Misogyny in Fandom

Related terms:	Gender and Fandom
See also:	Ableism in Fandom, Ageism in Fandom, Homophobia in Fandom, Judaism and Fandom, Race and Fandom
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Misogyny in Fandom is an observed phenomenon and topic of discussion in many fannish spaces, whether those spaces are majority-female or majority-male. Many observers have noted widespread blatant misogynistic comments at online social media sites, harassment at fan conventions and other offline spaces, as well as the lack of female representation--female characters, female canon creators, and even female fans (whom both fanboys and mainstream media outlets pretend don't exist). Subtler forms of sexism have been noted and commented on in relation to which fandoms attract the most fans and what fan creators create themselves. Misogyny occurs in science fiction fandom, comics fandom, transformational fandom, affirmational fandom, anime fandom, slash fandom, yaoi fandom, gaming fandom, music fandom, sports fandom, and elsewhere.

Pan-Fandom Misogyny

Some see misogyny in certain types of fannish interactions:

• when female fans are mistreated, sexually harassed, or simply disparaged or treated as mere "booth babes" or otherwise of lesser importance.
• when fanboys doubt the sincerity of fangirls' interest
• when media coverage focuses on male fans and excludes or downplays the participation of women -- except for those in sexualized or ditzy outfits
• when media coverage focuses on female fans to make fun of them, or makes fun of fandoms identified with women, such as Twilight or One Direction
• when fans do the same
• when female fans blogging about misogyny in fandom get harassed
• when works by female fantasy and SF writers are not mentioned, or mentioned only in passing, in general discussions on the genre; when they are omitted from 'best of' lists and other types of media exposure, mainstream or otherwise;
• when women fans themselves don't take fandom seriously, because it's "a girl thing", especially associated with young women in their teens and twenties
• when we accuse other fans of not being able to argue logically because they're women
• when self-proclaimed "fandom feminists" tell female fans they're being brainwashed or oppressed by the patriarchy if those fans openly disagree with them on anything
• when self-proclaimed male feminists try to White Knight women in fandom by talking over them
• when criticism or derision of certain media is based on how popular it is with teenage girls or middle-aged women instead of discussing any actually problematic aspects (ex. Twilight being hated because of its teenage girl audience, ignoring the racist implications of the vampire vs werewolf conflict as a legitimate point of criticism)
• when female fans bully other female fans over their preferences and opinions

In Media Fandom

Media fandom, and especially Slash fandom, are predominantly female spaces, so it may seem odd that misogyny in fandom has been a topic of discussion for years. In addition to discussions about pan-fandom issues, debates about misogyny in media fandom in particular center on the way fans interact with the source text:

• when fans disparage female characters, especially women cast as romantic objects for our favorite male characters or those we want to imagine in relationships with other men. Such characters are dismissed so frequently and with such fervor that fans are beginning to seriously discuss it in terms of internalized sexism.;
• when fans (even heterosexual ones) disparage heterosexual romance in fiction on the grounds that it's "gross" (see Het Is Ew on TVTropes)
• when fans write about the male characters in a fandom and ignore or even kill off the female characters (see The Cartwright Syndrome, Women in Refrigerators and Mysterious Wife Plague)
• when fans claim they "have to" write about male characters because there are no good female characters and the existing ones are so uninteresting
• when fans write hate mail to writers and producers for including a female lead or a female romantic interest for one of the heroes -- or even send death threats to the actress in question;
• the rarity of "f/f", girl slash, or female-character-focused general stories, compared to the abundance of "m/m", boy slash and male-character-focused gen stories.
• when competent female characters are accused of being Mary Sue or cliches, while similar male characters are beloved (see Female Character Flowchart)
• when flawed female characters are judged harshly and condemned, while similarly flawed male characters are excused, justified and defended
• when important female characters with leading roles are ignored in favor of minor male characters with minimal characterization and/or screentime (see Two White Guys)
• when fans judge female characters entirely based on their appearances; attractive women are called shallow eye candy, women who aren't conventionally attractive are dismissed as ugly, women with large breasts are called "sluts", "whores", or "fucktoys"
• when fans claim female characters getting more spotlight in a canon than males must be due to creators pandering to horny cishet males/the creators being horny cishet males, based on the default notion that female characters have nothing to offer but their looks and sexual appeal no matter how compelling their stories and character traits are
• when fans are personally offended by a female character's popularity compared to their male favorite's, or call any female character who has more than a handful of fans "overrated"

Studio higher-ups often manipulate film and television shows with fannish appeal -- including fantasy, science fiction, action-adventure and "buddy cop" -- in order to maintain a focus on males and sideline women characters. This meddling contributes to viewer perception of women as being extraneous baggage, or at least as less important. As canon creators have become aware of slash fandom, they may insert content that pertains to perceived relationships between male characters. Even if this is done in a humorous, teasing manner as a way of "talking back" to the fans, it nonetheless serves as an excuse to further diminish female characters.

