The Mating Habits Of The Nerd

After the long touted "Orgy" episode, you might have come away with the misconception that Shandi, my original pick for winner of America's Next Top Model, has departed the Road To Nerdville. You, bewildered, point to last night's shenanigans in the hot tub with Italian playboys, her abundant tongue action, frisky, nearly-anonymous sex in her Italian Apartment (hey, I'm not coining this one. That's all Tyra. "The eliminated girl will be going back to the Italian Apartment." You mean you guys aren't going to fly her back to the states one more time, to unpack her Italian trip suitcase, then repack in the New York Apartment? Whaa?) even her new designer two-tone sunglasses. You, however, would be wrong.

Shandi's romp in Milan last night only proved to me that she is forever a nerd inside. While her European sexcapade may have given the surface appearance of a change in personality, upon closer examination, it only further revealed the hardcore psychological nerd mechanisms deep at work within her brain.

When I got to Brown, I was confronted with a whole bunch of former high school female nerds. They showed up to the first day of the dorm-move-in with impressively frizzy hair (Providence gets pretty humid at the end of summer), pre-med courseloads, keys hanging on a university lace around their necks. And then, inevitably, during the first week the frats would hold their welcome parties, distributing invites as freely as STD's, and these dork-girls from my unit would come back to the dorm and excitedly run down the hallway squealing about how they had been paid attention by some Gamma Sigma Neu in their bio section, how he was expecting them for a round of beer pong. Friday night, 11 p.m. would roll around. I would poke my head out of the door of my room. Behold the parade of fuck me pumps! Lurex mini-skirts! Blow-dry-straightened hair! The nerdgirls had been waiting their whole lives for an occasion like this, and their heads were nearly exploding. "Do I look all right?" was the song that echoed down the hallway, fading into sad refrain as the partygoers made their way out of the building and down Waterman street toward campus. Saturday morning, 10 a.m., there was a new chorus. "I got so drunk, Shannon, and I slept with him! Gahhhhhhh!"

I use this example not to make light of the nerdgirls, but to explain how the world works. Nerddom is a vulnerability, a wound in the psyche. It shouldn't have to be this way, but it is. I could see it visibly churning as Shandi sat in the lap of her Italian in the hot tub. There she was in her tankini- a key, key, key clue to what was boiling beneath. If Britney Spears was not a girl, not yet a woman, Shandi is not a one-piece wearer anymore, but not yet a bikini sporter either. She's still trapped in that bathing suit limbo between gawky self-consciousness and eventual acceptance of her frame. This unwillingness to be either here or there also shows up in the way she was behaving in front of the guy behind her. I couldn't help but notice that Shandi refused to look at him (until she finally turned and began devouring his face), instead always laughing at the antics of the other girls around her. She was pointedly un-interactive. Classic nerd body language, revealing insecurities about her own desirability and her ability to attract the stud. Instead, she let his arms slide around her body and his manhood knock on the back door of her bottoms, removing the chance of possible rejection. And then once Shandi understood she was "in," so was her tongue.

I am convinced, more than ever, that Shandi is winning, not only because I'm sticking by this Year Of The Nerd thesis, but because Tyra banks is getting into the spirit, too. For two weeks now I've been hearing about this "orgy," this debaucle so shocking, so nasty, that she had to go back and re-edit the episode in the wake of Janet Jackson's nipslip. While I haven't seen the lost footage, unless it contains buck-wild, naked partner swapping and double penetration, I'm going to have to call a spade a spade. There are eighth graders in Irvine having a nastier time in the Woodflower hot tub than the girls of Top Model. Sure, there was some splashing. There was some drunkenness. There was some making out. But a French kiss does not an orgy make.

