Follow TV Tropes

Following

Nerds Are Virgins

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/wonderella_was_not_a_nerd_3538.jpg

Hardison: Looks like an ordinary cell phone, right? It's not, man. It's a metal detector. See, it uses pulse-induction technology that sends out a current that generates a magnetic field, and then... are you even listening?
Eliot: Yeah.
Hardison: Well, what'd I say?
Eliot: You were explaining how you're still a virgin?

If you are a Stereotypical Nerd and/or geek, then according to damn near every work of fiction in existence, you have never gotten laid, very likely haven't gotten to first base, may have never ever stepped up to bat — and quite possibly have never so much as wandered within a mile of the ballpark.

Now, this does have some real life basis, in that some nerds and geeks do lack some social skills, and take up unusual interests as a way to fill the gap in their lives (or, more unfortunately, fail to develop social skills because of said interests), or simply find them more interesting than exercising social skills. Though some might just be asexual.

This trope can apply to female nerds as easily as male nerds, but thanks to the Double Standard, the males are far more likely to find unwholesome outlets for their unexpressed sexuality, virginity notwithstanding. Also, because males are expected to make the first move, female nerds are not at a disadvantage due to shyness or social ineptness. In fact, male nerds have just as much chance of being the Casanova Wannabe as any other type of male character. Some males (and a rare female or two) may try to deny their virginity, out of fear of losing face, but thanks to their nerdy exteriors, they are unlikely to be believed by other characters, if they even have the social graces to spin a convincing lie in the first place. Another possible reason that female nerds are less likely to be virgins is because All Men Are Perverts and A Man Is Always Eager in Fiction Land and thus couldn't care less about what a woman's hobbies are, as long as she's letting him have sex with her. Women on the other hand are often depicted as far more discriminating and will reject a partner whose hobbies aren't "cool" enough. Hence the use of terms like "girl repellent"note  to describe nerdy things.

There is also a general perception that a nerd's level of nerdiness is inversely proportional to their chances of getting laid, which is a big reason that Even Nerds Have Standards. This also means that some nerds will deny at least some aspects of their nerdiness. Though, the reverse belief also exists: instead of believing that nerdy hobbies prevent you from getting laid, some people believe that the only reason people have nerdy hobbies is because they can't get laid to begin with, are miserable because of this, and therefore seek a form of escapism from said misery (most likely because that's what they do themselves, so they assume everyone else does too).

In non-mainstream works, this trope shows up less frequently, although some cases are deliberate aversions and some are just Author Appeal.

If the nerds are the main characters, there is a high chance they won't be virgins by the end of the movie/book/first season of the show, because virginity is a tragic flaw and heroes always overcome their flaws. Make that a very, very high chance if said heroes are male.

Note this doesn't prevent a Nerdgasm. Compare You Need to Get Laid. Contrast Nerds Are Sexy, Geeky Turn-On. Nerds Are Naïve is closely related however, that trope focuses on nerds and geeks being portrayed as lacking Street Smarts and ignorant to all things outside of their Geek Reference Pool, especially sex and romance. Also related is Nerds Are Pervs, in which nerdy characters are depicted as sex-obsessed, typically with deviant preferences and lecherous instincts, often because they've never gotten laid.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

