7 ms·

As a foreigner looking in, i have to ask: How common is physical violence perpetrated on "nerds" in the usa? I ask because while i know it is a popular trope,

As a foreigner looking in, i have to ask: How common is physical violence perpetrated on "nerds" in the usa? I ask because while i know it is a popular trope, i have never experienced or seen it in my country, despite being the prototypical nerd and having grown up in a poor area.

lfowles 11y ago
Likewise (rural midwest US), it has always seemed to be one of those TV fictions.
- overdrivetg 11y ago
  Wow, I moved around the US every 3 or 4 years growing up and saw this as a very predictable, common pattern. Although I guess I was mainly in larger cities/schools...
  - lfowles 11y ago
    It probably does have something to do with school size, perhaps my class wasn't big enough to support the distinct cliques required (graduating class ~20).
    - epimetheus 11y ago
      It's probably that, I grew up in the Midwest in a rural school district (outside the school district of a ~100k population city) - we had a 400 or so graduating class though. This was early to mid 90s, and it was pretty standard through the 80s too, at least for me. In the mid 90s I fell into a grunge group and they were a bad influence. Instead of getting bullied about being a nerd, it switched to that, and taunts about blowing my brains out with a shotgun (around the time that happened) were pretty common. Edit: to add this perspective though, my wife went to school in a relatively small town (Rolla, MO) and also had a 400 or so graduating class, but she claims ignorance of any sort of nerd bullying and thought it was a TV trope only thing too. She graduated in 2002. Maybe something changed between those dates?
    - azernik 11y ago
      I also didn't see nerd-bullying, coming from a 500-student-per-grade public school in West LA. Admittedly, it was unrepresentative in other ways: one third Ashkenazi Jewish, one third Persian Jewish, one third mostly-white-and-Asian other, very high population of affluent immigrants. We were plugged in to American pop culture, but I think we were isolated in some senses. Little to no idolization of the sports teams, for example.
    - bsenftner 11y ago
      I went to two Midwest high schools in the late 70's early 80's, one was large (5,000 students) and the other was tiny (17 in my class). Both schools had bullies, but the smaller private school had bullies with behavior far in excess of the large public school. The larger school had bullies that would fight each other and protect some nerds they liked or knew, while the smaller school was not diverse enough, so the few bullies had nothing to stop them, and they went way, way too far.
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    Were you the nerd being beat up/bullied or did you just witness it at different schools? I also moved around a bit and got bullied. It was a lot more about being the new kid than being a nerd. Being a nerd was just what they used to taunt me.
    - overdrivetg 11y ago
      I was that nerd, although admittedly I was only in one real fight (in grade school) and I didn't have too many problems beyond that. [edit] I guess I didn't see too much actual violent fighting otherwise beyond (I guess) normal making fun of / pushing around of nerds, although I did see a few fights between girls and some involving more metalhead/burnout types (in case anyone is familiar with the John Hughes High Schooler taxonomy)
overdrivetg 11y ago
In the USA, if you were a nerd that was not the victim of bullies and physical violence growing up in grade school, you would be in the slim, slim minority. I'd actually be quite surprised if anyone escaped some kind of violent altercation growing up as a nerd. Sad, but true.
- CM30 11y ago
  So it's a lot more common in the US than in Europe then? Because over here, you weren't usually bullied for being a nerd. Indeed, some of the smartest people in the class/year were also often some of the most popular, at least in the UK.
  - pramodliv1 11y ago
    >> Indeed, some of the smartest people in the class/year were also often some of the most popular, at least in the UK. Same in India as well.
- kevinnk 11y ago
  I would definitely consider myself a nerd and I never got in a fight or physically hurt. I can't think of any friends that did either. The vast, vast majority of violence that happened at my school (and we had a fair amount) was between unpopular, non-nerdy kids with homelife problems.
  - lijason 11y ago
    Same here on all counts. Without actual numbers, I have a hard time believing the previous assertion as anything more than anecdotal (as is my statement).
    - overdrivetg 11y ago
      Wow, you guys are lucky (or maybe I'm just unlucky?). I guess it's hard to avoid generalizing from our own experiences though, glad to hear some of us made it through unscathed ;-)
jonnathanson 11y ago
Less common now than it once was. Social norms around random acts of childhood violence have shifted pretty dramatically. Back in the day, nerds were shoved against lockers, given wedgies, or just randomly beaten on in my high school (c. early to late 1990s). From what I've heard from my parents or folks their age, this was even more common in decades past. I don't know if we're more enlightened now, or if we're simply more protective of, and involved in, every aspect of our children's lives. Either way, I doubt physical violence against nerds is as common as it may have been. Psychological violence, however, hasn't gone away. Bullying is alive and thriving in the US.
