Sexism in early anime fandom

The roughly mid-90's and earlier (generally pre-Toonami, pre-anime boom) era of anime & manga fandom: early cons, clubs, tape trading, Nth Generation VHS fansubs, old magazines & fanzines, fandubs, ancient merchandise, rec.arts.anime, and more!
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aurechan
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Sexism in early anime fandom

Post by aurechan »

Hi all! I am currently working on a project on sexism in early anime fandom, particularly in (but not limited to) online spaces, such as rec.arts.anime and rec.arts.anime.misc. I have already found a lot but I was wondering if anyone remembered any particular instance or event they would like to share? I am not only talking about overt sexism like harassment, but also exclusionary practices such as interrogating the legitimacy of anime female fans etc? We can also chat by email!

I hope this project can resonate with some of you!

kindly,
Aurechan
George W
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Re: Sexism in early anime fandom

Post by George W »

For what it is worth, I never saw any of that.

Not in conventions.

Not in the Comic and Animation Forum when I was a SysOp on CI$.

Nowhere.

In fact, there was a great deal of respect. The late Kim Yale (John Ostrander of Grimjack fame's gf) was the narrator of Vampire Hunter D. I'd bought the original tape and watched it in Japanese and didn't understand much. Her narration was excellent, and it was "on the fly" as they were speaking.

Granted, this was pre-subbed or pre-dubbed (ack) in anime time.

Once I moved on, the environment might have changed. I saw no signs of that in the early 80's through the early 90's.

Then again, I wasn't on the groups you referenced - I was in a product that was competing with them, and had a more simple platform to use relatively speaking.

When AOL developed their front end, they pretty much put CI$ on a declining trend that due to CI$'s inherent arrogance, put them into a death spiral they never recovered from.

Then again, is it possible to recover from a market disruption that completely blows your text based interfaces away with easy, point and click products? A nimble company would have seen this or predicted it. CI$ didn't. Oh well.
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mbanu
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Re: Sexism in early anime fandom

Post by mbanu »

I am an anime middle-schooler, so probably my perspective won't be so helpful, but something I noticed during my era is that a lot of anime-related subcultures seemed to self-segregate by gender, often (it appeared) unintentionally.

Sometimes this would bleed over into anime clubs proper, where you would have some clubs that were all-male and some that were all-female but where the members of the clubs earnestly assumed that it was because nobody of the other gender had any interest rather than that there was something happening that made the space invisible or unwelcoming to those outside the group. I think maybe the shift from community clubs to college clubs might have made this a little worse, because it replicated the gender dynamics of the larger institutions. An almost all-male engineering school would have an almost all-male anime club, and when the almost all-male comp-sci majors in those clubs at those schools reached out to one another through their Usenet, maybe it would reinforce the impression that there was only one type of anime fan? It's sort of like asking where the male slash-fiction writers were, maybe.

I think anime had it a bit better here because of conventions, since they would draw out all the various groups and tempt them into the same spot, and that for a while the community clubs existed at the same time as the college clubs.
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mbanu
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Re: Sexism in early anime fandom

Post by mbanu »

mbanu wrote: Wed Dec 01, 2021 7:39 am replicated the gender dynamics of the larger institutions.
Related to this, something I learned out of my own curiosity about this era was that the way I viewed "online" was different than the way it was viewed back then. Like being online now is sort of like having electricity, people don't usually say, "Oh, my hobby is electricity" unless they are an amateur electronics builder or electrician, they instead use electricity for their hobbies and the electricity itself isn't really focused on unless it goes out. On the other hand, someone might still say, "My hobby is CB radio" rather than, "I use CB radio to talk about my hobby".

During the earlier anime eras, being online was more like being into CB radio, if I understand correctly. A lot of anime fans didn't have computers, and if they did have computers, they didn't have modems, which were seen as a separate add-on like a CB radio. So the stuff we have from that era online was "modem hobbyists talking about anime" rather than "anime fans talking online", if that makes sense. So the demographics of modem hobbyists become more important to focus on, because the gender dynamics of that hobby will have framed the anime discussion.
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runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
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Re: Sexism in early anime fandom

Post by usamimi »

aurechan wrote: Sat Nov 27, 2021 10:09 am Hi all! I am currently working on a project on sexism in early anime fandom, particularly in (but not limited to) online spaces, such as rec.arts.anime and rec.arts.anime.misc. I have already found a lot but I was wondering if anyone remembered any particular instance or event they would like to share? I am not only talking about overt sexism like harassment, but also exclusionary practices such as interrogating the legitimacy of anime female fans etc? We can also chat by email!

I hope this project can resonate with some of you!

kindly,
Aurechan
As a woman-type person, I've had my fair share of sexist encounters over the years. Sometimes it'd be things that people probably didn't even realize were sexist when they did them (like in the 90s when I was told I couldn't be the ONLY president of the anime club because they never had a FEMALE president, so they gave me a "co-president"--not a vice president--that would literally never show up to meetings, saddling me with all the work), but other times it'd be quite loud and bitter. One of my "favorite" instances in more recent years being a dude on Twitter calling me an "ANIME POUSER" because I couldn't recall if I'd seen a specific Fist of the North Star OVA, then went on to tell me that the reason the anime bubble collapsed in the US was because GIRLS like ME didn't buy enough shoujo (which....is hilarious, because that would have to mean that shoujo anime was the dominating genre, which we all know has never been the case in the US.) This is why my Teepublic shop has ~ANIME POUSER~ buttons/stickers/shirts/etc, incidentally. :lol:

