Look i dont wanna sound like a Fandom Mom or whatever but what do you think women over 25 or so are supposed to do? Do u really think theyre supposed to drop all their interests and just talk about taxes and marriage or whatever? It seems like 25+ year old fanboys do not receive this kind of “ooh cringe” reaction either. There are guys in their 40s with comic book collections and shit and people might think theyre a nerd at worst, not a freak who shouldnt be trusted
Thank you. Because, here’s the thing, I literally tried that. And this sounds really dramatic but it kind of ruined my life for a long time.
Once I got out of grad-school and started working, at exactly age 25, I figured it was time to get serious because I was “too old for this stuff” and frankly I was afraid of being judged.
I sold all my comics, I stopped reading fanfiction, I stopped playing video games. All of it. It’s not that I never, ever watched anything “geeky” or spent a weekend binge-reading a kink-meme, but when I did, it was rare and I’d feel guilty about it like it was time wasted. I’d keep it all to myself, you know? And without any kind of inspiration, I eventually stopped drawing. After all, I didn’t need it for my “serious job,” so why bother? Unfortunately, my former skill is so atrophied now it’s nearly lost, but worse than that, it’s stressful now instead of the thing I loved to do for most of my life.
What was I doing instead? Well, I’d work my miserable, toxic job, come home and worry about how far behind everyone else I was, and how weird I was compared to all my colleagues. I’d go out with people and do the things they liked doing, but I only pretended to. But I’m not great at that and pretending to be someone else ate me alive. Unsurprisingly, by 31, my anxiety and depression was not in a great place, and I fuckin’ snapped. Not just because of this stuff, of course, but it honestly contributed. I quit my job and left town.
Suddenly I was completely alone, no job, no friends, and no reason to pretend to be someone else. So, I started doing all the things I’d given up. I read all the fanfiction I wanted, I bought a Playstation and an SNES and played them for hours. I bought back every comic book I loved, watched every Marvel movie I missed, and caught up on my favorite characters. I started traveling around just going to cons for the first time (NYCC, GeekGirlCon, DragonCon, etc). In fact, at @geekgirlcon and DragonCon especially, I saw groups of women who were 60+, just fucking enjoying things, and it made me feel so much better about my future. I’m not even joking, I literally cry every time I think about it, because I never realized how scared I was about aging in a world that thinks I’m already a decade too old for the things I love. Suddenly, that wasn’t so scary.
And then I just stopped pretending that I wasn’t into this stuff. I mean all of it, even the stuff no one understand, even the stuff people openly make fun of, even smutty fanfiction.
And look, I’m not saying this cured my depression, or that everything is perfect. For one, I picked a city that’s awful for geeks and I’m trying to figure out where to move and how. For another, I lost six years of making like-minded friends, and it’s hard to find them now because we’re all so worried about being judged and online – the space that was always a refuge for me as a loner weirdo growing up – is now apparently a Children of the Corn. But I’m happier here, actually fucking liking things, than being the unobjectionable robot woman I’m apparently supposed to be.
I don’t expect anyone to actually be interested in this, or have gotten this far, but because I’m having feelings about turning 36 on Monday, I just want to tell anyone who is about to turn 25 that you should just tell people to go fuck themselves. It’s your life. You’re going to offend people no matter what you do, at least choose the direction that makes you happiest, because those people certainly aren’t going to pay for your fucking therapist bills, are they? 🦖
This is gonna sound weird to you guys, but when I first started writing fanfic and sending stories to fanzines to be published back in 1991, in my first fandom all of the fans and writers and editors and readers I met were shocked that I was 17 because they were all in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I was the outlier. I was an aberration.
Wanna know when young people started discovering fandom en masse? In the mid 1990s, when AOL got their internet gateway.
All the folks who ran fannish mailing lists and conventions and published ‘zines and posted fanfic online were over 18, because email and IRC and Usenet and FTP sites and listservs were primarily used by adults because they were almost exclusively college students, government employees, and academics. And the users of gated communities like BBS, GEnie, Compuserv, and AOL all skewed older. Only Prodigy was actually aimed at kids, because prior to the mid-to-late 1990s, children weren’t getting online until they went to university.
And what kids found was the fandom that adults had built online, after being a part of it offline for decades.
Even when FFN was launched, the people who initially posted there were the same people who had been posting fanfic to the internet for a decade: THE GROWN-UPS.
So the idea that we’re meant to put away childish things is hilarious, cos for most of our lives, fandom was not a part of our childhoods. It was a part of our everyday adult lives.
