My paternal grandmother was a math professor and, as I now realize in retrospect, a gigantic nerd. She read not only Tolkien, which might not sound all that strange, but Dune. She loved Star Trek, and I do remember watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with her. If memory serves, which it often doesn’t, it was “Sub Rosa,” otherwise known as “the episode where a character has a fling with a ghost.”
I never talked to her about these things, however, because before I was born she had a stroke that deprived her of most of her speech. She had a small vocabulary at her disposal, which she used very well, but its subjects were limited. As far as art went she could only really indicate enthusiasm or disapproval. (Mostly disapproval.)1 I was a little afraid of her and also ashamed of being afraid of her. Still, even if I had not had those feelings, we could not have talked about Dune. For one thing, I hadn’t read it.
Though she was, again, in retrospect, a huge nerd, in terms of the time, she wasn’t a fan, by which I mean, she did not interact with “fandom.” I feel with moral certainty that she never went to a convention. I would guess that she did not subscribe to sci-fi magazines or ever look at a zine. If I had her copy of Dune, I could check to see the edition, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she were a member of the Science Fiction Book Club, which would have been a way of keeping tabs on books compatible with being “a normal person” with “a job,” “a family,” “a bridge playing habit,” or, in short, “a life.”2 She was a kind of hidden fan.
Short of a gender breakdown of the Science Fiction Book Club members, which could yield some information, there’s not an easy way to know if being a non-fandom-oriented reader was more typical of women than men. A group of people who enjoyed reading and watching science fiction and fantasy but whose interest and participation stopped there are, by definition, not going to leave a big footprint. But the Pareto principle tells us that there must have been a lot of them: if the “fandom is a way of life” type of fan was the twenty percent, who made up the eighty?
My grandmother is also an example of how the gender connotation of “fandom” has changed. It used to be male—which is why in the SNL skit where William Shatner scolds Star Trek fans, he asks if any of them have ever kissed a girl. Shatner surely knew that there were many women obsessed with Star Trek, but that wasn’t the image that could be accessed as a comic shorthand. See also, the amazing scene in Donnie Darko where Jake Gyllenhaal suddenly defends Smurfette’s honor:
Now “fandom,” the word, makes you think of girls, even retroactively: the Beatles, Elvis. There are certainly still types of fandom that are mostly male, but this isn’t about the actual gender breakdown of fandom so much as what the word itself makes pop into your mind. It used to be: scrawny guy with Vulcan ears who argues about numbers. Now it is: girl wearing fox tail who writes real person fan fiction.
The generally accepted story is that women entered science fiction en masse with Star Trek. While I think there’s some useful pushback to this story that you can find in books like Partners in Wonder, if we’re talking fandom and not science fiction in general, Star Trek absolutely introduces something new to the dynamic. Part of what it introduces, though, is a split in fandom. The world of Star Trek super fandom was, or at least this is my impression at this time, a little bit siloed off from everything. The women who are really fixated on Star Trek are not trying to mingle. They are creating their own fandom. There’s a lot of fan activity, but in their own zines.3
Joanna Russ specifically more or less stops writing fiction for publication and puts all that energy toward writing Kirk/Spock fiction under a pseudonym.4 There were various reasons for this shift, among them poor health, but I do think one was simply that she couldn’t handle the world of SFF anymore. She was not—understatement of the century incoming—an easy person to get on with for most of her life, but that world had been cruel to her in ways that made her embittered and a little paranoid. She could write Kirk/Spock without feeling like she had a target on her back.5
I have gone back and forth and every which way about fandom, the concept. It’s bad, it’s bad but other things are more annoying, maybe it’s good, maybe it takes the blame for things that are not really its fault, whatever.6 I think my relationship to it these days is neutral. Like “parasociality,”7 “fandom” is a natural social creation with good and bad effects; both can be manipulated and played into by advertising and corporate brand building, but neither can be made out of nothing or completely controlled.8 In the 2010s I had a sense that “fandom” was eating everything.9 Now, though… I don’t really feel that fandom is the major problem threatening the arts, writing, etc.10
But I could be wrong about that; it could be that I just got kind of bored with that drum and went to find another drum. Mostly, though, the problem with “being anti-fandom” is that it doesn’t really push people toward more mature ways of thinking and reading. It creates its own reactive enclaves which can’t develop much of a way of thinking beyond “not capeshit” or “not YA” or (now) “not slop.” These enclaves do not have anything like the commercial reach of fandom, but the way they get stuck in pure reaction is more frustrating to me personally because they should be the place better thinking and writing is happening.11 In the end it feels like there are a lot of people who really only want to talk and think about the stuff everybody else is talking and thinking about—just angrily.