Casual sexism has always been a problem. It's sadly been a problem for decades....yes, even in the 80s and 90s, and yes, even if you never saw it yourself.
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George W
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Re: Sexism in early anime fandom

Post by George W »

[/quote]

As a woman-type person, I've had my fair share of sexist encounters over the years. Sometimes it'd be things that people probably didn't even realize were sexist when they did them (like in the 90s when I was told I couldn't be the ONLY president of the anime club because they never had a FEMALE president, so they gave me a "co-president"--not a vice president--that would literally never show up to meetings, saddling me with all the work), but other times it'd be quite loud and bitter. One of my "favorite" instances in more recent years being a dude on Twitter calling me an "ANIME POUSER" because I couldn't recall if I'd seen a specific Fist of the North Star OVA, then went on to tell me that the reason the anime bubble collapsed in the US was because GIRLS like ME didn't buy enough shoujo (which....is hilarious, because that would have to mean that shoujo anime was the dominating genre, which we all know has never been the case in the US.) This is why my Teepublic shop has ~ANIME POUSER~ buttons/stickers/shirts/etc, incidentally. :lol:

Casual sexism has always been a problem. It's sadly been a problem for decades....yes, even in the 80s and 90s, and yes, even if you never saw it yourself.
[/quote]

Good heavens! That's ignorant that people would treat you that way.

Notably the jerk with the "posuer" comment. Like buying Anime or how much is something he could tell?

All I can say is that I didn't do that - and others shouldn't. Wow.
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Re: Sexism in early anime fandom

Post by NorthernKaleCity »

aurechan wrote: Sat Nov 27, 2021 10:09 am Hi all! I am currently working on a project on sexism in early anime fandom, particularly in (but not limited to) online spaces, such as rec.arts.anime and rec.arts.anime.misc. I have already found a lot but I was wondering if anyone remembered any particular instance or event they would like to share? I am not only talking about overt sexism like harassment, but also exclusionary practices such as interrogating the legitimacy of anime female fans etc? We can also chat by email!

I hope this project can resonate with some of you!
It hasn't always been women who have gone through this sort of thing, men too have probably experienced this without us even knowing about it. But now that we're older, we can see how really ugly some (but not all) female anime fans were when we growing up. I guarantee you that other guys have gone through this, whether it be at an anime gathering watching anime, or even just among friends in general. It's not their position to rise up and say anything about it, that's not my intent, but it's happened to me.

If you were in a club, and you didn't like strong, passionate anime stories like Kimagure Orange Road, Candy Candy, Princess Knight or any anime that invokes deep, heartfelt feelings and emotions, you were automatically cut off from engaging in any conversation they had. Instead, they immediately asked you what anime you liked as if you were filling out a anime fan application right on the spot, and if it was anything close to sexy or scantily clad, you were automatically dismissed and called a creep. Rarely has there ever been an experience where a fan, whose love for those emotional dramas, could have reached across the aisle and say, hey, give this anime a shot, I guarantee you'll love it. It doesn't have tits or ass, but you'll appreciate it for the great story that it is. I wish I would have had an anime fan share that with me, but sadly it never happened.

I'm just thankful that I can take that experience and turn it into something incredibly positive with my character and her story.

Exclusionary practices existed, and still do, to this day. It's happens to all of us, and the interrogation of the legitimacy of your fandom altogether, is what's torn apart. But I'm learning what NOT to do, when it comes to that.
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Re: Sexism in early anime fandom

Post by NorthernKaleCity »

And I need to proofread more. Sorry about the grammar mistakes, I hope the message still comes across correctly.
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Re: Sexism in early anime fandom

Post by davemerrill »

Fascinating topic! It's my experience, as an anime fan that was active in fandom before the internet really became a thing, that Japanese anime fandom always involved women fans, both as participants and as organizers.

The founder & chairperson of the first continuously operating anime convention in America, Project A-Kon, was a woman. The organizer of the largest anime fan club in America was a woman. The editor of the first national Japanese anime magazine was a woman.

Seeing examples of sexism in anime fandom, as mentioned upthread, is depressingly unsurprising, and at the same time almost confusingly nonsensical- even more nonsensical than sexism typically is - because at every stage of anime fandom, women have played prominent roles.
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usamimi
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Re: Sexism in early anime fandom

Post by usamimi »

NorthernKaleCity wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 2:11 pm It hasn't always been women who have gone through this sort of thing, men too have probably experienced this without us even knowing about it. But now that we're older, we can see how really ugly some (but not all) female anime fans were when we growing up. I guarantee you that other guys have gone through this, whether it be at an anime gathering watching anime, or even just among friends in general. It's not their position to rise up and say anything about it, that's not my intent, but it's happened to me.

If you were in a club, and you didn't like strong, passionate anime stories like Kimagure Orange Road, Candy Candy, Princess Knight or any anime that invokes deep, heartfelt feelings and emotions, you were automatically cut off from engaging in any conversation they had. Instead, they immediately asked you what anime you liked as if you were filling out a anime fan application right on the spot, and if it was anything close to sexy or scantily clad, you were automatically dismissed and called a creep.
To be fair, this kind of behavior in women or femme-presenting people is generally due to bad experiences with fans of those things. Especially if they're younger. I ran into older male anime fans who would try to convince young teen gals to watch racey or cheesecake stuff with Very Bad Intentions on more than one occassion, and it can be kinda scary, especiallyif you're young & don't have many friends (which back then was extremely common). So while, yeah, they def could have been more polite about it, that behavior is generally just out of feeling the need to protect oneself.

Not to dismiss your feelings or experience, just wanted to let you know that there IS a reason that happens.
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