My feelings about gendered media are very complex because when women became a big part of geek culture, it really feels like… there were women already here, a majority of us were gender non-conforming and a majority of our fandoms were really, really underground. Fanfic writers were seen, in the 80s and 90s, roughly the way we see furries. A lot of women geeks/nerds in my generation liked artwork and imagery that came out of the 70s and in many cases, a majority of it was definitely *not* child friendly. There were a lot of us who were kinksters and a lot of us who drew or wrote explicit erotica. And we weren’t minors, or even close. A lot of us were in our 30s and up. (And lots of us were socially formed, individuated adults who were already very, very experienced in navigating groups of weird or uncouth men.)
And when “geek feminism” happened, it happened as part of a general youth-focused “normie culture” overtaking of geek culture, that was also heavily corporate, heavily monoculture, and heavily middle class oriented. You also had video games and comic book movies being a big thing in general and a clash between male oldschool nerds and the incoming “bro culture.” So it’s definitely not just feminists vs old school nerds. It’s young post-Geek Renaissance geeks vs old school nerds.
The thing is, a lot of what’s happened in “geek feminism,” hasn’t really benefited any of the women who were already here. It’s mainly for the kinds of women whose groups we would never have been allowed into, and contains the kinds of social dynamics that we fled the mainstream to get away from, but then perpetuates them well into adulthood.
This quoted sentence uses the correct tenses: “Fanfic writers were seen, in the 80s and 90s, roughly the way we see furries.” Why has the public softened on fanfic writers but not so much on furries, who have been in the public eye for similar amounts of time?
I’m pretty sure that furries ARE more accepted now, it’s just the general opinion on them started at somewhere around “murderous rage/zero shits given about their deaths” and has improved from that point.
And I’m with @soulvomit ; the whole “geek Feminism” was very much more socially adept, conventionally attractive women moving in and speaking over everyone who was previously there, including the existing socially awkward, less “I have tits you must obey” female geeks already there.
What’s interesting is that it’s an almost perfect example of Cultural Appropriation, and it’s happening to people who mostly believe that’s not actually a thing.
Furries are far more commonly accepted than I remember in Web 1.5/the forum era.
Of course one thing there was that yeah, there was enough furry hate that if your community was furry-tolerant… it would draw enough furries and become a furry community, so precisely in the adjacent communities you’d expect more tolerant if you didn’t develop some degree of pushback that friendly -adjacent scene ceased to exist.
Part of it was it was just more perv-coded, buying comix didn’t mean autocompleting to just another website but might involve going to the weirdo section of the already low-status porn or comics shop. Part of it it was just more queer, and included people who today might be drawn to more particular scenes and identities now that they’ve had a chance to emerge, and that was also more low-status than today.
Part of it was the fursona idea was presented as closer to today’s otherkin and “furries show up” would mean some 13yo acting ridiculous and insisting you acknowledge he IS a wolf in the middle of you talking about Final Fantasy 8, and that was annoying. I do sometimes think of how much culture war stuff from this gender wave comes out of forum-type teenagers being teenagers and then insisting you acknowledge their proclaimed identity linking up to whatever remnants of offline orientation-themed ideology enforcement. Whereas other gender-bending idioms – femboys, RuPaul-style female impersonation as social identity, maybe even “traps” – don’t make or try to enforce those claims, and earlier transition protocols took place at more mature ages and emphasized invisible passing.
Part of it the “funny animal” thing just used to be more mainstream – old Disney or WB cartoons are, in fact, two partnered mice talking to a dog, or a rabbit who frequently cross-dresses to seduce men. Like, in the ‘90s when WB tried to connect to their tradition for a new generation they were like “a girl animal entirely defined by being sexually attractive, yes, this is in the classic spirit”
This thread has made me reread https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c for the first time in years
When Nerds Collide My intersectionality will have weirdoes or it will be bullshit. Medium