Thing from the con a week ago
Oct. 20th, 2014 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethLast weekend at the con there were screenings of a documentary about Doctor Who fans. I watched a bit of it, then walked out all :eyeroll: It wasn't being deliberately rude or anything, but it was being drearily tedious in a very gendered way. It was about how Doctor Who fandom is changing, and it seemed really excited about it, and you'd think that would be a good thing. But.
There's this story that fanboys tell themselves, over and over, in a variety of spaces I've seen and been to.
The story goes "And suddenly, women!"
This story is always wrong.
I know in not watching much I may well have misinterpreted it, but I just didn't feel the need to watch a couple of hours of clips editorially arranged to explain the fanboy story at length, because it don't resemble the truth as I have known it.
I do not understand how men can fail to notice that there are such things as female fans. I find it doubly baffling because in all the spaces I regularly hang out in we're predominantly women, and have been since at least the mid 90s. I was a proto human before that, but from the stories of fandom I've heard, wherever zines were made and fanac was in progress, there we were.
So anything that starts with the story that new DW brought the women in by casting sexier actors and including romance, especially something that can with a straight face suggest nobody fancied the Doctor before Tennant... I don't know what world they're in, but it seems to be where fanboys congregate all over.
And I don't understand it. There must be, and must have been, parallel tracks of fandom somehow. Because either women do fandom differently, or men can look around and just fail to see us.
... I have been at a convention discussing Doctor Who with other Doctor Who fans and had a bloke fan stare at me and be all "I've never met a woman who watched Inferno before." He seemed quite impressed. All I could think was I'd been having the same conversation online with dozens of equally knowledgeable fans who mostly identified as women, so where had he even been?
One thing I've noticed (repeatedly) is that the gender balance skews heavily male as soon as money is involved. Like I've been at cons where there were a vast majority women, but everyone there who got paid for anything to do with the show, be that as screen writers or magazine writers, was male.
And I know shows keep trying to have a mostly male fanbase. I've been in more than one fandom where the source got cancelled not because of raw numbers of ratings but because the viewers were predominantly middle aged women, and they just didn't want their/our eyeballs.
But male fans who don't notice that female fans exist don't ask the right questions.
Like the documentary seemed to think it proved something that when they asked young fans their favourite Doctor they almost all said new who Doctors, mostly the current Doctor. But, well, some of them weren't born when Classic Who was on the air? And any time you do a poll on favourite Doctors the current guy is going to win. And he was at that convention. What does it prove when people like him? That you've filtered your survey subjects already. So you can't start from 'new fans like new Who, what is it doing different?' because it don't prove that older fans didn't like older Who, so you don't know it is different.
... speaking as a 7 & Ace fan who always picks 8 as fav Doctor because audios, I'm pretty sure I'm not a unique snowflake, and I have had conversations with other fans of the classic series, and we do exist.
So if their perception is also true what they need to be asking is why weren't women fans in the same spaces as men?
I have a theory you can start that answer with the pub.
I mean, I go to the pub for the Science Fiction group, and early in the evening there's some women around, but the later it gets the more of them vanish, especially when it's dark. So when you have fan club meetings in a pub, all the reasons women don't tend to go to the pub mitigate against them/us actually turning up. Or indeed hearing of it in the first place. And that's in the here now; it's my understanding that women in a pub was even more of a Thing the further back you go. So if you're just calling pub meets fandom? Mysteriously invisible women.
But I reckon there's structural barriers to women (a) finding these things and (b) turning up, partly because safety, and because a club blurb that focuses on the 'drink beer' portion of the activities is going to put some people off.
I reckon this because once we get online and the structures are different, tada, women! Women everywhere! Where did we all come from?
If you assume women have weird woman brains and don't like science fiction / geek stuff in the first place, you end up looking at the texts we congregate around to find differences in what draws us in. And Doctor Who has changed, it's true, but mostly it's changed like all the TV around it. (I did studying, but I couldn't cite sources today, it's more of a vague impression from when we did a course on it.) Because of the big gap when it was off air the change looks abrupt, but if you chart it by comparator shows, it's more of a piece with changing tastes. Plus Doctor Who was designed from the start to appeal to women and men, of a variety of ages, and it's been my understanding that it succeeded. So if you have women viewers, but think there's no female fans, some odd definitions must be involved.
