When I was in Japantown, I spent a lot of time checking out the mall’s enormous selection of Gundam models. I didn’t have any room in my stuffed carry-on suitcase, but that didn’t keep me from window shopping. Lately I’ve been lusting after unusual models, like the Acguy and Z’gok.

At the store with the biggest selection, a group of four guys were standing in front of the wall of Gundams, blocking my view. They didn’t seem to notice me, so I said “excuse me,” in order to get through. That seemed to surprise the tallest of the guys.

“Wait,” he said. “You build Gundams?”

I nodded. As I’ve written before, I built my first Gundam a few years ago and have dabbled in tougher models since. I even wrote a Gundam modeling tutorial for beginners.

“Really. What’s the last model you built?” he asked. It may have just been in my head, but I felt like he didn’t believe me.

Perhaps it was the pressure, but I couldn’t remember the full name of the last model I’d built, an MS-06S Char’s Zaku Real Grade.

“A… Zaku,” I said.

That seemed to make him upset.

“There are a lot of Zaku models,” he pointed out.

“It was the new one, the real grade,” I said. (Real grade is one of the building difficulty levels defined in my tutorial.)

“Those aren’t even hard to build,” he replied.

I was feeling increasingly flustered, so I called over to Steven, who was in another part of the store, and we left together.

I had just been an unwitting recipient of the “geek test,” a pop quiz some fans give to verify the geek cred of people they don’t think belong in their fandom. I was frustrated with myself for playing along.

As I explained on ANNCast, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. As a woman, I know I’m not alone. It’s the reason I wrote about why I can’t be a hot girl and a nerd at the same time. Even if I feel like I’m blending in at a Magic: The Gathering event, somebody will ask me where my boyfriend is and break the spell. Even though I was there with my fiance, nobody asked him where his girlfriend was.

I hate to admit it, but the whole experience left me wondering, perhaps I should be trying to build more difficult Gundam models. That guy is going to assume that women aren’t good at model building, just because the woman he did meet was an amateur. Like it or not, whenever I choose to indulge in male dominated hobbies, I am an ambassador for my gender.

Have you ever been given the “geek test” by a fellow fan? Did you pass?

Photo by Fiends Ain’t Family on Flickr.