When women are portrayed in a canon source as action heroes, they are often hypersexualized for the benefit of men in the audience. This preserves the illusion of a "feminist" theme or story while attracting the more desirable male demographic. Lara Croft of Tomb Raider, the adventurer-archaeologist with improbably huge breasts, is an infamous example. An attempt to make her more realistic in the second Tomb Raider adventure apparently involved making her a fragile and vulnerable "girl" rather than the tough, confident and vigorous hero of the first installment.

A detailed critique from fan artist and critic IHCOYC XPICTOC:

There's something about making a character like that much younger and less skilled that I intensely dislike.

It's not about realism or artistic freedom; it's about genre. Lara Croft was a major figure in a recognizable genre about intrepid and omnicompetent explorers; she was an Indiana Jones figure. Rape doesn't really fit well in the genre, any more than it belongs in a superhero comic, a Robin Hood story, an Errol Flynn style swashbuckler, or a Flash Gordon type space opera.

This doesn't mean that rape does not occur in the quasi-modern world that's the typical superhero setting. Rape was quite common in medieval England, too. Among historical pirates? Probably several times a day. And humans being what they are, it won't have gone away in a Flash Gordon future either.

So what? All of these arguments boil down to "rape is real, so we get to use it." Yes, rape is real; it happens. This isn't about reality; it's about genre, which means it's also about the reasonable expectations of the consumers of fiction. Readers turn to genres they enjoy because they reasonably expect a certain kind of entertainment from it. Date rape is a serious problem that is part of our world. This does not mean that Harlequin romances will be made deeper or more interesting by adding it to their plots.

Likewise, the notion that Lara Croft becomes more interesting by turning her into a rape victim and a damsel in distress from the slasher genre is rubbish.

Writers who inject grim unpleasantness into the genres in the name of "realism" are taking a stance that they're deeper, more engaged, and more 'relevant' than the writers who founded the genre and created the market niche they're working in. My creative genius excuses me from creating what you thought you were getting on the cover. This is a sort of consumer fraud. Writers who adopt this pretentious stance need a stiff round of axhandle therapy.

Of course, these are really symptoms of a much larger problem concerning sex and gender conflicts in everyday life. But the focus of this article is on fandom. This means we must also look at business, such as the entertainment industry and the tech sector, especially game design, that have a lot of influence on fandom and may employ men and women who are fans.

Sidelining, sexualizing or killing canon female characters

Another fannish trend often attributed to misogyny is fan-written stories or fanfics that do not give the romantic history of their canon love-interest appropriate weight. For instance, this was a common complaint in Highlander fandom. According to established canon, Tessa Noël was one of the main loves -- if not the love -- of Duncan MacLeod's centuries-long life. But discussions and stories by fans -- even those that were nonsexual -- tended to make much more of his loss of his friend and mentor Darius than his loss of Tessa. It may not be anti-female, but it reflects a tendency in fandom to value women less.

Television producers contribute to this attitude with their treatment of women. Often, it is not the writers' decision but that of the studio or network in charge. Women in general are portrayed on television as disposable, often for the purpose of showing how evil an adversarial character is. Even canon female characters, especially those that are in power positions, are often killed off in series. This is what happened to Capt. Tryla Scott in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Conspiracy".

These creator decisions reflect a larger problem within the media industry as a whole. Statistics compiled by various media, journalism and women's studies projects illustrate that women make up only a small percentage of media voices, to the point that legal experts have called for investigations into violations of the civil rights of women media professionals. Films with female lead characters are dismissed as "chick flicks", presumably of interest only to women viewers unless they "deliver" nudity or explicit sex scenes).

In most other genres, women characters are routinely downplayed or kept to traditional supporting roles (wives, mothers), creating subtle associations for adult and child viewers. In her blog Reel Girl, feminist blogger Margot McGowan analyzes the fact that groups of imaginary characters in commercials, movies and TV usually feature several males and one female. She believes this amounts to cultural conditioning that leads girls to see themselves as a minority. In the real world, females are 51% of the population. A Florida State University study found that children's literature is three times as likely to feature male lead characters than female ones, and that "there is a connection between the historical ebb and flow of the women's movement and gender representations in children's books.". A 2015 study by Harvard University found that girls are still socially conditioned -- including by their own mothers -- not to view themselves as potential leaders. The comic book Noisemakers, about historical women who changed the world, was created by Condé Nast editor Erin Bried after she couldn't find a magazine for her daughter that didn't feature dolls, princesses or child stars. Science journalist Michelle Nijuis proposes, based on a directive by her five-year-old daughter, changing the genders of storybook heroes as needed when reading aloud to girls, giving them more identifiable-with protagonists and examples.

Until the 1960s, most science fiction and fantasy focused on male characters, partly out of a perception that space exploration would be a tough, dangerous and thus "manly" business -- similar to the mythologized western United States in the media fandom of its day, consisting of dime Western novels and pulp magazines. Again, the lack of identifiable-with female characters led female readers, and female authors, to identify with the men and exclude women in their own work. Sime~Gen's Jacqueline Lichtenberg explains:

I grew up on SF with all-male characters end learned to identify with males for lack of any good female leads. I guess times are changing. But as yet, I find it unnecessary to write about females.

Additionally, there is a long-established tradition in film and TV production that women must be conventionally attractive and sexualized; this demand is overtly expressed at the level of character breakdown, the one- or two-line summary of a character used by casting directors to look for the right actors.

