In my times as a single girl and as a nerd, I often tried to hang out with anime fans. Believe it or not, I watch anime on occasion — though not Naruto or anything like that. Rather, I’m more of a Beastars type of person.
But I digress. Talk to me, and you’ll hear me warn people against dating “anime nerds.”
If you hear me in casual conversation, I openly admit that I avoid anime conventions. Admittedly, I have very personal reasons as to why I don’t go to them that involves trauma. But, it’s not just anime conventions I dislike. It’s anime fandom in general.
Don’t get me wrong. A lot of my friends love to watch anime or read manga. That’s not the issue. Anime, as a genre, has some really decent stories that are worth watching. People who watch anime can be amazing friends and partners.
My problem comes with the community as a whole. If you’re heavily involved in the community, I’m going to get leery about hanging out with you. Or, at the very least, I’ll be more distant with you until I’ve fully sniffed you out.
Let me explain why…
There’s a secret among cosplay models that needs to be outed.
I’ve talked to quite a few adult film stars and cosplay models in my days. Heck, I used to be one at one point. While we bond over our favorite wig stores and costume shops, a short whisper often rises up.
Almost inevitably, one model will lean into me and say something like, “I can’t stand anime geek guys. They’re so horrible to me! They get so creepy, so territorial, and so weird with me. It’s depraved.”
Without fail, every anime convention I’ve gone to involved guys who groped cosplayers. Or, in the case of online forums, you’ll see X-rated screeds that quickly turn into rage-rants if the girl is taken but accepts tips from men.
Not all, but too many of these guys, tend to make sure girls know they are not safe here. If it’s not a matter of impeding on their boundaries, it’s often a way of just subtly showing girls that they are not welcome.
Theis is particularly visible when men try to gatekeep girls one too many times at conventions. It’s their weird way of making sure girls know that they are not good enough to hang.
“Oh, you’re an anime fan?” they sneer. “Tell me five titles if you’re not fake.”
Ugh, fuck you, you insufferable gatekeeper nerds. Don’t wail to me when girls avoid you if you make a point of making us feel unwelcome.
It’s a culture that breeds misogyny.
From personal experience, almost every single guy I’ve dated who was heavily into anime was a horrible, abusive, gaslighting, cheating sack of crap. I was the girl who actually gave “good nerds a chance,” per their own recommendations.
What that got me was getting beaten and being cheated on. Oh, and then I was verbally berated for being a slut. Okay, cool. Eventually, I realized that the culture was misogynistic since no one seemed to step up and say that this behavior was wrong.
If you look at a lot of those guys’ behavior, they’d tick almost every sign on this list:
If anything, most of the women who want to partake in the fandom get harassed and shunned. Some even get threatened over it. While it is obviously not all anime geeks, it’s enough that women get fed up in spades.
No wonder so many of them drop out!
Here’s what I think makes anime fandom so hateful towards women…
I’m not the only one who’s experienced this. In my circle of friends, I’ve counted at least six people who have walked out of the fandom because they could no longer tolerate the way guys treated them.
After years of watching this, I realized what was going on. Here’s what I noticed:
- People who are socially awkward are the ones who tend to gravitate towards anime fandom. They love the stories, all the gorgeous women, and the humor. They make it a large portion of their identity because they can bond with others like them.
- These same people tend to get repeatedly rejected and outcasted by others who aren’t into it. This makes them bitter, especially towards the opposite sex. If they’re gung-ho about being a female fan, they often want to be the only girl in the group because it makes them feel special.
- Anime forums start to feed them hateful content. I’m just going to point out that a lot of forums that tend to hate on women have a LOT of anime followers. I mean, at one point, there was a Nazi My Little Pony Movement. (Not anime, but still, it’s along the same vein of vibe.)
- Many anime fans egg each other on when it comes to cruelty or strange behavior. I’ll leave it at this: a lot of anime communities I’ve seen seem to get a kick out of being weird, abusive, or just downright unhealthy regarding relationships. I mean, CBR did a whole list about this. I’ve seen anime fans take what they see in shows as the norm. That’s alarming.
- Anime storylines tend to give them unrealistic expectations of dating and love. I’m looking at you ecchi harem stories! Same with fanservice-heavy plotlines that involve awkward people getting the girl. JFC, life does not work that way!