Look, anyone who tells me I should drop fandom because I’m over 25 is going to get laughed out of the room, because you know what age I was when I first discovered organised fandom existed?
I was 26.
I started writing fanfic (or at least, I started writing stories that I labelled as fanfic, rather than just “stories”) at about age 30. I’m in my late forties now, and I have no interest in dropping fandom. I especially have no interest in dropping fandom because some brat who wasn’t even born when I started putting my fanfic online wants to try and sell me their internalised misogyny.
I was twenty-three when I found fandom; in all the important ways, it decided the course of my life.
I didn’t even know I liked tech; for my first fic, I needed a webpage, it was ugly, so I opened it to look at the code, saw my first html, and fell in love. Now I’m an analyst who tests programs for statewide and even national use.
I didn’t know I liked people; I thought something was wrong with me, that I seemed to always say the wrong thing, that I seemed to think wrong. Instead, it just turns out how I think is just fine; there are so many people like me and I still meet them to this day.
I didn’t know I could make and maintain friendships, short or long term; as it turns out, not a huge problem. I make and maintain friendships of almost two decades and still made new friends as of this year.
When my son came out to me as gay, I was ready for the question he wouldn’t ask that I had to answer right then; I love you. Of course it’s okay. And why the fuck are you awake and messaging me at three in the goddamn morning? YOU HAVE SCHOOL TOMORROW. Without all the friends who told me what they needed that day for themselves, I’m not sure I would have known that was something he needed to hear. Without my friends, I wouldn’t have known to even expect–much less how to answer–a thousand questions (at least) he had, and where to have him look for more.
(Also didn’t hurt fandom was the one place I could be sure was all the happy ending gay love stories any gay child would need to read and knew exactly where to send him. Fuck knows the pro version still isn’t exactly thick on the ground though it’s getting better.)
When I first started, I was mentored by an older woman in her forties-fifties, and on her webpage she had a log of all this shit she’d done just in the last year; traveled to hang out with fan friends, all the fic she wrote that year, all these people she met, this wonderful life. She posted to all these sites, and she posted to mailing lists her opinion and argued without fear or self-consciousness.
All I could think is I want to be her.
At twenty-three, I couldn’t imagine it would be possible for me. I’m forty three, and as it turns out, I underestimated myself; it’s even better.
Something you activist kiddies should keep in mind with all the “lol a thirty-year-old in fandom doesn’t she have dishes to do” nonsense is that it’s not only generally misogynist (not sure why you struggle with that one, it’s 101-level, but okay), but it is specifically designed to thwart women’s power by separating you from potential networks.
You think men just somehow magically get powerful as they pass into adulthood? No. They are mentored by, they get given chances to move up from, they learn from older men in their social networks, including in predominantly male “fannish” space. Power, knowledge, opportunities move through those networks–and don’t kid yourself, they are primarily masculine networks. By narrowing your networks to women within one or two years of your age, the “lol thirty-year-olds” rhetoric cuts you off from resources you might use to get stronger. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Just the other day, I was in a room full of older fans that included a Nebula-winning author, an agent for a (different) Hugo-winning author, two tenured professors in radically different fields, and a member of the Foreign Service. You’ll make your own friends in fandom (I did; one of my closest is 15 years older than me, and, my, did I learn from her), but these are the kind of resources available to you there. Misogyny wants you to despise and avoid older women because it wants you weak. Is this really something you want to play along with?
#reblogging for @harriet-spy’s excellent commentary#its NOT AN ACCIDENT#that we disown our mothers and foremothers#it’s how they keep us weak#its how they destroy our networks#fandom is the best old girls network in the world
And, by the way, thinking that a woman over 30 is “too old” to have fun is a misogynistic notion in itself. Our culture already fetishizes female youth to the extreme and does a very good job to convince us that our life is basically over by the time we are 29, why would you want to contribuite to that? It isn’t just that you’re never too old for fandom, it’s that most of the time all these “old women” aren’t old at all.
I am here for the old girls’ network
The old girls’ network saved Star Trek.
The old girls’ network started the first media conventions.
The old girls’ network redefined fanfiction to be stories about characters (as opposed to stories about fans themselves, which was what Fan Fiction was prior to Devra Langsam and Spockanalia.)
The old girls’ network was fandom before FANDOM was a word.
I’m 31, and I’m too powerful for any of these kids to stop.
