hey girl it's feminist fandom

[metaphortunate]

This was a reply to hradzka and then I thought I would just put it here as well.

Still, fandom is currently in a bit of a self-questioning state that it doesn't seem too eager to resolve. From my perspective as a non-feminist, this is at least partially because the answers presented by much of current feminist and leftist ideology would seem to me to be *answers that fandom does not want to hear.*

Yeah, you think that, because you think that there's 1) something wrong with feminism and 2) something wrong with our (where by "our" I mean female fandom, and therefore pretty obviously elide a huge number of differences) desires. God knows there's things wrong with feminism but it's not what you're thinking here. And what's wrong with our desires is only the inevitable outcome of what's wrong with the world. Read what Sugar wrote here about her teenage fantasies and their roots. Nobody's sexual development happened in a vacuum. Every woman in this world grew up in a world where men were presented every single damn day from a variety of sources as more intelligent valuable interesting strong capable central active resourceful blah blah blah, and incidentally, in a world where white men were presented as sexier smarter faster more valuable more cultured more interesting blah blah blah than non-white men, and do people really then wonder, somehow, when writing stories about canon that are 90% about white men, that our hindbrains come up with stories and desires for stories about white men? That the bits of our brains that are looking for fun and not hard work frequently consider their comfort zone to be white men? Surprise. And does that mean that those desires are wrong?

NO. Everybody makes their own erotic compromises with the patriarchy. We're going to die while the world is still fucked. We can't put our libidos on hold until everything is sorted out. And to sort out our libidos we'd not only have to sort out the world but we'd also have to hop in our imaginary time machine and go back and fix it so that we grew up in a fair world where people cared about what happened to people who weren't rich white men and that is also going to happen on the twelfth of never so you will forgive me if I say that there is nothing wrong with the way we live with our oppression by eroticizing it. I mean that. It's a survival trait that the brain eroticizes things it's afraid of or angry about, that is one of the ways we cope. And I love our survival. I will be cheerleading it forever. And when we find ways to not only survive but have fun with the place we are condemned to take, when we turn it into art and community and squee, I want to throw a fucking party. We win.

And questioning it is not wrong either. Feminism is not wrong about interrogating the whitecockers. Because that's how things get better. That's how we work on decolonizing our brains while living in our colonized brains. You say that this fic doesn't resolve or offer to resolve feminist fandom's ongoing internal conflict, but dude, to fix feminist fandom, you would have to fix the whole world. Are you seriously complaining that a 4000 word fanfic about a tumblr doesn't finish the job? It does its job, okay? It does its little part. It's one small step for fandom. I think it's a great story.

The story in question is When Fics Take on a Life of Their Own. Fandom: RPF/Feminist Ryan Gosling.

(Though to be honest I prefer Hey Girl, It's Kstew.)

Comments

[kest]

A lot of times it's so subtle...like the girls *seem* to Do Things, but they only do them following someone else's lead, or by accident, or after discussing them (getting permission), or get themselves into trouble and have to be rescued and Learn Their Lesson.

I was going to say something else, but I appear to have been distracted by rage.

Oh, yeah. Now I remember. I had a whole theory when I was younger, about why main characters were all male - because girls will go see the movie or whatever either way, but boys are self-centered and won't see 'girl' movies or read 'girl' books. Unless the girl is 'sexy'. Patriarchy win by being smelly buttheads.

[kore]

I had a whole theory when I was younger, about why main characters were all male - because girls will go see the movie or whatever either way, but boys are self-centered and won't see 'girl' movies or read 'girl' books. Unless the girl is 'sexy'.

Yeah, isn't that still the standard argument in a lot of publishing and Hollywood? And part of explaining the success of Harry Potter &c -- "Well, girls will read about boys, but boys won't read about girls." (And then there is Twilight, but one guy apparently gained internet fame by going, "Lo, I am a guy reading Twilight on the Internet!", so.)

I do remember a lot of young boys going to see Titanic (not just on dates either), but again, that was pretty much the story of how a Girl was Rescued by a Boy, even if he wasn't the main focus of the story. (And the Girl's Story came out because of the Macho Male Explorer, as well. sigh.)