     Advertising 
  • A Pacific Bell from the late 1990s' implies this when it features a group of geeks playing a D&D like game in a basement that goes something like this:
    Geek #1: I roll 13 so I reach level 35 wizard.
    Geek #2: You can't level up, you ate a poison mushroom in the enchanted forest.
    Geek #1: No, I didn't!
    Geek #2: Yes, you did!
    Geek #1: No, I didn't!
    Geek #3: Ugh...
    (The geeks get knocked on the floor by three flying phonebooks that open up on a specific page)
    Narrator: "Dating services." Another problem solved by Pacific Bell.
  • One ad for Cadbury Creme Eggs features the signs of the zodiac singing about how they prefer eating their creme eggs. Here, Virgo is depicted as an awkward Stereotypical Nerd girl, and apparently it's her first time eating a creme egg too.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Nerd na Yatsura, an H doujin, is about a boy named Jimon and his female senpai Nakatani who, upon going to their hotel room at the end of their first day of selling her doujinshi at a Comiket-type event, end up having Their First Time and a Relationship Upgrade. When she wakes up the next morning, Nakatani has a comical episode of self-disgust when she realizes that losing her virginity makes her a "normie".
    "What is this!? This super-saccharine morning!? This total sense of shame!? This wasn't an act befitting of an otaku! Normies blow up!! Normies blow up!!"
  • No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!: Several stories revolve around Tomoko's inability to talk to boys and her sexual frustration.
  • Princess Jellyfish: The group of female otaku that Tsukimi lives with are called the Nuns; they have No Social Skills and are terrified of men. When Kuranosuke brings up sex one time and Tsukimi freaks out, he realizes that she (and all the roommates) must be virgins.
  • In Steins;Gate, Okabe and Kurisu spend a great deal of time mocking each other for being scrawny, nerdy virgins - naturally ignoring their own scrawny, nerdy virgin-hood.
  • Tokyo Ghoul introduces protagonist Ken Kaneki as a shy bookworm that rarely leaves his apartment. He's very clearly a virgin, fretting over trying to ask a girl out for the first time. Unfortunately for him, his first date ends with him discovering Rize is a Literal Maneater...

    Comic Books 

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The 40-Year-Old Virgin: The virgin protagonist collects fantasy (comic book style) toys, and has a good understanding of technology; this doesn't necessarily imply 'geek' therefore 'virgin' but it is consistent with that view. But the film is also a deconstruction of Sex as Rite-of-Passage, so it's probably a subversion. Also, the protagonist is conventionally attractive and has good social skills, further subverting the mainstream nerd stereotype.
  • Inverted in American Pie: the biggest nerds (band geeks) are also the sluttiest.
  • Enforced by The Angry Video Game Nerd in Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, who tells his protégé Cooper that true nerdhood means forsaking the pursuit of social interaction — especially dating and sex — for the pursuit of your chosen hobbies. Or, to summarize: "Nerds before birds". He's fine with Cooper hooking up with Mandy at the end of the movie, though.
  • Back to the Future:
    • Played with/implied when in the past, Marty observes his dad's incompetence:
      Marty: Jesus, George, it was a wonder I was even born.
    • There's also this, when Marty and Doc observe George's incompetence in 1955:
      Doc: Which one's your pop?
      Marty: (points him out) That's him.
      (They see him getting kicked around by other school bullies)
      Doc: Maybe you were adopted.
  • In The Breakfast Club, Brian Johnson (the brain) is a virgin... but so are Claire (the princess) and Alison (the basket case). However, Alison and Claire both get together with Bender (the criminal) and Andy (the athlete) at the end, while Brian is left alone and single.
  • Subverted in Clueless is about Cher and Dionne trying to help a more awkward girl become popular. Ironically, they're virgins while she isn't. Though Dionne's own virginity "goes from technical to nonexistent" by the end.
  • In The Core, the resident Hollywood Hacker delivers the following line when confronted by the Government Conspiracy:
    Rat: Wait a second... you guys aren't here to whack me, are you? Cause I was kinda hoping to have sex before that happens...
  • Implied in Dead Poets Society:
    Meeks: I'll try anything once!
    Charlie: Except sex!
  • A PG version in Inspector Gadget 2:
    Gadget: If you see anything suspicious, you let me know.
    Gadgetmobile: You mean like a Trekkie with a girlfriend?
  • Prom Wars: The intelligent but non-athletic Selby students are mostly dateless and even though the prom date offer doesn't come with the promise of sex, several of them are hopeful that things will progress and lead to them losing their virginities, although as a face-saving Last-Second Word Swap they try to claim that it's the girls' virginities they're hoping will cease to exist.
  • Revenge of the Nerds plays with this in varying degrees. Clearly some of the nerds are out of their depth sexually, but Gilbert seems fine at attracting nerdy girls, Lewis comes off as a sexual maestro, and Booger clearly has enough experience to take an illegitimate child scare seriously in the fourth movie.
  • In Satanic Panic (2019), the Satanists immediately surmise that the pizza delivery girl Sam is a virgin when she starts describing her dweebish interests, and subsequently snatch her for a Virgin Sacrifice.
  • Referenced in Transformers (2007) when Glenn is being held for interrogation by the FBI.
    Glenn: I have done NOTHING bad my entire life! Hey man, I'm still a virgin.