Until a few days ago, I’d never really witnessed outright fandom ageism targeted at other fans. A large fandom I belong to is rife with antagonism toward a mature female character. She’s in her 50s & is called hag, crone, etc. But I’d only seen that kind of thing leveled at the character until some moron kid on Twitter snarled about another fan, “Omg, I didn’t know she’s fifty. UGH.” She and her friends thought it was hilarious and shameful. This woman is a very sweet person, and no one called the kids out because we hoped she hadn’t seen the tweet & didn’t want to call any attention to it. I’m sure she would have been hurt. It was ugly.
I’m curious, do kids think adults just magically stop being interested in shows & movies at some point? Or do they think we just consume them with clinical detached eyes and then say “Hmm, yes, that was quite a superior viewing experience. Now let me get back to more age-appropriate activities. I think I’d like to mop a floor.” What’s the age cutoff for being excited about a show and wanting to find likeminded people to share it with? A part of me thinks these kids are scared of getting older & the presence of adults in fandoms brings it home to them.
As a married woman, this goes not only for me, but for my husband. He works his butt off, and sometimes he wants to relax with his PlayStation, and that’s perfectly fine. Or get into some football. Which reminds me, do you see men being shamed for painting their faces, dressing in team colors, and being sports fanatics? Not too much, tbh.
I’ve been here since I was twelve years old.
Grown women in fandom showed me a way out of my toxic religion and a path away from my toxic family. Grown women in fandom mentored me, befriended me, accepted me and loved me even as my age peers rejected me and my family of origin neglected me.
When I reached an age where I was interested in sex and porn, grown women in fandom shared their work and their faves with me, and when I said things like “the consent is awesome here!!!!” we had conversations about how consent under duress is not consent. When I was twenty and my grown friends in fandom were between 5 years younger than me and 25 years older than me, those friends helped my pick through the terrible hot takes on relationships and sexuality fundamentalist Christianity had given me.
At twelve, when I barely knew what sex was, I came into fandom believing that if you marry (a man), by virtue of marrying him you’ve consented to sex with him any time he wants for the rest of your life. Grown women in fandom showed me that i, as an emergent young woman in fandom, deserved better than the legacy my religion wanted to force on me.
I came into fandom wanting that for myself, at TWELVE, wanting a life of reproductive servitude and marital discipline from a “good Christian man,” and the grown women of fandom saved me from the life script of fundamentalism.
Christian Fundamentalism gave me tracts about marital discipline. Grown women in fandom gave me frank talk about my right consent.
Grown women in fandom deradicalized me, and stuck with me through the growing pains that go along with that.
I accept absolutely and without question the right of young fans to avoid adult fans if they want to. I also reject the assertion that adults have no place in fandom wholesale, because we have always been here.
It is our duty to make room at the table. It is our duty to welcome with kindness and thoughtfulness those new fans who would sit beside us. But we have no such obligation to clear out of our own home, built with the sweat of our own brows, because newcomers exist who think this part of the world would be better off without us.
To make room fills me with joy. But I will not leave.
I found internet fandom at 14, socially awkward, probably already mentally ill, isolated, being neglected by my family.
Online, these people liked the same Thing I did, and it didn’t matter if they were on the other side of the continent or on the other side of the world. A couple were my age, a couple were college students, a few more were 30-somethings, sometimes with families, and a good handful of them were old enough to be my mother.
And it didn’t matter how devastatingly awkward I was in person. No one mocked my interests or my vocabulary or my appearance.
That connection was vital to me as an isolated kid with no real support network. I got to see what healthy (caring!) relationships looked like, sometimes from both sides of said relationship.
I’m not going to leave the table now that I’m a fandom “old” (I turn 30 in a couple weeks and change), but I’ll add a few more chairs and turn the kettle back on.
So glad I found this post!
I discovered fandoms and started writing fan fiction when I was about 50 years old!!
In high school, my elder daughter inadvertently, introduced me to AO3. She got into trouble reading a fanfic (after completing her class work) & the servers monitor EVERYTHING on their computers connected to the WiFi. Anyway, the disciplinary printed pages & brought in the parents. The concept/story was definitely PG, & I was unimpressed with their thought process, and told them so.
So I started looking through AO3 some more after the meeting & I loved reading the stories that interested me. Then I started writing!!! My daughter & I laugh when we talk about how I found AO3 and fell in love with it! Those teachers would be scandalized by some of the things I've written, but it's cathartic for me! I know it's not real-life! It's a story!
