Brett White, Comic Book Resources (via wandrinparakeet)
and yet men remain the most marketed demographic for just about everything.
(via ohhoechno)
I’m pretty sure the only men who spend more time thinking about DC than women on Tumblr are the men who actually work there.
(via touchofgrey37)
The thing about driving fandoms is SUCH A GOOD POINT. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about fandom and such in other contexts as well, and I feel like the word “fan” (in my mind at least) has a female connotation. Never mind the actual fan cred we get for having organized the first Star Trek convention, written the first fanfic, etc. In the cultural consciousness, “fan” seems to scan female. When I think of hordes of screaming fans, I think of teenage girls at a concert. When I think of fans lining up to get author signatures, I think of masses of women milling around at a Neil Gaiman book signing. Etc.
And while there will always be a contingent of assholes who are jerks about loving something a lot, by and large the women I know are proud to be fans. I’m a Harry Potter fan. I’m an Elementary fan. I’m a Doctor Who fan. Whatever. I self-identify as a fangirl the way people self-identify as geeks or nerds; it might not fly in the mainstream but it’s a positive signal to others who grok the culture.
But the “fan” identity — in my limited, anecdotal, and possibly biased experience and observation — doesn’t seem to attach itself as readily to men, nor as positively. The men in my life are into things and like things, but they’re less attached to the fandom and all its attendant baggage and delight. (Except for bronys - you rock on, dudes.) There’s a real disdain towards the word “fanboy” that I don’t necessarily detect in the word “fangirl” - not least because grown men are far less frequently referred to by the word “boy” than women are referred to by the word “girl”, so it still feels obviously infantilizing. (And, come to think of it, it’s rare that there’s a male gender-specific group identifier to begin with.)
I feel like this probably circles right back to the patriarchal gender binary thing, where men are supposed to be emotionless providers and women are supposed to take care of kids and be kind and gentle and such. If you’re a Big Strong Dude, it wouldn’t do to get too attached to any sort of media and get emotionally invested in the life trajectories of fictional characters, even if you might want to. Women, on the other hand, are expected to be more empathetic, which also means it’s more acceptable for us to sigh longingly at our favourite ship and dream about a story’s ending. Plus, if we go by a stereotypically gendered upraising, when girls play with the dolls their well-meaning relatives foist upon them, they’re inventing stories about the lives of those dolls - a natural precursor to (fan)fiction, no?
Where that intersects with comics and games, the main platforms of the stupid “fake geek girl” meme, is an interesting question. Certainly the intended and most visible consumer of some of this media are men, if due to nothing else other than that men create this media and will speak to other men about it. But the stereotypical male fan who demands others prove their geek cred before he’ll accept them seems to be focused with the canon rather than the fanon, with some sort of demonstration of mental recall ability than actual indication of passion.
He (the generic, stereotyped he) cares that you know this specific thing about this specific character from this specific issue, but not if you’ve written half a million words in fanfiction, or if you’ve drawn doujinshi with gender-swapped versions of the OCs, or if you RP with a group of like-minded geeks on Tumblr every Tuesday.
Why are the remix and tribute and reinvention aspects of fandom seen as less indicative of love and devotion than straight-up memorization of character stats and page numbers, in our culture? Is it because the remix part of fandom is often associated with women, and we have to devalue fanfiction and fanart and fan AMVs created by women because men are supposedly the canonical fans?
Anyway, just some scattered thoughts.
