Siiigh.

[pyrephox]

It's never fun to see people who you normally respect and even admire ending up like everyone else on the internet.

As a side note, I like Ani Difranco, and I especially like one lyric from a song that goes, "Privilege is a headache you don't know that you don't have". I think that I've rarely heard the concept summed up better. There are a lot of headaches I don't have. I'm white, I'm straight, I'm apathetic about religion, and I'm solidly middle class (and have been perceived as such even when I /wasn't/, because I don't have much of an accent, and my conversational patterns are heavily inspired by my readings), so I can be one of the powered majority in almost every context except the gendered.

I think there are conversations that Fandom (in general, and in specific fandoms) needs to have about our inclusiveness; fandom has tended to view itself as a comforting, accepting venue for the 'weird ones'. However, what that usually ends up /meaning/ is the 'white, straight, male weird ones'. You can vary 'male'...online and modern media fandom tend to skew female, but gaming fandom still tends to be pretty male-dominated, particularly in the live venues. I can't really answer for how welcomed or unwelcomed gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender fen feel within fandom; I can point out a few things that make me deeply uncomfortable (not least of which is the fetishization of gay men or gay male stereotypes for the sexual gratification of straight women and I could write a whole essay on the course of my drifting away from slash fandoms from my discovery of them in the early nineties all the way to today), though. And I've long been dissatisfied with the way I see a lot of cons: namely, a sea of white. There simply isn't a lot of diversity in, at least, the con-going fandom that I've seen (I live in the Southern United States. This may be different in other parts of the country).

I'm not sure how to improve the situation, but there's a lot of defensiveness about just the observation, and I think that's wrong. And, for that matter, I'm not sure it's even my place to say how to 'improve the situation', since I'm not one of the ones being discouraged from joining fandom, consciously or unconsciously. But I'm pretty sure that the right way has nothing to do with refusing to acknowledge the issue, nor with getting all defensive and pissy because you're made to feel like now you have to think about whether you're being offensive. Nor does it have to do with trotting out the old canards about being 'colorblind' (because, again, if you're white, you have the /privilege/ of being colorblind, because society assumes your color is the default), or diverting the conversation to how you feel as a white person being forced to think about these issues, or about that time someone you know was once treated unfairly because he was white and how that proves that racism is an equal problem for everyone. Not. Helping.

God, this was a bit of a ramble.

I suppose my only point is...I wish fandom were as open and accepting as we claim we are.

Comments

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

When it comes to intolerance in fandom, it's usually less of the overt 'we don't want you here' than it is of the covert, 'we don't want to hear about your experiences because they might make us uncomfortable' kind. For that matter, the very response you quote, 'In Nomine or D&D today' can be a kind of that, particularly if the person in question was trying to engage as a member of a community, and not simply as a fellow hobbyist. Sort of like if you were meeting with your friends, and had been going through a rough patch, and when you said, "You know, I'm worried about finding another job," then they just looked at each other, shrugged, and went, "Alright, whose turn is it now?"

Please note, I'm not saying that it /was/ in that particular instance, nor that fandom activities should be entirely superseded by personal issues, but it is something to be wary of...whether certain viewpoints or experiences are brushed over more than others.

I think the difference, for me, between lesbian porn and a large portion of slash-fic/RP is that porn makes no pretensions to be anything but stroke material. However, when members of fandoms take 'real' characters, and think that making them homosexual also means making them into a collection of stereotypes and fetishes...well, that's another matter, because what they're saying (whether they realize it or not) is "The only thing I changed was this character's sexual orientation, so /this/ is what that sexual orientation means". Is there good slash/yaoi? Absolutely. I still read some, and I still have pairings that I like. But there are patterns among a large bulk of it that are increasingly disturbing to me. That said, I'm not all that keen on exploitative lesbian porn, either. Or exploitative porn in general (although, yes, I do like porn).

And you can't really compare fetishizing het couples, because again, it means something different when it's the default compared to a minority that has to face /real/ discrimination in the world.