But what's important isn't that the orgy wasn't actually an orgy, but that Tyra seems to think it was. Undoubtedly she dubbed the tub party an orgy partly to stir up public interest, but in interviews about the episode she also displays a certain nerdy excitability about the incident. Ty-ty baby told Conan O'Brien, "My girls on the show were doing the nasty. There's eight people making out at the same time, kind of, in the same vicinity. I don't want to say orgy--but I just said it." The key phrases in this statement are "kind of" and "same vicinity." So Shandi was doing the freaky-deaky in the bedroom and Yoanna was mp3 swapping with her guy in another part of The Italian Apartment, and Tyra's calling orgy. This reminds me of myself at the height of my nerddom, when, in eighth grade, after being felt up by Paul V. for the first time, I yanked my accompanying friend outside with me, made my eyes really big, paused a moment for dramatic effect, and said, "Do you realize that I almost just had sex?" That's the dork impulse- to turn AOL chats into a romantic relationship, to turn boob brushing into third base, to turn kisses in the jacuzzi into a UPN orgy. It's the poetic need to fit the world to your own quaking nerd scale, when the non-nerd people around you are indifferent to the same events because they consider them ordinary business. Tyra's showing her nerd wounds now, too. One significant executive producer vote for Shandi on the way.

On a very side note: Did anyone else notice that Stephen Fairchild, featured designer on last night's episode, is a dead ringer in looks, behavior, and especially voice for serial tickler Yaqi from the Howard Stern show?

Comments

[Wax]

There were so many wierd things about the non-orgy, like the fact that Yoanna was wearing what? Long johns? And April was doing, I don't know what, watching. How scandalous could it really have been? I call bullshit on Tyra.

[trendle]

I think it's obvious that the "orgy" was over hyped. I do have to disagree with you on Shandi winning though. If you remember last season, Audrey (I think that was the #2)who essentially was the "most high fashion" of them all looks wise, got to the final 2 and then lost. And that's what I think will happen w/Shandi. She's going to have a career anyway, so they'll give it to Yoanna. Mercedes is outclassed. And I'm convinced the only reason April got he boot was because she pissed of Tyra's little gay stylist man.
Have these girls learned nothing of last season? The one girl from last season did the same thing and she got the boot. He's the keeper of "gate", you don't piss him off or you will be banished.

I think it's obvious that the "orgy" was over hyped. I do have to disagree with you on Shandi winning though. If you remember last season, Audrey (I think that was the #2)who essentially was the "most high fashion" of them all looks wise, got to the final 2 and then lost. And that's what I think will happen w/Shandi. She's going to have a career anyway, so they'll give it to Yoanna. Mercedes is outclassed. And I'm convinced the only reason April got he boot was because she pissed of Tyra's little gay stylist man.
Have these girls learned nothing of last season? The one girl from last season did the same thing and she got the boot. He's the keeper of "gate", you don't piss him off or you will be banished.

[chanex]

I think that they really did cut a lot out of the orgy and out of the girl-on-girl photo shoot due to the Janet thing. Esp the photo shoot looked really awkwardly edited.

I have to wonder if Shandi did the nasty because she wasn't getting any back home. Her bf is obviously gay, it was hilarious when he called her a bitch, because it was like me calling one of my "girlfriends" a bitch. So, so gay.

And what about when Shandi freaked out about him going to the movie with some married woman? She's more than just a nerd, she's a little crazy. Your average nerd doesn't have a past involving doing time for drugs. She's like Adrienne and Elise from last season combined, nerdy but dangerous.

Yoanna is totally going to win. Trust me.

[Eppy]

No, she's a white-trash nerd. White trash nerds do a lot of drugs if they're girls. Especially the drugs Shandi seems to have done.

Yoanna's sort of a nerd, too, but a self-denying one.

[ad guru]

The sephora ad campaign has already been shot and it's not featuring Shandi.

[esteban guillermos]

I hated those lace-key-ID setups (invariably worn over the oversized Brown t-shirt, with the B, B, & B dorm sandals). I didn't realize those girls were the nerds though in the HS sense. They were such eager Joiners: going to the Orientation Carnival, listening to that jackass sing on Wriston on the sunday of spring weekend, and so on. As a nerd, I've always been deeply suspicious of groups.

[Lena]

If that was an orgy, then I was an unwilling participant of many in the 90's.

[Natasha Jackson]

What I want to know is what is Shandi doing now?