SAN JOSE -- Not long ago, Ellen Spertus, a 32-year-old computer science professor at Mills College in Oakland, California, could safely have been labeled "a bit of a geek." She wouldn't have been offended by that taunt; indeed, she'd have probably embraced it and said, as she did on Tuesday, "I'm not just a geek, I'm a geek proselytizer."
But that changed Wednesday evening at the convention center here, when Spertus won a title that will forever frustrate all those wisenheimers who dare to call her "kinda geeky." Ellen Spertus is not just a little geeky: She is officially the Sexiest Geek Alive, and she's got a crown to prove it.
Spertus won her dubious honor as the second-ever Sexiest Geek Alive after beating out seven other regional finalists in a pageant that felt, at times, like a conference of (very) minor celebrities.
Chase Masterson, a supporting star of the TV show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, hosted the show with help from Martin Sargent, a TechTV anchor. Jennifer Glover, Miss California USA, presented the Sex Geek's crown.
And there were reporters from all over the country who had gathered to get a wacky story for the readers back home.
"There's more press than crowd here," said Steven Phenix, who founded the contest last year as a publicity stunt meant to parody People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive issue.
He was right. Discounting the finalists' friends and family, very few "real people" came to see the geek contest, which left little doubt that this thing, though it's received much media attention, is little more than a carny sideshow in our vast pop cultural landscape.
Even though some of the geeks here tried to say something different, the truth is that geeks aren't sex symbols. They're smart people whose talents have nothing to do with looks and social skills and popularity -- and Spertus won because she didn't try to pretend otherwise.
When the judges asked her to recall her proudest moment, she told just about the geekiest anecdote of the pageant: She received a piece of spam from Kozmo.com and, annoyed that the message was sent to her even though she had told the company not to mail her, Spertus sued the company in small-claims court.
"And I won," she declared, to great cheers from the crowd.
Spertus is a small woman and though she has a very commanding voice, she always looked slightly shaken as she addressed the crowd -- and this effect added volumes to her geekiness. "Kozmo is now out of business," she added, "so let that be a lesson to spammers."
The other geeks, generous with their references to Linux and Star Wars, seemed fake beside her. They only talked computers, while Spertus, with her three degrees from MIT and her electric car and her circuit board-shaped corset, seemed to eat, drink and breathe machines.
For the "talent" portion, Spertus showed a five-minute biographical video she'd whipped up for the pageant. With the MIDI-version of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" as a soundtrack, the film followed Spertus' life from her early days at computer camp to her current job at Mills College where, she says, she "produces" geeks every year by teaching them computers. And since she's producing so many geeks, she's a kind of geek fertility goddess -- which is very sexy, she insisted.
And now that she's officially the sexiest geek, Spertus said she wants to help produce even more geeks, especially geeky women. Besides teaching at Mills (a women's college), Spertus also often speaks at elementary and junior high schools in her area, and she said she might step up those efforts.
"Though I don't know whether I'll mention this title of mine to the 14-year-old girls," she said. "I'm not sure whether they'll take it as a plus or a minus."
Farhad Manjoo was a judge for the Sexiest Geek Alive contest.
