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08/24/2002: this entry is the result of an uncooperative LJ interface
Obviously my reply to this thread in Betty Plotnick's Live Journal was far too rambling for the LJ maximum number of characters alloted for comments by anonymous users (no idea if the limit is higher for comments of LJ users) and an unwise decision to cut according to content had the result that one part was still too long. Hence I just decided to post the section of my reply that deals with mainstream media images of fans here and link to it over there, instead of trying to break it up into still smaller chunks.
Anyway, for those not coming from that link, in the directly preceeding comment Betty said among other things:
[...] It's just that I'm consistently bitter about the rap that fandom in general gets in the larger culture. We're all supposedly middle-aged virgin males who live in our parents' basements, because who else would care about a tv show? Whereas knowing every tiny statistic about every game your favorite baseball team has played in the last forty years is eccentric but cool and somehow Americana-y and even noble, knowing the name of the episode where Blair dates the daughter of the Central American arms dealer is neurotic and strange and turns you into some kind of mutant social pariah. We're fine to make fun of, because we're irrelevant. [...]
As for media images of fans, I'm fairly okay with obscurity. And I don't think mainstream media depicts any subculture accurately from the viewpoint within that subculture, not even sympathetic mainstream media. At least I've never found any of the mainstream reports I've read on any subculture I'm in or even just familiar with from the fringes very on spot or representational. Whether it is fan communities, political groups, music scenes... it doesn't matter. Sometimes they are outright hilarious in their uninformed incorrectness, sometimes just slightly off, but I think that it is an inherent problem. It is slightly better when someone from within the subculture writes for the mainstream, but even then the constraints of writing for the mainstream, having to limit the descriptions and explanations to something that can be understood by the mainstream reader and will be accepted by mainstream editors, will make it unacceptable depiction at least in the eyes of parts of the subculture.
I think that fans are seen as predominantly male is because "the public" doesn't always distinguish between the different kinds of fans, and there are many subsections of fandom which are very much male-dominated. Before I found net-based tv fandom I had assumed that most fans of anything would be male, because that was the way it was in all fannish contexts I knew: In comic fandom (here and from what I've heard also in the US) women are still much fewer than men, it has improved during the last decade not at least due to younger manga fans, but any comic convention I've been to had far more men than women attending. And with the artists the proportions are even worse. Many comic shops really are somewhat like the one from the Simpsons. And in shops selling merchandise, mainly for SF shows and movies, and in special SF bookstores I've also seen relatively few women. The few RPG conventions I've been to had been a tad better than the comic ones, but still mostly guys. Nearly all the people I met in school and university who were into anything remotely fannish were also guys. And in the feminist contexts/groups which I sought out I never met any fans (not media fans anyway, sports and music fans sometimes), and often even casual non-specific media references to well known shows (like the X-Files) weren't understood. So even though I had been part of the larger media fandom and in contact with other fans for most of my life, I hadn't met many other women, and that cliche perception of fans seemed somewhat simplified but not totally unwarranted.
And I think the comparison sport vs. media fandom and their media coverage is skewed if you only look at segments of these fandoms. There is a lot of money and coverage in a few popular sports, but there are tons of marginalized sports you almost never hear about in mainstream media, or only hear about during the Olympics. So just like the mainstream media sees only some kinds of media fans, it also only sees some kinds of sport fans.
Also I'm not sure that sport fans are that much better off in the way they are covered, at least not here. Sure interest in sport and general excitement is okay, but more starts to get strange too. First here the only really widespread sports fandom is football (the kind called soccer in the US). Sure other sports are also somewhat popular, but the prototypical sport fan here is the football fan, with football being just about the only sport you can't avoid during major events, and also the media will somewhat cover fans as well as the events. But with football the main "media narrative" about sport fans goes something like this: there are the regular folks, enthusiastic about their teams, celebrating, having family fun or whatever, and then there are the obsessed fans. And the media images of football fans are either that of devoted nut cases, but more frequently that of the hooligan. Most major football clubs have official fan clubs for which in the mainstream media coverage (like what a non-football fan like me reads or sees) is predominantly in connection with their failure or their success to manage the violent parts of their fan base. Interspersed is that with coverage of how (un-)successful the police was to manage the fan crowds, concerned reports about other countries where all is still worse, with the usual range of pictures (either inter-fan violence, battles with police or the ever popular burning stuff on streets pictures) and the occasional politician announcing a new database or more supranational interconnected databases to restrict hooligan travel etc. Even the picture of the non-hooligan fan is that of a working class male (if it's neutral, just as often it's bordering on the image of "white trash"). Educated successful people with well paid jobs are not the media image of the dedicated football fan. Compared to that the "image problems" of media fans are still relatively minor.
Posted by RatC @ 02:04 PM CET
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Replies: 2 comments
Well, maybe I should've identified my frame of reference or whatnot better on that sports comment. I'm familiar with the US and not much else, I'm sorry to say, and here, at least, I don't see that correlation between hard-core sports fans and the lower classes. I live in a college town and I grew up in another one, and the people who swarm in like pilgrims for game weekends are by and large upper-middle class. Truthfully, with prices what they are, a whole lot of pro and college sports events are not an option for anyone of modest means. At the University of Missouri, you spend thousands of dollars for the *ability* to buy season's tickets -- and then more money for the tickets themselves, not to mention the money you spend traveling and so forth.
Beyond that, I'm sure you're right. Nobody thinks they come off looking well in "mainstream media." And possibly they don't. But I object to that, you know? It's one thing to be mocked by the Simpsons (and, dude, I love the comic shop guy, because everyone *knows* that guy; he's fantastic), but I feel as though when a subculture is the subject of a piece of journalism, the ethical thing to do is to accept that they're people and try to see the world from their perspective. It doesn't always work that way; I'm not talking about this particular article now, just non-fiction media coverage of fandom in general.
I was very happy with the movie Trekkies, btw, if you haven't had a chance to see it. It doesn't hide from the oddities of the hard-core Trek people, but it doesn't make them look like fools, either. It makes them look like exactly what they are -- devoted, usually quite intelligent, eccentrics with a whole different set of priorities and values than mainstream society, but functional ones.
Posted by Betty P. @ 08/24/2002 11:17 PM CET
Obviously the situation is really different, here watching football live is quite affordable. A single ticket in the cheapest category will often cost less than watching a movie in a cinema. The cheapest season tickets for one of the two local football teams cost about $130 a season for non-members of the club, less as a member and about half of that if you are eligible for reduced prices (like as a student, senior, probably also when you're unemployed). Oh and you get great discounts, like reduced licquor prices in the bar they own. And this club doesn't have the cheapest prices in the league.
Also there are no visible college football teams, sports don't have any presence on my university's campus, except for the general recreational offerings and the people who are in the sport sciences department.
Posted by RatC @ 08/25/2002 01:10 AM CET
