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Granny Reminisces about the Bad Old Days
Aug. 29th, 2016 10:21 amThis morning I fell down a rabbit hole of reading through my Livejournal and came across an interesting passage I wrote in 2013 (as part of a much longer post titled On fandom and being "crazy") that describes my experience of moving through fannish spaces prior to 2006. It reads as follows...
[ Looking back to the beginning of this Livejournal, I've realized that I used to have a strange relationship with fandom. On one hand, I loved games and fantasy novels and comic books and anime. I never had a lot of money, but what little money I had I spent on geek stuff. On the other hand, I would periodically throw away my books and VHS tapes and DVDs and console games so that people wouldn't know I was into that sort of stuff. On one hand, I loved to draw and paint fan art and fantasy art. On the other hand, I felt as if I had to keep it hidden at all times, and I would throw away entire sketchbooks and paintings so that they didn't embarrass me. On one hand, I loved fan fiction and fan conventions. On the other hand, I did everything I could to dissociate myself from "the type of people" who liked fan fiction and fan conventions.
To me now, this seems totally crazy. At the time, though, I guess I was doing my best not to appear crazy. The consensus among "normal" people seemed to be that people in fandom were crazy, and "crazy" was the one thing I didn't want to be. If I were going to have anything to do with fandom, it needed to be a socially productive and acceptable type of fandom, like starting an anime club at my high school or volunteering at Anime Weekend Atlanta over the summer.
What I wasn't able to articulate when I started writing under this Livejournal account is that my actual lived experience of fandom corroborated the idea that fans are strange people, and that this was partially because the fandoms I had experience with were dominated by males. Being a young woman interested in something like Final Fantasy or Lord of the Rings or Magic The Gathering generally involved having to tolerate a high level of sexual harassment. I'm not saying that all male fans are or were sleazeballs, but rather that male-dominated fandom spaces used to feel male-dominated to me. Even if people weren't necessarily doing anything, the attitude was still there.
In high school and college, it was difficult for me to make friends in fandom, because I subconsciously didn't want to be friends with "that type of person" – by which I meant, I guess, the type of person, male or female, who objectifies both female characters and real woman (and I mean "objectify" broadly in the sense of "creating and operating within a discursive space in which men are subjects and women are objects") or tolerates and pardons this behavior and attitude in others. Women who were involved in male-dominated fandoms struck me as especially crazy, because it seemed to me that that they were actually embracing the inherent misogyny either by becoming hyper-accommodating to a male gaze or hyper-misogynistic themselves.
One of the major components of being crazy is that your personal reality doesn't mesh with consensus reality. Aside from indicating interests that were fairly removed from what was considered socially acceptable, fandom seemed impossible for me to join as someone who considered herself a feminist. Given my experience with fandom, then, it's no wonder that I felt like everyone involved in fandom as I understood it was crazy, and that I was crazy for being involved myself. ]
I think this passage is worth reproducing here not only as a mile marker in the way I've been approaching the topic of "fandom," but also as a demonstration of the sort of thing I used to write on Livejournal before its untimely demise. I was considering deleting my account, but discovering that I had written essays like this has encouraged me me to reconsider. More on this later, I think. (ETA: I did in fact write quite a bit more.)
[ Looking back to the beginning of this Livejournal, I've realized that I used to have a strange relationship with fandom. On one hand, I loved games and fantasy novels and comic books and anime. I never had a lot of money, but what little money I had I spent on geek stuff. On the other hand, I would periodically throw away my books and VHS tapes and DVDs and console games so that people wouldn't know I was into that sort of stuff. On one hand, I loved to draw and paint fan art and fantasy art. On the other hand, I felt as if I had to keep it hidden at all times, and I would throw away entire sketchbooks and paintings so that they didn't embarrass me. On one hand, I loved fan fiction and fan conventions. On the other hand, I did everything I could to dissociate myself from "the type of people" who liked fan fiction and fan conventions.
To me now, this seems totally crazy. At the time, though, I guess I was doing my best not to appear crazy. The consensus among "normal" people seemed to be that people in fandom were crazy, and "crazy" was the one thing I didn't want to be. If I were going to have anything to do with fandom, it needed to be a socially productive and acceptable type of fandom, like starting an anime club at my high school or volunteering at Anime Weekend Atlanta over the summer.
What I wasn't able to articulate when I started writing under this Livejournal account is that my actual lived experience of fandom corroborated the idea that fans are strange people, and that this was partially because the fandoms I had experience with were dominated by males. Being a young woman interested in something like Final Fantasy or Lord of the Rings or Magic The Gathering generally involved having to tolerate a high level of sexual harassment. I'm not saying that all male fans are or were sleazeballs, but rather that male-dominated fandom spaces used to feel male-dominated to me. Even if people weren't necessarily doing anything, the attitude was still there.
In high school and college, it was difficult for me to make friends in fandom, because I subconsciously didn't want to be friends with "that type of person" – by which I meant, I guess, the type of person, male or female, who objectifies both female characters and real woman (and I mean "objectify" broadly in the sense of "creating and operating within a discursive space in which men are subjects and women are objects") or tolerates and pardons this behavior and attitude in others. Women who were involved in male-dominated fandoms struck me as especially crazy, because it seemed to me that that they were actually embracing the inherent misogyny either by becoming hyper-accommodating to a male gaze or hyper-misogynistic themselves.
One of the major components of being crazy is that your personal reality doesn't mesh with consensus reality. Aside from indicating interests that were fairly removed from what was considered socially acceptable, fandom seemed impossible for me to join as someone who considered herself a feminist. Given my experience with fandom, then, it's no wonder that I felt like everyone involved in fandom as I understood it was crazy, and that I was crazy for being involved myself. ]
I think this passage is worth reproducing here not only as a mile marker in the way I've been approaching the topic of "fandom," but also as a demonstration of the sort of thing I used to write on Livejournal before its untimely demise. I was considering deleting my account, but discovering that I had written essays like this has encouraged me me to reconsider. More on this later, I think. (ETA: I did in fact write quite a bit more.)
