Sometimes I Forget
Aug. 24th, 2017 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingYesterday evening I spent a good bit of time on TV Tropes (as one does) trying to find the name of a specific sexist trope. What I found instead was that TV Tropes isn't particularly interested in documenting that sort of thing, which is a deliberate decision attributed to editorial policy. The rationale behind this is that the mods don't want to deal with flamewars. This seems like it makes sense, except...
...except there is a lot of borderline sexist nonsense on the site. For example, tropes related to male-gendered wish fulfillment are treated seriously, while tropes related to female-gendered wish fulfillment are ridiculed as the products of bad writing. The word "fangirl" is always used with negative connotations, frequently in tandem with "bad fanfiction." This is especially the case when female fans interpret a story in a way that is not 100% compliant with the male-authored canon, or when female writers create empowered "Mary Sue" female characters in their own work.
When I was a senior in college, I once found myself in a dorm suite with a bunch of nerdy guys who all fancied themselves to be creative types. Even though they had obviously never read any fanfic other than the sort of thing pilloried on the Something Awful forums, they spent a good hour talking about how disgusted they were by female fans, who insist on ruining everything for everyone by getting their nasty little fingerprints all over High Art like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. I stopped spending time with these men shortly after that, and I gradually learned to avoid people who remind me of them.
This is why I sometimes forget that entire congregations of these howling assclowns still dominate large swaths of the mainstream internet. I suppose there's nothing to be done for it except to shake my head and step away.
...except there is a lot of borderline sexist nonsense on the site. For example, tropes related to male-gendered wish fulfillment are treated seriously, while tropes related to female-gendered wish fulfillment are ridiculed as the products of bad writing. The word "fangirl" is always used with negative connotations, frequently in tandem with "bad fanfiction." This is especially the case when female fans interpret a story in a way that is not 100% compliant with the male-authored canon, or when female writers create empowered "Mary Sue" female characters in their own work.
When I was a senior in college, I once found myself in a dorm suite with a bunch of nerdy guys who all fancied themselves to be creative types. Even though they had obviously never read any fanfic other than the sort of thing pilloried on the Something Awful forums, they spent a good hour talking about how disgusted they were by female fans, who insist on ruining everything for everyone by getting their nasty little fingerprints all over High Art like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. I stopped spending time with these men shortly after that, and I gradually learned to avoid people who remind me of them.
This is why I sometimes forget that entire congregations of these howling assclowns still dominate large swaths of the mainstream internet. I suppose there's nothing to be done for it except to shake my head and step away.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-25 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-25 05:03 pm (UTC)Would it surprise you to learn that Wikipedia used to be exactly the same way? I don't know the full story outside of my own personal experiences, but apparently the dominance of men and male-gendered concerns on the Wikipedia editorial forums was so strong that in 2014 several organizations (like the Fembot Collective, which is hosted out of the University of Oregon) started organizing "write-ins" not only to create article stubs for notable female figures but also to mob the forums in order to ensure that these articles were not immediately deleted for not being important enough.
I wish someone would do the same thing for TV Tropes, which is actually a fantastic resource and brilliantly put-together website, but... Bitches got to have priorities.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-28 12:41 am (UTC)I think I did know that about Wikipedia. I repeat: WHY ARE MEN.
(I mean, women and internalized misogyny contribute too, but I think we all know where this problem truly comes from~)
no subject
Date: 2017-08-27 07:30 pm (UTC)