"Why don't girls like video games?"

"Why don't girls like or perform well at advanced STEM?"

"Why are the top 1% of mathematicians men?"

"Nerds are hegemonically masculine misogynist pigs!"

etc.

These statements reflect a common bias I have noted in gender discussions. I call this bias Nerd-Normativity.

This bias consists of ascribing, to men as a whole, abilities or hobbies or characteristics that are usually only prominent in a specific set of outlier males. The result of this bias is an inaccurate understanding of our society's standards of traditional masculinity.

Let's take the discussion of video games and how they are mostly male. More specifically, "hardcore" games are male-dominated. Some people will contest the idea that video games are mostly male by pointing at causal gaming and mobile gaming, which are female dominated sectors, but the reality is men and women still have completely different gaming patterns. This - not some nebulous conspiracy theory about men trying to keep women "out" of gaming - explains why "hardcore" gaming culture is male-dominated despite "gamers" as a whole being 50% female. Where "Nerd-Normativity" comes into play is the assumption that video games are no longer a stigmatized or thought-of-less-than-masculine hobby due to the fact that "everyone is a gamer now." Women are mostly (but not exclusively or always) casual and mobile gamers. The slice of gaming that is considered "acceptable" or "masculine" is small - it mostly consists of a handful of "bro game" franchises like Halo, FIFA, Gears, CoD and Madden. Being a hardcore gamer with an interest in obscure or non-mainstream franchises is still, to a substantial degree, seen as a "nerdy loser" pasttime, i.e. not a "hegemonically masculine" game.

Let us take another example that feminists will be quite familiar with - the presumption that women are bad at mathematics. Whilst there is research that suggests women are inferior at spatial-rotation tasks relative to men, the idea that women as a whole are inferior at mathematics to men is still controversial. I would suggest that, again, Nerd-Normativity is at work here - the vast majority of men aren't skilled mathematicians and have very little interest in advanced mathematics.

What causes "Nerd-Normativity"? I would argue that its a case of the Apex Fallacy in a post-information-technology-revolution world, combined with a leftist bias towards seeing culture as a product of capitalism, as well as the fact that gender theory is mostly situated in the academy and not inside popular culture. In short, gender theorists see the huge numbers of successful tech companies and industries, they see the massive shift towards use of information technology, they see Google making obscene profits, and they themselves mostly deal with intellectuals, and they therefore presume traditional masculinity lionizes nerdy, intellectual men as the height of (or at least perfectly consistent with) traditional manliness.

Why is "Nerd-Normativity" bad? Well the obvious reason, other than being incorrect, is that it assists to blind feminists towards the suffering of gender-nonconforming, geeky, intellectual men under the gender system of our society. They can dismiss nerdy "loser" men as simultaneously being the oppressors of women/embodiments of the patriarchy and pathetic socially-worthless losers (they will ignore the contradiction between these accusations, of course). They can ignore the fact that weirdo geeky nerds still get shamed and bullied (and even participate in said shaming and bullying) and pretend that because Bill Gates is rich as fuck that no one has ever mocked a weirdo geeky nerd for being a weirdo geeky nerd. Considering that Incels disproportionately likely to be weirdo geeky nerds, addressing the Incel problem requires that we accept they are outlier males and stop pretending that they are somehow the embodiment of thugjock brutishness (and by the same token, Incels and MRAs and Manosphere commentators need to be careful to stop pretending that all men are super-rational thinkers and all women are chronic emotionalists - rationality is volitional and there are tons of men whom are no better than the average woman in terms of emotionalism).

Perhaps the greatest example of a feminist falling to Nerd-Normativity is the heterodox feminist Camille Paglia. In her book Sexual Personae, Paglia argues that the height of masculinity is, essentially, the gay artist or the sexless scientist - society at large clearly doesn't accept these assessments. Paglia, once again, falls prey to this when she describes the masculine drive as fundamentally about abstract reason and individuation, yet she remains blind to the Dionysian machismo of things like Fascism, the military, and team sports. Paglia can theorize all she wants but mass culture does not agree with her about what constitutes "real masculinity."

Have any of the participants on this forum encountered this cognitive bias before? If so, where? Any thoughts on strategies for tackling it?