[a comment from Radegunde that got mistakenly deleted]: Just a comment— she’s not correct about Kirk/Spock being written by lesbians, or even largely by lesbians. Not at all. It was written by straight women, the same way any kind of slash fiction is today: it is overwhelmingly a straight woman’s genre, love stories with the female body— with all its attached anguish—removed. The feminine man in the story stands in for the girl (Joanna Russ wrote very well about this in her essay on K/S, examining why Spock was the female stand-in paired with the masculine Kirk). Straight women write gay slash in order to revel in male sexuality without necessarily having to deal with men, and to imagine a space where they can be human beings loving men without the prison of heterosexual power dynamics. I don’t know much about the Omegaverse, but it seems an attempt to address deeply internalized misogyny, the same way young white women claim “non-binary” identities as a way to separate themselves from the ordinary order of girls and women. Anyway, despite my “no, actually” moment here, I’m very glad to see the imagination of girls being taken seriously, which it deserves to be. I’m guessing that the misogyny embraced by young women has everything to do with modern artificial beauty standards and the resentment that arises at being held to them. At least when I was growing up, in the 70s, we had counter movements that were critical of beauty culture and made that a plank of resistance. Girls today are given far fewer ways to opt out and still be girls. As a hippie who rejected makeup as unnatural, or a punk who used it for garishness, I could move in relation to beauty without being crushed by hundreds of images of perfection at my fingertips. Anyway, thank you for this interview!
[reply from Melissa in Philly] Thanks for this, and what you say highlights that there is a lot of misinformation about fandom and lots of levels and layers. I took the Kirk/Spock information and lesbian element directly from a fellow academic who specifically studies the history of Star Trek fandom but not necessarily from the perspective of female imagination. The perception that it was lesbian women doing this in the Trek fandom goes pretty deep in fandom studies so I've always trusted it. However, I'm going to rethink it. My friend has a collection of print zines from early conventions and I will ask her to look into author identification. Of course we all know that many straight women who write this stuff today identify as queer so that muddies the waters. I will add that when I spoke at WDI, I was under the impression that the Omegaverse was an entirely straight thing as it struck me as having deeply heteronormative underpinnings. I was shocked at how many of the lesbian women under thirty had consumed and/or read it. So I think it is all intertwined.
The teenage girl's fascination with gay men can have tragic ends. Sometimes these girls transition thinking they're going to look like they're in a boy band, but instead they go bald, develop heart disease, and break a hip in their twenties. It is a huge trend, though, and a huge market. I guarantee the audience for "Heartstopper" is mostly teenage girls.
It starts off like a disembodied sex fantasy. It's a fantasy about romantic and sexual connection, but it has her body, the female body, taken out of it. That makes sense if the girls are terrified by puberty and by the reality of living in the world as a post-pubescent female. In a way, that's no different from how it was back in the day with girls who preferred to hang out with gay boys - we called them "paper clips" or "fag hags." It was usually just a phase the girls went through, and for many I'm sure it still is. Complications ensue, in this new world, in two ways: when the girls become trans cheerleaders for the gay boys and try to make them over into girls, or when the girls' obsession intensifies and gets turned around on their own bodies, and then they try to make themselves over to be a gay boy themselves. It's the epitome of alienation for a girl who is attracted to boys to try to excise the female parts of herself and interface with those boys as another boy.
"Second, we should realize that a lot of the trans stuff is a reaction to the idea that girly girls are stupid: that you can’t be female and do serious things. I try to role-model that I am a serious, tough, intellectual person who works with men—and I wear dresses, I love romance novels, I have long hair. I’ll say, “Don’t judge me for my shoes! I love girly stuff!” We need to be clear that males can be feminine, females can be masculine, and it’s all fine.
Third, we should take the female imagination as seriously as we take the male imagination. Have you noticed that men are allowed to keep their teen interests—sports, comics, gaming—their whole life, whereas women are told to get rid of all that “girl stuff” or no one will take them seriously?"
This really hit home. I feel like I'm the years of trying to (correctly) tell young women it's ok to like sports and rough and tumble play, to be a leader, to not like pink or dolls, and to want careers in male-dominated fields, these young women have also gotten the message that anything seem as traditionally female, whether in career, life choices, interests, or personality traits is inferior and something to be rejected or even hated in themselves. This is great for all the girls who are naturally less interested in the hyper-feminine, "girly" stuff and who have been shamed for their interests and goals in the past, but I believe it has inadvertently harmed the girls who are naturally the very feminine, girly-girls with their stereotypical girly/female interests and traits. Now they aren't looked down on by the patriarchy for being the lesser sex, they are told they aren't even being girls and women the right way and are harming other girls and women for their feminine interests and traits. It's no wonder they would get tied into the kind of knots these young female writers are tying themselves into trying to figure out how to be an acceptable hyperfeminine female. Aren't the social media extremes of the "trad wife" trend just another example? Are they saying, "if I'm a problem for wanting a more traditional/feminine life, then here's my middle finger to all of you. I'm going all in and owning it."
