alias_sqbr

Hmm. See, I realise it'd be pretty arrogant of me to be all "I, as a straight cisgendered woman understand the pain of the queer and transgendered way more than you queer and transgendered women!!", and that's an aspect of this which has niggled at me. (especially since the stuff I'm talking about is pretty subtle, and open to interpretation) So, this is just my opinion, I'll understand if you disagree.

And I agree that a lot of the men (queer or otherwise) who complain about fandom "oppressing" them are just having trouble getting used to being in the minority.

But...I still think it's wrong to equate fandom, where women happen to be in the majority, with a social setting which is specifically created as a space for women. The two situations have a number of things in common, but they're not the same.

For example: If a whole bunch of men decided to join the What women want party and policy started shifting towards what men wanted...that would be legitimate reason to complain and try to exclude them or something. Similarly, the mods of the deliberately slash-friendly scans_daily had a right to complain when anti-slash guys started joining and trying to change things.

But if, tommorrow, every gay man in the world suddenly decided that slash sounded like fun and joined fandom, do you think it would be reasonable to exclude them? To complain when the general tone of slash went from "From women by women" to "from men by men"? (this is different from expressing nostalgia for the Old Days or forming "old skool, for women" subsets of fandom, both of which I think would be 100% reasonable) I do think it'd be fair to complain if those gay men then, as a community, started picking on or belittling the sort of slash which started things off, which is why I have no problem with the suggested change of OTWs values to talk about fandom's history as a primarily female space.