....finally, a FanLib post, of sorts. *facepalm*

I've actually been following the FanLib thing with a mix of interest and a sort of disgusted horror, but until now nothing's really struck me strongly enough to wade in. At least, I don't want to think about fandom's doom, y'know? I really don't like the whole idea of doom; it puts me off my supper, so I try to steer clear of any discussion that sort of skirts by the concept.

Anyway, it's funny... while I agree with the nobler sentiment (if not the phrasing) of posts like this, and they also make me feel a bit guilty in the way my old philosophy professor made me feel guilty about using 'feminist' to describe myself rather than 'humanist'-- besides that, posts like that make me want to play the gender bias card. Which. :/ I never like wanting to. :/ It's funny how disregarding/fighting against gender bias winds up appearing like gender bias, doesn't it? Or perhaps acting feminist in itself is inevitably a form of 'gender bias', but in the end we do it 'cause we have to, because society's bias leans off-center in the first place, so it needs a somewhat exaggerated counterbalance.

I wonder if you can be a feminist with confused/fuzzy/progressive ideas about gender, since umm, 'feminist' assumes you know what you're referring to in regards to 'women' (as in, 'women's rights'). As in, how much do you define femininity by defining the issues covered by feminism, for instance? And how can you be feminist at all if you're equally appalled with traditional boys=blue/girls=pink philosophy & with the following segregation and societal pigeonholing but also with 'gender-blindness' where everything to do with socially/biologically driven gender roles is malleable and therefore the subject becomes irrelevant or 'unprogressive'. But anyway, that's a tangent.

    I've seen a lot of media coverage at large about the slowly shifting cultural conceptions of gender, and yet at the same time all I see is more of the same stuff dressed up differently, which just makes me into more of angry feminist than I like being. I see people (notice I didn't say 'men', haha) with the right ideas, but at the same time the lack of real empathy is something that worsens and widens the gap. We may be looking at the same big picture, but we're not really in the same space, if that makes sense.

I think the reason 'fanfic fandom' is a mainly 'female space' is because fanfic is heavily dominated by shipper or romance fic. Now, I say this as someone who used to write hardcore slash fanfic with her open-minded, gender-progressive ex-boyfriend as her main sounding board and guaranteed audience, so I know all about writing for 'people' and not 'other women'-- but at the same time, that experience enables me to tell you that yes, there's a difference in writing for women compared to men or 'people', and while I 'just write', the point is that who we are determines both how and what we write and read about.

( blah-blah-gender-rambles-in-fandom-blah. )

We cannot try to understand and bridge our differences if we don't acknowledge our differences; likewise, we cannot share space if our separate spaces aren't acknowledged and respected first. That is what the people who dislike that first step of respect as alienating or separatist don't get-- that without this initial understanding of the degrees of separation, there can be no true union.