Yesterday on the subway, the cute girl sitting next to me was reading The Fellowship of the Ring. I thought that genre was only for nerdy guys.
* * *
Conquistador writes:
Women follow whatever is cool and trendy. The success and popularity of the Lord of the Rings movies have removed the loser stigma through social proof.
I think this is the correct answer.
 | Lion of the Blogosph… on David Karp’s mother |
 | Dan on How to profit from the educati… |
 | Conquistador on The impact of immigration refo… |
 | Robert on Another post about the to… |
 | Portlander on How to profit from the educati… |
 | D Brooks on Another post about the to… |
 | Mark on How to profit from the educati… |
 | asdf on David Karp’s mother |
 | lion of the lionosph… on How to profit from the educati… |
 | Jay on How to profit from the educati… |
| D Brooks on Another post about the to… |
 | IC on Another post about the to… |
 | Beer Vanguard on How to profit from the educati… |
| asdf on The impact of immigration refo… |
| Jay on The impact of immigration refo… |
What, no photo?
As the kids these days like to say: pic or it didn’t happen.
blighter
January 15, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Sadly, photographing a random cute looking girl reading a book on the train is likely to get one labeled as a pedophile. I bet Lion could have composed a pretty good photo, too. Also my girlfriend loves LOTR
Anonymous
January 15, 2013 at 1:45 pm
By “girl” I really meant young woman. She may have been 30.
Lion of the Blogosphere
January 15, 2013 at 2:00 pm
You can take photos discretely with iPhones these days.
DaveinHackensack
January 15, 2013 at 8:50 pm
Not sure if I trust the Lion’s view of cute, but stranger things have happened. Yesterday a girl said something funny. Genuinely funny. On purpose.
Vince, the Lionhearted
January 15, 2013 at 1:41 pm
I don’t believe you.
destructure
January 17, 2013 at 12:33 am
Unfortunately, cute nerdy girls tend to morph into hipster chicks as they grow older.
IHTG
January 15, 2013 at 3:10 pm
If they don’t, they pack on the pounds and are no longer cute.
SFG
January 19, 2013 at 2:44 pm
Women follow whatever is cool and trendy. The success and popularity of the Lord of the Rings movies have removed the loser stigma through social proof.
Conquistador
January 15, 2013 at 3:18 pm
That girl reading LOTR is an outlier. Sci Fi fantasy was never cool or trendy for most women, except the occasional movie watching with their friends or BFs.
Just because you see a few attractive chicks in cosplay events doesn’t mean it’s a trend. Girls go to them to have fun without the intention of meeting guys, especially the dweebos who make up the majority of the attendees.
Just Speculating
January 15, 2013 at 7:59 pm
Conq is correct. It’s a most valid assessment.
To infer more is a stretch.
She IS reading, not doing dorky cosplay.
Firepower
January 16, 2013 at 10:04 am
I always thought that LOTR actually did appeal to women to some extent. It’s more fantasy than hardcore sci-fi.
Peter
ironrailsironweights
January 15, 2013 at 3:48 pm
Definitely – I know lots of chicks who like it, including some that are reasonably attractive (my wife and my sister, to begin with).
Samson J.
January 16, 2013 at 8:53 pm
Can you maybe make a post about this NYTimes article? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/education/parents-financial-support-linked-to-college-grades.html?src=me&ref=general
Seems like a shoddy study at best.
AsianDue
January 15, 2013 at 3:51 pm
Seems to me like mistaking cause and effect.
Lion of the Blogosphere
January 15, 2013 at 5:33 pm
You would think that the external factors would generally favor those whose parents are paying for college, though. More family income, higher IQ, higher expectations.
trumwill
January 18, 2013 at 2:06 pm
Did you talk to her? Did you tell her that she must be a nerd to be reading LOTR?
ASF
January 15, 2013 at 4:39 pm
I know of one gogo dancing type (very clever, but never attained her telos) who was an ardent fan of the novels from teen years on.
Lucius Somesuch
January 15, 2013 at 8:39 pm
A lot of cute girls seem to like fantasy movies. I knew a girl who worked as a stripper. She told me that when she was giving a guy a lap dance she would sometimes pretend that he was David Bowie as the goblin king from the movie “The Labyrinth”.
Mark
January 16, 2013 at 9:17 am
Did you strike up a conversation with the girl? Try to get her digits? If not, why not?
DaveinHackensack
January 15, 2013 at 8:51 pm
The appeal of The Lord of the Rings goes far beyond the sci fi/fantasy genre(s). If you saw someone reading the Bible, would you assume that person just had a thing for Jewish history?
RBG
January 15, 2013 at 11:21 pm
Guys were watching Hammer films and reading comic books decades before things like Twilight and Comic-Con made their genres cool. Geeky men tinker in the wilderness ostracized for years, women join in only after a movement gains wider acceptance.
Eazy-E
January 16, 2013 at 12:25 am
I remember a newspaper article wrote by a Italian Catholic Bishop about The Lord of The Ring when the first movie came out. He said he was unsure if it was a good reading when offered by a friend, but when ill and with a lot of time blocked in bed he decided to read it and found it very christian (this probably happened around 1990s.
Are Catholic Bishops nerdy guys?
painlord2k
January 16, 2013 at 5:45 am
Tolkein, a devout Catholic, wrote the LOTR as a speculative pre-Christian history of Britain. C.S. Lewis did the same sort of thing with his insertion of Merlin in the last book of his Space trilogy.
Interestingly, I heard second-hand that Christopher Tolkein said his brother could never bring himself to write a post-Aragorn sequel to LOTR. Apparently his chain of thought inevitably led to a warlord-scenario with roving bands of Men adopting Orc dress and behaviors.
The Anti-Gnostic
January 16, 2013 at 8:46 am
Probably somewhat. The Catholic Church was European intellectual life for a millennium or so. Bright Catholic men were encouraged to become priests. It’s waned somewhat, obviously. From a traditionalist standpoint, your clergy have to be able to read the holy books, so they are the only ones who actually need book-work skills, though obviously interpersonal skills are important for counselling couples and grieving people, for example. I bet there are a lot of geeky theologians.
Also, as AG says below, Tolkien was a deeply Christian writer, and this informs much of his work. The binary good and evil dichotomy seems more religious than, say, Game of Thrones, which is about a bunch of squabbling warlords with swords (ie, like the real Middle Ages).
SFG
January 19, 2013 at 2:51 pm
I have to say, there do seem to be more cute girls into the nerd stuff these days. I actually saw three girls in Dalek dresses at a sf con the other year, and they were reasonably cute. No clue why this is. I suspect that getting a geek is probably a good way to get a stable husband for a family-minded girl.
SFG
January 19, 2013 at 2:58 pm