This even extended on to my friends, primarily farm boys, and their parents. Never did you hear, “Girls can’t…” or “Only boys can…” It just wasn’t said. In fact one year my whole 4-H club took shooting sports and the only 4-H approved range was shared among the whole county. So it was a rare occurrence to get the range to just your club. On one evening, I’m off to the side goofing off with one of the boys while we strap on our safety gear. A few members of another club had come to watch us shoot our bows as it was their first day on the archery range and that meant they were stuck just watching. I was about 14 at the time which made the boys in my club 12-15 years old. Supervising the newcomers was a Junior Advisor, aka a teenager who has intent on becoming a group leader after graduation. They’re usually 16-18. The Junior Advisor sees me pick up my bow and square up trying to see how I was going to aim that day (vision issues made it difficult at times). So he leans over to Dan, the eldest member of our group a whole whopping 10 months older than me.
“Why’s she even bothering? Girls can’t shoot.” I heard the Junior Advisor say but rolled my eyes and ignored him. Dan however was irked.
“Girls can shoot and I wouldn’t let her hear you say otherwise.” Dan was well aware that anger made me more focused and a far better shot. The Junior Advisor kept going and when it was mine and Dan’s turn to shoot he handed his bow to the Junior Advisor, who having been deer hunting many a time was completely capable of handling the weapon. “Let’s see who’s the better shot.” I wanted to kill Dan because he was the one annoyed he should be the one to draw the arrow. But he clapped me on the shoulder and smiled at my death glare on his way off the hot range. The Junior Advisor was lazy in the way he aimed and fired. He emptied his quiver in a nice grouping close to the bullseye then looked over at what I had done. It wasn’t some amazing Robin Hood stunt. I had made an equally nice grouping IN the bullseye. The Junior Advisor didn’t say anything as he walked off to the back of his charges to watch the rest of his visit. It was a few years before I saw him again, the next time with a 9 year-old girl on the archery range teaching her to line up a shot.
My boys didn’t rise to fight the battles of the girls around them out of belief we needed their heroism. They didn’t just not spew sexist bull, they’d actually turn the people who were spewing it in the direction of the nearest girl proving them wrong. They let my sister and me fight our battles, offering us a hand to stand back up, picking up our slack, behaving like they did when someone called one of them out. We were complete equals, we just used different public bathrooms.
To me there has never been something that truly belonged to one gender or the other. I’m capable of saying, “Hey, that’s a thing that is done primarily by this gender.” I do that, though, in the same way I say, “Clovers primarily have three leaves,” with the complete knowledge that every so often there are four leaf clovers. Every once in a while you find a girl who wants to play football. Every once in a while you find a boy who is passionate about being a cheerleader.
Now, when it comes down to our nerdoms and geekery, I think its completely ridiculous that we want to bully each other. We are human so we’re going to fight. We're going to tease and there will be fandom wars. It's just this thing we do; a bit of a trade off for opposable thumbs. But that we feel the need to single each other out and bully each other is stupid. So you found the thing. Why does it matter how you found the thing?
I view the subject matter of fandoms as water. Geeks and nerds are wandering aimlessly in a desert searching endlessly for water. We don’t even know what water is. We just know that our environment is killing us. It's breaking us down; it's making us feel like nothing but the sweet kiss of death will make us feel anything close to OK. Then we find water. We’re saved. We find this thing that washes away the grime our environment has plastered us with. It makes us feel powerful. It makes us feel like we can survive. We follow it and find a habitable space filled with others like us.
So please! I’m begging you! Tell me why it matters how we found water. Does it matter if someone wandered out of that oasis and handed us a bottle and a map back to the oasis? Does it matter if we found water in a mirage that made our pants do weird biological things? Does it matter if we were at another oasis and someone said “I heard there is another kind of water”? Does it matter if we found water falling from the sky, or as a river, or even just a little puddle here and there? Maybe it was in a cactus we decided to try and make useful.
I’m hoping we all agreed it didn’t matter how we found water just that we did and it helped us get through until better conditions were found. In my experience that’s what fandoms and their subject matter does. I was in pretty sorry shape emotionally when I found Harry Potter and X-Men. But between the two I found friends. Some of these friends were real, living breathing human beings. Others weren’t so real. Others I had to find by popping in a DVD, opening a book, dragging up my favorite fanfiction site, or finding some good fanart. I had many a conversation with these friends by sitting down at my family desktop and writing a new tale. But either way I found strength in them. I found inspiration in them. I found understanding and acceptance in them. I eventually found pieces of myself through them. I put myself together because I had them standing behind me.
Now this kind of segregation of “fake” fans happens in all the fandoms I’ve had contact with. “You’re not a real fan if you didn’t read the books.” “You haven’t played EVERY version of this game? How dare you call yourself a true fan?” “You watched the movie FIRST? You can’t be a fan.” “You heard about our thing because of word of mouth!?!?! Disgusting!” “You didn’t watch the original series? So not a fan.”
I admit that I’ve questioned someone’s status as a fan when I heard they only watched the Harry Potter movies. I cringe at the thought. There was so much in the books that just isn’t in the movies. I’m a huge fan of death day parties. When a favorite character of mine dies that year on their death day I bake a cake. If you only saw the movies you'd have no idea what a death day party is. Cedric Diggory came off as a bit of a pompous ass in the movies. When he helped Harry, it seemed like he felt he was doing Harry a favor that Harry hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve. Which was a stain to my proud Hufflepuff house. But that’s not what was happening at all and we don’t even need to get started on what happened with Ginny. So when people say they didn’t read the books I’m offended for the characters I know and love.
