leonardo da Vinci, Euripides, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Marcus Aurelius, H.G. Wells, Brahms, Nikola Tesla, Ada E. Yonath, Youyou Tu, Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr, Matt Mullenweg, Gao Xiingjian, Timothy Berners Lee, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, Gabriela Mistral, Wangari Muta, Octavio Paz Lozano, Aristotle, and Plato.
From spectacularly beautiful to distinguished to adorable, they’re fine looking individuals one and all. Gao, for instance, has the most beautiful smile. She smiles with her whole being.
Now my fellow nerds, the ones inhabiting the world of Nerds Don’t Wolf Whistle, look like this:
Glorious, complex, endearing, beautiful nerds, one and all.
Get the picture?
Real or imagined, nerds are at the forefront of those who strike it rich with their ideas. They employ their smarts to keep these dynamic ideas in the world by informing everyone how indispensable the ideas are. The pronoun they is ambiguous there. That’s deliberate on my part because both the nerds and their ideas are indispensable.
And irresistibly attractive.
Because, you see, no matter what they look like, successful nerds are automatically attractive. When people know you’ve got more money than their bank does, and/or more accolades than their comic superheroes do, they lose sight of what you really look like.
Gold glitters so faithfully and beautifully, you’re sheer glamor even if you wear thick glasses, don’t like to bathe, can’t stop rocking when people are trying to talk to you, are losing your hair, have stooped shoulders and speak like someone turned off your bass and treble, leaving you with speech so flat-lined that voice recognition computers wouldn’t be able to detect your voice as human.
Now, someone like Bezos doesn’t meet that description. He’s got a nice enough face. Nice and interesting. But who cares what he actually looks like? That billion dollar smile of his dazzles us into wanting to get a selfie of him and ourselves lounging around together in, er, in let’s say, Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. We just know that if we looked closely enough at his image, we’d find dots at the matrix all right. Solid gold ones.
Money is sexy. So is the power, influence and respect that goes with it. At least it is to most people. Especially those who crave it for themselves. One way or another people find ways to screw you over and around to get it. Human beings? You know the ones. They roam the planet Earth and have sex with money.
For my money, a more suitable icon for a nerd is Rodin’s The Thinker. Even his attire with its beautiful bronze patina that doesn’t require tanning.
The allure of wealth is incalculable, however. And a lot of nerds are at the forefront in generating wealth, which makes them both calculating and incalculable.
In other words, folks, nerds are fully qualified members of the humanoid species sometimes known as Homo sapiens. Which means they laugh and cry, work and play, love and hate with the best and worst of ’em.
