The Great Fangirl Debate

There has recently been a spate of articles in the geekverse about a supposed invasion of fangirls. Basically, 40% of this year’s San Diego Comic Con attendees were female, and many of them were young and fans of Twilight. There was a lot of bitching at SDCC about the Twilight fans; I was there and overheard plenty… and even did some myself. [cough] But it seems that the Twilight invasion has brought to the fore the concept that women can and do like geeky things, and a lot of the commentary seems to express shock, as if women are just now starting to like comic books and science fiction and all that deliciously nerdy stuff. Girls invading the treehouse! That sort of reaction. There has also been a lot of speculation as to why girls get into geeky stuff as well as the differences between fangirls and fanboys.

The writers of The Discriminating Fangirl weigh in with their own experiences as female geeks.

The Bibliomaniac

I’ve been a fangirl almost from the get-go.

My mom taught me how to read when I was three, and I’ve never quit. I was reading the Oz books by the time I was six. The Narnia books, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan series, and Madeleine L’Engle’s novels accompanied me to the age of nine, when I simultaneously discovered comic books and the novels of Stephen King. From there, I branched out into H. P. Lovecraft, the pulp series of Destroyer novels, and the Wild Card shared-world anthologies.

It wasn’t just reading, either. Movies like the Star Wars and Star Trek films, the Indiana Jones series, Ghostbusters, and the three fantasy ‘L’s of the mid-80s—Ladyhawke (1985), Legend (1985), and Labyrinth (1986) further fed my fannish bliss.

By 1985, I had graduated from high school, but family members and friends who expected me to “put away my childish things” now that I was an adult were doomed to disappointment. They didn’t understand what I got out of—in their words—such shallow and stupid pursuits.

Part of that’s perfectly understandable when you realize that being a geek back then was pretty much accepting that you were consigning yourself to the bottom rung of the social ladder. This was especially true for female geeks. In comparison to the last few years, when geekdom has come into its own, being a girl geek in the 80s and early 90s was to constantly struggle with the ugly stereotype that was in vogue then: socially maladjusted, physically unattractive, uninterested in the things that occupied “normal” girls. My stepmother, for example, couldn’t understand why I preferred to watch The X-Files rather than the soap operas she loved.

But geekdom has always offered me two things that made all the social bias worth it. The first of these is social acceptance. One of the things about any hobby is finding other people who share your interests to talk to, and this is as true of collecting action figures or manga as it is about setting up model trains or birdwatching. We seek peers to share and compare our stories with, to discuss highlights and lowlights, and to expand what we know about our interests.

Perhaps even deeper than that, however, was the overwhelming sense of magic and wonder that I found in these books and movies that has stayed with me to this day. Watching a sorceress fly away in a magic bubble, reading about talking lions and superheroes made me believe that anything was really possible—not just around me, but within me, as well.

It was enjoying the fantastic experiences created by others that led me to want to create my own. These days, I’m a writer; I write fantasy and horror, and have done freelancing for RPGs. Geeky fangirl stuff all the way. With any luck, the stuff I write will inspire people as I was inspired. If so, then all the bias and societal disapproval in the world will have been worth it.

Emily

Quote: Guys, says Krasniewicz, tend to focus on stats, quotes and other details: “I’ve discovered at different comic book conventions that it’s more about ‘can you top this?’

I have definitely experienced this. When I tell some guys I’m a comic book fan, they quiz me about names of characters and other details. I’ve never had to prove my geek cred to another female fan. But the generalizations of the articles kind of scare me. I don’t think that is what all male fans are like. Even if it were all fanboys, it might be a guy thing or it could be something else. Maybe fanboys are used to being picked on so they want you to prove your geekiness before they trust you. I’m not sure. Nor do I think all female fans “… want to talk about how the stories make them feel.” Ugh. That makes us sound like an episode of Dr. Phil or something.

I’ve had plenty of conversations with guy fans about storylines and emotional moments of comics or movies. It’s not so much talking about our “feelings” as saying, “Dude, that was awesome!” or “I was trying not to cry!” So I suppose I tend to side more with Joss Whedon and think that fans are fans for the most part but with the caveat that men and women often come at things with different perspectives. I think the Twilight brouhaha was more about the age of the girls who attended that panel. Hundreds of twelve year olds can be a lot to handle, I know because I went to sleepovers when I was a kid. But they won’t always be twelve. Kevin Smith followed up his quote about the Spock and Chewy costumes by saying, “They need to be encouraged because in six years they’ll be eighteen-year-old girls who like vampires. [...] Don’t boo it. There’s a plan and it’s working.”