"Across the board, audiences today are subjected daily to female characters who are not, for lack of a better word, ordinary. They are almost always gorgeous, fit, sexy and dating or married to someone not nearly as attractive as they are. Men can be all shapes and sizes on film; women must be hot.... Here are a few of the descriptors I encountered for female characters: Smoking hot, beautiful, cool, personable, attractive, fit, stylish, siren, curvaceous, sexy, alluring and flawless (did I mention sexy? It shows up a lot). For male ones: filthy rich, confident, wealthy, businessman, authoritative, debonair, corporate giant, brash, corn-fed, pudgy, adorable, serial killer, funny, smart, famous, passionate and handsome. As you can see, breakdowns for women put much more emphasis on looks."

This hypersexualization is also extremely common in video games; Lara Croft is only one of many examples. Reducing breast size or putting more clothes on an action heroine is often decried by a certain type of male player as "censorship", but creator Olivia Hill reveals that censorship frequently happens in reverse, again dictated by the company and not by the writers or artists who actually do the creative work. She describes working hard to depict mature, in-charge female warriors, only to have company executives order that all the women characters need an overhaul to be "sexually appealing and available" and very, very young:

"This is just pedophilia. They took a powerful woman and they ground her down to a sexualized child. ...THIS is censorship. This is the creators' vision trampled all over. And it happens every goddamn day in the video game industry. But the boys crying 'censorship' any time a studio puts a woman in a sports bra don’t give a shit because this is meant to tickle their dicks.

In games, developers are censored every time some creatively bankrupt trust fund kid stomps into a meeting and demands the creatives change something due to 'market demand.'

In games, censorship happens when an investor who has never played a video game before draws a big X on the developers' white board and writes '16-30 YEAR OLD WHITE MALES.' It happens.

You want to bitch about 'people who don’t even play games trying to change them?' Oh god let me tell you about producers. They’re insufferable and they never play games. The only thing they know is telling artists to mimic other successful properties. They murder art."

From Fans

Disliking female characters in canon

Fannish dislike for female characters seems to happen much more often than random chance or general patterns of character bashing could adequately account for. Almost every fandom has at least one female character whom fans profess to "hate". She is just as likely to be an ally as an adversary. One of the most famous examples among anime fans is Relena Darlian-Peacecraft in Gundam Wing; "kill Relena" discussions abounded in the heyday of the show.

It is not uncommon to find epithet-laden screeds about virtually any woman with screen-time on any film or show with fannish appeal (fantasy, science fiction or action-adventure, anime). Female characters in RPG video games such as Final Fantasy come in for their share as well. These derogatory statements are just as likely to come from female fans as males. The level of anti-female character venom among some fans is bizarrely high, especially given the general fannish love for adversarial characters such as Darth Vader.

Occasionally, communities will be formed with names like "kill [female character]". Members post stories where the character dies in a humiliating way. This type of community is only rarely found for male characters.

Women, then, become an obstruction to true love in such a maligning way that they essentially slander themselves and their own sexuality.

In the 2010s, this antipathy towards female characters has spread to the actresses who play them. Sherlock fans reacted with dismay at the news that Amanda Abbington was going to play John Watson's (canonical!) wife Mary. Abbington, who was the common-law wife of Watson's actor Martin Freeman, reported having received death threats from devotees who support the idea of a romance between the two male leads. Many of these fans believed that with enough pressure, producer Stephen Moffat would allow Holmes and Watson to become lovers on the show. For more detail, see Sherlock/John and The Johnlock Conspiracy.

Mary died in a later episode. Although (and because) this is true to the canon, Mary's death presented its own set of implications and questions: Sherlock takes place in modern times, but its female characters are still being used to portray what media critic Sophie Gilbert rightly calls "stale gendered archetypes". Moffat is himself notoriously misogynistic and has made many comments disparaging women characters and fans.

Death threats were also received by Anna Gunn, who plays Skyler White on Breaking Bad. Here, it is not a question of a woman interfering with a fantasied slash ship, but simply the fact that the show celebrates the ruthless, often criminal behavior of ex-schoolteacher Walter White, and his wife Skyler is portrayed as constantly calling him on his evil deeds. Anna believes her character's willingness to speak up and have the courage of her convictions violates today's archetype or standard of how a woman should behave.

Meta posts often pose the question "is being 'anti-female character' the same as being anti-female?"

Anger towards active, assertive female characters and the actresses who play them is not limited to female fans, of course. Men who resent the "intrusion" of such women, along with nonwhites, into a perceived white male fantasy often respond very harshly, using social media and other feedback to condemn the characters and the actresses who play them in derogatory terms including racial slurs. This happened, for instance, to Daisy Ridley, who played the scavenger Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Kelly Marie Tran, who played engineer Rose Tico in The Last Jedi. Similar harassment was received by other nonwhite, non-male creators in the franchise, along with straight, white, male director Rian Johnson, who reported getting death threats.

