Digital Girls, Digital Boys Part 1: Fandom & Erotica
How tech-savvy Grateful Dead fans sharing tapes set the stage for the nerdy, porn-laden subculture that rules the internet, and what it growing up as part of it was like.
In the intro to this series, I proposed that the internet is a unique world that exists not within, but parallel to the physical world. I speculated that the abstract method of text and image-based communication causes a sharp divide between the real self and the digital self, which contributes to the loneliness and dissociation epidemic we are currently facing. Finally, I pondered what happens when the digital self becomes just as, if not more developed than the real self.
In this part, we’ll take a flyover tour of online fandom (n. from “fan kingdom”), how it became the dominant force driving internet culture, how it operates, the huge role that erotica and pornography play, and the difference between fandom’s girl world and fandom’s boy world. Information about this is extremely difficult to come by- the Wikipedia entry for Fandom is overly technical and captures none of the culture and vibe that shapes society’s quirky youth. Therefore, this tour is strongly biased to my own experiences being deep into fandom since 2007, when I was 12.
Internet users can be sorted into two groups, with a bit of fuzziness around the edges: the normies (n. from "normal people"), and the fans. Fans of what, you ask? Anything. What distinguishes these fans from a coworker who binge watches Netflix is the way that fans engage with their chosen media- by participating in fandom.
Wikipedia defines fandom as, “A subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of empathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the objects of their fandom and spend a significant portion of their time and energy involved with their interest, often as a part of a social network with particular practices, differentiating fandom-affiliated people from those with only a casual interest.”
This isn’t a bad definition, but it’s missing a few key parts. I propose that participation in fandom is marked by three things: hyperfixation, intense social engagement, and content creation. Fandom, in common parlance, is a term for the collection of communities where the social engagement and content creation surrounding a particular piece of media happens. These communities are mostly online, but sometimes cross over into real life, mostly through anime and comic conventions, tabletop game tournaments, and, of course, having fandom friends in real life.
Most people are familiar with Trekkies (pictured above), a term for fans that participate in the Star Trek fandom. If not, you probably know the stereotypes that the characters in The Big Bang Theory embody- quirky, on the autism spectrum, and terribly awkward around girls. This is a good place to start, but is an outdated view of fandom, from a time when it was overwhelmingly adult men.
Online fandom goes back further than that, though, first brought to the internet world by the Deadheads of the 70’s. According to this fascinating article, one of the very first messages exchanged on the early 1970’s proto-internet ARPANET was about trading Grateful Dead setlists (another was to sell a bag of weed).
High-resolution file sharing is a huge part of fandom, and Deadheads had perfected the infrastructure. Once the internet became widely accessible in the mid-90’s, other fandoms modeled their communities off of the well-established online Deadhead community, which also displayed hyperfixation in the form of their obsessive archiving of Grateful Dead tapes, along with social engagement and content creation. Like fandoms today, Deadhead content came in the form of high-quality digital files, artwork, and merchandise.
I got into fandom in 2007, when it was mostly on LiveJournal, a Reddit-like blogging platform that fostered an interconnected network of small, niche communities and personal blogs where users would post essays, fanfiction, rants, memes, community discussions, and more. This site’s userbase would migrate to Tumblr around 2012, then later expand to TikTok and Twitter.
While fandom used to be dominated by 30+ year old men with day jobs, nowadays, fandoms are dominated by 12-25 year old students and have two overlapping, intertwined social spheres: girl world and boy world, just like a high school might.
Girl world’s most coveted content is long, slow burn romance fanfiction. This is almost always between two male characters, with perhaps more characters paired off on the side. This genre usually concludes with a clumsy but cute "first time" sex scene.
As anime is a cultural touchstone for most fandoms, many depictions of male/male ships (n. from "relationships"), especially by younger fans, are influenced by yaoi, a genre of male/male romance anime written by and for women, and have little in common with actual gay relationships or even mainstream gay porn.
There are consistent tropes in yaoi, but the most prescient- and criticized- is the uke/seme dynamic, essentially a Japanified, feminized version of tops and bottoms. Ukes generally have huge, innocent eyes, spunky yet submissive personalities, cry a lot, and start the show sexually naïve. Semes are the opposite- tall, smug, handsome, sexually aggressive, boundary-violating, and emotionally disconnected. Many fans complain about inaccurate characterization when this dynamic appears in male/male fanfiction, while others enjoy it.
