\n\n"}\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMy feelings about gendered media are very complex because when women became a big part of geek culture, it really feels like\u2026 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\u2019t 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\u00a0\u201cgeek feminism\u201d happened, it happened as part of a general youth-focused \u201cnormie culture\u201d 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 \u201cbro culture.\u201d So it\u2019s definitely not just feminists vs old school nerds. It\u2019s young post-Geek Renaissance geeks vs old school nerds.\u00a0
The thing is, a lot of what\u2019s happened in\u00a0\u201cgeek feminism,\u201d hasn\u2019t really benefited any of the women who were already here. It\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0This quoted sentence uses the correct tenses:\u00a0\u201cFanfic writers were seen, in the 80s and 90s, roughly the way we see furries.\u201d 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\u2019m pretty sure that furries ARE more accepted now, it\u2019s just the general opinion on them started at somewhere around \u201cmurderous rage/zero shits given about their deaths\u201d and has improved from that point.
And I\u2019m with @soulvomit ; the whole \u201cgeek Feminism\u201d 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 \u201cI have tits you must obey\u201d female geeks already there.
What\u2019s interesting is that it\u2019s an almost perfect example of Cultural Appropriation, and it\u2019s happening to people who mostly believe that\u2019s 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\u2026 it would draw enough furries and become a furry community, so precisely in the adjacent communities you\u2019d expect more tolerant if you didn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s otherkin and \u201cfurries show up\u201d 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 \u2013 femboys, RuPaul-style female impersonation as social identity, maybe even \u201ctraps\u201d \u2013 don\u2019t 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 \u201cfunny animal\u201d thing just used to be more mainstream \u2013 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 \u201890s when WB tried to connect to their tradition for a new generation they were like \u201ca girl animal entirely defined by being sexually attractive, yes, this is in the classic spirit\ufffc\ufffc\u201d
This thread has made me reread https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c for the first time in years