But Star Wars is no longer a purely fun experience for those involved, because of an incredibly outspoken, organized army of trolls. Both Tran and Ridley were excited newcomers to the franchise and, although they clearly still love being a part of it, that light seems to have dimmed. The only way they seemingly felt able to deal with being a public figure in a movie that fans so grotesquely attacked was to leave part of their public lives behind. Star Wars fandom has transformed, for many people, into a battle between people who believe they have ownership over a franchise they literally have nothing to do with and people just trying to do their jobs. Fandom used to be inspiring, but a large chunk of it is now gross and off-putting.

I was happier not knowing this, but it has become abundantly clear since 2015 that Star Wars fandom is a wretched hive of scum and villainy -- maybe the worst in all of sci-fi. The first hint came when a small but noxious minority lost their shit over the prospect of a black stormtrooper, and it’s only gotten worse from there. I’m sure most Star Wars fans, even of the tribal persuasion, aren’t Incels, Pepes, Red-Pillers, Info-Warriors, or tiki-torch Nazis, but HOLY SHIT, YOU GUYS!!!! Healthy, sane fan communities don’t chase actresses off of social media for getting icky girl cooties all over their favorite corporate-controlled intellectual property, alright?

This type of hatred had begun to ramp up in 2015, when trolls forced Daisy Ridley -- who plays Rey, the central hero of the new trilogy -- off social media. Before The Force Awakens was even released, racists threatened to boycott the film because it supported “white genocide” by featuring actors of color. This became a loud fringe movement, that, by midway through 2018, had also driven star Kelly Marie Tran off social media completely. The actress, who played the Resistance mechanic Rose Tico in The Last Jedi, was the target of a disgusting online harassment campaign. An Asian-American actress, Tran was attacked for months by racist, and misogynistic trolls. ... Other fans penned entire declarations decrying The Last Jedi as “too political” and using new characters as “tools to push an agenda of masculine inferiority.”

In fact, digital media analysis by Morten Bay of USC-Annenberg found that most of the angry messages directed at Johnson and the actresses came not from individuals but from "bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists," including Russian trolls. In other words, social media was weaponized to manipulate fandom:

So it seems that it was political operatives, not fans, who were denigrating the movie and fomenting some of the virulent racism and misogyny against its cast.

Esquire's Matt Miller believes most of the misogynist spew did come from fans: "In fact, Russian bots actually did target The Last Jedi on social media, but their impact on the conversation was negligible."

Related Meta

• On narrow genre tastes, female characters, and a wider variety of books (2007)
• "You know I wouldn't want it any other way..." (2007)
• "I've stopped being able to enjoy media with female protagonists" (2018)
• Why did Kelly Marie Tran (Rose from Star Wars) receive so much hate she had to delete her instagram? Lengthy, mostly intelligent discussion on reddit about audience reaction to disliked characters and their actors.
• y’all love the morally gray, snarky, grief stricken characters until it’s a woman. (2022)
• an excuse to never talk about any female characters but then they'll have an entire made up backstory and 700 fics on ao3 for background male character (2022)

Misogyny and Slash

A time-honored technique in slash fiction writing is to vilify canon female love-interests to justify breaking up canon heterosexual couples to make room for a male/male pairing.

Fanfiction is peppered with character hate, and it’s almost always directed at the canon girlfriend/love interest. What I mean by this is that somehow, in order to constitute a relationship between male characters, the best way to do it is to marginalize the women in the equation. This is either done through writing them as bitches who deserve to be… quite frankly… shanked, or pretending that they don’t exist in the story at all. Women, then, become an obstruction to true love in such a maligning way that they essentially slander themselves and their own sexuality.

Slash writers often kill off canon female partners to get them out of the way of the desired male/male pairing. (See Mysterious wife plague, The Cartwright Curse or Women in refrigerators, or Die For Our Ship on TVTropes.) Some of the hatred toward Mary Sues and those who write them may be an offshoot of this phenomenon.

Here is my theory. People enjoy sex. They love to imagine making out with the guys. . . but writing about S & H falling for beautiful and intelligent women makes everyone else jealous. Besides that, it breaks up the wonderful, loyal, male-male bonding friendship. . . So, we get S & H making out with each other, described in detail or not. Sex is sex and the reader can get as much vicarious enjoyment out of it as the forbidden Mary Sue stories while keeping the characters loyal to each other.

Most fan writers are women, and the oversexualization of females in media sources has been cited by fans as making them unable to identify with female characters, contributing to their detraction of their own body image, and as a rationale for writing slash:

I can’t normally read het romances, a little dabbled into a greater plot is fine, but a pure romance is a hell no. I can’t watch rom-coms or romantic movies that way and for the same reason:

I will never have what those women have. I cannot be that woman. Comparatively, I will always be lesser, have been told I will always be lesser, and these things make me acutely aware that I don’t measure up. So it hurts. It hurts to be reminded of all my failings and the fact that no one will ever see me as a romantic lead or even potential romance in someone’s life.

With slash, I don’t have to worry about it. I can enjoy the romance, the relationship, the banter, the squabbles, the LIFE, without putting myself in a position to constantly compare myself to the leads and finding myself coming up short every time. I’m not a man. I have no desire to be one (though if you do, go for it and I’ll support you every step of the way). I literally cannot be that character, so it’s free of that burden and I can simply enjoy two people finding each other and finding something I never will.

