I imagine most people who bother to read this feature know that I am one of the link-collectors for When Fangirls Attack (the other is Blog@Newsarama’s own Melissa Krause). That’s a project we started before we were invited to join the team here, and it has brought my great enjoyment and great stress over the past 20 months or so.

See, we have a “Link ‘em all and let the readers sort ‘em out” policy at When Fangirls Attack that occasionally gets an annoyed response. People don’t understand the point of linking patently anti-feminist rants and letting those arguments spread. We have a number of reasons for pushing the neutral policy (my own standards for a “feminist opinion” don’t necessarily match even those of my closest friends, becoming too one-sided chases some of the traffic away to the point where the only people who visit the site are already in the choir anyway, I have a bizarre compulsion to be as neutral as possible, Melissa and I have a collectively twisted sense of humor, I enjoy being angry), but really the best one is that conflict breeds eloquence. Most of what feminists do is spread awareness, based on the logic that if someone is aware of a problem they will take steps to minimize the problem. Analyzing social trends in media is a way of bringing awareness to harmful attitudes in our culture, and convincing people that things need to change. Arguing for social change in a culture where much of the population has been trained since birth to feel that things are the way they are as a result of human nature gets tricky. You need a good angle for your argument.

Its hard to find a good angle for your argument if all you speak to are people who think the same way you do. I’ve found the best way to shake up someone’s thinking is to get them into an argument with the real Devil’s advocate, someone who spouts the exact opposite opinions and will not budge on the issue.

Several things can happen as a result of this. People can make fun of that person, people can get angry at that person, people can try and reason with that person, or people can reason against that person (they can argue the person’s logical points, convincing the spectators of their side even though the person they argue against will never concede the discussion). All four tactics yield entertaining and expressive turns of phrase, and the last two often yield a new way of thinking about an issue that can convince someone who’s been sitting on the fence about it. I mean, after you’d had a chance to think your idea through and work it out against a hardcore antifeminist, persuading a person who only differs moderately on the issue is a piece of cake. And as unreasonable a debate partner as certain members of the community may seem, they often start from positions that are well-ingrained in our culture and generally used by more reasonable people who’ve never seem those assumptions challenged. If I’d never linked this post, this considerably better post that drives so many points home would never have been written. No one would have thought of it and we’d have just continually amiably agreed to disagree.

There’s all sorts of discussion across the internet. There’s reasonable, detached analysis and there’s passionate ranting and raging. There’s sites where people who think alike come together and commiserate, and there’s sites where different attitudes co-mingle and debate. There’s so-called “safe-spaces” and there’s spaces where you go specifically to get challenged. There’s a need for all of these places. When Fangirls Attack is not, and never has been, a “safe space” for even my own ideas. Its not meant to be. It doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t work if it is.

We need places like that. We need places where the conversation can run wild and people can butt heads and get angry and get passionate about what they think. And in those places we need people to oppose us and be pigheaded about it and not surrender an inch so that you can sort out your thoughts for the person who won’t be nearly so stubborn but who still needs a clear reason to change their way of thinking. We need spots to fight and sharpen our skills just as much as we need spots to retreat and lick our wounds in. We need a place to run free with these ideas and test them on the unreceptive! We need wild, untamed debate! Rational raging and reasoning rants!

This sort of thing can get troublesome in a single community so Melissa and I try to facilitate this a bit across different websites. People control their own little space of the web, and they see each other and talk at each other through our link service. Its like throwing snowballs (or hand grenades, depending on the combatants) at each other from behind homemade forts.

Why am I telling Blog@Newsarama this? Because understanding When Fangirls Attack is pretty central to understanding my point of view on getting comic book companies to stop being so stupid when it comes to female characters, and the much smaller goal of getting people to stop being so stupid about gender altogether. We need ideas and eloquence to do either, you can’t bash people over the head with rules. You have to convince them to change their way of thinking. To do convincing, you need drive and passion and well-tested arguments. To have drive and passion, you need anger. To have well-tested arguments, you need real conflict.

So this is all not just because I like to watch people argue.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 8:39 am and is filed under Just Past the Horizon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.