I thought I might share an interesting social aspect I've noticed aobut being a martial arts geek.
I'm the type of person that really gets deeply into the subjects that appeal to me. When I was a young boy I was into Spiderman comic books. I always had to have them. I still have spiderman stuff everywhere since my family always buys it for me even though I gave up buying the comics years back....but I was always know as a comic book geek because if my deep interest in the spidy character.
Video Games were another thing I spent too much time on. I still do, even though I spend much less time. I was there when the first space invaders game showed up at the pinball arcade down the street. I took my fare share of jabs and pokes about being a video game freak / geek / etc while growing up (and I use that term loosely).
I work in the software field, on the quality side. I had a strong interest in computers and all related aspects for some time (yea past tense...sick of it now). Of course, when I'm at a social gathering meeting new people and the discussion of careers and work come up I get the usual...oh so your a computer geek, maybe you can help me with mine. The geek jabs are always an expected conversation topic when work comes up.
I'm also now know Fitness nut/geek/freak or as my wife like to put it..a food Nazi. That certainly spurs a lot of juicy discussion here in the US where a large population of the worlds fattest people are created.
So there are all kinds of geeks into all kinds of things. I'm really into MA. I currently train Aikido, Hapkido, and TaeKwonDo. I've trained in Kajukenbo in the past. I'm always up for a MA training session, trading techniques / philosophies with other stylists, or just having a discussion about some MA topic. I am deffinately a MA geek, no doubt about it.
The interesting thing I have noticed is that people certainly recognize that I am MA geek when it gets to the discussion of my hobbies, but most are not so willing to start tossing out the geek comments like they do with other topics.
People don't seem to make fun of MA geeks as much as other geeks...at least not to their face.
sorry..I didn't think this would be such a long post.