For me, I don’t really think it’s internalized misogyny, but more being told and taught to hate everything about me. For years, I didn’t even feel female as I did everything wrong in society’s eyes. Took me a long time to just be me and learn my gender was secondary.

At least with slash, I can enjoy the idea of love even if it’s something I gave up on finding long ago.

Counterpoints

A great deal of meta seems to imply that female fans somehow owe it to the nebulously defined "fandom community" to write female characters — in other words, "eating your vegetables." This is not a belief that is universally shared. When these meta writers are told to go ahead and write their own fic, they view it as yet more proof of misogyny.

Proghets, as the term implies, insist that hetfic is inherently more progressive than slash because it contains women. This is in spite of the fact that a great deal of hetfic is full of gender essentialism. In addition, quite a few proghets are religious conservatives who have learned to use progressive rhetoric to advance homophobic and other bigoted viewpoints.

From a fan in 1994:

I intuitively agree that slash appeals more to feminists than "traditional" women, no matter that some slash does its best to re-institute sex roles. The concept of slash evades sex roles and makes it unnecessary to belittle women by showing them in stereotypical helpless-female roles. (This is one reason the hostility in those few stories that are actively misogynistic is so jarring.) In terms of presenting a fantasy universe that would look feminist to non-fans, slash may look retrogressive; in terms of a fantasy for fans who already assume that women as a class can be belittled only as a mistaken premise, the absence of stereotyped women is more a relief than a drawback. Non-stereotyped women, aside from being difficult to create and more difficult to create out of TV templates, are not needed to make a slash story's point. It's not slash erotica that needs female characters, but just about every other type of fan fiction, not excluding explicit hetero fiction, as either erotica or character development (or both). In stories where the two leads need not be the same gender to define and carry out the intended storyline, by all means, I should like to see more women as important and believable characters. From there, I suspect they'll look more sexy more often as well.

In Original Slash

Through college and the years that followed I may not have been writing, but I was definitely reading. A lot! I’ve been a voracious reader my whole life. Starting around junior high, I primarily read fantasy. But a few years ago, I started to notice something odd: no matter what book I was reading, I found myself hating the female lead. Now, I’m sure it’s not actually the case that every single female character in fantasy is poorly-written. I can readily admit that the issue is my own. Regardless of the reason, the fact is, they drove me nuts. So I started specifically buying books that had male protagonists. Of course, then those fabulous male leads were always falling in love with the some silly girl, and I never understood why, so if I managed to find a book that didn’t even mention a woman in the blurb, I was thrilled. Which is of course how I discovered the Nightrunner series (thanks Lynn!!).

Honestly, I still remember the night that I finished Stalking Darkness. I was lying in bed, and I read the ending over and over and over again, and I swear I could feel the giant light bulb going on inside my head. I could hear the “ta-da!” music. I got up the next day, and I started scouring Amazon for fantasy books with gay male leads.

Well, it turns out that list is depressingly short (at least, it was back then), but I found myself sliding down this slippery slope of books -- first fantasy with a bit of gay romance thrown in, and then gay romance with a bit of fantasy thrown in, and then before I knew it, the fantasy was gone and there were just men falling in love. I’d never in my life been a reader of romance books, but once I discovered m/m, I was hooked. — Author Marie Sexton

In RPF

This internalized misogyny also appears in RPF and tinhatting -- the belief that the actors who portray one's favorite m/m couples are themselves in a relationship.

I wanted harry to be gay so badly because I couldn’t help comparing myself everytime with all the beautiful women he’d be seen with.

I wanted larry to be real because I couldn’t stand the thought of Louis with a girl who wasn’t me

Sidelining

Ignoring female characters in fanworks

One of the oldest arguments about the treatment of female characters in fanfiction pertains to the comparative enthusiasm for male characters over female characters in fanfic. This is not only a problem in slash; female characters are underrepresented in non-explicit, general audience writing as well, although, obviously, less so in heterosexual romantic stories.

Fans who do not consider this an issue point out that they don't have a lot to work with. It's reasonably accepted that Hollywood, at least, is actively opposed to female leads and even female strong characters. The stars of shows with fan appeal (live-action or anime fantasy, science fiction, comic book adaptations or action-adventure series) tend to be male; bigger parts, better writing. When women are the first or second lead of a fannish type show, they're still usually written by male script writers and still tend not to be well written. It is, of course, difficult to write fanfiction about characters who are consistently minimized and given mediocre characterization within canon. (See Star Trek Dance Floor)

At this point, the first group of fans usually point out that extremely minor male characters are often fleshed out and given popular pairings in sex stories, while minor female characters generally don't get these opportunities.

In some fandoms, even the way that sexual pairings are described in the labeling can be revealing. Heterosexual pairings are often written with the male's surname and female's first name, e.g. "Smith/Mary", rather than both characters' first or last names. Homosexual or "slash" pairings are usually described with either both last name, or both first name: John/Fred, Smith/Jones. For example, Hypatia Kosh's 2000 review of Star Trek: The New Voyages mentions the Claire Gabriel novel Simple Gifts (online here), and describes it as "Spock/f", as if the female lead -- Dr. Sarah Halstead, who is the POV character for much of the novel -- is so inconsequential that her name isn't worth mentioning.

