#and i also studied it in university so i dont want to send like. meaty academic texts necessarily

[atthebell-moved]

hi, i completely agree that the fandom has a problem with misogyny and often fails at self-introspection. my question is, do you have any resources/tips/thoughts on how to be better about it? even, how to recognize it in yourself the first place? "ok i'll stop being a misogynist now" is a lot easier said than done, especially for people who might not be that educated on the subject, and majority of the people in this fandom are quite young as well.

this is long as fuck and possibly somewhat incoherent bc it took so long to write but i did my best

my biggest tip for people who don't know much about misogyny is to look at your own behavior and learn how to clock what you're doing as sexist.

are you criticizing a female creator? think about why you're doing it, what the actual beef you have with them is. if it seems to be just a sense of discomfort or thinking they're annoying or overly loud or pushy, think about male ccs who act the same way and why you dont consider them annoying. are you annoyed with them for being on a male cc's stream? why? does it feel like theyre taking up too much attention? do you get annoyed with them for talking too much or flirting with guys? for gaming especially-- do you get annoyed with them for not knowing something or being "bad" at a game? think about why that is and why its just funny when a male cc is bad at games or doesnt know something.

a HUGE problem i see in this fandom is the Madonna-whore complex, repackaged as the little sister-racist dichotomy (kudos to @yourlittlemenace for that phrasing).

if a female cc is deemed to be "playing nice" (doesnt talk too much, is "nice", streams with male ccs but doesnt flirt with them, isn't "overtly sexual"), she's the little sister of the group. all the male ccs "protect" her, she literally folds their laundry, she doesnt call out how people treat her, and the fandom pretends that this is a normal and cool way to treat women who are public figures. this also goes for mom/big sister/etc. if you think you haven't done this, think about all the aus where you've forced puffy into some kind of maternal or sisterly role when it made no sense. then think about how pissed people got when she decided not to be the server therapist and was "mean" to Tommy (in lore, with permission. that she didnt even need to get. see that clip i rbed earlier from her podcast.)

if the fandom decides she doesnt play nice, if she flirts with male ccs too much or stands up for herself or points out how unfair it is that she's being treated this way, she gets demeaned, harassed, and shunned by the fandom. consider, again, puffy. consider how niki flirted with wilbur and talked about misogyny and got called a racist for *checks notes* "speaking to schlatt and fundy" and "not being a native english speaker". she got called a slut and a queerbaiter for kissing another woman despite being bisexual.

consider how hard people went down on hannah for having said the r slur several years back versus how hard they went on dream for the same thing. and how people dug it up as a direct response to her being on stream with dream. consider how every time hannah talks about how unfair it is that the mcc subreddit treats her like trash, she has to delete all her tweets bc they harass her to hell and back and act like she's an asshole for pointing out their hypocrisy.

the fandom doesnt do this across the board; i shouldnt have to say this, but its not an everyone versus no one issue. some people do this outright and loud, some dont seem to realize theyre doing it, and a few people dont do it at all (incredibly rare, i can count on one hand the number of people who genuinely seem to try to avoid these issues, which is why im complaining).

in terms of lore, have you ever once done analysis on a female character? why do you think you haven't? the bechdel-wallace test is an (imperfect) way of gauging how a piece of media ignores women and prioritizes men. think about the fact that there are FOUR female ccs on the DSMP and they are continually ignored in favor of male characters. consider that puffy and aimsey both talked about trying to do genuine lore and getting shafted, either because no one was online and wouldn't put in the effort to stream with them or because they received insane amounts of criticism for breaking anything on the server, despite the clear lack of "no griefing" rules and the precedent that you can blow other people's shit up (tommy leveling one of puffy's builds, amongst many other examples).

a quick thing about ships: have you ever wondered why m/m ships are so popular? the general consensus amongst people who care about feminism and are into fandom studies is that for a long period of time, m/m was hugely popular because women are so rarely written as full and complete characters in any media. so people took to engaging with m/m ships and writing about them because they were the most fulfilling relationships, and because misogyny led them to be predisposed to be uninterested in female characters.

say an m/m ship is incredibly popular, something like, i dunno, john watson and sherlock holmes from bbc sherlock. lets also say the canonical media presents one or both of the characters with a female love interest. how do you think a fandom that prioritizes m/m ships and is primed to be disinterested in women as characters (either because of our society's role in teaching people that women do not matter or because of fandom's history in assuming female characters are not fleshed out) is going to react? if you said theyre going to send undue amounts of criticism her way and act like its an act of homophobia to give a canonically straight character a female love interest, congrats, you've figured out a huge component in fandom misogyny. take this, amplify it over several decades, and add the psychic damage that supernatural gave society. queerbaiting is bad but mistreating female characters in service of nonexistent queer relationships is also bad.

this is relevant in general but i also believe its relevant for the dsmp because of the complete lack of m/f ships. aside from phil and kristin, who are literally married irl and kristin isn't even on the server, there are no m/f ships that involve female creators. this is not, despite what you may think, due to the inherently yaoi nature of minecraft roleplay. this is because the creators, including the male ones, are afraid of the blowback of m/f flirting and how fucking awful people are to female ccs anytime it happens. once again look at niki. as another example, consider how notfounders harassed the living daylights out of mxmtoon for flirting with gnf on twitter. if i was a cc i would avoid it like the plague too considering how happy people are to dig shit up about them or accuse them of being a slut or an attention whore/"pick me girl" for speaking to a man.

one last thing, this is more about fanart than anything else but stop drawing women to look like teenage boys. the amount of fanart i see where i literally cannot tell if someone has drawn niki or tommy is fucking insane. niki has curves. draw her with them. if you cannot draw women or people outside a very specific body type you cannot draw. fatphobia and misogyny have a clear overlap.

i cant think of anything else and ive already spent forever on this. look into feminist media analysis. think twice about how you react to female ccs & female characters. consider not just what characters have interesting stories but who is allowed to have interesting stories. you might be neglecting someone who has a lot going on because you're dismissing a female character as inherently less likely to be interesting. you might not even know someone has an interesting story because the fandom neglects it so completely.

as a final little note: like i said earlier, if you're not familiar with gender & sexuality studies, you may not know this, but homophobia and transphobia are rooted in misogyny. the idea that gender is immutable and rigid is because of the patriarchy. this is why gendered slurs are used against queer people and why queer men in particular get accused of and demeaned for being feminine. your understanding of queerphobia is incomplete without considering how sexism plays a role.

also go read everything rayne fisher-quann has ever written but especially this piece on getting woman'd and listen to you're wrong about