Thinking out loud about Fandom misogyny
This excellent post by @slitheringghost about how fandom can lazily replicate and often fail to meaningfully challenge — the books’ (JKR’s) minimisation of female intellect has had me thinking more broadly about this fandom.
I’ve had thoughts for a long time about how fandom struggles with female-presenting people expressing intellect, at least in my personal experience (and to be clear, this isn’t everyone in this space, and I’m not claiming to speak for all female-presenting people here — I’m talking about patterns I’ve observed in my own experience). In my entire life, I have never been told not to have an opinion as often as I have in this space. I’ve been vague-posted that I have no right to an opinion, had people in my inbox telling me my views aren’t important and that nobody should listen to me, had my sexual desires speculated about without my consent (e.g. “you think X so you must want Y” even when I’m not talking about anything sexual) and been instructed to be quiet rather than having my ideas actually engaged with (I have literally received rape threats for analysing a fictional character through the lens of mental health). I’ve also had misogynistic insults like “bitch” and “cunt” appear in anon hate.
And the hostility listed above almost always clusters around my metas and longer think-pieces and invariably attaches itself to moments where I’m analysing, theorising, or trying to think something through in public. Again, this pushback almost never takes the form of substantive disagreement. It isn’t my arguments being dismantled; it’s me being told to stop talking (or more accurately thinking) altogether (if I wasn’t a huge advocate for globally enforced podcast licences I would be advising some of you anons to genuinely consider starting a red-pill podcast).
And this isn’t me asking for sympathy or trying to martyr myself (if this were unbearable, I would simply log the fuck out). I’m also not saying that other marginalised identities don’t experience pushback here (they absolutely do) I’m saying that, in my case, the hostility to me thinking in public has a distinctly unpleasant misogynistic undercurrent, and it’s hard not to notice it.
For me what’s particularly noticeable is how closely that undercurrent mirrors patterns in fandom discourse more generally. For example, when canonically intelligent male characters are feminised by fandom, or popularly reimagined as more feminised versions of themselves, they’re often stripped of their intellect altogether. This isn’t a complaint about gender-bending or reimagining characters (if anything, being transformative is where this space is at its most creative, and that freedom to play with gender is part of what makes fandom valuable): the issue is what consistently gets lost when femininity enters the frame.
You see the same selective logic at work with canonically female characters too. Intelligence and female characters are very rarely conflated in this fandom in the way they routinely are for male ones. Bellatrix is an obvious example here: her madness is leaned into far more than her brilliance or talent, despite the fact that she is canonically formidable. And while there are people who do interesting, expansive work with female characters, you very rarely see women reimagined at scale as misunderstood geniuses or intellectual outliers. Sybill Trelawney is another case in point — despite making several genuinely accurate predictions in canon, she’s almost universally treated as a fraud, rather than as someone whose abilities might be uneven, misread, or poorly understood (a kind of rehabilitative reading that sidelined male characters are frequently afforded).
All of which taken together, and based on my own experience suggests to me a deeper discomfort with the idea of someone read as feminine thinking out loud, analysing, or using their brain (especially as my gender is what is reached for to ‘put me in my place’). And this discomfort shows up in how fandom struggles with intellect once it’s associated with femininity more broadly (not only when characters are feminised, but in the way canonically female or female-presenting characters are treated at scale). For me, these patterns (both towards real and fictional people) don’t feel separate; they feel like the same unease.
