"Fake geek girl" is a pejorative term for a woman who is accused of feigning interest in geeky topics such as video games or comic books to get attention from men. The topic was the subject of controversy in 2012 and 2013, when multiple articles were published supporting or condemning the concept.
Contents
Origin
Much of the controversy surrounding the concept of fake geek girls began in March 2012, when Tara Brown published an article on the Forbes website titled "Dear Fake Geek Girls: Please Go Away". In the article, she discussed the difference between geeky women as a social outcasts, and "pretentious females who have labeled themselves as a 'geek girl' [who have] figured out that guys will pay a lot of attention to them if they proclaim they are reading comics or playing video games."
Joe Peacock continued this criticism to discuss booth babes and female cosplayers in a July 2012 blog post for CNN titled "Booth babes need not apply". In this article, he denounced women who pretend to be interested in geek culture to gain attention from men or play at being models. Comic artist Tony Harris wrote a Facebook post in November 2012, described by The Daily Dot as a "diatribe", about female cosplayers who were not knowledgeable about the characters they were representing.
Criticism of fake geek girls has given rise to other phenomena, such as the "Idiot Nerd Girl" image macro.
Criticism
These articles prompted considerable response. Some people argued that fake geek girls did not exist, or were more rare than the criticism suggested. Kirk Hamilton wrote in Kotaku that people perceived to be fake geek girls were instead people who were interested in things to different extents. Some responses describe the criticism as misogynist and as a form of gatekeeping.