Remember those guilty crushes you had at school? No not the ones on the teachers or your best friend’s mate, but the ones you didn’t dare admit to anyone.
The ones for the ultra geeky boys with the worst hair who shuffled around talking about ‘Games Workshop’, or at least that’s what it sounded like.
We in the office have always been partial to the geekier boys in life but it seems like finally the rest of the world is catching up with us.
Not only are geeks taking over our screens with everything from The Big Bang Theory to The In-Betweeners, but it seems they’re continually getting the girl. And not just any girl, the hottest ones around to boot.
Just take Megan Fox and Shia LaBeouf who star together in Transformers, Shia’s not the alpha male you’d expect someone of Megan’s super-hot siren status to end up with. But she does and it works.
Or the wonderful Michael Cera with the beautiful Kat Dennings as Nick and Nora in Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist, one of our favourite feel-good movies of the past few years. Geek + hot female = bliss.
Then in season three of The Big Bang Theory Johnny Glaecki and Kaley Cuoco finally hit it off as the most unlikely couple and revel in the strangeness of each other’s worlds. Maybe opposites really do attract?
Finally, Jessie Eisenberg, a geek whose star is definitely on the rise with the release of The Social Network later this year, ‘zombs’ it up with the gorgeous Emma Stone in the movie Zombieland. It wasn’t just those zombies that sent her running into his arms you know!
So why are girls going geek? When did we turn from the alpha male to the decidedly omega one and why? One theory is that years of taking the Pill could have altered our hormones and affected our taste in men, meaning we’re now looking less for the popped out muscle-bound chests that our ancestors coveted in their hunter-gathering days, and instead opting for a gentler, more modest male specimen.
Moreover, whatever your sex, success has always been a big aphrodisiac. With the phenomenal rise of companies like Microsoft, Apple and Facebook from the 1980s onwards geeks have achieved a newfound status and power where they enjoy all the benefits of economic and business success, and beautiful women do tend to come with this lifestyle.
Whereas jocks could always flex their might on the sports field, geeks and their scrawny physiques had always fallen by the wayside. Now, as technology goes more mainstream and becomes an integral part of our life, geeks can flex their digital might on Twitter and impress with their in-depth IT knowledge.
And as a result you see babes like Drew Barrymore getting romantic with super-geek Tom Green and David Arquette ending up with Courtney Cox. It definitely wasn’t like this at school. Maybe geeks will inherit the earth after all
The Big Bang Theory Season 3 is out now on DVD boxset.
Tagged in The Big Bang Theory