Sorry, Popular Kids: The Nerds are the Kinky Ones

Cover your funko pop's eyes

One of my most popular cartoons (which had the watermark removed by some asshole at some point- not sure who- but luckily my “art” style is bad and distinctive enough that everyone still knows I made it) depicts a phenomenon that I’ve long believed to be true: the nerds are having better sex than the cool kids:

I noticed this back when I was on Reddit. Reliably, you can go to r/sex for “questions” that are actually thinly-veiled brags by people who, in my estimation, recently realized that they are able to have sex and are extremely excited about it.

I lost my virginity at fifteen. Not endorsing this, by the way, in hindsight I think it was a bad experience that was psychologically damaging, but anyway…I was very proud of it. I knew that most girls my age had not had sex, and I felt that being a non-virgin made me special. I mean, I had suddenly entered a club that included both Hillary Clinton and Britney Spears. What could be more exciting? I would regale my virgin friends with pseudo “concerns” like “Hey guys, after having sex do you ever feel like your legs kind of ache? Oh, just me? Weird!”

r/Sex is a bit like this. Every day someone will post something like “Is it normal that I LOVE going down on my girlfriend more than I enjoy penetrative sex?” or “My boyfriend made me cum 15 times yesterday…is this normal? Should I go to the ER?” At first I found it irritating, but then I realized I don’t even subscribe to that subreddit and never did, I was going there specifically to read these posts for whatever reason, and ultimately it was easy to ignore them if I found them tiresome.

But it got me thinking.

Reddit is for nerds (generally.) These nerds are posting about a lot of wacky sex they’re having. It’s easy to dismiss these stories as fake (and I’m sure some of them are, I would know a thing or two about fake Reddit posts) but I also think a decent amount of them are real. Because there is nothing about being a nerd that makes you less sexual. Liking dungeons and dragons does not make you impotent. Being an annoying girl who wears cat ears and talks like an anime character doesn’t cause vaginal dryness. The nerds are having sex.

This seems incomprehensible to some because nerds are typically late bloomers. You don’t see a lot of nerds losing their virginities before the age of 18, and I would argue many of them don’t until college or later. I remember playing a game of “never have I ever” with some nerds in college, wondering why all the prompts were “never have I ever been to Minnesota” or “never have I ever seen a Komodo dragon in person” and it dawning on me that everyone playing the game was a virgin (perhaps even a third base virgin), despite being over the age of twenty.

But this doesn’t mean nerds don’t want to have sex. Beneath every polyester wizard cloak and prosthetic elf ears is a burning desire for the sharp, rhythmic melody of clapping cheeks. But these nerds likely didn’t get started “on time” (whatever that means.) As a result, all this sexual energy gets released around the age of twenty-five in the form of wild, out-there, but totally harmless kinky sex lives.

I often asked myself why nerds didn’t just have sex with each other on the same schedule as everyone else. Why are the nerds not diddling each other in the AV room after hours while Chad and Stacey get it on under the bleachers? The answer is that being a late bloomer, physically and emotionally, is a cornerstone of being a nerd. If they were early bloomers, they likely wouldn’t be nerds. Even if they were early physical bloomers (and sometimes they are) the social awkwardness so innate to nerddom means that they are likely unable to express these desires in a way that makes sense to other people and achieves their aims.

(Of course, there are exceptions: in high school, my Druid best friend, who was a massive nerd, received “dry oral” from another nerd on the lacrosse field after hours. In case you’re wondering what this entailed, he licked her repeatedly over the underpants. She bragged about this for weeks.)

When I was fifteen, I went to a party hosted by some nerds at my school and got all dolled up in my best pink polo shirt, sparkly lip gloss and mini skirt, expecting there to be lots of cute boys there to flirt with. When I arrived, the party consisted of six nerds, supervised by adults, watching Monty Python and imitating the characters. One girl, I regret to inform you, was literally wearing a wizard hat. In that moment, I concluded nerds simply didn’t want to date at all. But now I realize they did. They likely did not have the social ability to make it happen, but this was their form of flirtation.

At this point you might be wondering, “Hey, CHH, you keep talking condescendingly about nerds like you’re not one of them, so why are you hanging out with them all the time and acting so high and mighty about how much more sexual you are than them?”

Allow me to retort:

1. I had nerdlike tendencies. As I’ve made clear many times, I am neurodivergent. I have ADHD, SPD and OCD. I struggled profoundly with social cues until my late twenties, and probably still do to some extent today. Had I been interested in nerd stuff, I would have been 100% nerdy. But because I liked things like fashion and parties, I didn’t really fall into the nerd category fully. Despite having so many social issues, I still dated boys fairly often because I was a huge extrovert, had reasonable standards, and presented in a hyper-feminine way. This meant that while I hung out with nerds sometimes due to the fact that they were forgiving of my social cues, I was still on the periphery of this group because they knew I wasn’t truly one of them.

2. I’m not more sexual than they are. The whole point of this article is that nerds absolutely have me beat in the sex department. Just throwing that out there because people get confused about this every time I post this comic. Without getting too TMI, I am extremely vanilla.

3. I’m not better than nerds. I probably thought I was at fifteen. Now I am almost thirty-five and I realize I am not better than nerds. In fact many nerds today probably make more money than I do, and are equally as happy with their home lives. Good for them, truly.

Anyway, I truly believe that getting a late start and having so much pent up sexual energy between high school and your mid-twenties causes an explosion of sexual desire that manifests in exploring kink in a way that the former jocks might not care to.

Imagine that you only eat for sustenance and you never go to fun restaurants. If, one day, fun restaurants become an option for you, you will likely want to go to every restaurant you can think of. You will talk about restaurants. You will try crazy foods. People who have always been able to go to restaurants will likely have already settled into their favorite cuisines, and are more likely to order baked ziti than sea urchin foam.

So, friends, it is the nerds who are having the orgies. They are tying each other up, perhaps while chortling and quoting Gollem. They are turning their funko pops in the other direction while whipping out the sex swing and going to town. And to them I say: good for you! You deserve it. Now get your freak on, geeks.