But you want to know something? I got into comic books because of the movies. I love the Avengers and have only read one of their comics. I mean, I plan to read more of them at some point but life is always in my way. So, by my own standards, I wouldn’t be a true fan of the Avengers. Want to know something else? I’ll take you down if you say that to my face. Which I imagine is much how that Potterhead felt when I said they weren’t a real fan. In fact, as I completely fail to understand Pottermore, there are people who would tell me I’m not a true Harry Potter fan. Or that because I only read the books once I’m not a true fan.
I think what a lot of this comes down to is a failure to communicate our feelings. We’re automatically on guard to protect our subject matter of choice. We fall so deep in and get so wrapped up that we forget what it was like when we just started. Then forgetting that we can’t relate to someone who is the same age as we are now trying to get into a fandom because we got in when we were younger with fewer responsibilities and it was easy to spend hours consuming fandom. We get all caught up in wanting to defend how we joined the fandom, already irritated by this actor’s portrayal of a character, that writer’s story arc, or that director’s point of view that we fail to see that they don’t know what we know yet. Given time they might be just as annoyed or maybe they’ll be able to explain to us how their doorway into the fandom was very valid, because it was. Even if it was as bad as the Order of the Phoenix movie, it was valid and valuable.
Now look up to the start of that last paragraph. I said A LOT of this comes down to communication issues. There is also a massive portion of this that comes down to good old-fashioned battle of the sexes. We see it all the time and most of the time we don’t even notice. It’s just so common place for us. Grass is green, we only notice the color of grass when its decidedly not green. There have always been female comic book fans. Its impossible to consider things any other way. Granted that first little girl in love with comic books probably had several brothers and didn’t tell anybody she read them. She existed. Then she grew up. The first comic book was published in 1837*. Comic books saw their Golden Age from the late 1930’s to the late 1940’s. That was a pretty active period of time. There was a lot going on everywhere.
Let’s think about the little girls old enough to read in that period for a moment, and bear with me as my history has strong American leanings being that is where I’m from. These girls saw Amelia Earhart flying. They watched their brothers, fathers, uncles, and friends get shipped off to wars leaving women behind to keep their country running. Worldwide, women were showing their mettle heading into factories to make the equipment their boys needed, they were working the farms, they were running the family businesses, they were doing everything pretty much on their own. Have you ever taken a look at what women were doing in sports during that time period? ** Women didn’t earn the right to vote in America until 1920 so these were among the first generation and second generation girls to be born into the US with the right to vote.
There is no doubt in my mind that from the birth of superheroes they gathered female fans. In fact last year at con I had the opportunity to talk with one of Marvel’s current artists. He told me a story of the Golden Age of comic books when Marvel kept a small studio of older women whose job it was to color all the Marvel comics. If fact, even that early there are a number of women listed as creators in comic books. *** The first female superhero was the beloved Wonder Woman in 1941.**** Yes, she started out as a secretary but she was soon kicking butt with the big boys in the Justice League. I’ve have my beefs with Jean Grey/Marvel Girl/Phoenix's character over the years but she is one of the original X-Men. With costumes likes the one below you can’t tell me she was added for the sex appeal.
So when I'm scrolling down my dash and someone gets up the nerve to say some female isn't a fan and girls have no place in comics, I'm well past annoyed. We've been in the comic book industry since its beginnings. But of course "fake geek girls" aren't just related to comic books. They go into other areas I'm less schooled in. But I've heard the mutterings and read the posts. It's a strong theme in the gaming world. Somehow a uterus prevents you from gaming. It prevents you from developing the problem solving skills or hand-eye coordination needed to play well. Now admittedly my lack of affection for electronic gaming is because I suck at them. But for every one girl I know who dislikes these games I can find an easy ten girls who play proficiently. Yes, some of them are even so self confident as to attend the related conventions in cosplay. You can find them on YouTube putting on skits and other productions in their home-made costumes, that in a lot of cases rival anything I've ever seen mass produced.
There are even TV and book genres that boys try to claim as their own. You can bet if there is a sword or laser involved boys think you have to have a penis to handle it, even in just the capacity of a viewing audience. But go ahead and take to Google. Women have been involved in the creation and development of so many of these things that it's kind of insane to think anyone could deny they were there. They were computer programmers and mathematicians, they designed the costumes, wrote the novels, and hold your horses they even starred in them.
All of these things would be so much less without female involvement. Yet here we sit in 2014 and we tell ladies of all ages they can't be part of something because cooties. So here's the deal, boys and girls. Just like on the playground when we chanted, "Circle circle dot dot now I got my cootie shot," drawing on ourselves with our fingers or a pen snuck from the classrooms before a game of Red Rover, it's time to shut up and prepare for contact. Girls aren't fake anything. They sure as hell aren't faking interest in a subject that just earns them more ridicule. They're not getting up before the sun to pull on a costume and get to the panels on time at cons to make boys drool. That is usually just a side effect. We do these things because they make us feel good. They make us feel empowered.
One more story before I leave you. A few months ago, my sister and I were discussing some dresses I really liked but would never wear because someone would claim I looked like an idiot. Finally annoyed, my sister huffs, "How can you run around downtown in go-go boots and a mini-dress with some mask on declaring yourself Marvel Girl but you can't wear a sundress?" I didn't say it at first though the thought came to my mind instantly.
"I can do that because it gets me closer to being someone who is strong, smart, brave, chaotic, gorgeous, and all around amazing. For that one weekend I'm those things and I don't have to be ashamed."
We live in a society where girls must pick and chose which qualities they're going to show and which they will hide, almost always sacrificing their comfort. Sometimes this is just comfort in their clothes but too often it's comfort in their own skin. We're lured into fandoms with the promise of acceptance no matter how ridiculous we may believe ourselves to be. Then we're labeled fakes despite putting in the very same effort as our male counterparts. We're torn down and shoved into positions that once again leave us sacrificing our comfort for survival, or at least the hope that survival is possible.
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