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RantA (probably quite hypocritical) rant about fandom and misogyny
I'm someone who's been involved in fandom to some degree for most of my life, now. I don't want to get too specific beyond broadly being a current user of Tumblr, but I've been around long enough to notice some repeated and shifting trends in how misogyny operated and operates in fandom. To put it succinctly, fandom prioritizes, centers, and generates content for male characters, particularly white ones, to a disproportionate degree, beyond what even just a lack of female screen time in source material accounts for. This is because many of the women involved in these majority female spaces have an alarming amount of internalized misogyny that they're grappling with, often most visible in the way large swaths of them refuse to accept the fact that they're female. Additionally oftentimes, in the source material, these characters are sexualized and stereotyped to an uncomfortable degree.
All of this to say, while the internalized misogyny of the women in fandom spaces annoys me, the imposing condescension of the TIMs who complain about the problem annoys me more. While women who complain about misogyny in fandom do it with an understanding of how upsetting and uncomfortable the misogyny can be in the source material, I do not consider TIMs, frequent consumers of misogynistic and degrading anime, pornography, and other media reliable sources on what drives female aversion to engaging with female characters. Like sure, the perv pandering enjoying Kill La Kill fan is going to tell me how I should be producing fan content about women and just ignore literally everything else degrading that's happening in that show. I see what you are.
I know this is a double standard. I know this makes me a hypocrite. I don't care. Men don't get to dictate how women should respond to misogyny.