We are All Just Fans: a Discussion of "Fanboys" vs "Fangirls"
Fans come in all forms. Hardcore fans, low-key fans. Ones who are canon-focused and ones who are more interested in interpretive forms of fandom. Old, young, loud-and-proud, or quiet and person about their fandom. We are as varied as the types of things we are fans of. But aside from the general term, fan, there are two general buckets that fans tend to get dumped into: fanboys and fangirls. For the record, I’m dealing in generalizations here when it comes to gender norms and depictions – these are broad strokes and, of course, do not cover the glorious messiness of human life and individuality.
There is, by definition, inherently gendered aspect to calling people fangirls vs fanboys. Logically, the phrase would imply a fan who is either male or female. But it actually doesn’t. Fangirl and fanboy refer to different types of fandom, ones largely based on gender norms or expectations, rather than solely on the gender of the fan.
Fangirl is used to describe a fan, usually female, whose focus in their fandom is based on emotions or relationships. For the emotion part, the word fangirl evokes the image of, for example, teenage girls screaming when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan Show – or when BTS recreated that iconic performance on Late Night with Steven Colbert. As for the relationship side, as I mentioned in my piece Fanfiction 101, there is an expectation that fanfiction is just smut written by women for other women. Which is not only absurd given the amount of mainstream fanfiction, is also a gross simplification.
Fanboys, on the other hand, are generally considered more technical and detail-oriented within their fandom. Fanboys are the ones who have the technical specs of the Millennium Falcon, or have memorized every statistic about their favorite football team. It’s not about emotions, it’s about a mastery of the details. It’s a knowledge-based concept of fandom, rather than an interpretive one. And as a result, it’s also (again, generally) canon focused. For example, whether or not Han shot first in Star Wars is a massive point of contention because it’s about what is the “real” canon and thus official, rather than the individual’s interpretation of it.
On a practical level, the lines between “fanboy” and “fangirl” are incredibly blurred. What, for example, is the real difference between having a framed picture of a favorite sports team, and a favorite actor or actress? Or between memorizing every fact about a pop singer vs every bit of canon in a sci-fi show? All of them are expressing their fandom, and in similar ways – displaying memorabilia or learning and absorbing a great deal of information about the object of fandom. And yet they are classified as different, because one is coded as “male” and the other is coded as “female.” And as such it creates both a false dichotomy of what different kinds of fans do, and reinforces damaging gender stereotypes.
Gendered expectations of fans and types of fans are extremely difficult to escape. I always assume the Harry Potter fanfiction authors are female unless I catch myself, and once in a conversation assumed the man I was talking to didn’t get fanfiction, only to be gently corrected that he, too, enjoyed reading Harry Potter fanfics. At the same time, there is a cultural assumption that hard-core fans of a sci-fi canon, say Star Wars, are male. Just look at The Big Bang Theory, a massively popular and mainstream TV show, where the male geniuses know endless details about geek culture (comics, Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, etc.) and the women who are also depicted as geniuses have zero interest those things.
But any fan can be one, or the other, or both. I have, in my life, been a “fangirl” and a “fanboy,” often of the same thing and the same time. At one point (no longer sadly) I could identify any Star Trek episode in any series within five minutes – hard-core, knowledge-based “fanboy” behavior. I also have shipped so many couples in Star Trek, long before I even knew what shipping was. Solid, stereotypical fangirl.
When I first started thinking about this piece a few weeks ago, my conclusion was to keep the labels – they do describe different kinds of fandom after all – but divorce the phrases from the gender of the fan. Men can be fangirls and women can be fanboys and it’s all good. But I’ve since changed my mind. Because even classifying different types of fandom by those phrases reinforces gender stereotypes, which are both pernicious and destructive to everyone. No one wins if screaming over a boyband is considered “fangirl” behavior, even if it is applied to both men and women, because it still implies that women are the ones who normally or should be that kind of fan and men, as a corollary, shouldn’t, or at the very least its weird if they are.
Humans all contain multitudes. We are all many things, often contradictory, at the same time. The phrases fanboy and fangirl flatten that reality. It forces everyone into boxes, and limits our abilities to be ourselves. I do think having words to describe subsets of fans would be helpful – fan can be so broad as to be almost useless at times. But when we do, they need to do so without involving gender stereotypes and instead accepts that we are, however we express our fandom, just people doing our thing and loving what we love.
