For years, young women have dominated online fandom spaces. In the 90s it was boybands such as N*Sync and the Backstreet Boys, in the 2000s Twilight broke onto the scene, and in the 2010s boybands came back with a vengeance when bands like One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer – this time with the added help of Tumblr and Twitter.
Now, in the 2020s, women have taken an interest in all sorts of things, especially video games and superheroes. Through all this, one thing has remained constant: no matter what young women love, men always find something negative to say about it and the way we interact with it.
Women who take an interest in typically masculine hobbies always “do it wrong.” We play the wrong types of video games, and don’t actually know anything about these superheroes. Girls who like The Sims or Tomadatchi Life are told they don’t actually like video games, they just like to play dress up.
But suddenly if those same girls also like Mortal Kombat or Counter Strike they’re not even actually good at them or they’re only pretending to like them for male attention. In these online spaces, women are made to feel othered and unwelcome for no reason other than just they are women in men dominated spaces.
On the other hand, girls still receive a lot of hate for engaging with other things that are considered traditionally feminine interests and hobbies. Throughout my time on the internet, I’ve been in countless fandoms and most of them were for things that teenage girls are expected to like; bands like Twenty One Pilots or Fall Out Boy, movies like Divergent or The Hunger Games, or even online creators—the list could go on for hours.
The one thing all of these interests have in common is that they’re all made fun of for the simple fact that a majority of people who enjoy them are teenage girls. Just the fact that teenage girls enjoy something is often enough reason for people to collectively agree that it’s stupid, shallow, or just plain bad.
The fact that girls are so often made fun of for their interests can also lead them to becoming part of the problem. Women have been so conditioned to think that the things other girls are interested in are shallow or idiotic that they’d rather ridicule other women because they want to be seen as “not like other girls.”
The only issue with this is that when girls do this, they’re automatically put into the category of girls who “pretend” to like the same things as boys do for attention. There is no winning when it comes to these things, and, unfortunately, it’s been like this for women for years.
The embarrassment of being seen as “less than” for liking things that everyone else likes leads girls to feel like they need to hide their true personalities. Girls are constantly hiding the fact that they love thin