Quote:
Originally Posted by Amalthia
I'm also a-okay that it's mostly women. Everything else in the world is made for men, I don't see why women have to accommodate men in spaces we've made for ourselves.
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Why do people have to sort themselves out into "men" and "women"? Even in something that should be as inclusive as fan fiction, where we should be dealing with minds, not bodies, some people have to make a distinction. Are we reading the story, or staring through the computer at the person behind the keyboard? Why can't things be made for
people?
If someone writes good fanfic, I don't care if they're a man, a woman, or a sheep. And if their fanfic isn't worth the pixels it's printed on, I likewise don't care; nothing about them will make it better. Who the person is doesn't make one iota of difference to me; all I care about is what they write. That's a big reason why OTW bothers me: they want only a specific type of writer, and in large part that type is defined not only by what the person chooses to write (media slash) but by how that person happened to be born (female).
It's particularly offensive when I see someone say, in effect, "we've been mistreated, so now it's our turn to mistreat other people" -- which is how the quote I repeated a couple of posts ago came across to me. One would think that a person who had suffered at the hands of others would be less willing, not more, to repeat their mistakes, since they know how wrong it is. I know, intellectually, that it doesn't happen that way; you only have to look at the world around us, past and present, to see how often the oppressed become tyrants the instant they get the chance. But fen should be better. We should do unto others as we would have others do unto us, not do unto others as different people did unto us in the past. Otherwise, we just perpetuate the cycle of abuse. A abuses B, so B abuses C, and on and on it goes. Do we really have to continue that?
There are all kinds of writers, just as there are all kinds of fans. It makes me highly uncomfortable to see an organization say that female RPF slash writers are "real" fanfic writers but male literary gen writers are not. And yes, they have presented themselves as the face/voice of fanfic; if necessary, I can go dig up examples. If they were just
an organization,
an archive, I wouldn't care; those, in all forms, have been popping up like mushrooms since the first fanfic was written. It's when they try to define what fanfic is, and what a fanfic writer is -- and when that definition is at odds with what many fanfic writers believe it is, whether it includes them or not -- that I take issue.
I prefer the motto of Valdemar: There is no One True Way.