Posted on

bookshop:

In case this section gets cut from my article on the Tim Roberts/Cumberbatch fandom backlash, I’m stowing it here, because this is a hugely important point that I’ve never really articulated before:

All this overemphasis on etiquette and fear of fangirl hysteria is arguably rooted in sexist stereotypes of female fans as too hypersexualized and brainless to behave with decorum in public spaces. Yet the fans haven’t delivered the mindless frenzy the media was expecting. At worst, isolated reports of shrieking fans seem to be an extreme exception to much more widely-reported evidence of well-behaved audiences enjoying themselves.

But even though fans have been generally well-behaved, they’ve been stuck with the stigma that their behavior has been just the opposite. Roberts’ tweets and the backlash from many of his supporters show how easy it is to generalize, stereotype, and dismiss female fan culture.

Moreover, the pattern of this vitriol going hand in hand with misogynistic, sexualized insults suggests that the real fear is not a lack of female decorum but an abundance of female expression. Fangirls, and people who actively participate in fannish cultures, have wrested control of their own pleasure, and how that pleasure is expressed, away from a society that would rather they kept a lid on it, thanks.

The cultural language that dehumanizes and demonizes fangirls does so because it fears what happens when female fans express unrestrained joy and pleasure in their hobbies, their favorite celebrities, and their consumption of media, rather than the stereotypical things women are taught they should value instead. A woman attending a theater in public as an ebullient and occasionally noisy fan is a woman who has given priority to satisfying her own pleasures and love of culture. She is the total opposite of a quiet, domesticated housewife living a private and insulated life.

Fangirl culture isn’t aligned with the image of obedient housewives or quiet, submissive sexual partners. No wonder Roberts was led to describe female fans as ruined sexual organs. Their behavior was never for him.