bemusedlybespectacled:

i saw a post that was like “it’s socially acceptable for adult men to be nerds and have nerd interests but not women who are similarly Old” and I sort of agree but also think that it’s missing something: men of a certain age and prestige simply cease to be “nerds” even when they are doing exactly the same things women do.

like, the true privilege of being a man in fandom isn’t that your nerdiness is accepted and women’s isn’t, but that your fannishness isn’t even seen as fannishness. it’s art, not a cringeworthy embarrassment.

like, no one makes jokes about andrew lloyd webber writing self-insert fanfiction, even though he wrote a musical about a tragic tortured genius musician who writes a musical centered around his muse and then cast his girlfriend in it. (and then wrote a sequel that was about his two favorite characters getting together, because he didn’t like the canon pairing.)

a hollywood exec putting out yet another movie intended to appeal to 80′s nostalgia isn’t told “wow, why do you still care about something that came out in 1985,” and people who go see those movies aren’t mocked for still liking something they liked as children. “stranger things is just goonies fanfiction” said no one ever. 

no one dismisses moffat and gatiss as being too old to write fanfiction, even though they are self-admitted fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories and essentially wrote a Modern AU. in fact, they don’t think of themselves as nerds: they wrote an entire episode mocking their own fanbase for caring too much, when they cared so much about fictional characters that they decided to write a whole tv show about them.

like, there are definitely elements of male nerdiness that are mocked just as much as female nerdiness. the big bang theory is absolutely laughing AT the nerds just as much it celebrates them, and there’s still the stereotype of the guy who lives in his parents’ basement and plays too many video games. but I feel like that’s almost like the (male, nerd) writers finding someone lower on the totem pole than them. “sure, I am writing this incredibly detailed screenplay featuring all of my favorite tropes and references to all my favorite fandoms, but that’s not real nerdiness. real nerdiness is collecting action figures.” 

(there’s also a sort of meta-ness going on here because the Unattractive Loser Nerd trope is an element of a lot of 80s and 90s media, so even that is an homage to stuff those writers used to like)

anyway if moffat opens his mouth again about the incomprehensible nature of slash fans you have my full permission to tell him that he’s a nerd who writes shitty fanfic