Finally, to build on some of the points about lesbians...I recently saw an Instagram content creator who says she's autistic say that when younger, she confused her natural femininity and desire to fit in with the neurotypical girls who had figured out how to navigate being successful and confident in being hyperfeminine as being romantically and sexually attracted to them and later realizing it was that she just desperately wanted to fit in with them. I wonder how common that is happening now in this current culture where femininity is so difficult to navigate?
Agree 100%. I think we tend to forget how literally and seriously children and young people (not just the ASD ones) take social norms, and how avidly they look for clues about how to fit in. We imagine they are all rebels, and that may be true with their parents, but with their peers, they are wildly conformist. If the message is, "It's good to be a strong, smart, unfeminine woman," they will be apt to interpret that as, "If I want to be good, strong and smart, I must be unfeminine." Mix in the body fears that are also natural in adolescents, and we have a perfect setup for shunning femaleness.
Sounds like something coming out of West Chester or Swarthmore! I know 1 out of WC and she aspires to write this fan-fiction garbage to make a living. I'm sure it is a very small audience that would pay to read this crap!
Apologies for a mess here— I wrote a long comment, thought I had accidentally deleted it, posted *another comment* about that but I am unsure now if my original comment exists or not as there was no “comment deleted“ artifact left behind… huh
Yes I would— with my thanks. And I did leave a wall of text with no paragraph breaks, but oh well. Thank you for rescuing that half hour of writing and the words. It’s appreciated
[Radegunde: Here is what I got in my email. Let me know if it's ok. -jd] Just a comment— she’s not correct about Kirk/Spock being written by lesbians, or even largely by lesbians. Not at all. It was written by straight women, the same way any kind of slash fiction is today: it is overwhelmingly a straight woman’s genre, love stories with the female body— with all its attached anguish—removed. The feminine man in the story stands in for the girl (Joanna Russ wrote very well about this in her essay on K/S, examining why Spock was the female stand-in paired with the masculine Kirk). Straight women write gay slash in order to revel in male sexuality without necessarily having to deal with men, and to imagine a space where they can be human beings loving men without the prison of heterosexual power dynamics. I don’t know much about the Omegaverse, but it seems an attempt to address deeply internalized misogyny, the same way young white women claim “non-binary” identities as a way to separate themselves from the ordinary order of girls and women. Anyway, despite my “no, actually” moment here, I’m very glad to see the imagination of girls being taken seriously, which it deserves to be. I’m guessing that the misogyny embraced by young women has everything to do with modern artificial beauty standards and the resentment that arises at being held to them. At least when I was growing up, in the 70s, we had counter movements that were critical of beauty culture and made that a plank of resistance. Girls today are given far fewer ways to opt out and still be girls. As a hippie who rejected makeup as unnatural, or a punk who used it for garishness, I could move in relation to beauty without being crushed by hundreds of images of perfection at my fingertips. Anyway, thank you for this interview!
Thanks for your response! I responded to the quote directly and you highlight just how complicated this all is and how there's still a lot of misinformation and simplicity out there.
Thanks for this, and what you say highlights that there is a lot of misinformation about fandom and lots of levels and layers. I took the Kirk/Spock information and lesbian element directly from a fellow academic who specifically studies the history of Star Trek fandom but not necessarily from the perspective of female imagination. The perception that it was lesbian women doing this in the Trek fandom goes pretty deep in fandom studies so I've always trusted it. However, I'm going to rethink it. My friend has a collection of print zines from early conventions and I will ask her to look into author identification. Of course we all know that many straight women who write this stuff today identify as queer so that muddies the waters. I will add that when I spoke at WDI, I was under the impression that the Omegaverse was an entirely straight thing as it struck me as having deeply heteronormative underpinnings. I was shocked at how many of the lesbian women under thirty had consumed and/or read it. So I think it is all intertwined.