kevinnk 11y ago
I graduated from a large public high school in middle America about 5 years ago. There were quite a few fights/acts of physical violence, virtually zero of which was directed at "nerds". If TV show style bullying ever existed it's mostly gone at this point. (Of course this is my experience - others may vary)
- Thriptic 11y ago
  I think the sheer size of some high schools is what prevents bullying of specific groups; it becomes incredibly difficult to establish known social hierarchies when you have 1000 students per grade (not uncommon in large Midwestern high schools). This means that there isn't much social ROI for bullying someone and so people are largely left to their own devices.
  - kevinnk 11y ago
    My school had closer to 400 students per grade than 1000, but it still had pretty defined cliques that people categorized into nerd/jock/popular kids/whatever. Additionally, bullying was still common, it was just mostly non-physical. Regardless, even in this thread there are people who claim to be from small schools and have not experienced physical violence. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I do think it's far, far less common than Hollywood would have you believe.
  - carussell 11y ago
    The picture painted by the classic sitcom universe and essays like Paul Graham's "Revenge of the Nerds"—the one described so casually that it's almost as if agreement about it is expected to be a foregone conclusion—is something I found totally unrelatable growing up. It was something I always just chalked up to bad tropes that were holdovers from from sitcoms from an era past. I was brainy in school, but none of the axes that groups split on resembled the ones you see in the movies, so most of my friends weren't. No jocks vs nerds. Nobody was intimidated or otherwise pressured as a result of doing well in class. More often than not, people were likely to be down on themselves for feeling dumb or when they felt they weren't keeping up. The best predictor of clustering habits was usually outgoing vs timid, and then those in the middle. But mobility within those clusters meant that even those were pretty fluid. The type of humor my class most valued was, if not intelligent, then at least quick. Contrary to what the article lays out, in my view, Matthew Perry's Chandler Bing is probably one of the biggest influences there. Aside from standard relationship drama, most everybody in my class got along. I wore glasses for a year starting in 4th grade after I began getting headaches at the end of the day. Once shortly after getting my prescription, a classmate called me "four-eyes" after lunch, and I just laughed in his face. He'd really meant for that one to sting, and he was a lot tougher than me, but that just wasn't a thing. Anti-intellectualism was something that I noticed became a big thing after 9/11, to the point that I found it genuinely alarming, but it showed up clearer in the world I was seeing than the one I was living. Thankfully, the insanity died down (at least from where I'm standing), but we have Idiocracy and American Dad as artifacts. I've tried referencing that era since then, but I have difficulty, especially in regards to using words to recreate the world at that time in order to have a conversation about exactly why something like Idiocracy was originally made. My family and acquaintances who lived through it seem to just see the last 20 years as one homogeneous blur. "Shit was crazy" is what I've resigned myself using and is how I described it a few weeks ago to a friend of mine from Iraq. After I'd graduated and moved out of state for school, I read a longform article about the death of irony that I thought was on-point in describing the world I grew up in vs the world I saw on TV growing up, but it's none of the ones that show up when I search for it now. The best and most direct treatment of the topic that I've seen since then is in the scene in 21 Jump Street when Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum first run into Dave Franco and his friends on the first day of their assignment (even though they fudged the timeline a bit). My high school graduating class was something like 40 people, and I graduated in 2007. This all happened in a public school in a small town in North Texas (Collinsville). I was fairly sure that my hometown wasn't special and this was just the way the world worked now, compared to the sitcom holdovers. Went to the University of Oklahoma (it's ranked first in National Merit Scholar enrollments for a public university, and they give out lots of money). Freshman year I was mostly weirded the fuck out, especially by the other people on my floor in my dorm and in the CS program. ("This isn't how people act in real life anymore, right? Nobody really buys into these tropes, do they?") Ended up having a pretty bad time there for as long as I stayed, and I left less sure about how the much the world differed from TV after all. I'm in neither Oklahoma nor North Texas anymore. What I've seen since suggests that Norman, Oklahoma is an anomaly; every now and then I'll meet someone with the same alma mater and the weirdness comes back. As far as predictors go, that has turned out to be a pretty good one for whether I'll be able to get along with someone or be totally at a loss for how to interact and connect with them. (Some false positives about whether someone will pass, but zero false negatives so far, unfortunately.)

