Femmefans

Femmefans are the opposite of fanboys, both in gender and demeanor.

The term femmefans or femmefen for female fans dates back to the days when there weren't too many, but old-time fans still use it when a distinction between genders matters.

Men outnumbered women in early fandom enough that when Lee Hoffman began to correspond with other fans, everyone thought she was male. Bob Tucker wrote that, in 1951, when she and two other fans trooped into his Nolacon 1 hotel room and introduced themselves, he had just stepped out of the bath and was so flabbergasted that he dropped his towel.

In the early years, it was a rare girl who entered fandom other than “via the 3 routine routes of masculinity; i.e., brother, boyfriend or breadwinner,” as Forry Ackerman put it in 1942. As late as the 1950s, Harry Warner asserted, “Lee Hoffman is the first all-out girl fan who isn’t hanging onto the coattails of a brother, husband, or boyfriend....” (This was not actually true, as accounts of Jean Bogert, Barbara Bovard, Mary Byers, Tigrina, and others attest.)

More women joined fandom on their own rather than as a companion to a boyfriend or relative beginning in the late 1960s and early '70s, when the microcosm expanded exponentially. However, despite being in the minority, women nevertheless made an impact on fandom before then, among them Morojo, Judith Merril, Helen Cloukey and Virginia Kidd, who were among the First Fans, and Julian May, Noreen Falasca, Anna Sinclare Moffatt, Dirce Archer and Ella Parker, who chaired Worldcons.

Also see Fanne, Early Femmefen.

From Fancyclopedia 2, ca. 1959

Explaining everything is contrary to our philosophy of education.

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Fanspeak

This is a fanspeak page. Please extend it by adding information about when and by whom it was coined, whether it’s still in use, etc.