- Some people lose their gourds altogether and dissociate from reality. As you can imagine, this makes them intolerable to be around and also makes them shitty partners. How do I know? I’ve been that person and needed to grow and find a real clique rather than hole up in an anime nest.
As you can imagine, all these unhealthy factors put a fairly large percentage of people in a bad headspace. Some of them get out of it, others don’t.
So what happens to girls in the anime fandom?
So, girls who have an interest in anime tend to have a wide range of different experiences. I’m going to try to run through all of the common threads I’ve noticed:
- Some girls go to anime conventions and experience abuse. Some might reject the guys, which triggers their trauma response and makes them flip out. They decide to avoid them. Eventually, many refuse to admit they watch anime to others or just put their manga in the garbage.
- Girls who date geeks sometimes end up having a month of goodness, until the anime fan starts to punish the girl for things other people did to them. I noticed that this is often a subconscious thing. They treat girls bad because they have all this hate in them, and because they’re insecure and try to force the girl to stay with them. At times, they do it consciously. That’s even worse.
- More than a fair amount of girls report being sexually assaulted, harassed, and raped by anime geeks. Personally, I could tell you horror stories that happened to me. I am not alone because I watched it happen to close friends of mine.
- Some girls actually find a good community for them and find a boyfriend too. Hopefully, this can be more common than it was when I went to conventions. I hope this will be more normal, but I’m very skeptical.
- Finally, other girls just grow out of the fandom and end up dating someone who’s not a fan because it’s easier. This seems to be the most common ending for women my age, but I can’t be sure. I’m just reporting what I’ve noticed.
But shouldn’t girls still give geeks a chance?
Uh, no. Fuck that. It’s not a woman’s duty to give a guy a chance when he’s seething with hate and entitlement. Girls have a right to protect themselves from abuse — and that includes saying no to guys who show red flags.
Anime fandom, for many women, became a red flag. It’s not because anime sucks, either. It’s the terrible experiences they have with men who lack introspection and empathy in the scene.
If girls notice that they get abused by anime fans on a regular basis, they are going to sit there and wonder why they’re with them. Eventually, jocks, goths, and other “popular” types are going to become more attractive to them than nerds.
The guys making shit worse for themselves don’t care to better themselves. It’s never their fault, you see. Most of the problematic anime guys I’ve met wail about how “jocks” and “Chads” are abusive but won’t look in the mirror at how they treated girls into them. With them, “It’s different!”
The lack of introspection a lot of the problematic guys have is horrifying. I’ve seen it firsthand. I had an anime-loving ex who would beat on me till I cry, then would look at me with a bruise on me, and say, “I never hit a woman. That was me just playing with you.”
The phenomenon of geeky guys choosing to punish girls for slights done by others is well-known among former anime fans. It’s also fairly easy to witness, to the point that some particularly fanatical anime geeks openly admit they’d abuse a girlfriend if they had one.
If these are the experiences female geeks are having with their male counterparts, people shouldn’t be shocked when they stop dating their male counterparts. Mr. Johnny Football Star or Mr. Rock Star is going to look more attractive, even if that’s not her ideal type.
Do all anime nerds treat women this way? No, but enough of them do and enough of them stay silent to turn this fandom into a turnoff for many women. (Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, right?)
Can anime be empowering and uplifting?
Absolutely, it has the opportunity to be that way. I’ve actually gotten a lot of value from the manga version of Marie Kondo’s book. You also can learn how to cook through Manga University’s books and tons of people learned Japanese from anime.
The thing is, in order for it to be a truly uplifting thing, the anime community has to work harder on actually encouraging healthy attitudes towards sex, women, socializing, and more. So far, I have yet to see mainstream anime step up to that need.
It has to stop being about “nerds vs. the world” and start being about, “let’s all watch this stuff together and laugh.” Making others view your fandom as a red flag or even ousting people from your fandom only hurts you in the process.
As I said, I think I had enough anime trauma for my lifetime. For me, it’s a bit too late for me to jump into anime again. I lost all interest in it years ago. But, people, let’s think about the next generation of fans. Can we do better this time around? I think so.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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