thefourthvine | Super-Wanky Special Poll: Nobody Loves Me, Everybody Hates Me. I Think I'll Go Eat Trolls.

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Super-Wanky Special Poll: Nobody Loves Me, Everybody Hates Me. I Think I'll Go Eat Trolls.

Except, see, I really don't want this to get wanky. I'm just not sure there's any way to discuss this without wank, although I'm going to try. Try really, really hard.

And please keep in mind, as you read this and select various boxes of clickiness, that I am not asking why no one loves me. Because, actually, I feel very loved. (Um, yeah, the title of the post and the poll would seem to argue otherwise, but my feeling is: if I'm going to post on a topic of potential wankiness, I might as well make fun of myself. That way, at least it will be amusing. To me, I mean.) LJ has been good to me.

It's just that anniversaries are much on my mind lately. (Best Beloved and I will be celebrating our, um, somethingth year together tomorrow. We still haven't figured out just what number year it is, though.) And my LJ anniversary is coming up, so I've been reflecting on it, in my usual mature, considered manner. ("Hmmm. Two years? Really?" [pause for thought] "Oooo! Porn!") And I've noticed that, over time, my experience of LJ has changed. For example, I'm much less likely to make friends (actual friends, not friends-list friends) now, and when I do, it's as a result of me seeking other people out.

Also, I've been getting strange responses to the comments I leave in other people's LJs lately. Used to be, people just responded. Or not. Whichever. Now - well, I sometimes get responses that indicate major astonishment that I commented on a friend's post at all.

This is weird. Isn't it? It's new to me, anyway, and therefore weird to me.

Admittedly, I'm not the biggest commenter; I don't comment on 99.5% of the posts I read, because I'm just not very social. (People who know me in real life are invited to take 10-15 minutes to laugh helplessly on the floor at that understatement.) But that's always been true, the not commenting and the not socializing. So I'm kind of wondering if the subtext of these new, weird responses is, "Wow. You actually came down from your high horse long enough to leave a comment in my LJ! A very long and pointless comment, let me add, which I'm kind of astonished you thought I'd be interested in." (Because when I do comment, I do it to excess. You should all be very glad I don't comment any more often, actually.) In other words, I'm wondering if my bad LJ habits (lack of comments, spotty replying, a dearth of posts) have made me something of, um, a Notorious B.I.T.C.H. (I'm spelling it! For purposes of delicacy! See? No wankiness here!)

Which, hey, if that's the case, I'm fine with it, actually. (Yet more evidence for bitch-hood, I realize.) But, okay. You know how we are all destined for hell because of all the fun we're having? I suspect I will not be frolicking on level 2 with the rest of you lusty folks, but rather wherever it is they store the excessively curious. (I'll be asking "Why?" in hell, in other words. This is a very suitable fate for me.) I'm okay with my LJ experience changing; I'm still having just as much fun here - more fun than is legal in most states, in fact. But I want to know why it's changed.

So I'm asking you.

But, seriously, this is not a request for you to tell me you love me. (Love doesn't need a season! Or a reason! Or a wankfest!) Instead, I invite you to speculate on why other people don't love me. Or, at any rate, why they seem unwilling to talk to me, and why they sometimes act shocked when I talk to them.

Plus, it's an occasion to post a poll. And is there ever a really bad reason to do that?

[Poll #671603]

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they're just awed by your coolness

If there is anyone on the planet who can be awed by the coolness of a woman who a) cannot consistently brush her own teeth without foam and sex related disasters b) once had a complete stranger inform her that her shoes were on the wrong feet and c) has a documented, lengthy obsession with a bird she has never actually seen - I mean, really. Aren't we setting the bar a bit low?

I became active in online fandom thingies about 18 months ago. I had my LJ for years before that and was aware of fandom but not really *in* it til I realised there were active communities for people who were obsessively squeeing over tall ship fandoms

Oh, those ships. They can turn any girl's head.

I'm always fascinated by the people who were on LJ before getting into fandom and kept the same journal - I mean, don't you get kind of a weird mix of friends and commenters? (You post about, for example, ships. One person says it's a lovely photo. One person says the photo makes her think of Horatio and Archie fucking against the mast. It just seems like those two groups are not going to be easy to deal with in the same place.) I mean, I know you're, like, the most open girl in all of fandom, but even so, it could get weird.

