Elkins discusses why online fights, especially within online fandom communities, can get so very nasty. She reflects on the paranoiac style of many online fandom disputes, and wonders if there’s a connection to how girls in our culture are taught to express aggression:
The other week, however, while I was at the beach, I read a book someone had recommended to me on the subject of girls’ particular modes of aggression–Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, by Rachel Simmons–and it was really shocking to me just how well many of the things that this book described were things that I strongly associate with online fandom dynamics. That in turn has made me wonder to what extent much of the “paranoiac” behavior that I’ve been seeing in on-line fandom might be an artifact not only of CMC, but also of the predominantly female demographics of the fandom circles in which I’ve travelled. […]
Because of this, and also because these modes of aggression are often so very subtle, their use actively encourages people to hyper-analyze their social environments, to try to “read things into” all of their social interactions. There’s not nearly as much room for misunderstanding in a fistfight as there is in a dirty look, or in the slight turning away of bodies when a girl who has been targeted for exclusion enters a room. These are shows of aggression which already need to be ‘translated’ in order to be properly understood; if you can’t perform this act of translation, then you will have no idea what is really going on. Girls learn to spend a lot of their time and mental energy trying to analyze and to second-guess the behavior of the people around them precisely because within their social milieus, this is often a relevant social skill.
The above quote only scratches the surface of the post, so I recommend that you head over there and read the whole thing.
There’s a great deal of interesting discussion in Elkin’s comments, as well. I liked this brief discussion of how society views male vs female aggression, for instance, and this comment on the overlap between girls’ friendships, fandom, and romance:
…Another of the things that kept striking me as I read that book was just how similar, in many ways, girls’ friendships at the age at which these behaviors are most common really are to romantic relationships, so much so that I think at times it’s difficult even to avoid the language of romance when we talk about girls’ friendships. Girls get crushes on each other; they have break-ups; they seek exclusionary relationships with their best friends and then become fantastically jealous of interlopers. They write each other what are really, for all intents and purposes, love letters. They’re very passionate about each other.
And that’s something else that I see a lot of in on-line fandom, honestly, although I suspect that some might find it a somewhat uncomfortable subject. :) Fandom interactions often seem to me to have strong homoerotic overtones: we express approbation by giving each other *snogs* and expressing desires to have each others’ “internet babies.” We “fangirl” each other.
I was also particularly struck by the exchange between Lyssabard and Elkins about how the structure of Livejournal encourages paranoia:
The entire ‘friending’ issue is monstrously given to fostering social paranoia, I quite agree, as is the ability not only to friendslock and screen comments, but also to use “private filters,” so that even ‘friends’ can’t really know whether they’re privy to all of each other’s interactions or not. An excellent recipe for paranoia, that – I’m not sure if they could have designed a better one if such had been their intent.
There are many more comments worth quoting, but I’d better stop before I end up summarizing the entire thing.
Although Elkins focuses on online fandom in particular, I can’t help reading Elkins’ essay and thinking about how the interactive style she describes applies to some of the feminist internet communities I’ve been involved with. The closest match I’ve been involved with are the Ms Boards (a large, now-long-defunct feminist bboard that Ms Magazine used to run), where the paranoid style – right down to wondering if parties F were plotting against parties G in private forums or instant chat, and accusations of conspiracies – happened quite a bit. (There was also an appalling amount of cliquishness, which I think encourages that sort of thought).
The Feminist Blogosphere seems to have a great deal less of that sort of thing (at least, I’ve seen it less). I think one reason for that is that there’s less feeling of privacy in blogs. In BBoards – and in LiveJournal communities, for that matter – it’s easy to fall into the illusion (sometimes true, sometimes not) that the people you think of as involved in that community are the only people reading what you write. Blogs, for some reason, feel more like public documents.
Please Note: Moderation at “Alas” is sometimes heavy-handed. If you’d like to avoid all that, consider commenting on the cross-post on Creative Destruction instead.
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Here I go again:
What’s fandom mean?
I don’ t know the specific definition the author being quoted has in mind, but I take it to mean the culture of fans (pop/film stars/cult TV, etc.).
Ron, I was using the term to refer to the specific subculture also sometimes known as “on-line media fandom,” as opposed to ‘fandom’ in the more general sense of “all people considered fans of things,” which might also encompass sports fans, literary science fiction fans (“truefen”), comics collectors, music lovers, etc.
Sorry, my use of the term was not defined as it might have been in an article intended for a wider reading audience than my livejournal usually gets. “Fandom” is the short-hand by which members of that subculture themselves – who comprise the majority of my readership – refer to their own subcultural milieu, so the idea of trying to define the term more specifically than that didn’t particularly occur to me while I was writing the post. Sorry for the confusion.
Oh my goodness… Amp, were you around for the great Ms Boards vs Bust Boards throwdown (what was that, 1998?)? That was quite the intra-family squabble.
Oh ghod yes, the whole LJ “friends” thing with all its attendant baggage! This is, I believe, a holdover from LJ’s original purpose as a way for people who really were friends — online or otherwise — to keep in close contact. However, confusion between the real-life and the LJ usage of “friend” causes all kinds of drama.
