Quit putting down dorks to sell your product!

My colleague Tom Barlow reported recently on back to school marketing strategies of many companies, but one in particular caught my eye. J.C. Penney will soon be offering up a game for girls called "DorkDodge," in which players maneuver past the "undesirables"in order to get to their dream guy.

I didn't know us dorks had been relegated back to the bottom of the caste system! You'd think with us running the Internets and making beaucoup bucks supporting your online poker addictions, the tendency toward labeling us as "undesirable" would have passed.

Corporations take note, the people who run your infrastructure, create your websites, and these flippant little webgames you so easily use to disparage those without popping pecs, washboard abs and perfect vision, are the dorks, the geeks and the nerds. It is OK for me to call myself a geek, I self identify, I am a geek and I am proud of it! It is not OK for you to go putting down a whole segment of society just because we don't look like Derek Zoolander!

If I were to create a game called "Dumpy Dodgem" where it was the goal of boys to avoid girls without an anorexic waistline, a perfect tan and blond hair, I'd be run out of town. Society as a whole is so concerned about the image we grind into the minds of young girls about what they should look like and do, but when it comes to boys, it's apparently still OK to snub anyone who doesn't fit the Dawson's Creek Mold.