Ignoring female characters in fanworks: Fan Comments

what is this on misogyny and slash? Aren't you making a mountain out of a molehill? I seriously doubt that slash authors are being misogynistic. After all, the definition of misogyny is "hatred of women." Us? Hatred of women? Oh, come on!! Female characters may be underdrawn, practically non-existent, or even stereotyped in a lot of slash, but I for one don't give a flying fuck. It's the relationship between the two men that interests me.

I don't see the lack of women in slash as misogynistic. It's just that dealing with male-female relations in fanfic is too much like work. A one-gender universe is the easy, effortless way to freedom from gender roles. I get almost the same kick from stories in which there are no men, which is why I prefer female/female slash to straight. Gee, I probably sound like the mental patient from that Tiptree story, "Your Faces, Oh My Sisters..." But it's just an admittedly escapist fantasy ~ nothing I'd want in real life.

The problem [of misogyny] is certainly not limited to slash. There is a definite tendency in B7 gen stories to underplay the female characters or get rid of them altogether. I find it particularly annoying when a writer kills off one or more of the women from the show only to bring on an original female character. Would they do that with one of the men, I ask you? Ha!.

I think there is indeed something that looks a lot like misogyny in certain specific slash stories. I don't by any means think that the genre as a whole IS misogynistic, but I find that I come across things that bother me in this respect quite often. Here's an example:

Blake could imagine how it had been, Anna delicate and circumspect, kissing his cock as a great sacrifice, maybe using her tongue a little (but nowhere near the tip) while Avon politely lay and yearned to thrust it arrogantly down her throat. Women, very often, just had no idea." — Sebastian, "Bittersweet," in Oblaque IV, p. 50.

This was an excellent story that I liked a great deal, but I really could have done without this paragraph on the next-to-last page. Yeah, there are some justifications for it within the story, but I still don't like it. And this kind of gratuitous slam at the female characters, which I for one am capable of interpreting as a put-down of women generally, occurs in many stories. Why does sex with men have to be presented as inherently better than sex with women? Why can't it just be different, or better because it's with a particular partner that you're madly in love with?

[...]

As for the lack of women as evidence of alleged misogyny, certainly it would be out of place to waste time developing a female character at length if the story is really about two men. But it seems odd and unbalanced to me when the story is set in a world without any women to speak of at all. It's one thing if Avon and Vila are alone on a planet all by themselves; it's another thing altogether when the Pros move through 20th-century England without encountering any females at all, in any capacity. Jane brought this up at a Pros panel at Escapade, asking why there are so often no women in Pros stories— not necessarily as fully realized characters, but just as walk-ons: a doctor to patch the guys up, a clerk in a store, a passerby on the street, etc. A world without any women at all is just plain unbelievable. This is at least as bad a flaw n the writing as presenting an unrealistic view of what it would mean for two men in 70s Britain to be sleeping together.)

Rarity of female/female sex or romance stories in fandom

See also Prevalence of Femslash.

Explanations for the lack of f/f fanworks include:

• Even now, there aren't a lot of shows with two strong female characters (especially where one or both of them aren't pining after male characters on the show), and they were even rarer in the '80s and '90s.
• Straight women aren't as turned on by the mechanics of f/f, so there is no audience. (This argument carries its own baggage by assuming that slashers are overwhelmingly straight women, which is not necessarily the case.)
• We are used to seeing women having intimate emotional relationships, so it isn't necessary to create fictional versions, or easy to differentiate the friendship from a sexual relationship in them.
• We aren't used to seeing women have intimate emotional relationships in fiction (as the Bechdel Test indicates), and so we have nothing to go on.
• Female authors might conceivably write from personal experience or insights, but may shy away from it because they've been told it leads to self-inserts or Mary Sue.

Women are also sidelined in amateur fiction simply by the dearth of heterosexual stories in which they might appear as female love interests, even if the hero is depicted in canon as attracted to women. Female "guest stars" often appeared in early Star Trek fan fiction, as they did on the show, but became less numerous as fans moved beyond the structure of television episodes for their short stories, and particularly after the Mary Sue flak post-1973.

centrumlumina, who runs AO3 Ship Stats, created a Tumblr post listing all of the potential reasons for the lack of femslash in fandom, complete with illustrative chart: "A chart illustrating all of the possible explanations people have suggested for the lack of femslash in my AO3 ship stats survey, and the ways in which they might interlink."

Ignoring/sidelining female fantasy & science fiction authors

Why are women so scarce in SF -- the literature, among the fans, and most of all, among the writers? - Ursula K. LeGuin, speaking at WorldCon 1975 in Melbourne.

