There's a curious act of cultural revenge going on, an act so insidious and subtle that many of you may not even have noticed that it's happening. It's called the revenge of the geek and its effects can be seen everywhere in the media. See if you recognise this scenario, and you'll know what I mean.
You're watching a film or television programme and one of the protagonists is a short, fairly weedy looking man who suffers from terrible anxiety and is rather lacking in social graces. As he witters on about his inability to self-actualise, a beautiful woman, who is usually either blonde or foreign, and is always very tall, falls madly in love with him. She desires him for his mind because he's not a muscle-bound jock like she has been hanging out with, but a sensitive, intelligent guy. The details vary slightly here, but it usually ends with weed man rejecting supermodel who wanders off looking confused and distraught.
It's a pattern that I first started to notice in that paean to neurotics, Ally McBeal. While Ally mumbles on about her own shortcomings and is rejected by a series of fairly appalling prospective boyfriends, the men in her offices are flooded with offers of adoration and casual sex by the female lawyers. Ridiculously glamorous, possessing of tumbling blonde curls and figures to die for, these women are all blindly pursuing the likes of John Cage, who is short, paranoid, neurotic and a geek of the kind that would have got fairly short shrift in Lord of the Flies. Then there's Fish who is about as irritating as hay fever, as well as being short and nerdy, and who is being pursued in and out of the unisex toilets by the exotic Ling. I mean really, I'm all for happy endings but this is all getting a little too unlikely.
For the most part, people match up with people that are similar to themselves. Really beautiful people tend to marry and mate with other really beautiful people and the rest of us fall in all the way down the line. I even remember hearing once that a super race of beautiful people was emerging because all the pretty genes are un-diluted by plain-Jane genes. So all the beautiful people keep producing beautiful children who grow up and marry the beautiful children of other beautiful people. I'm hoping this is the case so we can all shake our heads sorrowfully and whisper "Beautiful, but terribly inbred, poor thing".
Yet if you watch Ally McBeal or Friends, or any number of American movies from Election to American Pie, or anything at all made by Woody Allen or Kenneth Branagh, you'd imagine that the geeks get all the girls. I used to imagine that this was because they didn't want to introduce any more highly paid characters into television dramas, preferring to stuff their existing characters together in unlikely combinations. But recently, a friend has pointed out a much more likely reason why all these geeks are cleaning up. It's because it's the geeks who are writing the scripts these days.
All around America, writers are churning out scripts in which the guy who was laughed at all his life, the guy who is knock-kneed but good at maths, the guy who stutters around girls, finally gets the model girlfriend. In the process, good-looking jocks are shown to be morons, and those girls who laugh at nerds are humiliated. With a little stretch of the imagination, you can imagine all of these quiet guys in school, getting sand thrown in their faces, wet towels snapped at them in the showers and laughed at when they ask a girl to the Proms. With all the time they gain by not playing football or trailing their girls around shopping malls, they start writing.
Now is it likely that they'll create a film in which the good-looking buff guy gets the girl? No way; they're going to make sure that for once the guy who collects comic books and wears glasses gets to date, and more importantly, to dump the girl. We all of us would like to re-write reality, to make sure that the first shall be last and vice versa, but if you think about it, scriptwriters get to do it - to make themselves into the star turn instead of the bit-part player.
Of course, there's another way in which nerds are getting their revenge on the rest of the world, and that's the techie revolution. While the jocks were out playing sport and the valley girls were shopping, quiet boys and girls were inside playing on their computers. Every now and then they'd break for a spot of "gaming", creating huge imaginary and hugely stratified worlds while playing Dungeons and Dragons. Now who was in a better position when the Internet started to dominate and the dot com industries took off?
These people didn't need to get good jobs through contacts made on the playing fields or because of their astonishing ability to network; they had the knowledge in the form of years spent in front of a computer screen. Suddenly the nerds are creating Internet start-ups, floating them for millions on the stock market and then retiring to spend their days pampering their model girlfriends and playing computer games. Meanwhile, the guys who were always the winners at school are left clutching their old school ties, adjusting the team photo on their desk and wondering how on Earth they ended up in accountancy anyway.
There's something rather satisfyingly Greek about this remarkable come-back by the underdog - nobody particularly wants the dumb, bully-boy jock to always get the girl. For every screenwriter who recreates himself as the leading man, there is a fleet of other nerds who revel in this revenge by proxy. But I'm beginning to wonder just how far this revenge is going to go.
Already, a kind of misogyny is creeping into the nerd-hero films - women are gullible, adoring, easily duped and easily cast aside, because hey, they're only there as status symbols to bolster the male ego. In the world of new technologies, the one who is being patronised and under-regarded is the consumer. By creating a whole new world of acronyms, technical terms, slang and rapidly changing technology, an elite has been created, an elite that has little regard for the large swathes of people who understand little of what is going on.
Let's by all means applaud the nerds and geeks who have proved that they have invaluable skills lacking in the rest of the world. But let's not create another hierarchy where those who don't know their dot coms from their Dot Cottons are made to feel Jurassic, unemployable and distinctly geekish in modern life. Being a computer nerd is one thing; being a computer bully is quite another.
Louise East can be contacted at wingit@irish-times.ie