Peter Sinclair: Cyber 'it' people

By PETER SINCLAIR

Every medium produces its own sex-symbols.

Television, movies, photography — from the fragility of Mary Pickford to the wounded gorgeousness of Monroe and the perverse antiglamour of Twiggy in the Sixties — each seems to produce its own brand of allure.

So if these sexual avatars reflect their time and place, who has the internet chosen to personify desire in the Digital Age?

The pedestal is still empty, awaiting its first true occupant. Sound the weird-alert and ready, steady, click ... the hunt is on for the sexiest geek alive.
For a while it looked as though X-Files star David Duchovny might fill the vacant position. For some reason he seemed to personify geek values — well, he uses a Mac, after all.

If you thought he was big onscreen, he almost attained cult status online with more than 65,000 links, including any number of David Duchovny Shrines, a First Church of DD ("a site devoted to the principle that the adoration of David Duchovny can bring you closer to the Truth") and a really exhaustive FAQ maintained by, ahem, the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade?

With his obsessed cyber-legions, Duchovny was about as close as you get to geek glitz.

But Duchovny seems to have gone off the boil and now the search is officially on for Hard Bodies Who Love Hard Drives — the second annual Sexiest Geek Alive contest.

The search for this year's winner started last week in Indianapolis, the first of 11 regional contests. And here's a thing, willing contestants who can't make it to the regional face-offs can submit a photo and bio at the site's registration page from which three geeks will be chosen to compete in the final in San Jose, California, on June 21.

Sound like you? Despite the techno downturn, founder Steven Phenix says geeks are still in big demand — in fact, he started the contest in response to a constant stream of barbed comments from his wife-to-be.

"I tried to tell Meg that geeks were cool these days," Wired reports him as saying. "Then People magazine came out and I said that some day Bill Gates would be on the cover."

Last year he inaugurated an awards ceremony to assemble geeks worldwide to celebrate what he saw as "their emerging coolness."

Technobabes and nerdish hunks flocked to flash their pocket-protectors at the judges. More than 18,000 registered — this year's contest has already drawn some 2000 entrants with a common obsession — technology.

For this year there are almost as many girls taking part as guys. Look at Ellen Spertus. After receiving her undergraduate and graduate degree plus PhD from MIT she said to herself, why not?

"As a child, I was intimidated by these guys who seemed to possess an amazing knowledge of computers. Then I realised ... a deep knowledge of Doom wouldn't necessarily translate into real skill at programming."

After turning up a few pictures at Geek of the Week ( ) though, I can definitely say my money's on you, Ellen.

How do you tell a geek, incidentally?

"The minute you say to yourself, 'I think I'm going to spend Saturday night figuring out how X works' instead of going out to the movies, you've become a geek ..."

petersinclair@email.com

Links

David Duchovny Shrine

The church of our guy David Duchovny

Sexiest geek alive

Geek of the week