In the LiveJournal days, most large fandoms had a special kind of community called a Kink Meme, a request-based erotic fanfiction writing forum. To participate, you would go onto the Kink Meme, request a ship and a sexual kink, and a stranger on the internet in an anonymized account would write some smut for you. In return, good etiquette expected you to fulfill someone else's request.
I discovered these communities when I was 12. The family computer was downstairs and phones charged exorbitant data fees in 2007, but I had somehow managed to connect my Playstation Portable to the internet, giving me unfettered access to all sorts of explicit content from an early age without any risk of my parents finding out.
You will be pleased to know that the younger the average age in the fandom is, the less explicit most requests and fills are. A lot of them use 'kink' in a sort of cheeky way, and many requests are for "fluff", meaning a light-hearted, cuddly romance, or "crack", meaning a campy and fun humour story.
Mixed in are other requests that are a dizzying mix of excruciatingly explicit and downright bizarre- torture, rape, sex slavery, male pregnancy, animalistic heat cycles, watersports, tentacles, egg-laying- everything you can imagine, plus a whole lot of stuff that you can’t. Most kink memes even include a link to an endless list of kinks for us to get inspired.
Fandom’s boy world is less interested in fanfiction, but when it is, it favours large, epic adventure crossovers between fandoms. Boy world typically rewards risqué fanart, game mods, video game strategy, and merchandise collecting. Gigantic, barely-clothed breasts are ubiquitous, and anime’s influence once again can be seen in the form of hentai (anime porn), which has its own set of tropes.
Merchandise is often centered around explicit or semi-explicit images of female anime characters. At any given anime or comic book convention, you will find several booths selling printed body pillows called “dakimakuras”, sometimes translated to “hugging pillows” featuring scantily clad girls making bedroom eyes. To see how pervasive these are, check out this video of a YouTuber walking through a My Little Pony convention.
Yuri, the female equivalent of yaoi, is also popular, and is as far from real lesbian relationships as yaoi is to real gay ones. However, erotic images of solo female characters is most common, with pornography often featuring disembodied male hands or genitalia.
The pornographic aspect of fandom's boy world is more visible, both because this aspect of fandom is more familiar in pop culture and because of its visual nature- it is much easier to see if your son has brightly coloured anime porn on his computer than if the 50,000 word fanfiction your daughter is reading has a hardcore BDSM sex scene in it.
Just like in real life, many boys participate mostly in girl world, many girls participate mostly in boy world. Some spaces, like community discussions, are less overtly gendered, but it is generally easy to estimate the gender split of a fandom based on the type of content being produced.
Fans typically spend a few months or years completely consumed by their fandom until a new one sparks their interest and repeats the cycle. It is most common to have one main fandom at a time, with a few smaller, less active ones on the side.
A stable fandom like Star Wars, with an endless supply of fan content and new media coming out constantly, could be a lifelong hyperfixation. A different fandom might be bustling during the first season, dry up, then be revived once the second season comes out. During these periods of hiatus, it's not uncommon to see the fandom scatter initially, only to coalesce around a new, similar fandom together.
Since fandom has more to do with the method of engagement than the media itself, fandoms don’t have to just be shows, movies, or video games, but can encompass sports, politics, historical events, bands, and so on.
During my most active years in fandom, small reminders of previous fandoms- the theme song coming up on shuffle, for example- could "catch", and cause me to spiral back into that one. It is not uncommon to see users apologizing to their followers for suddenly switching all their attention from one fandom to another. Due to the social aspect of fandom, their friends and followers will often join them in the new fandom rather than unfollow them, causing a chain reaction that quickly deflates one fandom and inflates another.
Because hyperfixation, intense social engagement, and content creation are the building blocks of fandom, fans spend way more time online than normies, have larger online social spheres, make up most forum moderators, and can easily outmaneuver attempts to tamp down on illegal file sharing. This has caused fans to play an outsized role in building internet culture despite their much smaller numbers and influence in real life.
While fandom used to simply consume the source material, fans now directly engage with the creators and often influence the writing. Gripes about racial or gender stereotypes, diversity, and “queer-baiting” (when the writers tease a gay relationship but don’t commit) are the most common, to the point where they now have strong influence over Marvel and Disney’s big budget blockbusters.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore the rise of social justice activism, gender ideology, and “wokeism” in fandom spaces and the sudden spike in people with transgender identities at anime and comic conventions. We’ll take a look at gender identity as a fandom, with participants displaying hyperfixation, online trans communities acting as a platform for social engagement, and the creation of fandom-like trans content and merchandise.