valentinite

I will occasionally get grouchy/snippy about the fact that I could not be a girly girl if I tried -- it's residual guilt mostly from my mother trying to get me excited about things like plucking eyebrows when all I wanted to do was follow my dad around and learn to program.

99% of the time, I'm pretty solid in who I am, as a cisgendered woman who just doesn't do girly. Who comes out male on just about every one of those pop-culture gender-brain classification tests. Being in slash fandom is about the only stereotypically female thing I do, really.

And then I end up having to RP it and I flip a little because it's one thing to not do it, it's another to sometimes feel like I'm going more against the grain playing a woman picking out nailpolish than as, say, a guy readjusting his boxers in a semi-public setting. (Which, yes, I've written.)

That said, if other people doing it gets on my nerves, it's entirely my own little pack of issues. I'd never ask people not to talk about it. (And I do apologize for the fact that I'm sure I've been touchy in multiple RP chats, before realizing I should take a deep breath and not be a brat. It's not an excuse, though I will say that RP's one of the few places I see it come up. For some reason, my RL friends, when in a majority-female space tend to end up more on the TMI side of "girl talk" discussing IUDs or sex toys rather than makeup.)

And danke to lady_angelina and oxymoronic3 for helping me reboot my brain and research unfortunate fashion trends rather than just staring at my screen and going bwuh?

Also, as apparently once I've started posting I can't stop, memo to fandom:

Please, please, please stop using the terms "boyfandom" and "girlfandom". I know, I can't stop you, and the stereotypes have some basis in fact, but all they make me want to do is throw something through my computer screen.

Arbitrary gender dichotomies are bad, kids. You're so good at seeing sexism and trying to fix it (at least the bits of fandom I associate with), so why do you do this? There's so many things wrong with it I don't know where to begin.

1. There are more than two types of fandom.
2. Gender isn't binary either.
3. "boy" and "girl" are belittling anyways, though in an equal-opportunity way.
4. Even when accurate, there are other terms.
5. In a sexist society, pointing out that "so-and-so has offended girlfandom" means they will Write You Off because you're a girl and you don't matter and you don't fit their demographic anyways.

Yeah, I know, cry more. It's my LJ, I'll whine if I want to.