So often, I focus more on being a nerd in this column than on being a girl. Yes, I am both, and one informs the other, but there are unique challenges to being a female geek. Those challenges compound when a gal is an attractive female geek.

Being geeky for a woman is not a passive hobby. The world does not encourage us to read comics obsessively or play videogames on anything other than a Nintendo product. Nor is it considered feminine to read science fiction – read science fiction, not see Twilight movies.

The very act of seeking out nerdy hobbies destroys the princess in the ivory tower metaphor that we’re all steadily force-fed once we’re weaned off mother’s milk, and forces us to make do with content written and marketed for men. Hell, even the porn industry is more advanced at producing product for women consumers.

We female nerds are caught between two worlds: the world of the female, where indirection is encouraged and confidence is not; and the world of the nerd, where we idolize dynamic, decisive, beautiful women who wear very skimpy costumes.

I’m musing about this because this week, one smoking hot nerdy friend of mine was openly mocked on Facebook and accused of “misogyny” because she posed for a magazine to promote the service she writes for.

It was completely unnecessary cattiness: the photos were tame and she looked great. But other girls just had to take swipes at her. Seriously, ladies, what the hell is wrong with us as a collective gender? Why do we crucify women who see their bodies as a form of communication, while we line up to drool whenever Daniel Craig or Gerard Butler goes shirtless? How much merchandise did Orlando Bloom sell? Uh huh. What did his nakedness in Troy contribute to the plot of the film?

Yeah. So is he a stupid, slutty attention whore? What about Robert Pattinson, AKA Edward Cullen?

No? Why not? Any woman in his position, alternately posing for sultry photos and bitching about the life-altering attention they generate, would be called one. Unless you have a penis, if you are pretty you must be a slut. Or else the world blows up or something.

Is there shameless attention whoring that takes place on the internet? Of course. But when someone is acting as a subject for photographs to promote a business venture, that doesn’t apply. It’s commerce, plain and simple.

Granted, the inability to distinguish between negative attention and positive attention is a problem many young women have. But the negative pile-ons that are becoming ever easier thanks to Facebook and Twitter make it difficult to know when other women are just jealous, and when they’re telling us something for our own good.

What’s a girl to do?

I know what I did: as I gained confidence, I lost all of my old friends… no, “lost” is the wrong word. I left behind my old friends: I had to distance myself from people who meant well (for the most part) but just couldn’t relate to me any more.

I don’t take my clothes off for a living. No, it’s worse than that. I make people want me to take my clothes off for a living. Women with poor self-esteem, who have never had the benefit of that kind of attention, have understandable trouble with that. It’s not a weakness on their part, because self-esteem is something that must be built up while an entire world is trying to tear it down; the signals we send young women are appalling and, frankly, evil. I think of it instead as an incomplete development of self, a spot reserved for a skill not-yet-learned. There is an evolution to womanhood that cannot be demarcated by petty traditions like sweet sixteen parties. Our social benchmarks are lagging terribly behind the modern challenges involved with being a woman.

Unfortunately, I rapidly ran out of friends without making many new ones. This happens a lot with women in the public eye, especially in a male-dominated field. Trusting people, especially other women, becomes difficult, and so a woman becomes more and more defined by the men in her life. The problem with this is that there is an impediment to true trust in platonic boy-girl relationships: that nagging feeling a woman has that a man will stop associating with her the minute it is made clear that he’s never getting in her pants.

Platonic friendships are so critical to women who are overtly sexualized for professional reasons. I can’t honestly use the word “objectified”, because there is nothing inherently objectifying about photography. A well-conceived photo that tells a story does not make an object out of a woman, and historically, nudity has been used as often to symbolize innocence as it has been used for the opposite purpose… or have we forgotten the work of the Renaissance masters in the recent deluge of pr0n? Leonardo, Michaelango and Raphael must be spinning in their graves. Those are the artists, not the Turtles, twits. You know, the guys who painted naked people all over churches to symbolize purity of being?

We women have been fed pap on both sides of the equation: we are taught to worship “sexy” and abhor “slutty”, but we have no consensus on where the line is drawn. There are, of course, obvious negative consequences to reckless sex, but this fine line between the desirable and the depraved has created a neurosis we’ve then serialized and glorified in Sex In the City.

The thing is, many nerd girls can’t stand that show. But we also get annoyed by the rampant male-centric sexuality in shows like Battlestar Galactica. Is it any wonder that we’ve gotten so twisted that we sexualize the Care Bears by putting them on adult panties? Compounding the problem is the North American male’s fear of demasculization. This makes men freak out and start squirming at the mere mention of slash fiction, and makes the women who write it retreat further into their increasingly secretive fictional worlds. Guys, you have no business complaining about girls gaying up Lord of the Rings, since the female nudity and pointless sex in conventional media is pandering to those with a penis.

Now that I’ve pissed off both genders, where was I? Oh, right, friendships and the lack of them when you get labeled a “pretty girl”. Right. We were in a place where women just wanted to cut us up, and men just want to sleep with us. At least, that’s where we’re at in our heads. The beautiful woman has replaced the sideshow freak as the person that respectable folk pay money to gawk at while still being properly horrified.

But what do you do when you’ve narrowed your social circle to nothing in self-defense, but have found no kindred spirits to serve as a moral compass? Well, you hook up with dirtbags and have a colossal meltdown like Britney Spears.

Fortunately, the female role models in geekdom stopped me from having a head-shaving moment until I made new friends. Comics and video games have a wealth of female characters who are loners, defined by their actions instead of by their boyfriends. Yes, most of these characters are considered “bad girls”, but you start identifying with Emma Frost and Mystique when you want the rest of the world to die in a fire. Again, women are dismissed for such violent thoughts as “bitches” or “lezzes” while men merrily worship antiheroes like the Punisher or outright villains like the Joker… while openly boast that they hate Superman.

Yes, they hate the one top-tier guy in all of comics who isn’t sulking all the time and treating his girlfriend/wife like schizophrenic dog crap. He’s “boring”. He’s “too much of a boy scout”. A bit more boy scout would get you more booty, boys.

And this subject brings me to the happy ending for the week. My friend and I met up for girl time and spent hours talking over Riesling and avocado spring rolls. The subject of boys came up, but it was comic book boys.

We agree that one of the dreamiest guys in comics is… drum roll… Slam Bradley.

Slam’s a plain ol’ private eye with no superpowers, created by the same guys who gave birth to the Blue Boy Scout. He is, to date, the most adorable and believable of Catwoman’s love interests. We can see why she would continue to have a relationship with him, whereas with Batman, we think the co-dependece has gotten to the point where it diminishes Selina – Bruce Wayne doesn’t really know how to treat a woman.

Siegel and Shuster, it seems, had a knack for creating characters who know how to care about strong, independent women. Too bad they didn’t dream up more girls who could do that: we could use them.