[a comment from Radegunde that got mistakenly deleted]: Just a comment— she’s not correct about Kirk/Spock being written by lesbians, or even largely by lesbians. Not at all. It was written by straight women, the same way any kind of slash fiction is today: it is overwhelmingly a straight woman’s genre, love stories with the female body— with all its attached anguish—removed. The feminine man in the story stands in for the girl (Joanna Russ wrote very well about this in her essay on K/S, examining why Spock was the female stand-in paired with the masculine Kirk). Straight women write gay slash in order to revel in male sexuality without necessarily having to deal with men, and to imagine a space where they can be human beings loving men without the prison of heterosexual power dynamics. I don’t know much about the Omegaverse, but it seems an attempt to address deeply internalized misogyny, the same way young white women claim “non-binary” identities as a way to separate themselves from the ordinary order of girls and women. Anyway, despite my “no, actually” moment here, I’m very glad to see the imagination of girls being taken seriously, which it deserves to be. I’m guessing that the misogyny embraced by young women has everything to do with modern artificial beauty standards and the resentment that arises at being held to them. At least when I was growing up, in the 70s, we had counter movements that were critical of beauty culture and made that a plank of resistance. Girls today are given far fewer ways to opt out and still be girls. As a hippie who rejected makeup as unnatural, or a punk who used it for garishness, I could move in relation to beauty without being crushed by hundreds of images of perfection at my fingertips. Anyway, thank you for this interview!
[reply from Melissa in Philly] Thanks for this, and what you say highlights that there is a lot of misinformation about fandom and lots of levels and layers. I took the Kirk/Spock information and lesbian element directly from a fellow academic who specifically studies the history of Star Trek fandom but not necessarily from the perspective of female imagination. The perception that it was lesbian women doing this in the Trek fandom goes pretty deep in fandom studies so I've always trusted it. However, I'm going to rethink it. My friend has a collection of print zines from early conventions and I will ask her to look into author identification. Of course we all know that many straight women who write this stuff today identify as queer so that muddies the waters. I will add that when I spoke at WDI, I was under the impression that the Omegaverse was an entirely straight thing as it struck me as having deeply heteronormative underpinnings. I was shocked at how many of the lesbian women under thirty had consumed and/or read it. So I think it is all intertwined.
The teenage girl's fascination with gay men can have tragic ends. Sometimes these girls transition thinking they're going to look like they're in a boy band, but instead they go bald, develop heart disease, and break a hip in their twenties. It is a huge trend, though, and a huge market. I guarantee the audience for "Heartstopper" is mostly teenage girls.
Yes, Heartstopper was absolutely for teen girls and not young gay boys, who were likely only a small market for that. Disney is all in on that market.
I wonder if some of these girls are thinking, "I can be my own boyfriend!" (similar to autogynephilia, though a lot more romanticized and pitiable)?
It starts off like a disembodied sex fantasy. It's a fantasy about romantic and sexual connection, but it has her body, the female body, taken out of it. That makes sense if the girls are terrified by puberty and by the reality of living in the world as a post-pubescent female. In a way, that's no different from how it was back in the day with girls who preferred to hang out with gay boys - we called them "paper clips" or "fag hags." It was usually just a phase the girls went through, and for many I'm sure it still is. Complications ensue, in this new world, in two ways: when the girls become trans cheerleaders for the gay boys and try to make them over into girls, or when the girls' obsession intensifies and gets turned around on their own bodies, and then they try to make themselves over to be a gay boy themselves. It's the epitome of alienation for a girl who is attracted to boys to try to excise the female parts of herself and interface with those boys as another boy.
"Second, we should realize that a lot of the trans stuff is a reaction to the idea that girly girls are stupid: that you can’t be female and do serious things. I try to role-model that I am a serious, tough, intellectual person who works with men—and I wear dresses, I love romance novels, I have long hair. I’ll say, “Don’t judge me for my shoes! I love girly stuff!” We need to be clear that males can be feminine, females can be masculine, and it’s all fine.
Third, we should take the female imagination as seriously as we take the male imagination. Have you noticed that men are allowed to keep their teen interests—sports, comics, gaming—their whole life, whereas women are told to get rid of all that “girl stuff” or no one will take them seriously?"
This really hit home. I feel like I'm the years of trying to (correctly) tell young women it's ok to like sports and rough and tumble play, to be a leader, to not like pink or dolls, and to want careers in male-dominated fields, these young women have also gotten the message that anything seem as traditionally female, whether in career, life choices, interests, or personality traits is inferior and something to be rejected or even hated in themselves. This is great for all the girls who are naturally less interested in the hyper-feminine, "girly" stuff and who have been shamed for their interests and goals in the past, but I believe it has inadvertently harmed the girls who are naturally the very feminine, girly-girls with their stereotypical girly/female interests and traits. Now they aren't looked down on by the patriarchy for being the lesser sex, they are told they aren't even being girls and women the right way and are harming other girls and women for their feminine interests and traits. It's no wonder they would get tied into the kind of knots these young female writers are tying themselves into trying to figure out how to be an acceptable hyperfeminine female. Aren't the social media extremes of the "trad wife" trend just another example? Are they saying, "if I'm a problem for wanting a more traditional/feminine life, then here's my middle finger to all of you. I'm going all in and owning it."