I may not want to have sex with these girls when they are of age (as is implied) but the point is, these are young fans and if they’re kicked out of fandom (or not allowed to Comic Con) we’re gonna lose the next generation. That means fewer friends for me and fewer chicks for the fanboys.

Finn

Since I hit my mid-thirties next year, I’ve probably been a fangirl longer than the word “fangirl” has even been in existence. It also means that my formative fangirl years were during the 80’s. Transformers, X-Men, G I Joe and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (“By the power of Grayskull!”) were all parts of my daily life well before the movies were ever made, so the references I’ve been hearing lately about the “sudden surge of female fans” is crap. We’ve been here the whole time.

No one bothered to take notice of us fangirls because we weren’t seen as the ones snapping up the products, watching the shows, or buying the comic books. We were supposed to get caught up in what our Barbie was going to wear to one of her many jobs, or wonder which My Little Pony to play with that day instead of wanting to watch fighting ninja turtles or people from the planet Arus (bonus points if can name that one before you read the rest of the sentence) who rode around in robotic lions.

Maybe that’s it.

Maybe it’s not the fan world suddenly noticing our presence, maybe it’s the business world stirring the figurative pot. Maybe the starched shirt corporate America types with their overinflated salaries are creating this buzz by saying it’s some sort of phenomenon because they see dollar signs when they see us coming. After all, females are the same ones that don’t even bat an eyelash at dropping $400.00 on a pair of designer shoes they’ll wear once. What says that they wouldn’t drop the same amount on some piece of comic book art they consider a collectible?

Then again, maybe that’s not it either.

Maybe we’ve always known who we were and everyone else finally caught up to us fans who just happen to be girls.

Strangeness Abounds

Photo courtesy of “korukunuki” on http://www.cosplay.com

As a completely packaged “fangirl” and rabid nerd from the day I could punch buttons on my father’s NES (I want to say…two years old?), I must say that I’m rather insulted by these “discoveries.” The fact of the matter is, women like me have existed for a long, long time, but this Twilight phenomenon is forcing people to more or less officially recognize us. Frankly, I’m disgusted that women cosplayers haven’t been recognized before the Twilight frenzy – surely they are a version of the nerd at their zenith? At the very least, these women should have been recognized before any of these so-called Twilight “fangirls.”

I am a rabid nerd, but I have not always been unapologetic, to my shame. I played video games all throughout childhood, waited in line to buy the first N64 I could lay my hands on in 1998, watched Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Lord of the Rings as a young teenager, but unfortunately, my desire to be accepted by peer groups I believed were the best forced me to mash my nerdy nature into a corner where I did not talk about it and never even mentioned it in passing.

It was not until my late high school years when the much-repressed nerd inside me broke out with a voracious appetite. I pulled out all my old gaming systems, repaired them if needed, and worked on playing them all over again. eBay was especially helpful during this time of release— I ordered old cartridges and controllers like a true junkie.

And movie preferences? I’d rather sit down and watch Watchmen over a sweet, tender, teary chick flick any day of the week. Raiders of the Lost Ark beats The Notebook in romance and I will not take that back.

So about the sudden discovery of these fangirls – I say they’ve been here all along. They just learned to hide their tendencies because they wanted to fit in for so long and then realized later in their lives that there is nothing like being themselves, as absolutely cheesy and over-rehashed that sounds. I hope that this current trend towards open welcomes to female nerds in all forms continues – it would be a shame to see another generation of daughters hide their love for all things nerdy.

TDF Pamela

Like most of my esteemed fangirl colleagues, I’ve been a fangirl for a looooong time. I was a fangirl before I even knew there was such a thing, having been raised on Star Wars and Star Trek: TOS reruns and SF/F books. I remember being teased in junior high for wearing a Star Trek: TNG t-shirt (of course, it did have Commander Riker on it…), and I remember the vaguely amused confusion of my high school classmates when they found out that I was obsessed with The X-Files. But at that point, most of the confusion and teasing had nothing to do with the fact that I was a girl. It was just because I liked geeky things.