Still, I think there was a lot that was good about the science fiction fan world for a long time. There was also plenty of stuff that was bad. The harbinger of things getting worse was not Star Trek (which was an essentially niche phenomenon) or its mountains of slash fans (a niche of a niche). It might have been Star Wars, which revealed that there was a lot of money people could make in this area, and in so doing began to transform fandom from a niche spot for discussion into something else. Now, do I think this because I like Star Trek and not Star Wars? Yes, OK.12 Also I don’t really have anything to back that up. It’s just a thought.13
Things she hated included: the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings, the adaptation of The Great Gatsby with Mia Farrow in it, and Fawlty Towers.
Other people feel she would not have been a member.
There’s a book about this—Enterprising Women, by Camille Bacon-Smith. I’ve read some of it but not all of it. It is let’s say not uncontroversial, but probably worth reading in particular if you’re wondering why large groups of women get so invested in fictional gay romances because it is one of the earliest books to deal with that question.
Her last published story, “Invasion,” is very clearly “a serial numbers filed off” Kirk/Spock fanfic.
After she moved to Arizona, she became a much happier person.
Fandom remains at its most toxic whenever it becomes fixated on real people. I do think people have lost sight of the fact that something like real person fanfic is a fundamentally creepy pursuit that you should not want the subject to ever be aware of. That used to be understood but at some point the ancient truths ceased to be passed on.
As Jeanine Basinger observes in The Star Machine, a canonical BDM Industries text, studios had no way of creating star power, but they had a system in place to use it if somebody had it. So they fed different actors into that system and some of them became stars and some of them flopped. Fandom is similar. You cannot reverse engineer Heated Rivalry (though a lot of people are about to try) but you can know how to take advantage of it when one arrives.
Fandom also seems like a victim of its own success. There used to be a lot of rules in place that you learned as you went along. If you wrote fan fiction about real people you didn’t want them to know. If you wrote fan fiction in general you were careful because you did not want to be sued. The kind of aggression a writer like Anne Rice had toward fan fiction is hard to imagine now.
In some ways I feel most justified in this belief because criticizing fandom is more popular than it used to be. I see worse versions of my “sore winners” piece in bigger publications than the Outline all the time. Anyway… I may be a sore winner about sore winners but for the record (well I’ll probably say this again) what makes my piece better than the version of it I see in [insert paper here] these days is that I began by talking about something I liked because I felt you could not say “don’t take criticisms of stuff you like personally” without doing it yourself. Also, it’s better because I wrote it, obviously.
Analogously, I don’t really care about bad Substack writing the way I care about bad writing in an institution that is theoretically dedicated to producing “real” work. A Substack that is not very good and not produced by somebody with a lot of internal drive will just die. A bad staff writer, on the other hand, is usually the product of a career’s worth of incentives and rewards that have produced somebody who writes this way on purpose. Once they reach a certain level their career is unlikely to die.
But one thing I do find interesting is that a book just about every writer whose letters I’ve been reading singles out for particular loathing is The Sword of Shannara, which comes out in 1977. And A New Hope also comes out in 1977…. Fight the real enemy….
Also a friend of mine is gonna pop up in the comments to remind me to read the Henry Jenkins book. I will, I will.… I would tag you but you never show up in the drop down list.
I'm a fan of many things but always found a concept of fandom suspicious. Well, I guess you could count my ultra days as being a part of a fandom but I'd resent that and would find it a very surface read of football culture. People think KPOP fans are deranged but do they fight police and each others in fist fight? I don't think so.
If I had to guess why I was repulsed, it would be two things: I can't be devoted to one things, it would be a very boring life, and being bound to some media property sounds like hell. Event the best meal loses its luster on 7th serving.
The second thing is that fandoms are often too sexually charged. I'm not sex negative but my outlook on love and sex is very conservative. I shudder when someone talks about waifus and I'm deeply offended by the concept of shipping. I never asked myself "what if those characters that are likeable fucked?" and can't get into a mind of someone who does.
The pre- and post-Internet fandoms are also different beasts, methinks. The reach alone, the propensity of elevating bad things for clicks and time spent, and the blurry borders around what's in and what's out ("let people enjoy things") makes it incomparable.
I guess I'm not like other girls (yaoi shippers)