worth saying? or not worth saying?

[tielan]

bookshop's post Fannish spaces, girls, and the culture of silence about how our denial of women and females in fandom contributes to rape culture: the silencing of the female perspective in fandom finds its echo (or echoes back from) the silencing of the female voices in real life.

Fandom is not woman-positive. Fandom needs all the urging it can get just to talk about female characters, let alone talk about them nicely. Fandom prioritizes men above everything. Fandom prioritizes male-based fantasies, and fandom prioritizes the status of the people who write those fantasies.

Fandom perpetuates rape culture by silencing women, and we silence women when we remove women from our own narratives, when we refuse to write or read about women, when we talk about how female characters are stupid, slutty, saucy, too strong or too weak to enjoy, not written well enough, not worthy of as much attention as the boys are. We perpetuate victim-shaming when we degrade "women's issues" as inferior, icky, and gross. We perpetuate misogyny when we venerate canons that have high numbers of male characters and only one or two girls. We perpetuate the idea that boys' stories are better than our own, the idea that boys are better than us.

It's nice to hear someone else say it.