A fair number of people who are on my “friendslist” are really not people I think of as personal friends — they’re only people who write interesting stuff, and whose journals I therefore want to read. It sometimes makes me a little twitchy to know that they can also read my friends-locked posts; I just have to remind myself that I’m probably not important enough to them for what I say there to matter.
What I really wish LJ would do is either remove the “friends” terminology altogether, or implement a level between “friends” and “public”, where you could put people in that “I want to read what they write, but I don’t necessarily want to make them privy to everything I write” category. Call it “acquaintances”, perhaps.
Celine,
You can actually do that with various levels of screening. You can screen a post so that it is only readable by whatever sub-group of your f-list you want to be able to read it. It just doesn’t have a formal designation like “acquaintances.”
Basically, “>create a custom friends group (just like you would do to filter your friends list).
Then, when you post an entry, select custom as the security level, and select the custom friends group that you created as the group who can see the post (a list of all your custom friends groups appears when you select custom).
It looks like you have to use the full update journal page to access this feature, rather than the “quick update” section of the “my LJ.”
Anyway, hope that makes sense and that you find it useful.
The Simmons book, Odd Girl Out, should be required reading for anyone with daughters. That our societal structures offer girls so few “appropriate” ways to demonstrate anger or experience their own power is appalling.
Well I’m definitely intrigued by this book now, and because of this blog and responses I’ll seek it out as well as this link to Elkins’s original comments. (I just wanted to give anyone who cares here a head’s up that now you all have got my juices pumping, my curiousity piqued, this really sounds like an area ripe for all sorts of examination for anyone interested in pop*culture, media, etc. influence on girls/women/men/society!)
But let me just add that I recently discovered, quite by accident, that my beloved love-bug sweet-pea princess niece who just turned five is a bona fide Mean Girl. I witnessed this myself at the end of the pre-school year, on the very day she turned from four to five as a matter of fact — I went to her classroom’s birthday party and took photos, at this age it seems there are many extra adults helping out with classroom parties. Anyway. As folks got the classroom set up for the cake and presents all the preK children from all the preK classes had a half-hour recess in the gym. And they cut loose, little bodies flinging themselves around, dancing, running, basketballs bouncing, etc etc. And my little precious, as observed in this dynamics where no one even saw me tucked away with the teachers on the bleachers, wasn’t just a Mean Girl but *the* Mean Girl of the girls of this entire age set. She’s run zig-zag from one gym wall through all the bouncing basketballs and haphazard toddlers and preschoolers flailing about, and a single-file line of little girls would follow behind her, going whichever zig-zag way she led. But the meanness and cliqueness of the dynamics really shocked me when two teeny tiny girls — turns out they were just-turned-four-years-olds — wanted me to take their photo when they realized I’d been snapping shots of my niece running about. And so I turned toward these adorable little gals.
And at that point my niece and three other Mean Girls slinked — there is no other word that comes to mind to convey the way they deliberately, cooly slithered over as if these girls were prey, as if all this time they hadn’t noticed them or me or anything but just suddenly did and wanted to make sure the *right* girls got the camera’s attention — they came over to the bleachers and LoveBug barked at me, her aunt: “They’re Not in Our Age Group!” I shot her one glance and she turned back into the little doll we all love and adore at home. I made them *all* pose together for a group photo for me.
And when I developed it, there on the left end of the photo were the two enthusiastic 4-year-olds, clearly ecstatic to be in the same photo with the 5-year-old Mean Girls — but the entire whole of these little girls ALL being Mean Girls, there being plenty of other little girls who honestly didn’t even realize anything was going on over near the bleachers. My niece was in the middle and — I swear this is true — she and the very end Mean Girl Boy-Mad Thingy of the Clique flanking the right of the photo were shooting each other this look over the heads of the other clique girls inbetween them, I mean, the most self-satisfied, smug, heads-tilted-back eyes-narrowed look on their faces that said perfectly clearly:
Can You Believe We’re Letting These Two 4-Year-Old Losers Appear In this Photo With *Us* (the four 5-year-old Mean Girls) as Though They’re Part of Us?
It was all so shocking to me, I PMd elissa from the old boards about it. Myself, I had grown up oblivious to all of these dynamics — in fact, such ignorance of these dynamics is probably one of the *key* reasons I never was in the It clique in the first place — but it wasn’t just the dynamics, IT WAS THEIR AGE, HOW YOUNG IT ALL STARTED. It did not seem possible that such dynamics already were distinctly in place. And elissa, genius that she is, said of course this is the case, and that the truth of the matter is the human animal has to be socialized to be nice, not the other way around, and to share, for example, rather than take the lead and run away with it if she can and can set the rules for everyone else to follow, etc.
Oops. Sorry. I don’t know how I got so far out there. SEE! I *told* you you’ve all tapped in to something that obviously fascinates me and now I’m dying to get this book and go read this other blog etc……
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