What “Buffy” hath wrought: the new face of fandom

Six months ago, I wrote about ?Maxim,? a male-oriented magazine that I, a female, enjoy…. Six months ago, I wrote about ?Maxim,? a male-oriented magazine that I, a female, enjoy. When I tell people I read Maxim, they respond by looking at me cockeyed and backing away, as if I?ve told them that Geoffrey the Toys ?R Us giraffe was munching peyote behind them.

Revealing my fannishness ? my obsessive love of all things Buffy and X-Men ? draws a somewhat similar reaction. One of my friends, while discussing the little wink-wink, nudge-nudge fan moments included in X2: X-Men United, said, ?Why Sydney, I had no idea,? when I mentioned that I had been monitoring various Web sites for spoilers ? hints either dropped by the studio or collected by fans about a unreleased project, in this case a movie.

His genuine surprise struck me. I had kept most of my fannishness in the closet, along with my 42 pairs of shoes, because, well, I was afraid of being judged.

Consider the stereotypical image of a Trekkie ? mid-twenties, single, white male with adult acne and no social skills. Star Trek, one of the first fandoms, is archetypical of the fan experience. It?s a huge fandom ? covering several TV series and movies, and incorporating hundreds of thousands of fans. They attend conventions, circulate fan ?zines and memorize minutiae. Still, fandom was seen as a fringe activity and its adherents as deviants, however harmless.

It was also male-dominated, and fangirls were the exception rather than the rule. This makes sense, given that there were few TV shows or comics with a strong female protagonist, with Wonder Woman as one of the few beacons in the long darkness.

Two things changed fandom, particularly for women ? the advent and increased popularity of the Internet, and ?Buffy the Vampire Slayer.? The first allowed fandom to, in a sense, go public. It emerged from the convention halls of hotels and back areas of comic book shops like some waking beast blinking in the sun after 60 years of hibernation. Its message: ?We?re here. We?re dorks. Get used to it.?

But even the anonymous nature of the Internet could not deconstruct the glass ceilings and walls segregating gender. Women were far outnumbered. There was the occasional girl who surmounted the social convention dictating that girls read Nancy Drew while boys read comics, and the fannish assumption that girls were somehow ill-equipped to discus the finer points of Marvel Comics.

Then came ?Buffy.? Though the feminist movement extended to science fiction, ?Buffy? was the first to merge it fully with fandom. Not without predecessors ? indeed Buffy could look to Dana Scully as her foremother and Emma Peele as her patron saint ? there?s no doubt that Buffy, both the character and the show, changed things.

One Web site posits that ?Buffy? is ?the fandom that ate everything,? meaning that it left most other fandoms in its wake. Because it was my first brush with fandom, I can?t say what the fan world was like pre-?Buffy.? But I can say that its pervasiveness (232,000 hits for ?Buffy + fan? on google.com) and its rabidly attentive fan-base, along with critics lauding the show as intelligent, sexy and feminist, make it one of the biggest and best-known fandoms.

Suddenly the gates to fandom were blown apart. Women began flocking to fandom. Being a fangirl isn?t something shameful ? it has its own language, celebrities and conventions. My former roommate ? a popular cheerleader in high school and an ardent Trekkie and Buffy fan ? could express her love for high kicks and Patrick Stewart.

Still, walls between fandom and society remain. Recently, one of my classmates used a fannish term to describe mainstream fiction. Met with stares, she attempted to explain. The more she spoke, the more the class turned away from her; her language erected an invisible wall, driving fan from non-fan. As her voice grew more nervous, and the class?s silence more pronounced, I was faced with a decision ? speak up and come out of the fannish closet, or avoid self-incrimination and take the fifth.

I chose the latter, but regret doing so. I chose it because fandom may be gaining acceptance, but my classmates? condemning silence indicates that it has not been accepted fully. The message: It?s okay to be a fan, so long as you keep it at home.

As a closet fangirl, I can pass in either world. But for now, here is my apology to all fangirls current and past, and my proclamation to the world: I?m here. I?m a girl and a dork and a fan. Get used to it.

Sydney Bergman can be reached at sbergman@pittnews.com.