Things were so much simpler before women started stealing all of my favorite things from me. I don’t care what anyone says. Women aren’t and will never be true fans of Doctor Who, Star Trek or any of that. You jumped in because you wanted attention. You became “fans” because suddenly liking sci-fi shows and fantasy became popular. You only want guys to drool over you because you’re girls who “like” geeky stuff. Kindly go jump in a lake and die.
A woman organized the letter-writing campaign to NBC to save Star Trek when it was on the verge of being cancelled after the first season, and thus enabled the show to continue on for three seasons allowing it to go into syndication and gain the following it did in reruns.
A woman organized the first ever Star Trek convention, and convinced NASA to donate a truckload full of stuff for said convention thus starting the tradition of Star Trek conventions featuring space for modern science.
A woman greenlit Star Trek while acting at the head of a major studio, and consistently fought pressure to cancel the show. This same woman was the person who greenlit Mission Impossible and was the first woman to head a major studio.
A woman wrote many of the most famous TOS episodes, and went on to write on to write episodes of The Animated Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine.
Learn your history.
You think women stole your favorite things? If it weren’t for women, those things wouldn’t even exist, but you probably don’t even know the names of the women who made that possible.
So much for “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”…
Who is the fake now?
Also, a lot of the current fandom terminology we take for granted originated in the Star Trek fandom, specifically Star Trek fanfic. And who were the major driving force behind Star Trek fanfic? Women.
Earliest spec fic texts in the English-speaking Western world were written by Thomas More (Utopia), Lady Margaret Cavendish (the Blazing World), and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein). Note that there are two women among those names.
I am so sick of these Fake Geek Guys who don’t even understand the history of the fandom they claim to want to protect.
Are you fucking kidding me? So we can create your favorite things, but it’s impossible for us to be fans of them?
AHAHAHAHAHAHA YES
It would be lovely to see the names of all the women who were so important to the history of Star Trek and Doctor Who.
I’ll quickly add that Marcia Lucas won an Oscar for editing Star Wars: A New Hope and that The Empire Strikes Back was co-written by legendary science fiction author Leigh Brackett.
Bjo Trimble organized the letter writing campaign
Joanie Winston,
Eileen Becker, and Elyse Pines were members of the committee that ran that first convention
Lucille Ball (of I Love Lucy fame) greenlit Star Trek after it’s pilot was rejected by NBC
Dorothy Catherine “DC” Fontana was the writer of
“Tomorrow Is Yesterday”, “Friday’s Child”, “Journey to Babel”, “This Side of Paradise”, and “The Enterprise Incident” in the original series, along with several other episodes under the psuedonym Michael Richards. She continued writing for the series all the way into 1993.
It takes a special kind of misogyny in a man for him to believe that women are literally incapable of enjoying certain popular entertainment and only fake it for attention from men.
i’m just laughing so hard right now bc it’s hitting me that there are geek guys who think that women would actually pretend to like this stuff to cater to guys. like it never really occurred to me the depths of how absolutely fucking stupid that idea is. ”we appear to have common interests but you still don’t like me so that must mean we don’t actually have common interests and you are not a real fan”. oh my god i just can’t right now. i want to feel offended by the fact that there is an idiot out there trying to tell me what i can and cannot like but i’m just too busy laughing.
I love when fake geek boys get slammed.
I’m reasonably certain I’ve been a sci-fi fan longer than most of these gibbering blowhard fake geek boys have been alive.
What makes me, a happily married woman in her thirties, so enraged about these little pukes is that I have been into this shit since before they were born. If you transported to my teenage bedroom, you would find that instead of wallpaper, I had hundreds of mint-in-box Star Wars figures lining the walls. I started watching Doctor Who in 1996. Sliders? VR 5? Quantum Leap? Highlander? ALL OF THAT GEEKY SHIT. All of it, before these petulant man-babies were born. EVEN GHOSTBUSTERS, ASSHOLES.
But yeah, I’ve got TIME LADY tattooed across my knuckles to impress some barely legal misogynists at a convention, because I’m the least ambitious cougar of all time.
On the Doctor Who thing I’m a fan at least in part because my parents are and were fans. And have been since the late 70s. My mom knitted Tom Baker’s scarf WAY before it was ‘cool’ (and I think had to design her own pattern). She also sold jellybabies when she owned a coffee and candy store because of Doctor Who and always donated some to the local PBS station for their pledge drives. They had boxes and boxes of classic who on VHS that I think they had to get rid of a move or two ago.
My mom’s also been a Sherlock Holmes fan since she was a kid.
A few weeks ago, while preparing to speak to a band called Mothxr, I came across an interview they’d given a couple of months earlier. In it, they were asked their favourite thing to see in the audience from onstage – and their answer was all too familiar. “Guys!” they said. “I’m not kidding!” I wish they were.
“A balanced ratio of men to women,” they continued, “means we have music listeners in the audience. When it’s all girls of a certain age, it’s likely that our music might not be their primary interest.” It’s probably worth pointing out here that Mothxr’s lead singer is Penn Badgley – who rose to fame in the TV series Gossip Girl. His anxious desire to distance himself from a show he feels he’s outgrown is a common one. But so, too, are comments like that.
Speaking to Rolling Stone at the end of last year, 5 Seconds of Summer estimated that “75% of our lives is [spent] proving we’re a real band. We’re getting good at it now. We don’t want to just be, like, for girls.” In order to prove themselves as a “real band” (apparently for the time being, they’re merely a figment of teenage girls’ imagination) they must gain the approval of men. Already, they explained proudly, they’re “seeing a few male fans start to pop up”. What an incredible moment that must be for them – to glimpse a man among a sea of female frivolity, each Y chromosome taking them one step closer to credibility. Never mind that they wouldn’t have been doing this interview if it wasn’t, like, for the girls that bought their records.
