User:Mel's quill/sandbox

Sports
Sports are traditionally a male-dominated fan culture item, in terms of viewing as well as physical involvement. Women are often rejected from the participation within this group of fans. For instance, women do not frequent live sporting events as frequently as men due the overt sexism and aggressive masculinity displayed at such events, a lack of proper facilities for women (such as restrooms), and the fact that, ideologically, sport is considered a male domain. Due to this, female fans are often labeled as ‘inauthentic’ in comparison with their male fan counterparts, who are able to follow the games live as opposed to watching via a television screen.

This is not a new issue, since women have been barred from sports as early as the ancient Greek Olympics. However, strides have been made towards the inclusion of women. For example, after England’s World Cup win in 1960, a television campaign was launched to attract more female fans, whereby women could watch instructional coverage of football rules to better understand the sport. A similar initiative was taken up in 2000 by the NFL where they “launched a series of seminars entitled ‘football 101’ to teach women more about (American) football.” This campaign was a success and led to a 5 percent increase of female fans over the following year. Yet, despite such efforts, sports fandoms are still viewed by the majority as a male domain, and gender inequality is rarely discussed as an issue within the community.

Music
Marginalization of female fans in music related fandoms can be reflected within music genres, where the “commercial” or “mainstream” music is feminized, while the “hip” and “authentic” is viewed as masculine. According to Diane Railton, this trend originated from the inception of rock music, when musicians rebelled against the ‘low-culture’ of mass-produced, commercialized pop music, and the ‘high-culture’ of Western Art Music developed through theoretical education. However, while Rock music claimed to be revolutionary at its inception in the 1960s and 70s, it maintained hegemonic ideas of gender, where a woman’s role was to provide the sex. In fact, to this day, women who become involved in a rock music fandom are often relegated to the realm of ‘groupies’, deemed unable to enjoy the artistic merits of the music and more interested in sexual interactions with the attractive male musicians.

Such discrimination is further perpetuated through the actual content of such forms of music, in terms of band members and production, its lyrical content, and political agenda. For instance, according to Mary Meade, “Seldom [in song lyrics] does one come across a mature, intelligent woman, or for that matter, a woman who is capable enough to hold a job,” such music typically reducing women to their bodies. As for women’s involvement as rock band members, Meade states that “The very idea of a woman's rock band is looked upon as weird […] a freak show good for a few giggles.” This idea is reinforced by Cheryl Cline who addresses how women rock stars, despite being involved in the music scene in an artistic, intellectual fashion, are frequently labeled as ‘groupies’ who are only interested in joining the music scene to “[form] alliances with the most starstudded of their colleagues,” while such is never the case with male members of a rock band.

This is partly because rock music is typically associated with masculinity, or masculine ideas of intellect, while pop music, or mainstream music, is qualified as a more feminine genre (hence the critique often heard against such types of music). The rock music movement, at its inception, had the goal to create serious music with a meaning, tapping into subjects of political, cultural, and psychological discussion, in opposition with mainstream pop music at the time, which, according to Eric Burdon, lead singer of the Animals, was “about love and kisses and all that stuff” or more emotional, aka feminine, content. In fact, despite pop music’s predominance within mainstream media, it is rarely the subject of academic writing within the field of popular music studies, or, when discussed, is described using highly sexualized terms, linking pop music to hormonal changes in adolescent girls. According to Railton, such forms of music, with its predominantly female audience and feminine subject matter, pose a threat to the masculine domain of ‘serious’ popular music and the certainties of gender and genre, hence the need to discredit its discourse.

Comic Books
Men are often portrayed as dominant within Comic Book Fandoms, causing increased discrimination against women interested in its content. Part of the problem is the habit of overlooking the female fans present within its community. For instance, several academic texts examining US Comic Book Culture reinforce this belief simply by their titles, such as “Jean-Paul Gabilliet's Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books; Gerard Jones's Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book; [and] Matthew J. Pustz's Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers.” Furthermore, the content within the titles listed, according to Suzanne Scott, features inconsistent and limited data in terms of their research study groups, using biased information to reiterate the fact that comic book culture and fandom is completely male, when in fact that is not the case. Yet, even the women present, and recognized, are subject to discrimination.

Within comic books, there is an extreme lack of women representation, particularly in superhero comics dominant among mainstream culture, and the few representations of heroines present within its content involve a disproportionate number of disheartening representations, many being “depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in a refrigerator." This lack of representation causes women to feel unvalued, undesired, and excluded from the world of comic books.

Furthermore, women are often attacked or harassed for their interest in comic books, either demeaned as “fake geek girls” who don’t truly appreciate the art form, or relentlessly hit on by men present within the fandom. This happens with particular frequency within the institution of the comic book shop. Matthew J. Pustz describes comic book stores as the most important site for avid fans, serving “as a kind of cultural clubhouse, where fans can spend time being themselves among their friends and other likeminded individuals.” Therefore, the comic book store is an important part of the fandom experience. Yet, as Noelle Stevenson, a professional comic book writer and enthusiast, describes in a short comic about her experience in comic shops, women are often made uncomfortable and unwelcome in these locations, whether through their reception by the male staff and clients in the store, or through the overtly sexist representations displayed.

This problem is also depicted within the popular television show Big Bang Theory. In episode 20 of season 2, entitled “The Hofstadter Isotope”, female character Penny joins the four main ‘fanboy’ characters in their local comic book shop in search for a gift. Yet, the moment she enters, she is the subject of multiple stares, highlighting how women present within these establishments are frequently singled out and made to feel uncomfortable for their mere presence.

However, Comic Book Fandom is in fact more complex than this, due to the multiple communities within the large world of comic books, and while mainstream superhero comic book fandoms consist largely of young men between the ages of ten to twenty-one, alternative comics audiences are far more diverse, hence the difficulty to generalize such a large group.