Fannish spaces, girls, and the culture of silence.

[bookshop]

I've been thinking about this post for months, and there's no easy way to say it. It's born out of a lot of thinky thoughts on women, fandom, rape culture, and basically all the things I've been posting about lately.

In January, I made this post about gay subtext, and I was overwhelmed at the response it had. Then I made another post about

Comments

[brimtoast]

I absolutely agree that fandom has (serious, scary-upsetting) problems about women. One thing that still makes me prefer it to other places that have problems about women, though, is that here at least people are talking about it.

Of course, talking isn't the same as taking action, and taking action can be a lot harder, especially when so much energy gets built up around these m/m pairings and that's where the interest and investment is, and it becomes like "yes, wow, it's awful that women are being ignored, but these male characters are the characters I'm already in love with." And detaching a bit and re-attaching to a fandom or pairing that is more female-friendly can be hard. Especially when those female-friendly pairings tend to have a lot less action happening around them. I mean, even with a writing challenge to write female characters, it's a bunch of scattered female characters rather than one strong fandom. It's like the big m/m pairings are these rivers with grand currents that will sweep you up and take you places, and in comparison m/f or f/f pairings are these dribbling little streams. (Just in terms of the number of stories and conversation and so forth that are taking place around them. Not speaking of any quality inherent in the pairings).

And it just takes a lot of effort to overcome that kind of momentum. And it sometimes requires doing things that feel less fun and natural at first (and then you're like, "wait, but fandom is supposed to be fun! Maybe I should stop doing things that feel less fun and natural and let the current sweep me back to where it's more comfortable). But it is so incredibly important to try to change it. Because fandom should be a place that makes women feel happy and empowered and brave and strong. And as long as there's this subtle message that only men are interesting enough to write about, read about, think about, have sex with, and so on, I don't think fandom will really be that place. And it *could* be; it has all the right ingredients. I really really want it to be. But the first steps are so hard to take, and they don't *feel* as good as staying the same. And in fandom, which has always kind of flowed and evolved naturally from enthusiasm about various things, I think it's really hard for people to *not* just rush along doing what feels good?

(Maybe? Thinking through all this and trying to get to the bottom of why it's so easy to say YES YES and so much harder to actually change habits.)

[bookshop]

I completely agree with you about a lot of this. For me, personally, it all comes back to last year and Racefail, because for me, personally, watching people go through that and stand up and speak about it means that I can't continue to be passive--like, it is the very least I can do to make up for all the crap those fans and writers had to go through, to not just keep on writing and pursuing the status quo. And once you start thinking about changing it's like your eyes just keep being re-opened to how much more work there is to do. But you can't stop--I can't just go back, like you were saying, to that place where everything was comfortable and easy. Because now I know what kind of things I'm empowering by doing that, and I can't go back to that place of ignorance. I mean, I could, but I'd be doing so with full awareness of what kind of harmful system I'm enabling.

Regarding the grand rivers v/s the tiny streams -- this is actually one reason why I really love a) The Devil Wears Prada fandom and b) femslash_today. Because in both cases you can SEE what happens when powerful characters take over and consume everybody's interests. And, like, really before DWP fandom I had never seen what the femslash side of fandom was like as an entity--it was always just "hey, we'll write this as a one-off or an experiment." But with Miranda/Andy, I really suddenly grokked to how successful and powerful female characters could be when the whole fandom got behind them and just ran with them. And that helps that they had Telanu, one of the best writers in any fandom ever, at the helm, writing phenomenal fic; but they also had lots of committed people enervating and invigorating what could have been this very tiny and mediocre fandom, and instead it's been going strong for years at this point, and there are lots and lots of well-written fics. And as for femslash_today, it's just so ACTIVE and you can really see which fandoms and which female characters are attracting all the attention. Plus, you know, actual PEOPLE getting involved in writing women on a regular basis! Just being able to *see* that happening has helped change my perception significantly. :)

Then again, you are totally right--writing is easier said than done. So far, my participation has been relegated to reading/reccing/reviewing, only one fic in the last year has been written from a female POV--but I keep trying to tell myself that hey, it's one more than I had the year before, and every little bit helps. For me, even just reading and reccing has helped a lot. Especially when the best fanfic is just SO GOOD, period, regardless of gender.

[brimtoast]

DWP fandom sounds lovely! That sounds like exactly the kind of thing I was saying I'd never seen but would love to see. I had no idea it was actually *out there.* The world is slightly better than I'd thought, hooray!

femslash_today looks cool, but I am generally happier following recs or authors I already know than browsing through fics (because I tend to feel compelled to finish stories even when they're not very good, so I try to only start ones that I have reason to believe will be good.) I suppose I should go looking for het or femslash reclists. Do you know of any good ones?

I did just recall one great het-and-femslash podfic I listened to, so my contribution to recs is that. And there's a lot of OT3 stuff I've found and loved with two men and a woman, but I feel like, while that's a step in the right direction, it's not as far a step as I'd like to be taking. It is nice that it's out there, though. I'd say that's how I have mostly satisfied my RAWR WANT MORE LADIES feelings about fanfic thus far.

[law_nerd]

Ein-Myria has an excellent list of (mostly) femslash recs. Includes a section on DWP that is a great intro to the best of the best in that fandom.

[beckyh2112]

I love the entire concept of femslash_today, but I am sad that yuri_today has apparently never gotten going. It would cover the fandoms I actually gravitate towards, and it's a resource I'd desperately love to have.

[beckyh2112]

in comparison m/f or f/f pairings are these dribbling little streams

Fandom-dependent; in my current fandom (Avatar: the Last Airbender), the biggest pairings with some of the most emotional investment I've ever experienced are both het.

[brimtoast]

Yes, definitely fandom-dependent. But in my experience, when I look out across the fannish landscape from where I'm standing (and what I see is heavily influenced by what is being podficced and posted in amplificathon), it's like I described, with lots of momentum around m/m pairings and tiny little forays into female pairings. But yes yes, my experience is definitely limited. And I have fond memories of the Veronica Mars fandom, so I know there are times when a het pairing is dominant. Just haven't personally run across many examples of that lately.

Also, I loved Avatar. What a wonderful show <3

[beckyh2112]

Yeah, I just find a lot of the really well-written fandom meta that speaks to me is written from the pov of fans of western live-action television. So I tend to step in and go "this is not always true" when I feel it's appropriate. *snugs?*

AtLA really is. Especially with having lots of strong characters, both male and female, and showing complexities in the different cultures - not all the "good" cultures are actually good, not all the "bad" culture is actually bad. ("The Waterbending Master", "The Avatar and the Firelord", the Ba Sing Se arc, early S3.)

[brimtoast]

Yes, that's a good point. Thank you. It's true that I was thinking of western fandoms that tend to overlap and be near the center of my fannish experience, and I should not have spoken as if that was representative of all fandoms.

[dragoness_e]

Which for some reason makes me think of Dragonball Z, which tends to have lots of male fans... and yet has perhaps the strongest female characters of all animé. I don't think there's any weak female characters at all; the show defies animé conventions with the type of women it has.