Especially given that someone was writing all that fanfic, even Before.
The thing is though, if someone can figure out the right questions, the ones about how a variety of people always liked the texts but now they are more likely to share fan spaces and do fan activities, that might get some useful answers. Like, what made people feel safe and welcome? What changed? How do we do it again?
Because the other thing I noticed at the convention - at all the conventions really - is how very very white we tend to be. Much more so than the UK in general. And the convention organiser had a nice speech at the closing ceremony about how everyone is welcome in fan spaces, no matter your gender, sexuality, or race... but I don't reckon you could prove it by the actual attendees. And that might be a failure of eyes on my part, but, the UK is 87% white according to the 2011 census. So there should be 13 people in every 100 that are not white. Even in a 200 person convention, that's 26. And I only actually noticed two.
Unless I missed a couple dozen people, we're too white. We need to understand that lack of diversity.
And asking the right questions seems like a good start.
Of course if a diverse audience actually isn't watching the same texts, okay. Anecdote is not data, and maybe I am that much the special snowflake, and happen to online know the only classic era women or people of color in fandom. But I can't actually believe that.
Which makes with the epic :eyeroll: when some fanboy story takes it as the baseline assumption.
There's this story that fanboys tell themselves, over and over, in a variety of spaces I've seen and been to.
The story goes "And suddenly, women!"
This story is always wrong.
I know in not watching much I may well have misinterpreted it, but I just didn't feel the need to watch a couple of hours of clips editorially arranged to explain the fanboy story at length, because it don't resemble the truth as I have known it.
I do not understand how men can fail to notice that there are such things as female fans. I find it doubly baffling because in all the spaces I regularly hang out in we're predominantly women, and have been since at least the mid 90s. I was a proto human before that, but from the stories of fandom I've heard, wherever zines were made and fanac was in progress, there we were.
So anything that starts with the story that new DW brought the women in by casting sexier actors and including romance, especially something that can with a straight face suggest nobody fancied the Doctor before Tennant... I don't know what world they're in, but it seems to be where fanboys congregate all over.
And I don't understand it. There must be, and must have been, parallel tracks of fandom somehow. Because either women do fandom differently, or men can look around and just fail to see us.
... I have been at a convention discussing Doctor Who with other Doctor Who fans and had a bloke fan stare at me and be all "I've never met a woman who watched Inferno before." He seemed quite impressed. All I could think was I'd been having the same conversation online with dozens of equally knowledgeable fans who mostly identified as women, so where had he even been?
One thing I've noticed (repeatedly) is that the gender balance skews heavily male as soon as money is involved. Like I've been at cons where there were a vast majority women, but everyone there who got paid for anything to do with the show, be that as screen writers or magazine writers, was male.
And I know shows keep trying to have a mostly male fanbase. I've been in more than one fandom where the source got cancelled not because of raw numbers of ratings but because the viewers were predominantly middle aged women, and they just didn't want their/our eyeballs.
But male fans who don't notice that female fans exist don't ask the right questions.
Like the documentary seemed to think it proved something that when they asked young fans their favourite Doctor they almost all said new who Doctors, mostly the current Doctor. But, well, some of them weren't born when Classic Who was on the air? And any time you do a poll on favourite Doctors the current guy is going to win. And he was at that convention. What does it prove when people like him? That you've filtered your survey subjects already. So you can't start from 'new fans like new Who, what is it doing different?' because it don't prove that older fans didn't like older Who, so you don't know it is different.
... speaking as a 7 & Ace fan who always picks 8 as fav Doctor because audios, I'm pretty sure I'm not a unique snowflake, and I have had conversations with other fans of the classic series, and we do exist.
So if their perception is also true what they need to be asking is why weren't women fans in the same spaces as men?
I have a theory you can start that answer with the pub.
I mean, I go to the pub for the Science Fiction group, and early in the evening there's some women around, but the later it gets the more of them vanish, especially when it's dark. So when you have fan club meetings in a pub, all the reasons women don't tend to go to the pub mitigate against them/us actually turning up. Or indeed hearing of it in the first place. And that's in the here now; it's my understanding that women in a pub was even more of a Thing the further back you go. So if you're just calling pub meets fandom? Mysteriously invisible women.