    Literature 
  • Referenced in The Martian when the NASA senior staff are meeting to discuss a risky but viable plan to hasten Mark Watney's safe return to Earth, which the guy who thought it up has dubbed "Operation Elrond". Annie Montrose, Head of Media Relations and sometime Nerd Nanny, is the only person in the room who doesn't get the reference and has to have it explained to her by one of the others.note 
    Annie: Jesus. None of you guys got laid in highschool, did you?
  • Subverted in Sho-shan y la Dama Oscura. Almost all of the adults on the book are nerds on their own way (Except Kadiri and her nuns, Sasuke, Placida and Kokoa) but it's implied that all of those nerds have also an active sex life.
  • In The Kingkiller Chronicle, Elodin gives his students the assignment of telling him a fact they consider interesting. One of the students presents an obscure piece of mathematics (although the math is actually wrong, for the record). Elodin flatly tells him that his next assignment is to have sex.
  • In The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong, near the beginning of the Sun and Moon Dew Mushroom arc, Shang Qinghua suggests that Shen Qingqiu use Virgin Power to get them out of the array they're stuck in, on the grounds that Shen Qingqiu is a nerd who obsessively read the terrible pornographic Webnovel they've both transmigrated into for the plot. Shen Qingqiu reminds him that it's his character's sexual history that counts, and as an adult man in a pornographic universe, he can't be a virgin. Due to being Wrong Genre Savvy, Shen Qingqiu is wrong.