Well, many of the non-fannish friends know me from places like the BDSM community, or the SCA, or are people I've shagged, so they're kind of used to me being a freak. Even my professional contacts are people in the Perl community, i.e. open source software, and they're pretty used to my weirdness too.

I've had a certain amount of flist shift over the years, but no massive "omg your fannish obsessions freak me out, vade retro satanas!" exodus (at least not that I noticed). I assume there's been a certain amount of drift, but some of that's just because I left Canada and a lot of my flist were people I knew locally there and we drifted apart.

The weirdness, honestly, happens when boys comment on fannish posts. At least, that's what I find. They're not *usually* offensive, and when they are it's usually fairly mild and clueless, but they just somehow have a different way of talking about things that rubs me the wrong way more often than not. In the past I've spent a lot of time in predominantly male social circles, and LJ fandom is one of the first places I've been that's predominantly female, and I don't know if I'm over-protective of fandom-as-a-space or what, but it kind of irks me when men waltz in to my comments and don't realise they're kind of shouldering their way into an existing social milieu with its own rules and ways of doing things.

Example: in fannish circles, I've found that if you comment irregularly in someone's LJ, you tend to phrase neutral stuff in a positive and somewhat squeeful way. Such as:

OP: I just watched movie X, wow, it was amazing! Anyone know what else that actor's been in?
Commenter: YES! I saw X a couple of months ago and I've been obsessed. That actor was also in movie Y and movie Z which is utterly cracktastic but OMG the hotness!

Compare and contrast typical non-fannish male response to a similar post:

Male commenter: He was in movie Y and the little-known cult movie Z, which [trivia trivia trivia]. IMDB link. (http://imdb.com/)

It's a straightforward kind of response, and inoffensive in its own right, but (

sjkasabi could put this better than me) it doesn't go through the expected social motions, yknow? It's like fandom has kind of exaggerated the usual feminine bonding rituals, and the (masculine) lack of them stands out in sharper relief against fandom than it does against the sort of general, mixed-gender conversations I was having in LJ before that.

I should probably add that while I've noticed this most from men on my flist, I've also seen it from women from other cultures (often with English as a second language)... it's possible they're also missing some of the social cues.

Gah, I'm rambling here. I hope I'm making some sense, but I'm tired and I'm also crappy at explaining this stuff. *waves hands frantically*

You're making perfect sense. Fandom is my first and only experience with female-normed culture, if I can call it that, and I find it absolutely fascinating. I guess I didn't realize the extent to which men form our social mores until I found a place where they didn't.

What fascinates me most, though, is the men who do fit in here, particularly the straight ones. DC fandom is great for sly amateur anthropology geeking. And it's just - really really gripping to see how guys deal with the female fan community. Like, you have

scans_daily, which has had a huge influx of gen comics fans that, and so of course you have the, "Slash makes me uncomfortable, so change yourselves and this community!" guys. But you also have the "Oh, shut the fuck up; we come here because the slash fans can at least act like grown ups" guys.

And the individual straight boys? If they want to write DC FF, this is really the only game in town for them. And it's amazing to me how well they fit in. They start out uncomfortable with slash, even pissed off with it, but in six months or year, they're writing slash snippets as birthday presents for their fandom friends and making dolphin-noises when they rec stories in their journals.

So, anyway, I had a point here, but I got distracted - surprise! - and totally lost it. Oh, right. My point was: I know what you mean. It's jarring when the guys act out, act against our local cultural norms.

And it's equally jarring to them, I think, that there are female cultural norms at all, since they don't see society as a whole as more heavily influenced by men. I see a lot of absolute loathing of our kind of fandom - I mean, not just slash, but every aspect of it - from guys in the lj-related communities, and a lot of their hatred stems from that dissonance, I think. (Because they don't, for example, feel the same about Star Trek gen fandom, which is mostly male.)

And, okay. I am shutting up now. Suffice to say that you touched on a topic of great interest to me. (And I'll bet you're sorry now.)

**I** am not sorry! I am listening in with great glee!

Also, Hi, I am commenting in your journal, I think you're cool, etc.

Dolphin noises?

You know, you really do need to cultivate some more rampant arrogance. Convince yourself that we're hanging on your every word. Because we don't *actually* think "gee, I wish tfv would shut up now" all the time, you know. Hardly ever!

Dolphin noises?

