Lately, I've become aware of sexism and misogyny in the most unexpected of place - geek fandom culture.

I was a comic book nerd when I was a kid, but haven't touched a super hero comic in decades, so I was unaware of the dramatic ways things had changed in fandom over those years.

So you'll have to excuse me for thinking that fandom stuff was still primarily the territory of awkward, but mostly benevolent, too-fat or too-skinny male outcasts who are persecuted for their interests. See, that's the thing. I grew up as one of those people, and most of my friends were into the same role playing games, comic books, and horror movies that I was. Some of them were also early computer nerds, so fascinated by the possibilities of the extremely primitive home computers they had at the time that they were willing to spend their time practicing old-fashioned programming languages instead of hanging out with the cool kids at school.

Let's be honest, that wasn't going to be happening in most cases, even if they'd wanted it to. The cool kids weren't exactly embracing many of the terminally nerdy back then. People like that were generally pariahs among the majority of their peers, and in the days before the Internet, being a nerd was often a lonely existence.

Finding friends who would accept that you were into entertainment and activities that marked you as a weirdo to everyone else felt special way back when I was a youngster. That's why I find it troubling that misogyny and sexism seems to have exploded along with the mainstreaming of fandom.

I know I'm late to this party. This phenomenon has been getting a lot of press for awhile, with women being hassled for being fake geeks and treated poorly if they are brave enough to stumble into the still mostly male-dominated world of online video game play.

It makes me sad that many guys who probably would've been bullied for their interests a few years ago will treat women poorly within their fandoms. How did that happen?

Maybe part of the answer to that is the fact that geek culture has become a lot more "acceptable." This mainstreaming of traditionally outsider activities has made those activities open to the types of males that might not have once been attracted to them. Being a computer nerd these days is seen as cool, it's not the life sentence to "Never Gets Laid Island" that it might have seemed to be in the early '80s. Playing video games seems almost universally popular now, and I see asshole "bros" talking about their passion for games as often as classic game nerds these days.