acafanmom:

Last word:

When these things blow up, I often see a lot of criticism of fan entitlement. I believe this exists, and I think it can be corrosive. I don’t see it myself, but I keep very secluded here, all told – I follow very few people and never, ever venture into the comments section of anything. But since there can sometimes be misunderstandings (or miscommunication on my part), I want to make clear what it is that gets me riled up.

It isn’t Benedict. Do I think he’s completely innocent? No more than I think that fans are completely innocent – I think we’re ALL very human, and we’re all coming from intensely personal places, him included. My beef isn’t with him, it’s with a mass media that uses fangirls for clickbait in predictably, consistently pathologizing terms. Yesterday’s NYM piece described his female fandom as a “seismic force of female hysteria,” and that right there is what I’m angry with. That this keeps happening in relation to Benedict is happenstance – it happens that he’s in two Christmas films and one Oscar contender, so his press for those has kind of bunched up – as it did this time last year with a similar roster of films – so he’s currently the media ‘it’ man. That’s as it is.

When I say we’re on a break – jokingly! – what I mean is that I want to keep on liking him, and his press is currently such that I feel like being a female fan of his is a liability. I’m tired of being characterized as something I’m not. I don’t care what he personally thinks of me – I can only imagine what kinds of fan encounters he’s had, and inasmuch as we all know someone we kind of side-eye in real life, I can’t help but think that some of those have probably been some kind of alarming. I don’t live his life, I don’t presume to say what he should think/say/do. I love his work – I really do. And I want to keep on loving it.

So we’re on a break while he finishes out this press junket (probably through The Hobbit). NOT because I suddenly hate him, not because I want him to act a certain way, but because the press seems compelled to keep dragging his female fans into interviews with him, and – some of you may think I’m making excuses for him; I suppose that’s possible, but for me I see it as giving him the benefit of the doubt, because that’s what I do. I think he’s tired, I think he’s got interview after interview after interview coming at him, and things are said. And, as I said above, he’s entitled to his experiences and opinions – they affect my life not at all. I simply have had it with the press attempting to capitalize on his current celebrity by scapegoating his female fans. They make choices when they decide to set up photoshoots with ‘rabid fangirls’, and those choices are just one more nail in the coffin of female fan representation.

THAT is my beef, that’s what I’m angry about, and it could be literally any celebrity – it isn’t about Benedict in any meaningful way for me, it’s about this hyperbolic discourse of fangirl representation, in which our pleasures, our passions, the fact that we do love something or someone, is ridiculed and set up as the excessive extreme against which ‘normal’ fandom is constituted – in which ‘normal’ is a kind of rational, distanced, masculinist appreciation, I suppose (we conveniently forget the passion of sports fans – or valorize it when, say, and underdog team wins a major sports tournament – until there are actual casualties).