Women have been a presence in fantasy and science fiction from the earliest days. However, the history of science fiction and fantasy literature beginning in the 1940s reveals a preponderance of male names and a longstanding presumption that most fans and most professional authors were men. Of course, this is untrue. Female fans have always existed, along with female authors who might write using their initials male pseudonyms or a sexually ambiguous name.In his book Partners in Wonder, Eric Leif Davin reveals that women authors also concealed their names to protect their everyday jobs, as science fiction was considered less than respectable. Also, owing to job scarcity in the post-WWII era, it was common practice to fire employees who were revealed to have a second source of income. Women's place in the post-war workplace was precarious enough, with the U.S. government directing media and medicine to shame women into homemaker roles. In the 1950s, women became more visible. Feminism and gay liberation rose to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and science fiction became a more respected genre, allowing more women to openly join the ranks of authors and fans.

Many female creators started out as fans, just as male creators did. When these women are ignored or sidelined, it sets a bad example for female fans, who might have taken these creators for role models and imagined themselves as creators also.

Notable Misogyny Discussions

See Timeline of Feminism Meta

• there is much discussion in 1995-ish issues of Strange Bedfellows (APA)
• discussions relating to Harlan Ellison's groping professional science fiction author Connie Willis onstage during the Hugo Awards ceremony at Worldcon (2006)
• discussions relating to The Open-Source Boob Project (2008)
• the debate over whether Supernatural's Season 3 was noticeably more sexist than previous seasons, resulting in the Bitch Watch project in which a fan using the handle Apocalypsos counted the number of times per season the words "bitch", "slut", "skank", and "whore" were spoken by the leads on the show.
• the debate over the Sherlock Holmes re-imagining Elementary which has an Asian-American woman playing Watson: Robert Doherty came up with this idea as a way of trying to address Sherlock's canon misogyny.
• the unconscionable behavior of panel moderator Theodore Krulik and high-profile BNF Rene Walling towards professional author Genevieve Valentine at the 2011 Readercon. Valentine was patronized by the former during a panel discussion on Frankenstein, and stalked and sexually harassed throughout the convention by the latter. Readercon's standard rules require that behavior like Walling's merits a ban for life, but the committee only suspended him for two years. After professional author Veronica Schanoes circulated a petition, signed by both men and women, protesting this move, Readercon's committee resigned en masse and the new committee banned Walling for life.
• As a response to the 2011 Readercon incident, Veronica Schanoes disclosed that she had been sexually harassed and threatened at Readercon in 2008 by Aaron Agassi, a mentally ill fan who had already been banned for life from several other conventions for similar behavior. Valentine had written about Agassi's behavior in her 2008 ReaderCon review, sans names.
• In January 2013, the publishers of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America bulletin were criticized for using sexist language. Their less than mature responses sparked huge amounts of criticism from both men and women online.
• In 2014, controversy arose over Ubisoft's lack of a female playable character option in Assassin's Creed: Unity. The sarcastic hashtag #WomenAreTooHardToAnimate emerged based on many developer comments such as "A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation, a lot of costumes," "It was really a lot of extra production work," and similar.
• Also in 2014, the organizers of WisCon were criticized for mishandling the banning of a serial harasser, former TOR editor James Frenkel, who had been a regular attendee and presenter at the convention. See WisCon's flaky response to harassment incident sparks Internet uproar by Aja at The Daily Dot. The 2013 discussion about sexual harassment at science fiction conventions started as a result of reports about Frenkel harassing another attendee at WisCon.[1]. Despite widespread knowledge of the 2013 incident, Frenkel was allowed to attend WisCon in 2014 because the official paperwork got lost. WisCon subsequently issued a temporary ban and indicated that he could return sooner if he behaved. In July 2013, Frenkel left Tor as an outcome of these complaints. Frenkel was subsequently permanently banned from attending the convention. However, in 2017, he was on the convention committee of Odyssey Con, a different science fiction convention also held in Madison, and scheduled as a presenter. Several authors (one of whom cited unpleasant experiences with Frenkel in the past), withdrew from the convention.
• discussions relating to Was Fanfic Any Different in the Olden Days? (2015 Tumblr discussion thread) (2015)
• In 2020, an Assassin's Creed fan named Kulpreet Virdi founded the Assassin's Creed Sisterhood to draw attention to and fight misogyny in the AC fandom and within Ubisoft.

This has all happened before, and it will happen again

In 2008, Sandy Herrold related a story that not only illustrates how long fans have been discussing responses to female characters, but points out the networks' complicity in sidelining or eliminating females. As she was reading through old forum posts, she found that she had said:

"It was interesting talking at to fans who at least claim to have some level of inside knowledge, talking about the "I hate grrls" club on the set (not just the two leads, but everybody up to the producers); not so much because she is a female, but because the network has insisted they have one.

"According to more than one fan, it was borderline intentional; i.e., play all of the scenes with her completely flat, and they'll have to admit that her character doesn't fit."

Sandy assumed this was part of a discussion on female characters in the 2008 show Supernatural before realizing that the post was ten years old and had to do with Cassie, a female character in The Sentinel.

