Rational
Facebook Groups have facilitated the transference of sexism from the physical world to the digital world. Social media cultures mimic and magnify the best and worst of human culture. The purpose of my guide is to celebrate the ways in which fans engage with fandom communities. It is to help them express their love of a fandom without unjustified shame caused by sexism.
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Voyeurism
Facebook Groups allow for niche communities such as Fandoms to come together and express their love and passion of a specific thing. The issue is that passion can come in the form of both positive and negative participation. Voyeurism can help explain the phenomenon of Facebook groups as Prof Dr Cameron Tonkinwise discusses in the week 4 lecture, explaining the ‘point made by Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek that voyeurism is about watching other people’s pleasure, taking pleasure in seeing other people’s pleasure.’ (Tonkinwise, 2021) Voyeurism is essentially how Facebook groups work, most people only view the posts in them, not often participating unless they feel passionately about what has been shared.
However, he goes on to say that ‘we most dislike other people when we see them enjoying something … I don’t like to see people taking pleasure in the things that don’t please me’. (Tonkinwise, 2021) This voyeurism online can lead to trolling through people witnessing others taking pleasure in what they themselves dislike and so feeling motivated to bring those people down.
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Weak Ties and Trolling
Fandom Facebook Groups are mostly made up of people who have created thin social relations, or weak ties. Prof Tonkinwise explains that ‘A thin social relation means that you and I only connect on one particular thing, for instance. So I don’t know anything about you, everything about you other than the fact that you like this band is not of interest to me.’ (Tonkinwise, 2021) Fandoms are made of weak ties, it is rare that you will meet someone in a fandom group and discuss anything other than the fandom. While these thin social relations may be weak when looked at individually, if they are grouped all together they create a strong connection to the fandom. This strong connection can lead to positive and negative outcomes. Fans may lift each other up and support each other’s love of the fandom, or they may tear each other down if they have differing views about the fandom content.
These negative engagements are trolling and abuse through posts and comments. It can be a negative engagement between two fans, a fan and the content creator or a fan and someone outside the fandom.
Prof Tonkinwise states the way a group of people can have a negative impact online. He says, ‘So piling on and situations of the internet in which overnight someone can be an absolute pariah, they can be cancelled, they can be shamed.’ (Tonkinwise, 2021) It does not even need to be a large group of people for this effect to happen, with many attacks that fandoms can be perceived as making, in reality it is generally a minority within the fandom who are trolling their target.
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The Way We Communicate
The way we communicate online and in Facebook Groups is very different to previous forms of communication in human history. Prof Tonkinwise explains in the week 7 lecture that we mostly communicate via the written word online, even when we post an image it will more often than not be accompanied by text. He continues stating, ‘We have a very literate form of communication but because it’s electronic, it has the immediacy of the oral. So it can feel like you are actually in dialogue with someone, but you’re in dialogue with someone through a fundamentally ambiguous domain.’ (Tonkinwise, 2021) Generally, when a conversation or communication is happening immediately online, it will feel private but as with anything posted online it is actually very public. This feeling of intimacy and privacy changes the way people communicate and so they will often show more of their passion, whether that be positive or negative. These negative interactions online can be taken to a new level as Prof Tonkinwise explains, ‘The nature of any of these flame war arguments is very difficult because there are no literate principles, there are no socially mandated sets of rules that have come through a kind of common schooling, in the way schools try to discipline arguments in a particular way. You have the capacity for things to be completely fabricated. All of this is occurring at the same time in the decentralization of content generation which means the kind of collapse of any kind of arbiters of these things.’ (Tonkinwise, 2021) There is no one set of rules online as the internet is a global community full of many different cultures and opinions. However within Facebook Groups, admins do create a set of rules for members to follow, if a member breaks these rules they can be removed from the group.
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Sexism Online
Fandoms that are generally made up of mostly women are unfairly targeted and stigmatised. It is a mark against you if you express a love for Sarah J Maas books or for Taylor Swifts music. People in these fandoms are labelled obsessive and hysterical. When comparing fandoms to sport you see men yelling at the TV or yelling at umpires and referees and yet they are not called out for it nearly as much as women are for expressing their taste in music or books. Lucy Blakiston touches on this in her article ‘It’s time to stop shitting on stans’ when she poses the question, ‘Why are young women screaming at a One Direction concert seen as hysterical, but grown men screaming at their inanimate TV’s or literally rioting and causing millions of dollars of damage, is just all part of being a sports fan?’ (Blakiston, 2021) She also lists many of the skills that stans and fans have that are not recognised because of the way they are being used. These include creating videos, photoshop and writing skills. There are a lot of transferable life skills such as organisation and marketing. She exclaims, ‘It’s no wonder there’s a confidence gap between women and men in the workplace, it’s literally SO HARD for us to recognise our skills as skills when we are constantly being told that our motive for learning them is something we should be ashamed of.’ (Blakiston, 2021) Women do not feel like they can put skills on their resume such as leadership if it was in association with, for example running a Harry Potter club in high school.
Lindsay Ellis takes an in depth look at the hate thrown at Twilight and its author Stephanie Meyer when it was at the height of its popularity. She states that ‘I am not saying that Twilight deserves to be re-evaluated because it was secretly good the whole time, but rather that the level of virulent bile that came to define it and Meyer herself was actually not in proportion to Twilight’s badness or anything Stephenie Meyer herself did.’ (Ellis, 2018) She compares it to other similar franchises aimed at men saying, ‘Yes, Twilight is silly. A lot of pop culture is silly. Imagine the same level of vitriol being levelled at the equally silly Fast and the Furious franchise. Both franchises are dumb cheese, but they are dumb cheese targeting different markets.’ (Ellis, 2018) The interesting thing that Ellis notes is that ‘The vast majority of the virulent hatred towards Twilight didn’t really come from grown men but from other girls and women who were more than eager to distance themselves from something so unapologetically female.’ (Ellis, 2018) Females fear being stigmatised for something that is obviously female targeted because they may be seen as just another obsessive and hysterical girl if they like it, so they choose to distance themselves from the people who unapologetically claim that they enjoy the fun romance novels known as Twilight. Melissa Click reiterates this in her book on Anti-Fandom where she looks at all the different ways people dislike or hate fandoms and the reasons behind it. She states, ‘in a patriarchal society, female figures and texts aimed at or otherwise coded as designed for women will prove easy default bad objects, as even those consumers with feminist values may find anti-fan coalitions easier to come by when they are directed at female figures or texts.’ (Click, 2019) This happens to such an extent that some people will hate female targeted media such as Twilight or Sarah J Maas books without having even read them.
With the rise of social media, this hate and trolling has increased and it has become incredibly easy for these groups of haters to target female artists or creators. This is why private Facebook Groups for fandoms are becoming increasingly popular as admins can remove anyone who is promoting negativity and hate in the group. It has created a safe space for fans to express their love and joy of female targeted media without stigma.