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A quick question for you: do you still hate Taylor Swift?
In the late 2000s to early 2010s, the mainstream music scene was, whether we like to admit it or not, dominated by two camps: the Taylor Swift haters and the Justin Bieber haters. Fan wars have always been around. For every person who likes one thing, there’s another person who will attack them for daring to enjoy X when Y is clearly better.
But the hatred of Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift wasn’t just about them being compared with “better” artists. So much of the hate these artists and their fans received was because they were associated with young female fans in their pre-teens to late teens.
Or better yet, in the language of the people who so love to deride them, crazy teen girls.
Many of us are quick to slap the “crazy” label on groups of young girls and women who are enthusiastic about something. Anything that draws the attention of hordes of teenage girls inspires in people a need to “protect” these poor, impressionable girls from the moral perils of…being a fan.
This is not to say that we should be letting minors consume media entirely unsupervised (anyone who’s used the internet regularly knows what’s out there), but there’s a special kind of moral panic that people fret over when it’s girls enjoying things.
So many of us fear and revile seeing teen girls screaming in crowds and cheering on their favorite artist or wearing fandom merchandise related to the fandom they’re in. When it’s teen girls wearing a BTS baller bracelet and jockeying for their favorite k-pop bands in voting contests, they’re called hysterical and too emotionally invested in something that isn’t “serious.”
Swap in teen girls for men and boy bands for sports teams and that attitude goes away. Suddenly, it’s a “serious” hobby worth being emotional about. But we don’t use the word “emotional” because men are only ever “passionate” about their favorite team.
Never mind the violent clashes that happen between predominantly male sports fans, it’s teenage girls crying over their EXO bias or One Direction’s disbandment that we need to worry about and ridicule.
But that’s alright, right? It’s not like these boy bands are actually good. After all, the bands that women are passionate about are passing trends just like the Beatles whose ardent female fans didn’t have much by way of taste in music.
According to Andi Lothian, a Scottish concert promoter who booked the Beatles after a No. 1 album, female fans were a headache, “The girls were beginning to overwhelm us. It was absolute pandemonium. Girls fainting, screaming, wet seats. The whole hall went into some kind of state, almost like collective hypnotism. I’d never seen anything like it.”
It was on that day that the term “Beatlemania” was coined. Beatlemania would later spread to other parts of the globe, marking the start of a long tradition of female fans providing their raving support for boy bands.
Funnily enough, the Beatles are part of the litany of “good” bands and artists that are used to attack and ridicule the music tastes of teenage girls today.
Things aren’t much different in other forms of entertainment, especially the stereotypically nerdy kinds that are often the focus of big fandoms.
Love it or hate it, fandoms are an inescapable component of internet culture. No matter where you go online, you’re bound to run into someone who’s part of a fandom. If you somehow managed to escape the behemoth that is fandom culture, it’s basically just a community that’s intensely dedicated to consuming, discussing, and even making art about a particular piece of entertainment. The solid core of fans that make up a fandom is what makes and breaks bands, book series, movies, and comics in the long run.
One of the biggest fandoms we’ve seen in the past couple of decades is the MCU or Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom. Yes, it really has been that long.
The first MCU film was Iron Man, a movie initially released in 2008. Its explosion in popularity, in part due to the engaging performance that Robert Downy Jr. gave, led to years of superhero movies dominating the silver screen both in the U.S and abroad.
The more well-known side of the MCU fandom, aside from your mainstream fans who just keep up to date with releases, is the original comic book fandom surrounding it. Now if there’s one thing that is true about the comic book fan stereotype, it’s that most comic fans are men. Even at the height of the MCU’s popularity around 2019, 43% of men reported that they were comic book fans. That’s nearly double the percentage of women who are, a low 24%.
As Walt Hickey puts it, comic books are made by men, for men, and about men. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. A lot of women just aren’t into comics. But where the divide becomes clear is in the gatekeeping that happens around the MCU.
The MCU is “cool” but only insofar as it isn’t associated with young women like the ladies who dominate the MCU fanfiction scene over at Archive of Our Own. While we often think of Marvel’s comic fans as the only core fan group for the MCU, the truth is that the MCU fandom has a second, predominantly female core group.
This second, hidden fandom has produced the 432,207 labors of love categorized under the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” tag. This is without counting the pockets of MCU-related fanfiction existing elsewhere on AO3 or other fansites.
And yet, even with thousands of words and artwork all made for a fictional universe of intergalactic superheroes, these hordes of female fans are rarely, if ever, counted as “real” fans.
In the same way that female music fans are shrugged off for being hysterical and not in it for the music, female fans of traditionally nerdy things often find themselves pushed out of main fan culture spaces through intense scrutiny that’s supposed to determine whether they’re a “real fan” or not — something that male fans, even if new, are rarely subjected to.
As Piper Hays wrote for The Varsity, “An internet user asked me to list all the winners of the Stanley Cup, from first to latest. This was a ridiculous question that none of the men in the same thread had to answer. But when I refused, the user mocked me for being a ‘puck bunny,’ a derogatory term for a girl who only watches hockey to pursue or crush on the players.”
It’s no surprise that there are women-only and queer-only spaces for Dungeons & Dragons. I won’t tell you where they are, of course, it’s kind of a ladies’ secret at this point. But most of the time, newcomers arrive with stories of how they were “chased out” of the bigger community of D&D players.
The stories range from microaggressions to thinly veiled attacks on them as the player, to even one instance back in 2018 (that I still can’t forget) about how one woman’s D&D group chided her for not being a good roleplayer because she refused to roleplay her character being sexually assaulted. I know, extreme.
But back to the quizzing.
Why the quizzing and gatekeeping of fandom culture from women? In my own and many other women’s experiences of it, the gatekeeping of stereotypically masculine hobbies seems to be a misguided attempt to “protect” these interests from being “tainted” by women who are seen as not serious enough or not really interested in the hobby or IP in question.
In that sense, the gatekeeping of fandom culture and the trivialization of women is just another extension of the trivialization of women in the workplace. Okay, now you’re pissed because what the hell does fandom culture have to do with something as serious as that?
But think about the kind of language used against women entering these hobbies and interests and compare it with the attitudes that existed, and unfortunately still exist, about adult women who enter the workforce.
It’s no secret that so few women are employed in trades and construction-related jobs. Just like the comic book fan disparity, a lot of this has to do with lack of interest. But of the women who do go on to work in these fields, many find themselves unwelcome, an experience that tradeswoman Shawna Henderson describes as, “All sorts of tedious reckoning with language and ducking the slagging of those who felt I was an intruder on the site because I don’t have a penis.”
It’s not just an on-the-ground phenomenon either. Engineers I’ve spoken to have mentioned that many firms will not assign women to jobs where they actually have to talk to construction workers because the workers refuse to listen to women who they see as “not that knowledgeable,” his words, not mine.
It’s a move that, while intended to protect women in engineering, also locks them out of other opportunities for advancement in their field with the added bonus of the actual problem never being addressed.
The view that women aren’t all that “serious” about what they do also has repercussions outside of fandom politics. For Japanese women who have been let go during the coronavirus pandemic, it’s among the key reasons they are now unemployed.
In a country still heavily dictated by tradition, female workers are seen as just supplementary income earners, not true career women, whose financial stability isn’t as important as their “breadwinner” male counterparts. The trend has led to a rise in female suicides.
Oh, and before we wrap up, remember the landmark case of Roe v. Wade? Sarah Weddington, one of the two female Texas attorneys who won the case, couldn’t get hired by a law firm. The reason? Law firms in the early 70s refused to hire women, leaving her with, as Susan Hays describes it, “lots of time for good trouble.”