Finally, to build on some of the points about lesbians...I recently saw an Instagram content creator who says she's autistic say that when younger, she confused her natural femininity and desire to fit in with the neurotypical girls who had figured out how to navigate being successful and confident in being hyperfeminine as being romantically and sexually attracted to them and later realizing it was that she just desperately wanted to fit in with them. I wonder how common that is happening now in this current culture where femininity is so difficult to navigate?
Agree 100%. I think we tend to forget how literally and seriously children and young people (not just the ASD ones) take social norms, and how avidly they look for clues about how to fit in. We imagine they are all rebels, and that may be true with their parents, but with their peers, they are wildly conformist. If the message is, "It's good to be a strong, smart, unfeminine woman," they will be apt to interpret that as, "If I want to be good, strong and smart, I must be unfeminine." Mix in the body fears that are also natural in adolescents, and we have a perfect setup for shunning femaleness.
Sounds like something coming out of West Chester or Swarthmore! I know 1 out of WC and she aspires to write this fan-fiction garbage to make a living. I'm sure it is a very small audience that would pay to read this crap!
This is just lovely! Thank you.
This was great. I have a feeling Melissa and I would have a lot to talk about over a coffee or a drink or two.
I could talk to her all day!
Thanks for taking the time to listen and getting the word out.
Thank you! It was extremely enlightening!
Apologies for a mess here— I wrote a long comment, thought I had accidentally deleted it, posted *another comment* about that but I am unsure now if my original comment exists or not as there was no “comment deleted“ artifact left behind… huh
It seems to have all been deleted. But I have the whole original comment in an email -- would you like me to copy/paste it here?
Yes I would— with my thanks. And I did leave a wall of text with no paragraph breaks, but oh well. Thank you for rescuing that half hour of writing and the words. It’s appreciated
No worries! Interesting comment!
[Radegunde: Here is what I got in my email. Let me know if it's ok. -jd] Just a comment— she’s not correct about Kirk/Spock being written by lesbians, or even largely by lesbians. Not at all. It was written by straight women, the same way any kind of slash fiction is today: it is overwhelmingly a straight woman’s genre, love stories with the female body— with all its attached anguish—removed. The feminine man in the story stands in for the girl (Joanna Russ wrote very well about this in her essay on K/S, examining why Spock was the female stand-in paired with the masculine Kirk). Straight women write gay slash in order to revel in male sexuality without necessarily having to deal with men, and to imagine a space where they can be human beings loving men without the prison of heterosexual power dynamics. I don’t know much about the Omegaverse, but it seems an attempt to address deeply internalized misogyny, the same way young white women claim “non-binary” identities as a way to separate themselves from the ordinary order of girls and women. Anyway, despite my “no, actually” moment here, I’m very glad to see the imagination of girls being taken seriously, which it deserves to be. I’m guessing that the misogyny embraced by young women has everything to do with modern artificial beauty standards and the resentment that arises at being held to them. At least when I was growing up, in the 70s, we had counter movements that were critical of beauty culture and made that a plank of resistance. Girls today are given far fewer ways to opt out and still be girls. As a hippie who rejected makeup as unnatural, or a punk who used it for garishness, I could move in relation to beauty without being crushed by hundreds of images of perfection at my fingertips. Anyway, thank you for this interview!
That's it! Thanks again. :)
Thanks for your response! I responded to the quote directly and you highlight just how complicated this all is and how there's still a lot of misinformation and simplicity out there.
Thanks for this, and what you say highlights that there is a lot of misinformation about fandom and lots of levels and layers. I took the Kirk/Spock information and lesbian element directly from a fellow academic who specifically studies the history of Star Trek fandom but not necessarily from the perspective of female imagination. The perception that it was lesbian women doing this in the Trek fandom goes pretty deep in fandom studies so I've always trusted it. However, I'm going to rethink it. My friend has a collection of print zines from early conventions and I will ask her to look into author identification. Of course we all know that many straight women who write this stuff today identify as queer so that muddies the waters. I will add that when I spoke at WDI, I was under the impression that the Omegaverse was an entirely straight thing as it struck me as having deeply heteronormative underpinnings. I was shocked at how many of the lesbian women under thirty had consumed and/or read it. So I think it is all intertwined.