    Live-Action TV 
  • 30 Rock's Liz Lemon is not a virgin, but merely has a terrible sex life, partly due to her bad social skills and partly due to the fact that, aside from Floyd, all the men (and one woman) she has dated turned out to be either insane or wildly unsuitable in some way.
  • The Big Bang Theory: While the main four aren't virgins, almost any time the girls enter the comic book shop, the stereotypical background comic book nerds are always somehow shocked into catatonia.
  • Bones: Played with in the case of Zach Addy, whom everyone initially assumes is a virgin. He tells them quite frankly that he has, and does, in fact, have sex. At one point, he asks the psychologist Sweets why everyone thinks/assumes he is a virgin.
  • Subverted in the Clueless TV series: the main characters are doing a school assignment with a nerdy girl who keeps running off to throw up. At first they assume she has an eating disorder; instead, it turns out that she's pregnant, which they get a test to confirm. Note that all three of the popular protagonists are virgins up until about the last episode. They're also surprised when they learn who the unseen father is, because he's a massive geek too.
  • Community:
    • Jeff Winger jokes that the math club has improved so dramatically at paintball that they must have been practicing... while everyone else was having sex.
    • Subverted with Abed, in that the group automatically assumes he's never had sex and doesn't know how to approach women (all with some justification) and so attempt to set him up. In turns out he does just fine due to a supreme confidence in himself.
  • Subverted in CSI, when the Hollywood Homely assistant coroner displays some particularly nerdy knowledge and Nick quips "you need a girlfriend, man." The coroner replies "I'm engaged".
  • Toby Isaacs, one of the few people in Degrassi Community School history to graduate as a virgin.
  • Female example in Derry Girls. In one episode Clare, who's a geeky bookworm, says something to the effect of "What's the big deal about him having sex? We're all going to have sex some day." To which her friends Michelle and Erin respond, in unison, "You won't."
  • Doctor Who: In "The End of the World", Lady Cassandra snidely references the trope when the Doctor rumbles her Evil Plan.
    "I bet you were the school swot and never got kissed."
  • ER. It's really not surprising when the geeky, bespectacled Mark Greene awkwardly reveals to his best friend Doug that at 30-something years old, the only woman he's ever had sex with his ex-wife.
  • Invoked on Friends when Joey doesn't know why Chandler and Ross' college friend is nicknamed Gandalf.
    Chandler: Didn't you read The Lord of the Rings in high school?
    Joey: No, I had sex in high school.
  • While not the bespectacled, awkward type, General Hospital's studious, med-school bound, class salutatorian Karen Wexler, is a virgin, as is her equally studious and med-school bound class valedictorian boyfriend Jason Quartermaine, in stark contrast to their sexier counterparts Brenda and Jagger who could care less about school, to the point that they eventually drop out of college and high school, respectively.
  • The Great: Orlo is a studious, awkward intellectual, and the other members of the court mock him for likely being a virgin because of it. Whether or not he actually is one is not clarified.
  • Good Omens (2019): Very nerdy Newton had yet to kiss a woman before meeting Anathema, let alone have sex, when he was in his 20s.
  • Late Night With Conan O'Brien made this joke a lot. It went so far that, one year, at Comic Con Triumph The Insult Comic Dog went around interviewing the attendees and seeing how much they really knew about sex, including Triumph holding a picture of a vagina and asking the men in attendance to identify it. No one did.
  • On The O.C., nerdy Seth is stated to be a virgin at the beginning of the series, but it doesn't stay that way.
    • Of course, so are Summer and Marissa.
  • Quantum Leap: When Sam's teenage leap-host was being mocked by some high school scifi geeks, one of them remarks that if he'd been as lame as host/Sam, he'd still be a virgin too. Al, looking invisibly over their shoulders, consults Ziggy and then remarks that the mocker still is a virgin at present, and will remain one for quite a few more years. (Talk about an Omniscient Database...)
  • In the Red Dwarf epsisode "Polymorph II: Emohawk", this is the implict joke in the fact Duane Dibbley, the Man From Uncool, insists on carrying a condom because "you never know". It's also the case that Rimmer has some pretty nerdy hobbies (he likes telling war stories about his Risk campaigns, and "engine-spotting" on the ship's diesel decks) and his only sexual encounter was with a woman who was concussed and called him "Norman".
  • Seinfeld inverts the trope and implies Virgins are Nerds. When men don't have sex, or stop having sex for a significant amount of time, the 99% of their brains that are always thinking about sex will start to function normally and boost their intelligence and thirst for knowledge significantly (George, for example, becomes an Omnidisciplinary Scientist within days and learns Portugese by accident). Women however, are the exact opposite, since they can get sex so easily that they take it for granted and normally never have to think about it at all, so their entire brains are functioning by default. If they go long enough without having sex, then they start thinking about it all the time and thus become stupider.
  • Supernatural:
    • Sam has been body-swapped with a teenage boy and is looking through the kid's stuff.
      Sam: (checking out his new face) Who are you? (finds Advanced Physics and Chemistry textbooks) Smart kid. (finds Darth Vader T-shirt) Virgin. (finds porn magazine) Frustrated Virgin.
    • Subverted with Charlie, a semi-recurring character who LARPs and loves Harry Potter among other nerdy endeavours, and is a lesbian Pornomancer that can bed pretty much any woman she looks at, even once crossing the species boundary and making out with a fairy. She probably also banged Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, but that's not confirmed.
    • Also both brothers are both a little bit nerdy, Dean constantly dropping references and Sam being a former law student, and seem to have no trouble getting laid. It probably helps that they don't look remotely nerdy.
    • In one episode, Sam and Bobby both make fun of Dean for not having heard of H. P. Lovecraft or any of his works. Dean then shoots back, "Sorry, I guess I was too busy having sex with women." Of course, Even Nerds Have Standards, and later in the same episode, Bobby is talking to a guy who collects Lovecraft's private correspondence letters and snarks, "You must be catnip to the ladies".
  • Used in Veep regarding Jonah's stats team:
    Statistician 1: You're like Neo.
    Dan: Wow.
    Selina: What's a Neo?
    Statistician 1: He's from The Matrix. Everything he does is awesome.
    Statistician 2: The first movie. The sequels sucked.
    Jonah: Guys, we agreed to let The Matrix debate lie.
    Dan: Jesus, I can feel my virginity growing back in here.
  • Subverted in a Saturday Night Live sketch where Chance The Rapper guest starred as sports reporter, Lazlo Holmes. Holmes normally covers the New York Knicks, so he is at a loss for words when he's sent to a League of Legends tournament since that's the first time he discovered that e-tournaments are a thing. When as he's interviewing, "S3XPANDA69", the captain of the winning team, a groupie comes into frame, and proclaims "I love you!" when he awkwardly asks if she'd like to go backstage, she enthusiastically asks if her friends can go too, when he says yes, he excuses himself and takes ten or so nerdy girls with him, leaving Lazlo even more confused.
  • The Walking Dead:
    • Glenn Rhee seems completely baffled and unsure what to do when Maggie Greene offers to have sex with him, and it's all but stated she had to take the lead on their first time due to his lack of experience.
    • Eugene Porter has come to meet Stephanie, a woman he fell in love with over the radio, and is interrogated by General Mercer before he can enter the Commonwealth. Trying desperately to convince Mercer he's not a threat and is being honest, he explains his whole story with Stephanie, and resorts to confessing that he's still a virgin. This gets Mercer, who'd been The Stoic overseeing his screening, to blink in a bewildered fashion. Then Eugene says he was hoping Stephanie would be the one to change his status as a virgin, and this gets Mercer's composure to break further, but convinced him he's being legit. Later in the season, it's revealed that Mercer is actually the older brother of "Stephanie", meaning Eugene just told his crush's brother he was trying to sleep with her.
  • In What We Do in the Shadows (2019), a mockumentary about a group of vampires living in modern-day Staten Island, Nandor tells his familiar Guillermo to bring some virgins for them to feast upon with their guest the Baron. Guillermo finds a high concentration at a LARP event, and lures two of them back to the house by offering to show them his master's medieval weapons.

