There is no basic mental difference between men and women, and so there is no reason to believe that women would be mentally any less tinker-inclined than men. Therefore, in order to determine the reason why there are so few female nerds, we must turn our attentions to the ways in which men and women are known to differ: the physical ways. Immediately, the answer becomes plain. Women do not need to glut their tendencies by tinkering with computers or cars or guns because of their reproductive systems, which require a great deal more attention and maintenance than those of their male counterparts. Simply put, women tinker with their parts, and so have no interest in tinkering with electronic substitutes.

Penises and testicles grow boring early on. They do not exhibit quirky, moody, fixable behavior. They hang loosely in a man's crotch and rarely get more attention than any other body part, and at those times tinkering is not foremost on the subject's mind. Particularly in the case of an circumsized penis, very little extra maintenance is ever needed. Contrast this, then, to the vagina, which must be carefully wiped after every use, and regularly cleaned to preserve womanly freshness. Females learn early in life that the vagina must be treated with respect, and in return they have the incomparable, primal joy of upkeep.

Women may contentedly seek non-nerdy sources of entertainment, safe in their knowledge that every month will bring them more new and exciting vaginal adventures. While some men profess to be unnerved or even disgusted by menstruation, their true feelings are probably closer to envy. Women, lucky women, may peruse those exotic aisles at the supermarket in search of feminine hygiene products, products that they need, they absolutely need, in order to keep their systems fully operational. Men never know the intimate thrill of personally dealing with menstruation by applying a tampon just in the nick of time, or the sense of deep personal satisfaction that comes with regularly eating yogurt and so having a yeast-infection free vagina for months or even years.

No, healthy men have no physical equivalents to the vagina, and so they have to settle for substitutes. These substitutes generally grow more and more complex the less interaction the man has with well-groomed vaginas, for even second-hand a vagina provides like nothing else can. So, while for the average, vaginally supplemented male, simply obtaining and having nifty gadgets will suffice, those who have little or no vaginal interaction will need more total surrogate vaginas. In terms of requiring regular attention and meticulous maintenance, only a computer system can match a vagina. And, for those truly dire cases of vaginal deprivation, it is necessary to run an unstable, exotic operating system like the Linux.

Linux is designed with the abject nerdist in mind. All of its code is open, so every nerd may feel that each line of code is part of him, an extension of his body; in reality, of course, almost no nerdists can actually understand computer code of any variety, and certainly would not be able to make anything of its intentionally obfuscated tangles. In addition, for most nerdists, it is not simply enough to have the toy and play with it. Just as women may knowingly giggle with each other and swap vagina stories and products, nerdist men may delight in swapping stories of their epic rescues of their corrupt, unjournaled filesystems, or of their ingenuity in using thermal paste to sooth their burning AMD processors.

Over time, the Linux computer will grow to be more to its nerdist than just a substitute for the tinkering rush that comes with vaginal contact. The nerdist, knowing that his chances of conventional procreation are limited to the illegal, will begin to channel his frustrated sexual energies into feverish futzing with his computer system. He will aspire to know everything about his computer. He will probably even acquire several computers in order to play a technologically enhanced, sexually charged version of the children's game "house," frequently referred to as "networking." He will bloat his computer cases by inserting loads of foreign hardware, hoping for his computer to reject his transplants so that he might lose himself in fixing it for hours on end, and for those few hours have the burden of his maddeningly functional penis lifted from his mind. In short, he'll be a hopeless, drooling nerd.

And now we know why it is unlikely that he will ever find a computer-obsessed female with whom to share his torment.