But I reckon there's structural barriers to women (a) finding these things and (b) turning up, partly because safety, and because a club blurb that focuses on the 'drink beer' portion of the activities is going to put some people off.
I reckon this because once we get online and the structures are different, tada, women! Women everywhere! Where did we all come from?
If you assume women have weird woman brains and don't like science fiction / geek stuff in the first place, you end up looking at the texts we congregate around to find differences in what draws us in. And Doctor Who has changed, it's true, but mostly it's changed like all the TV around it. (I did studying, but I couldn't cite sources today, it's more of a vague impression from when we did a course on it.) Because of the big gap when it was off air the change looks abrupt, but if you chart it by comparator shows, it's more of a piece with changing tastes. Plus Doctor Who was designed from the start to appeal to women and men, of a variety of ages, and it's been my understanding that it succeeded. So if you have women viewers, but think there's no female fans, some odd definitions must be involved.
Especially given that someone was writing all that fanfic, even Before.
The thing is though, if someone can figure out the right questions, the ones about how a variety of people always liked the texts but now they are more likely to share fan spaces and do fan activities, that might get some useful answers. Like, what made people feel safe and welcome? What changed? How do we do it again?
Because the other thing I noticed at the convention - at all the conventions really - is how very very white we tend to be. Much more so than the UK in general. And the convention organiser had a nice speech at the closing ceremony about how everyone is welcome in fan spaces, no matter your gender, sexuality, or race... but I don't reckon you could prove it by the actual attendees. And that might be a failure of eyes on my part, but, the UK is 87% white according to the 2011 census. So there should be 13 people in every 100 that are not white. Even in a 200 person convention, that's 26. And I only actually noticed two.
Unless I missed a couple dozen people, we're too white. We need to understand that lack of diversity.
And asking the right questions seems like a good start.
Of course if a diverse audience actually isn't watching the same texts, okay. Anecdote is not data, and maybe I am that much the special snowflake, and happen to online know the only classic era women or people of color in fandom. But I can't actually believe that.
Which makes with the epic :eyeroll: when some fanboy story takes it as the baseline assumption.
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no subject
Date: 2014-10-21 02:26 am (UTC)When Dr Who got big here, and I started going to the little cons we had back then, most of the fans were women. All the fanfic was written by women - Trek, Dr Who, Quantum Leap, Blake's 7 - all of it, especially the slash.
So women have been there since the beginning. People of color, not so much. Not even in California, which is a sad thing indeed. But women? Definitely.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-21 10:43 am (UTC)I think in part it goes back to the different ways men and women tell stories. You've probably heard the theory about men having Something Important To Say and telling the world, while women talking to women in their stories. So men go ahead and put together the ultimate encyclopedia of their fandom over there, while women write fanfic over here. In the eyes of these allimportant men the fanfic writers have nothing of value to say and therfore don't exsist.
Another part is, that men don't think women could possibly like these shows for the same reasons they do. We are probably just in it for the attractive male lead and therfore not _real_ fans, so we don't count. Ergo, no (real) women fans until we get so many and to visible, they can't ignore us anymore.
I recently talked to a male fan about the latest Doctor and after I said I hadn't quite warmed up to Capaldi yet, he immediately jumped to the conclusion, that Smith must have been my first Doctor. The implication was, that I had never before seen an experienced actor tackle that role. Unfortunately for this guy, I not only started with Eccelston and Tennant simultaniously (because I came to Who through Torchwood and watched the Captain Jack episodes first), but also went back and sought out as many classic episodes as I could find, so I know my Doctors and Pertwee is my alltime favourite, sorry boy. I found it interesting, how this guy didn't just accept, that my preference differed from his, but had to rationalize that by essentially claiming that I didn't know better yet.
Now if many women in the old, pre-internet days of fandom encountered this type of thinking, I'm sure many of them stopped bothering with the fanboys and formed their own clubs and zines, where they could meet in daylight and the guys were never the wiser.