    Music 
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic:
    • In the song "All About the Pentiums", one line goes "They call me the king of the spreadsheets. Got 'em all printed out on my bedsheets." Doesn't leave too much room, apparently, for doing anything else under the bedsheets.
    • And again in "White and Nerdy": "Spend my nights with a roll of bubble wrap. Pop, pop, hope no one sees me gettin' freaky."
  • The Stephen Lynch song "D&D" ends with the line "Virgins 'till the day we die!"
  • Inverted in the Weezer album Pinkerton's opening track "Tired of Sex", where the nerdy frontman Rivers Cuomo's problem isn't that he's not getting sex, but he's getting too much of it and not enough human connection.
  • Masta Ace Incorporated - "People in my Hood"
    There go Petey who be all in the books
    A's in every class, never had a piece o' ass

    Radio 
  • In the episode of The Now Show the week Endeavour was found, the audience question was "Is there anything you lost and and then found again?" One respondent claimed he lost his virginity, but got it back during a Dungeons & Dragons marathon.
  • From Series 79, Episode 4 of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue:
    Jack: The Ipswich Transport Museum attracts fans of antique trams and vintage buses from around the world. The museum was recently licenced to conduct marriages, and hopes one day to host a ceremony for its members, just as soon as one of them gets a girlfriend.

    Video Games 
  • Scribblenauts: "Virgin" gives the same result as "Gamer".
  • Subverted in The Last Story. Adventurer Archaeologist, and all-around bookish and meek shopkeeper, Horace, is married... and when hero Zael discovers this, he seems rather shocked. Horace tells him he doesn't have to act so surprised that a fellow like him actually managed to find a wife.
  • A rather subtle and possibly accidental instance of this trope occurs in Mass Effect if you decide to romance Liara, a shy, socially awkward scientist. At one point she states she has never done the "mind meld" asari equivalent of sex before, to which Shepard can ask incredulously, "Wait, you're a virgin?"

    Visual Novels 
  • Double Homework:
    • Dennis all the way (no pun intended). Despite his best efforts, his creepiness precludes him ever getting laid.
    • Probably subverted with Marco. At the end of the story, he is shown in a relationship.