lfowles 11y ago

Likewise (rural midwest US), it has always seemed to be one of those TV fictions.

overdrivetg 11y ago
Wow, I moved around the US every 3 or 4 years growing up and saw this as a very predictable, common pattern. Although I guess I was mainly in larger cities/schools...
- lfowles 11y ago
  It probably does have something to do with school size, perhaps my class wasn't big enough to support the distinct cliques required (graduating class ~20).
  - epimetheus 11y ago
    It's probably that, I grew up in the Midwest in a rural school district (outside the school district of a ~100k population city) - we had a 400 or so graduating class though. This was early to mid 90s, and it was pretty standard through the 80s too, at least for me. In the mid 90s I fell into a grunge group and they were a bad influence. Instead of getting bullied about being a nerd, it switched to that, and taunts about blowing my brains out with a shotgun (around the time that happened) were pretty common. Edit: to add this perspective though, my wife went to school in a relatively small town (Rolla, MO) and also had a 400 or so graduating class, but she claims ignorance of any sort of nerd bullying and thought it was a TV trope only thing too. She graduated in 2002. Maybe something changed between those dates?
  - azernik 11y ago
    I also didn't see nerd-bullying, coming from a 500-student-per-grade public school in West LA. Admittedly, it was unrepresentative in other ways: one third Ashkenazi Jewish, one third Persian Jewish, one third mostly-white-and-Asian other, very high population of affluent immigrants. We were plugged in to American pop culture, but I think we were isolated in some senses. Little to no idolization of the sports teams, for example.
  - bsenftner 11y ago
    I went to two Midwest high schools in the late 70's early 80's, one was large (5,000 students) and the other was tiny (17 in my class). Both schools had bullies, but the smaller private school had bullies with behavior far in excess of the large public school. The larger school had bullies that would fight each other and protect some nerds they liked or knew, while the smaller school was not diverse enough, so the few bullies had nothing to stop them, and they went way, way too far.
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  Were you the nerd being beat up/bullied or did you just witness it at different schools? I also moved around a bit and got bullied. It was a lot more about being the new kid than being a nerd. Being a nerd was just what they used to taunt me.
  - overdrivetg 11y ago
    I was that nerd, although admittedly I was only in one real fight (in grade school) and I didn't have too many problems beyond that. [edit] I guess I didn't see too much actual violent fighting otherwise beyond (I guess) normal making fun of / pushing around of nerds, although I did see a few fights between girls and some involving more metalhead/burnout types (in case anyone is familiar with the John Hughes High Schooler taxonomy)

overdrivetg 11y ago

In the USA, if you were a nerd that was not the victim of bullies and physical violence growing up in grade school, you would be in the slim, slim minority. I'd actually be quite surprised if anyone escaped some kind of violent altercation growing up as a nerd. Sad, but true.

CM30 11y ago
So it's a lot more common in the US than in Europe then? Because over here, you weren't usually bullied for being a nerd. Indeed, some of the smartest people in the class/year were also often some of the most popular, at least in the UK.
- pramodliv1 11y ago
  >> Indeed, some of the smartest people in the class/year were also often some of the most popular, at least in the UK. Same in India as well.
kevinnk 11y ago
I would definitely consider myself a nerd and I never got in a fight or physically hurt. I can't think of any friends that did either. The vast, vast majority of violence that happened at my school (and we had a fair amount) was between unpopular, non-nerdy kids with homelife problems.
- lijason 11y ago
  Same here on all counts. Without actual numbers, I have a hard time believing the previous assertion as anything more than anecdotal (as is my statement).
  - overdrivetg 11y ago
    Wow, you guys are lucky (or maybe I'm just unlucky?). I guess it's hard to avoid generalizing from our own experiences though, glad to hear some of us made it through unscathed ;-)

jonnathanson 11y ago

Less common now than it once was. Social norms around random acts of childhood violence have shifted pretty dramatically. Back in the day, nerds were shoved against lockers, given wedgies, or just randomly beaten on in my high school (c. early to late 1990s). From what I've heard from my parents or folks their age, this was even more common in decades past. I don't know if we're more enlightened now, or if we're simply more protective of, and involved in, every aspect of our children's lives. Either way, I doubt physical violence against nerds is as common as it may have been. Psychological violence, however, hasn't gone away. Bullying is alive and thriving in the US.