Susan Faludi writes about deliberately negative portrayals of females as either incompetent or predatory:

The popular cable television series Rescue Me, about fictional New York City firefighters after 9-11, revolved around an all-male firehouse brimming with buff studs in which women figured as bitchy ex-girlfriends, harridan wives, or, most frequently, 'booty call' nymphets in spandex whose character development generally followed an arc from brain-dead sex machine to Fatal Attraction psychotic. Toward the end of the show's first season, a lone firewoman [played by Laura Miles] was introduced to the house: "The bean counters lower their standards so they can make their bitch quotas", the chief gripes to his men. She isn't up to the job, can't win the acceptance of the "brothers", initiates an affair with one of the firemen in the house -- and is eliminated from the script by the end of the second season.

Star Trek and TPTB

Curiously enough, this never seemed to be a problem in the very earliest Star Trek fandom, although Gene Roddenberry was an avowed sexist, who stated that women were mere "set dressing" and once suggested that a planet's culture was peaceful because the women put out. Leonard Nimoy said that Roddenberry spoke in production meetings about how "all women were cunts" who should not be allowed into any position of real power. Early casting descriptions of the character Janice Rand included: "With a strip-queen figure even a uniform can't hide, Colt [Rand] serves as Captain's secretary, reporter, bookkeeper --- and with surprising efficiency. She undoubtedly dreams of serving Robert April [Jim Kirk] with equal efficiency in more personal departments." Similarly, early casting description of Star Trek: The Next Generation character Dr. Beverly Crusher included: "Wesley's 35-year old mother. She serves as the Chief Medical Officer. If it were not for her intelligence, personality, and beauty, and the fact that she has the natural walk of a striptease queen, Capt. Picard might not have agreed to her request that Wesley observe bridge activities, therefore letting her son's intelligence carry events further." Roddenberry's obsession with certain physical types led Bob Justman and others who worked on the show to speak about "a Roddenberry woman" -- everyone knew what was meant. Leonard Nimoy referred in interviews to Roddenberry's preoccupation with "miniskirted, big-boobed sex objects -- toys for guys. He cleaned up that act gradually only because people pointed it out to him." Roddenberry's original conception for Deanna Troi was that she should be a "four-breasted, oversexed hermaphrodite". In "Wolf in the Fold", Spock comments that women are "more easily frightened" than men. This must have been a difficult line for Leonard Nimoy to say, given his personal attitude towards women. In Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath's Shatner: Where No Man, he had this to say about "Turnabout Intruder": "What [Roddenberry] set out to prove was that this lady, given command of the ship, would blow it." Marshak adds that the episode "loads the dice" by making the woman mentally unstable instead of showing a rational female in command.

Marshak and Culbreath came in for their own share of misogyny in fandom when their aggressive attitudes, especially towards other fans, apparently caused them to be labeled with the pejorative fubba-wubba, which stands for "fat ugly broad with unbelievably bad attitude". In a 2016 blog entry on his Facebook page, David Gerrold says he was told it was coined specifically for them although the Fancyclopedia entry says it may have originated in the Society for Creative Anachronism. There is apparently no analogous term for an annoying male fan.

Much of the sexism in Star Trek is covered in Tom Lalli's excellent essay "Same Sexism, Different Generation". Lalli is quoted in essays on the Christian fan blog Potluck deconstructing the Left Behind series in terms of its portrayal of women.

Still, Roddenberry's "females as set dressing" meant that women were visible on the show week after week. Viewers saw women in a variety of roles and engagements, with a black woman at back center stage -- right behind the Captain's chair, so you couldn't miss her -- in nearly every episode. This was especially important to children, as these women provided inspiring examples.

And while acknowledging that Captain Kirk seemed to have an "alien babe of the week", especially in the third season -- although the modern image of Kirk as a swaggering, egotistical womanizer is questionable in and of itself -- fan writings of the period did not disparage Elaan, Deela, Miramanee etc. Poems were written about Leila Kalomi and Shahna. The zine Beyond Antares was focused entirely on Uhura. In the pre-Mary Sue era, many stories included women "guest stars" in roles similar to those on the show.

Misogyny aimed at female fans

In March 2022, Buzzfeed correspondent Maya Ogolini asked women readers for examples of sexism in fannish communities. "I can't help but notice that a lot of people who consider themselves "geeky" or "nerdy" still find themselves excluded from the community — especially women, whether they be in fandoms or STEM." She was flooded with examples, which she reprinted in "Geek Girls Are Sharing Sexist Behaviors They Regularly Deal With In Geek Culture, And It's Hurting My Brain" -- "I had to be twice the expert on every TV show, comic, or movie in order to apologize for being a woman in the first place."

From women towards women

Female fans can be especially vicious towards their own sex in the name of winning debates or fandom wars.

Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples.

Resources & Further Reading

General

• Eschergirls, "a blog to archive and showcase the prevalence of certain ways women are depicted in illustrated pop media, specifically how women are posed, drawn, distorted, and sexualized out of context, often in ridiculous, impossible or disturbing ways that sacrifice storytelling."
• Women in Speculative Fiction at Wikipedia.

Television

• Erin Horáková‏, "Kirk Drift", entry in Strange Horizons online magazine, April 10, 2017. Does modern American culture, both fannish and mainstream, have a distorted view of James T. Kirk as a reckless, macho womanizer? Detailed examination of James Kirk as the complex character he really was in the show vs. the popular impression.