    Webcomics 
  • In the Halloween page (#150) of Blaster Nation, that's how vampire!Ash deduces Matt is a valid source of virgin blood.
  • Inverted in El Goonish Shive. While the exact sexual history of most of the cast isn't stated, it's strongly implied that spectacular geek/magitek genius Tedd and Grace have the most active sex life out of their friend group.
  • Gary from Ménage à 3, although he does get laid eventually. A few times, even. And he later gains a reputation as a master of cunnilingus, so he has women literally lined up outside his door much of the time. Unfortunately most of them just want to use him like a glorified vibrator so he doesn't get much out of this reputation other than a sore jaw, and he's too much of an Extreme Doormat to say no. By the end of the comic’s run, though, Character Development has made him a more fully rounded and fulfilled human being.
  • The heroine of The Non-Adventures of Wonderella will of course state this.
  • Marigold in Questionable Content is a World of Warcraft-playing Yaoi Fangirl with zero boyfriends to her name, who admits that she has "never seen a dick". She later manages to find a sort-of boyfriend or two ... at least one of whom, Dale, is himself a rather nerdy WoW-playing virgin. The trope is later subverted, since as of this strip, where Marigold and Dale hook up.
  • Sabrina Online: the title character Sabrina starts out like this and her eventual future boyfriend/husband to be R.C. is as well. Que R.C.'s Spit Take when on a date together Sabrina asks him if he's a virgin and if he'd like to join her in the bedroom to change that. Both characters remain incredibly nerdy after the fact though with R.C. even going full on Otaku by starting to collect anime figurines.
  • In the Whimsy arc of Skin Horse, the group needs a "total, inexperienced, never-been-kissed virgin" to play the role of a princess, and they turn to Nick. In fairness to Nick, he is a cyborg with the body of a helicopter. Actually, even Nick can make jokes about nerd virginity: "Is this the reality filter kicking in, or are you that desperate?"
  • Ruby in Sticky Dilly Buns is something of a nerd and clearly a virgin. Admittedly, she has significant issues in addition to her relatively subtle nerdiness. She does eventually get laid — and get over most of her problems — without sacrificing her true self; indeed, her boyfriend has cause to appreciate her nerdy impulse to analyze and understand everything, including his own oddities.
  • Openly subverted in The Word Weary. The main characters play Dungeons and Dragons and are open nerds, but have active sex lives.
  • Girls with Slingshots has Joshua, who although has good social skills and has confessed having experienced sex (with man despite being straight, and hookers), he admits never being in a relationship before.
  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
    • "All who enter must prove they have renounced all love, desire, and pleasures of the flesh..." *holds up D&D Player's Handbook* "You may pass."
    • Later subverted with the usual flair.
  • Something*Positive includes a few jokes of this caliber, but most explicitly with the "Hell House" arc.
    Fred: Wait. You don't want teenagers havin' sex but you don't want 'em playin' Dungeons & Dragons either? Isn't that like sayin' you don't want 'em to get sick but you'd hate to see them get vaccinations?
  • The titular Virgin in the Virgin vs. Chad memes is a nerd who is usually Boring, but Practical.

