A Very Long Post About Fandom, Feminism and Internet Communities

I've been going over this over and over in my head, so perhaps I just need to write it out, just to stop my brain from going back and forth over it like a stuck bit of machinery.

So I left another internet forum over the past few days. (Why is this a big deal? Oh come on, if you have to ask, just hit that little X in the upper left or right hand corner of your browser and go get off the internet and play in the sunshine or have a life or something. I don't have much of a life. I'm stuck in an office for 9 hours a day, and my little window on the outside world that passes for a social life is the internet, and messageboards play a big part in that interaction.)

I've always been quite melodramatic and a bit larger than life on the internet - perhaps in a tiny way it's like being onstage, it's like a version of yourself both more exaggerated/distorted and yet utterly more true to the internal life of the mind. I've become aware that this seems to have a polarising effect on the people around me - it makes some people fiercely devoted to me, hopefully as friends (but unfortunately, sometimes as weird stalkers) - but it equally makes some people loathe me. Them's the breaks.

Anyway, that said, I left the Erol Alkan forum over the past few days.

Obsessive fandom is a funny beast, I'm not sure I entirely understand it, though it's been one of my driving forces for most of my life and I've spent nearly 30 years studying it from inside and out. It's that potent combination of both idolising someone, of admiring them, identifying with them, wanting to make yourself more like the positive aspects of them - but also mixed in with heavy lashings of desire and quasi-romantic... love? (If you can actually love someone you have created in your own mind from bits of public image.) It's complicated.

I was out DJing at 93 Feet East on Tuesday night (DJing is something I used to do quite a bit when I was younger, and had forgotten how much I enjoyed it - I think it's a positive force of this fandom that has made me take it up again) - it was exciting, because I'd had my name and my photo in the paper, which was quite a shock, but immensely flattering. So I rocked home at 1 in the morning, slightly drunk and very hyped up (it's a form of performance in itself) - get online to find that this man, my idol's MySpace profile image has changed to an image of a teenage girl, with her tits out, and Erol's name scrawled across her chest.

My first reaction was one of revulsion - of disgust and disappointment.

I mean, maybe this is projection. One of the reasons that I've avoided getting into dance culture (despite being intrigued and attracted by the music, the textures, the production values) for so long, is that I find the whole culture that goes along with it, especially in the UK, utterly abhorrant - it's a hyper-masculinised world of Lads Magazine cliches - naked birds, loads of flesh, truckloads of drugs. SO not me.

One of the reasons that I respected Erol Alkan in the first place was because he seemed to be the absolute anthesis of all that - that he stood for integrity, for intelligence.

So to log on and see this man I'd admired, using this imagery as part of his promotion? I was furious. It made me want to totally reevaluate my fandom. Because let's face it, my fandom isn't the ordinary "ooh, I quite like this..." sort, it's of the writing about it, telling my friends about it, organising fan meetups and even making crowdsourced fan merchandise kind of obsessive fandom. And I was in the midst of trying to organise a run of custom t-shirts. (This involves a huge amount of work and time and coordination - commissioning the printing, picking up the order, posting it - it's worth it, when you go to a gig and see people wearing your shirts, but let's not pretend it's not a huge effort.)

So, looking at this image - and, more importantly, reading the responses of the lads on this forum - I just felt my heart sink. I left some drunken screeds on the messageboard, sent him an angry tweet, saying I thought he had more integrity than that (not really expecting to ever speak to him again) and cancelled the t-shirt order, refunding the money of everyone who had purchased one.

And then all hell broke loose.

Did I "overreact" as Erol suggested? (Though of course, being Sensitive Indie Male, he "understands" where I'm coming from.) I have poor impulse control, especially when slightly drunk or extremely emotionally triggered. I regret, perhaps, the way I expressed it, but I don't regret my actual actions.

Especially in the light of what happened afterwards - the internet forum started with stupid childish banter, and degenerated into more and more nasty and personal attacks, both on me, and on "Feminazism" in general, until finally Erol himself stepped in and told people to step off. I knew I was going to get shit for what I said - but I had no idea quite how personal it was going to get. (Why am I always shocked by how savage humans behave behind the quasi-anonymity of the internet?) I asked to be banned from the forum - mainly because I know what I'm like, when I get a bee in my bonnet about something, I find it very difficult to walk away from an argument I really believe in. And this argument, in this setting, was a losing battle from the start.

I know that Feminism isn't popular and it isn't fashionable - if anything, it's seen as a little outdated, a little "puritan" perhaps. Feminism has had a lot of bad press over the years, but it's still at the very core of my beliefs. I hold this truth to be self evident - that men and women are equals, that they deserve to be treated equally.

I don't have a problem with sex - for gods sake, anyone who knows me more than casually knows that I'm a lusty beast, and I honestly believe that looking at attractive members of your preferred gender is one of the most pleasurable experiences life has to offer. I don't know how anyone could read any of the 76 pages of the Gurl Thread that I started, and think I was, in any way, anti-sex, or a puritan.

What I have a problem with goes beyond "objectification" - it's the COMMODIFICATION of womens bodies (and it's always womens bodies). The reduction of females to their secondary sexual characteristics, and the use of those disempersoned body parts to sell products - especially when they advertise the personnas, the branding of A MALE artist.

(As I actually asked Erol - would *he* ever appear in promotional photos with a similar theme, half naked, with slogans daubed on his chest? Of course he wouldn't. The joke fell a bit flat, and that's when he started calling the suggestion "violent in design" but it was a genuine question, that pointed to the double standard nature of the whole discussion.)

Because this works on two levels - not just the reduction of women to de-personned objects - but also the reenforcement of the stereotype that THIS is the true role of the female in the music industry. An accessory - a commodity that the male buys through his enhanced social status as a performer. What message does it give to fans? You want The Idol's attention? If you're a man - record a mix, produce a record, come up with some music. If you're a woman? Get your tits out.

To his great credit, Erol did actually email me personally and we talked about it - the simple act of his having a dialogue about it reaffirmed my belief in his integrity.

However, as to the messageboard? I have no interest in returning there.

It's not the first time I've been in a row there - maybe I'm used to a different level of internet discourse about music, raise as I've been on the twin bitch of ILXor and the playful intellectualism of Careless Talk Costs Lives/Plan B. I can understand that people might have different interpretations of music, and argue over there - but that messageboard was the first place I was ever dissed for *thinking* about music on a more than superficial level in the first place.

I knew that whatever I said was going to be misunderstood, misinterpreted, that the double standard would come out again and again, that the innocent flirtations of the Gurl Thread would be used as a stick to beat me with. I've butted my head against the inherent sexism and double standards of that board, practically from day one (for the first month I posted there, because I hung out mainly on the technical production forum, people actually assumed that I was a gay male rather than face the idea that a girl could know anything about DJing, music production, or have an encyclopaedic knowledge of bands and artists.)

I didn't pick my battles wisely. I picked my battle pretty stupidly, and that I regret. But for my beliefs, and the principles behind what I did, I will not apologise.