Still, it’s not exactly 5 Seconds of Summer’s fault that they’ve got such a distorted view of things. After all, they’re operating in a culture in which teenage girls are seen as the lowest common denominator of music fan. A culture in which older men are the bastions of good taste, the brave protectors of real music – while young women’s enthusiasm is dismissed as a sort of mass hysteria, blocking their ability to discern good from bad.
As a reviews editor, I’ve lost count of the number of times writers have – while bemoaning a gig’s drawbacks – referred derisively to the amount of “teenage girls” in the crowd. It’s as if that phrase itself is a code that needs no further explanation, no elaboration as to why a young woman’s fully paid-up presence at the gig is, unquestionably, a bad thing. It isn’t. Their judgments are just as legitimate, their enthusiasm just as credible, even if their screams are a little louder. And if you think their taste is indiscriminate, you’d be wise to remember that for every One Direction, there’s a thousand other bands who tried and failed to gain even a fraction of their success.
This is the case now, as it was 40 years ago. After David Bowie died, my mum dug out a £1 ticket from a Bournemouth gig she’d been to as a 15-year-old, alongsidesome old BBC footage of the very same show. Bowie, says the segment’s narrator, is “an object that is worshipped by millions of girls”. Later he decries, his voice plummy and faintly horrified: “It is a sign of our times that a man with a painted face and carefully adjusted lipstick should inspire adoration from an audience of girls aged between 14 and 20. Everywhere.” At this point, the level of panic bubbling up in his voice suggests he’s worried they might be infectious – “there are the girls”. Cut to 43 years later, and it seems those girls were pretty spot on as far as that “bizarre, self-constructed freak” Bowie was concerned. Just as they were with the Beatles.
I’m not suggesting, of course, that every band adored by teenage girls in 2016 will go on to be universally revered. (For one thing, the taste of teenage girls is far from a monolithic entity.) I certainly don’t think, even if they keep up the impressive feat of gaining male fans, that 5 Seconds of Summer are likely to be remembered in the same way as Bowie. But they’re no less likely to do so than a band enjoyed solely by older men with furrowed brows and an extensive vinyl collection. To look out into a crowd, or into your Twitter mentions, and immediately discount the approval of young women, is a foolish thing to do. Don’t bite the hand that feeds.
After interviewing Mothxr, and tweeting my dislike for their sentiments on gender, I got an email from Penn Badgley. He wanted to explain that he was pushed into answering that question, and that his quote had been taken somewhat out of context, but more so, he wanted to apologise. And to let me know that he’d changed his mind. “Every great band ever,” he conceded, “has played for a predominantly young female audience, and that audience is appreciative and invested and willing to scream and dance with abandon. Which is the point of music.” It sure is.
“The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities; we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.”
2. When St. Thomas Aquinas Said Women Are Sperm Accidents
“… A female is deficient and unintentionally caused. For the active power of the semen always seeks to produce a thing completely like itself, something male. So if a female is produced, this must be because the semen is weak or because the material [provided by the female parent] is unsuitable, or because of the action of some external factor such as the winds from the south which make the atmosphere humid.”
3. When Napoleon Said Women Are Just Slaves
“Nature intended women to be our slaves… they are our property; we are not theirs. They belong to us, just as a tree that bears fruit belongs to a gardener…. Women are nothing more than machines for producing children.”
4. When Cato The Elder Argued That All Women Are Wild Animals
“Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is useless to let go the reins and then expect her not to kick over the traces. You must keep her on a tight rein…. Women want total freedom or rather – to call things by their names – total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters.”
5. When Pliny The Elder Warned That Menstrual Blood Is Poisonous
“On the approach of a woman in this state, must will become sour, seeds which are touched by her become sterile, grafts wither away, garden plants are parched up, and the fruit will fall from the tree beneath which she sits. Her very look, even, will dim the brightness of mirrors, blunt the edge of steel, and take away the polish from ivory. A swarm of bees, if looked upon by her, will die immediately.”
6. When Plutarch Did Not Approve Of Independent Lady-Emotions
“A wife should have no feelings of her own, but share her husband’s seriousness and sport, his anxiety and his laughter.”
7. When Friedrich Nietzsche Was Basically Just Friedrich Nietzsche
“Finally – woman! One-half of mankind is weak, typically sick, changeable, inconstant – woman needs a religion of weakness that glorifies being weak, loving, being humbled as divine.”
8. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau Said Ladies Only Need To Be Taught About Men
“The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to council them, to console them, and to make life agreeable and sweet to them – these are the duties of women at all times, and should be taught them from their infancy.”
9. When Sigmund Freud Despaired Of Grown Ladies’ Sexuality
“The sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.”
10. When James Joyce Was A Bit Of An Idiot
“Men are governed by lines of intellect – women: by curves of emotion.”
I love being able to blunt steal and kill swarms of bees.
Posted on
Scott writes that all 23 women interviewed for the paper described doing both male and female chores. Men, on the other hand, talked mostly about male labor. Unless specifically asked, only a third of the men interviewed mentioned any work traditionally done by women. One apple grower described his orchard as a one-man business that his son would eventually inherit, with his wife and daughter only minimally involved. But, in a separate interview, his wife said that while her husband and son took care of the trees, she handled seedlings in the nursery, coordinated sales, hired seasonal labor, kept the books, and helped make decisions. She also mentioned that their daughter ran the farm’s fruit stand.
The men were also more likely to emphasize male ownership of family enterprises—“my grandfather’s farm” or “my tractor.” In contrast, the women usually referred to “my grandmother and grandfather’s farm” or “our tractor.”