I haven’t run into too much hostility because I’m a fangirl. There’ve been the creepers who followed me around the comic book store, panting. There have also been a few jerks who’ve disdainfully asked me if I’m buying comics for my boyfriend. Most of the nastiness I’ve experienced has been online, where the cloak of semi-anonymity seems to give some people permission to act like assholes. Overall, though, I’ve been having a great time as a fangirl, and I’ve met lots of fanboys who seem to have no problem with fangirls, and who aren’t surprised by any sudden “invasions.”

See, I don’t think there has been an invasion of fangirls. The fangirls have been here all along. Maybe we’ve had to learn to blend a bit, especially if we’re not the kind of fangirl who wears Slave Leia costumes. But we’ve been reading comics and science fiction and doing geeky things for a very long time, and in large numbers. Admittedly most of the cons I go to around Dallas are small, but there’s always a sizeable percentage of women there.

Perhaps the idea of the invasion has more to do with Hollywood suddenly realizing that women are a lucrative part of their audience. Twelve year old girls, such as the ones screaming over Twilight, can generate a lot of cash flow. When I was twelve and super into ST:TNG, I know I bought a lot of stuff, thanks to parents who sympathized with my geekiness. Hollywood has been increasingly using SDCC in particular as a vehicle for promotion of upcoming films, so the con itself is becoming less geek specialized and more mainstream. So… it stands to reason that it would attract a wider audience that would include people who wouldn’t normally go to a con.

I do have to say that I have a problem with the generalizations about fangirl/fanboy motivations. It falls back on outdated gender stereotyping: girls are emotional, boys are logical. I call bullshit. People are much more complex than that, and trying to narrow down exactly what fangirls like and what fanboys like does a disservice to everyone. Sure, some guys are really into statistics. So are some girls. And while lots of female fans dig relationships in comics, so do lots of male fans. I personally love relationships and romances in my geeky fandoms, but then I also adore some good, hard science fiction. So, which box do I fit into?

Fangirls have been around for a long time, and we’ll continue to hang around as long as there’s stuff to get geeky about. To all of the people who are completely cool with this concept, I thank you. To the people who continue to freak out and moan about how fangirls are invading “their” conventions and comic book stores… Come on. Get over it. After you do, I’m sure you’ll find lots of awesome fangirls to talk shop with.

WereGeek

“A Sudden Influx of Women? Hardly!”

I’ve been a comic book fan since I was four or five. I’ve been a superhero comics fan since about age twelve. In the nearly twenty years I’ve been going to comic specialty stores, I’ve never felt uncomfortable, unwelcome or unwanted…except around the time when the owner of my local was tired of the business and started acting like a jackass. But he drove everyone away, not just us female-types.

I was always disappointed growing up that no other girls shared my passion for comics. This was the pre-Internet age so the only people I could compare myself with were the kids in the one middle school in town and, later, the one high school. I didn’t know of any other girls who read comics, but I didn’t know any guys who read them, either. Which is why I was so surprised when I found out that bigger towns actually had whole stores devoted to comics!

Now, of course, everything is different. It’s very easy to find male and female fans from all over the world. Every show, niche or OTP has its own followers and finding one that takes your fancy is merely a Google search away.

I went to ComicCon in 2002. My female friend and I went in for the Wednesday night preview and we met some great industry professionals. I especially remember Joe Quesada taking the time to tell us con virgins how to deal with the unique stresses of SDCC. His advice wasn’t targeted to us as women; it was just general, all around good advice. There were plenty of women at the con and my friend and I didn’t feel out of place at all. If you want proof of how many women were there in 2002, just look at the floor scenes in Comic Book: The Movie.

What it boils down to is this: women have been interested in comics for a long time. We’ve blended in and gotten along and everyone seems to have forgotten we were there. The uproar taking place now is a response to the sudden influx of fans of new, female-oriented properties like the always-mentioned “Twilight”. What this shows me, more than anything, is that even in the supposedly individualistic, let-your-geek-flag-fly culture of fandom, the majority expects conformity. If women behave similarly to fanboys, they’re welcomed. Especially if they’re hot and rocking a Slave Leia costume.

If women behave consistently with fandoms other than the excepted norm (yes, there are a lot of similarities between early-60s Beatlemania and the “Twilight” phenomenon), they are seen as aberrant and abhorrent to “geek culture” at large. The detractors had better clue up though because, with entertainment outlets increasingly targeting young women and teen girls, this is only the tip of the iceberg and the fanboys had better learn to share.

We want to hear what you think!