kevinnk 11y ago

I graduated from a large public high school in middle America about 5 years ago. There were quite a few fights/acts of physical violence, virtually zero of which was directed at "nerds". If TV show style bullying ever existed it's mostly gone at this point. (Of course this is my experience - others may vary)

Thriptic 11y ago
I think the sheer size of some high schools is what prevents bullying of specific groups; it becomes incredibly difficult to establish known social hierarchies when you have 1000 students per grade (not uncommon in large Midwestern high schools). This means that there isn't much social ROI for bullying someone and so people are largely left to their own devices.
- kevinnk 11y ago
  My school had closer to 400 students per grade than 1000, but it still had pretty defined cliques that people categorized into nerd/jock/popular kids/whatever. Additionally, bullying was still common, it was just mostly non-physical. Regardless, even in this thread there are people who claim to be from small schools and have not experienced physical violence. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I do think it's far, far less common than Hollywood would have you believe.
- carussell 11y ago
  The picture painted by the classic sitcom universe and essays like Paul Graham's "Revenge of the Nerds"—the one described so casually that it's almost as if agreement about it is expected to be a foregone conclusion—is something I found totally unrelatable growing up. It was something I always just chalked up to bad tropes that were holdovers from from sitcoms from an era past. I was brainy in school, but none of the axes that groups split on resembled the ones you see in the movies, so most of my friends weren't. No jocks vs nerds. Nobody was intimidated or otherwise pressured as a result of doing well in class. More often than not, people were likely to be down on themselves for feeling dumb or when they felt they weren't keeping up. The best predictor of clustering habits was usually outgoing vs timid, and then those in the middle. But mobility within those clusters meant that even those were pretty fluid. The type of humor my class most valued was, if not intelligent, then at least quick. Contrary to what the article lays out, in my view, Matthew Perry's Chandler Bing is probably one of the biggest influences there. Aside from standard relationship drama, most everybody in my class got along. I wore glasses for a year starting in 4th grade after I began getting headaches at the end of the day. Once shortly after getting my prescription, a classmate called me "four-eyes" after lunch, and I just laughed in his face. He'd really meant for that one to sting, and he was a lot tougher than me, but that just wasn't a thing. Anti-intellectualism was something that I noticed became a big thing after 9/11, to the point that I found it genuinely alarming, but it showed up clearer in the world I was seeing than the one I was living. Thankfully, the insanity died down (at least from where I'm standing), but we have Idiocracy and American Dad as artifacts. I've tried referencing that era since then, but I have difficulty, especially in regards to using words to recreate the world at that time in order to have a conversation about exactly why something like Idiocracy was originally made. My family and acquaintances who lived through it seem to just see the last 20 years as one homogeneous blur. "Shit was crazy" is what I've resigned myself using and is how I described it a few weeks ago to a friend of mine from Iraq. After I'd graduated and moved out of state for school, I read a longform article about the death of irony that I thought was on-point in describing the world I grew up in vs the world I saw on TV growing up, but it's none of the ones that show up when I search for it now. The best and most direct treatment of the topic that I've seen since then is in the scene in 21 Jump Street when Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum first run into Dave Franco and his friends on the first day of their assignment (even though they fudged the timeline a bit). My high school graduating class was something like 40 people, and I graduated in 2007. This all happened in a public school in a small town in North Texas (Collinsville). I was fairly sure that my hometown wasn't special and this was just the way the world worked now, compared to the sitcom holdovers. Went to the University of Oklahoma (it's ranked first in National Merit Scholar enrollments for a public university, and they give out lots of money). Freshman year I was mostly weirded the fuck out, especially by the other people on my floor in my dorm and in the CS program. ("This isn't how people act in real life anymore, right? Nobody really buys into these tropes, do they?") Ended up having a pretty bad time there for as long as I stayed, and I left less sure about how the much the world differed from TV after all. I'm in neither Oklahoma nor North Texas anymore. What I've seen since suggests that Norman, Oklahoma is an anomaly; every now and then I'll meet someone with the same alma mater and the weirdness comes back. As far as predictors go, that has turned out to be a pretty good one for whether I'll be able to get along with someone or be totally at a loss for how to interact and connect with them. (Some false positives about whether someone will pass, but zero false negatives so far, unfortunately.)