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

[miaruma]

I agree with you on so many things in this post, especially how women in canon are marginalized and written out of fandom/disliked purely because 'they break up the ship', and I admit to have fallen into that category more than once. Why this happens I can only explain to myself with pseudo-psychobabble, so I won't attempt to, but it is just devastating nontheless. It doesn't help that there are so few canons that give us female characters I can and want to identify with and that those canons often tend to have little to no fandom(The Good Wife being one of the few shows on TV now that does have some of the best female characters out there and yet... no fandom).

There is a point you made that sounded a little off to me though. You say that women are discouraged from writing Mary Sue and fandom pressures them into writing slash, since I don't think anyone can be forced to write slash if they don't want to. And I also think that het and/or femslash writers are discouraged from writing Mary Sue fanfic. What is systemic is the fact that women who write fanfic ARE discouraged from writing Mary Sue, and that in itself is probably silencing enough. This probably ties into another issue that was discussed recently (women shouldn't say they are awesome and shouldn't embellish their person etc. which makes me angry enough, but that doesn't just apply to fandom, that mostly applies to our whole culture).

But I think you're very right in saying that fandom should stop denying that there are major issues when it comes to women and slash fandom. That we think we are empowering ourselves, but at the same time shackling ourselves even more to a patriarchical culture without meaning to and I love that you continue to make these posts, to wake up people from their apathy and their ignorance.

Augh two tiny words change so much.

[bookshop]

To use myself as an example: in 2002 my friend C came to visit me, and while she was visiting she let me read and beta her N*Sync fanfic, where her main character, also named C, meets and falls in love with J.C. while the band is on tour. It was a fun fic. She was really proud of it. And I read it the whole time thinking LOL NOOB because her fic was so obviously a Mary Sue fic. But the thing was: she didn't know it was a Mary Sue fic. She was more or less brand-new to fandom, had come into Popslash via ff.net, and didn't know that there was a derogatory term for what she was writing. And all I remember about the fic now is that it was fun and she was really excited about it. But me--I'd only been in fandom a few years at that point myself, and I'd already gotten accustomed to hating and mocking a Mary Sue. So privately, I mocked hers. Why shouldn't i? And I still hate that I did that. Oh, and C. had already decided at that point to throw in some Lance/Justin slash, because she knew it would be popular. I don't think we can overestimate how quickly people assimilate to the culture that says Mary Sue=bad; slash=good.

I totally agree that the 'women are awesome' trope is frowned upon by our whole culture (see karenhealey's recent post about this!) --but I feel like the Mary Sue-shaming is especially pernicious and harmful because it functions at least in part as literary criticism: essentially, girls are being taught, after a lifetime of being taught "write what you know," that they spent too much time writing self-inserts and it detracted from the value and the literary quality of their work. It perpetuates the idea that girl's stories are of inherently less value than other stories. And there definitely is a conversation to be had about literary quality, but we can't have it if we shame and mock the story idea first. Not when boys who write about things blowing up don't get the same kind of treatment. :(

[miaruma]

Ah, but i think your assumption (or rather: slash-fandom's assumption) of slash=good is faulty, because as you said in the same sentence, that slash is popular. Popular does not equal good, or at least it shouldn't! I think what it reveals is just how desperate people are to have the Cult of Nice on their side. That is a problem of fandom on the whole, and it is quite natural to want to be complimented, preferably a lot. And the issue with Sue-shaming is that it is mostly not done to the authors face, but behind their back. Of course people quickly assimilate, because that's how they make friends, that they then adopt the 'social' etiquette isn't really their fault, but rather the fault of the group they are trying to become a part of.

I do hope that discussions about these issues will change some peoples' minds about Mary Sue (and maybe even FanFiction.net but whatever, maybe it's too early for that), but I do think that Gary Stus are similarly derided. Fandom is predominantly female, so reading a Gary Stu fanfic happens very seldomly and mostly in published work, where it is mocked accordingly. But as I said before I do think the Sue-shaming isn't doing fandom any favours. I do wish to see more YKINMK (your kink is not my kink) versions of writing, YLSDINMLSD (your literary style device is not etc) and more women to embrace their awesome (I've read karenhealey's post) and through that maybe they will even post Mary Sue.

In the end I continue to dream of a fandom(/world) that doesn't need to explicitly state that it is a safe space because it should be synonymous (or were safe spaces aren't explicitly needed because treating people like equals is not even a question), where writing whatever kind of fanfic/story they write is not something that anyone has to be ashamed of, no matter what they write they are not judged. Not by their fellow fen, nor by people not involved with fandom.
And hey, hopefully this post (and all the other posts like it) get fandom one steop closer to that goal :)

[tsukikage85]

This makes me wonder about male "Mary Sue"s. Do they even exist? If they did, wouldn't they be as strongly discouraged as female ones? If they don't, is that possibly evidence that girls' fandom isn't quite as self-hating as we think?

[miaruma]

Male Mary Sues - or Gary Stus, as they are called by many people - definitely do exist. As I said in my above reply to Aja inmidst of much incoherent rambling, that I do think Gary Stus are similarly derided, but fandom as a whole (as far as I define fandom on LJ) is mostly occupied by women. Thus seeing or reading Gary Stus happens far less, so the discouraging doesn't happen as often, or rather: is not seen to happen often.

It is also the sad fact that men are far less likely to grow up in a surrounding which systematically undervalues and derides their expressions of self-fantasy.

So women discouraging other women to express themselves is even more damaging in this context.

[pinkpolarity]

You're right about fandom *on LJ* being mostly female, but not fandom overall. I'm in an overwhelmingly male fandom that doesn't exist on LJ, and the Gary Stus are probably the majority of the fic out there for this fandom. Every young man wants to be a Spartan! Are they similarly derided? Mmm... not so much as I've seen, really. There are definitely older, more experienced male fen in that fandom that dislike ff.net and deride other males for writing fanfic that gets canon wrong. But just for writing a fantasy where an avatar of themselves gets to play in the world? I don't really see a lot of that. I think boys are generally encouraged to imagine themselves in the story-- it's a gaming fandom, and, after all, you're running this male character around for hours and hours. Immersion is kind of the *point*, so it's not surprising that boys want to write themselves into it.

So no, I don't think Gary Stus are treated with anything even resembling the amount of derision that female fandom has for Mary Sues.