Jan 24, 2004 10:10
I would just like to take a moment to say, God bless female fansite webmasters. The funny thing is, they're almost all I run into these days. Guys are the ones who run movie fansites--Batman, Superman, Hulk, etc.--but it's the girls who run the actor fansites for the most part, male and female actors alike. Of course there are exceptions, but this has generally been my experience over the last two years. And you know what? God bless 'em. They just get it--a lot quicker than the guys, too. The guys always sit there and ask, No, really, that's all you want? What exactly do you get out of this?
Maybe it's something embedded deep in our social genetics, but women just seem to grasp the concept--and how it benefits both of us--a lot more quickly. And they're always excited to join up and what else can they do and let's keep in touch. Guys? Well, I rarely ever hear from them again. (I have to break in here to say that the guys at Keira Knightley Wavefront are absolute dolls.) Which is fine. But considering that guys are usually so concerned about how many hits a day they get--one webmaster was having a completely normal IM conversation with me, and then he suddenly blurted out, "I get 250,000 hits a day!" Uh, put your ePenis away, dear--you would think that they would see that helping people usually results in 1) tons of goodwill and 2) links back to your own site.
You know what the saddest thing is? If the major movie news sites--CHUD, Coming Soon, IGN, Dark Horizons, AICN, etc.--are all male. If there are female editors, I don't know about it. Well, Empire Online, I think. But that's the official website of a film magazine. None of the built-from-the-ground-up sites are run by women. Which is why you see all this coverage devoted to horror/action/scifi/comic books--many of which do appeal to women, not that they realize it--and a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean sneaks up and stuns everyone with its popularity.
That's what always cracks me up--people are astonished when this or that movie is unexpectedly huge, when it's a no-brainer from a female perspective. Lord of the Rings? I can't tell you how many articles were written about how it wouldn't appeal to women, never mind that there are 65 flavors of hot in the cast. X2? Ditto. The Hulk? Well... a movie that pushes shirtless Eric Bana out of the way in favor of the Angry Green Giant, well, it's not gonna do too well. Duh.
Anyway. I don't know why I've gone on such a ramble today. But that's always the perspective I've tried to run my site with--what do I find interesting, and what do my friends find interesting? And the answers surprise me sometimes (if you'd told me I'd end up looking forward to Hellboy, I wouldn't have believed you). But what I consistently find is that male-run sites miss a lot of things that women are interested in. Here's hoping we fix that. :)
x-men,
dailydigest,
movies,
pirates of the caribbean,
websites,
lord of the rings