*emits series of high-pitched chirps*

It's like fandom has kind of exaggerated the usual feminine bonding rituals, and the (masculine) lack of them stands out in sharper relief against fandom than it does against the sort of general, mixed-gender conversations I was having in LJ before that.

Christ, that explains everything in my case. I never did the RL female bonding thing well, now I see why in most cases online I feel lost and not 'in' when the conversation steers from facts sprinkeld with a bit of fangirling to pure squeeing and ohmygod-ing.
The best fangirling I've had was with my brother. About facts. *sigh*

Thank you for enlightening me. Seriously.

Well, it's a learnt behaviour. I wasn't used to it either a while ago.

I was ranting a bit to Ian about this last night. You know, trying to put my finger on it.

Found myself describing it as the 'you have used a word which reminds me of an opinion of mine' effect.

That sound about right?

Yeah, that's a good start, especially for some of the more blatant cases.

I remember also a time when I posted something(?), and you posted part of a poem in response. I think you posted, like, a couple of stanzas that particularly illustrated your point. And then one of the boys popped up and said: "The poem continues, blah blah blah" and posted th rest of the stanzas. Not for any particular reason that was part of the conversation, but just to show that he knew that the poem continued. And you flamed him fairly crisply, since IIRC the entire thread was about women's experiences of something-or-other, and he's very obviously popped up for no other reason than to wave his dick around in this (obviously threatening, to him, by its very existence) female conversation.

Aaah yes. That was a good conversation.

And, yeah. I was thinking of that incident.

Further examples: I have a repeating problem with guys who offer technical advice.

It used to be that most of the men I met online, I knew from technical fora. They knew and respected my professional knowledge, and my ability to learn things if I didn't happen to know them already.

Then on LJ, I started getting friended by people who know me from other places. "Real life", such as it is, or friends-of-friends, or people with slight fandom intersections (such as one guy who found me while googling for Paarfi of Roundwood, IIRC).

So now sometimes I post something rambling and technical, like "blah blah need to install the new hard disk but I think I need to tweak the BIOS blah blah blah". No response is requested or expected. And yet I *frequently* get boys posting with "helpful" information such as links to introductory websites on the topic at hand. On one particular occasion that I recall, I said I "needed to figure out file sharing between my Linux box and my Mac," by which I meant that I needed to read the manual and configure it appropriately to my needs. But some technical wonder-boy popped up with an OH-SO-USEFUL link to the tool I needed to use, which, actually, I'd known about for OOH AT LEAST FIVE YEARS and had worked with in a professional capacity in the past.

Now, if I'd asked for help, sure, that's fine. But when I just mention some computer twiddling in the context of a longer life update post, such "suggestions" come across as "you have used a word which reminds me of an opinion of mine" (or rather, an opportunity to show off my superior knowledge).

Male Answer Syndrome.

It's beginning to depress me that I've got enough experience with these behaviours that I've started giving them pet names.

Depresses me even more that the only reason we can have this conversation is because the thread's collapsed. We'd have to be madder than a box of frogs to have it in either of our journals...there'd be WAY too much nonsense involved.

Well, quite. I hope tfv doesn't mind hosting it ;)

I am *this* close to doing it in a post on my LJ. Stop me?

I can't quite bring myself to stop you.

But I'll hold your coat...

It's, yes, a topic with a very low coefficient of kinetic wank, but it's also a fascinating one. So I, for one, am not going to discourage you. (I'm not going to push you to open a discussion of it, either. Each LJer must decide for herself how much wank she is willing to risk.)

And I've been pondering this conversation ever since you guys had it. I still haven't quite managed to express my opinions on it in words - I've started and not posted a number of comments - but maybe if you start a post on it, someone else will.

or rather, "my ability to Google".

>>a positive and somewhat squeeful way.

Best description of fannish manners ever. And I'm fighting the urge to adorn that with capitals and italics even now.

That is, I expect, the source of the "OMG you commented!!" replies: as someone who is funny and spreads smut, we are obligated to squee you wherever you go.

Isn't wonderful, how you don't need to worry about grammar when using 'squee.'

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Super-Wanky Special Poll: Nobody Loves Me, Everybody Hates Me. I Think I'll Go Eat Trolls.

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YOU HAVE USED A WORD. WHICH REMINDS ME -- I HAVE AN OPINION

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