    Web Original 
  • Ask That Guy with the Glasses had this answer to the Star Wars special editions and the famous "Han shot first" scene.
    Q: Who shot first? Han or Greedo?
    A: Sleep with somebody.
  • There are several copypasta stories (which probably aren't true, but you never know for sure) that involve the poster bringing a girl who is very much into him back to his place only for her to see his nerdy interests and walk out.
  • Yahtzee alludes to this in his review of Catherine:
    (Increasingly amused) "... there's a moral choice aspect where you answer questions based on your own substantial experience with relationships *stifled laughter* "
    • And the accompanying visual is of a fat glasses-wearing guy sitting next to a blow-up doll.
  • The Involuntary Abstinence meme.
  • In a podcast, writer David S. Goyer asked, "How many people in the audience have heard of Martian Manhunter?" After some reaction from the audience, he asked, "How many people that raised their hands have ever been laid?" (That one of the architects of the DC Extended Universe expressed this view of the franchise's core audience did not go over well.)
  • In Anime Crimes Division, the thrill of playing collectible card games for keeps is "better than what I'm told sex is like". As in the Futurama example below, the cast and crew of the show all being otaku gives the line a very Take That Us quality.
  • A common Geek Twitter Copypasta:
    My Doctor: Have you ever had sexual contact in—
    (Sees my [Poster's favorite series] t-shirt)
    My Doctor: (Writing on clipboard) Have you ever drank, smoked, or taken illegal substances?
  • Made into a Running Gag on Scott The Woz's videos, which mainly focuses on comedic reviews and talks of video games. For example, the episode that covers Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball reveals that prior to February 2019, Scott used to think the word breasts was pronounced "beans". Scott's opinion of this tends to vary, but he usually sees virginity as something desirable; one episode actually has him being officially certified as a virgin.
  • Played for laughs in a skit in the Map Men episode "Why do maps show places that don't exist?". One nerd accuses another nerd of stealing his map as it contains a trap street — a town called "My Girlfriend" — and when the second nerd admits it has that town, the first nerd exclaims, "My girlfriend doesn't exist, it never has, and never will!", and then both nerds start hissing at each other.

    Western Animation 
  • Like its Seth MacFarlane companions, American Dad! has this in effect with Steve, Barry, Snot, and Toshi. Many episodes have a subplot involving either Steve or Steve and his friends trying to overcome their nerdiness and get some.
  • The Cleveland Show:
    • Cleveland takes Junior to a sci-fi convention, to show him what happens to guys that fail to lose their virginity. They ended up coming home with heaps of stuff from it.
    • Another example from this show involves a cutaway gag about finding a rapist at a Star Trek convention. The police ask the crowd to raise their hands if they are not a virgin. The only person who does so is told he is under arrest.
  • Daria:
    • Both Daria and her artsy best friend Jane end the series as virgins; of the other notable characters in their grade, the only one not implied to have sex is Upchuck. There was an episode where Daria and Tom almost have sex, but Daria can't go through with it.
    • Interestingly inverted with Daria's popular, boy-crazy sister Quinn, who is implied to have a Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality. In fact, there's not really any indication that anyone in the Fashion Club has had sex.
  • On Family Guy, a Cutaway Gag features an Al-Qaeda suicide bomber arriving in Heaven, excited to get his promised reward of 72 virgins. He gets 72 male nerds playing Magic: The Gathering.
    Suicide Bomber: (angry Skyward Scream) OSAAAMAAA!!
  • The Star Trek episode of Futurama mentions that in Earth's past, Trekkies, after the show became a worldwide religion, were executed by being thrown into a volcano because it was "the manner best befitting virgins." Considering how many of the show's staff are themselves Trekkies, nerds, or holders of advanced degrees, there was a definite Self-Deprecation vibe to the scene.
  • One bit on Robot Chicken has the Devil wondering what happened when everything in the underworld suddenly turns frigid as he's torturing victims. Cut to a bedroom with a hot blonde lying in bed and a nerd dancing around the room singing "I got laid! I got laid!"
  • The Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons lost his virginity to Agnes Skinner when he was in his forties. Principal Skinner, who is pretty square himself, lost his to Mrs. Krabappel when he was in his early 40s.
  • This is the implicit joke behind the planet of Hysperia in Star Trek: Lower Decks — it's a planet with dragons that got colonized by a bunch of Renaissance Fair nerds, and to take the throne, the heir has to have sex (ergo, losing their virginity will make them king of the nerds). Much to Lt. Commander Billups' annoyance, as he much prefers being in Starfleet and abdicated; his mother, Queen Paolana, has repeatedly attempted to get her son to get it on in the past, and attempts it again in "Where Pleasant Fountains Lie".


 
Feedback

Video Example(s):

Top

72 Virgins in Heaven

A Family Guy cutaway depicts a suicide bomber arriving in Heaven to receive his 72 virgins. To his outrage, they all turn out to be stereotypical nerds playing Magic: The Gathering.

How well does it match the trope?

4.5 (16 votes)

Example of:

Main / NerdsAreVirgins

Media sources:

Report