alias_sqbr

What I'm objecting to is the minority of women who do define fandom as a "female space" in an exclusionary way and who automatically pigeonhole anyone who doesn't 100% fit their idea of "female fanficcer " as male/part of the patriarchy and thus the bad guy (heck, this has happened to me as a gen fan)

Oh, yeah, wow. No, I don't advocate that at all. I find the designation of female space valuable in an analytic way, not as a way of policing who can and cannot be in fandom.

The world may "belong to men". But it belongs, specifically, to straight cisgendered men, and gay/trans/genderqueer etc "men" don't tend to get the full force of male privilege. And a man who is being all obnoxious and priviligey doesn't deserve our time..but that doesn't describe all not-women with a dissenting voice.

Definitely, 100% agreed. I mean, I think the intersection of privilege can be really complicated, and I definitely didn't mean to imply that just being a man prevents you from ever experiencing oppression or something (I mean, I'm a queer woman, but I'm white, and I'm USAmerican and middle class and cisgendered, so I am not really at the bottom of the privilege barrel, you know?). And abso-fucking-lutely, I think genderqueer and trans folks and pretty much everyone has the right to advocate for themselves in fandom, and I would not consider a them sexist for doing so.

When I said that experiencing some other type of oppression doesn't negate male privilege, I meant only that one can't assume that, say, a gay man is going to be completely not sexist because he knows what it's like to experience heterosexism, anymore than I'm going to avoid unintentional racism 100% of the time just because I know what it's like to experience sexism or homophobia. So, being gay or genderqueer or whatever isn't a defense against sexism, but neither is being male an automatic indicator of it (except in the way that all human beings sort of suck, and we all screw up, and deliberately or not we're on going to stomp all over someone whom we have privilege over at some point).

Also, for the record, I read a lot of gen and femmeslash and slash and het and various combinations of those, as well as tons of different fandoms and communities and authors whom I'll follow even into fandoms I don't know. I mention this because I have not seen much of such exclusionary talk about not-women in fandom, and I was wondering if the people saying it were focused in one particular area, and I've just missed them, or if they are particularly affiliated with OTW (in which case I'm freaked out), or what. The poster you linked to in your original post (the dodgy one) creeped me out, and I assumed that such opinions were pretty rare and that most of the "exclusion" of men in fandom was actually the result of privileged over-reaction the legitimate criticisms of sexism by women (this is what I've mainly seen before now, and that was the premise I was writing from when I made my first comment, which was ill-considered).