Zee made me post this.

[schmerica]

Dear fandom, sometimes people are a) immature b) bitchy or c) wanky. Surprisingly enough, there is no direct correlation between this and being under 18. Seriously, you deal with underage people ALL THE FREAKING TIME, and you don't know it, because we don't choose to tell you. Most people CAN'T TELL, and that's FINE. If you do have the emotional maturity to deal with fandom reasonably, and you don't broadcast your age and make it into a issue for list owners and such, nobody SHOULD care.

(Less life experience CAN mean more wankiness, but you know what? That's usually if you are a person prone to it anyway. Other people just keep getting worse and worse about the longer they go on. Seriously, there's a certain type of kerfuffle-raising that's a skill; you get better at it with time.)

I have to admit, too, that when I entered fandom as a teenager (after I started college, but before I was legal for anything), one of the things I absolutely loved about it was its age-blindness. On the internet, what matters is how you present yourself and how you act that matters, not your age. At 17, it is kind of amazing to be able to strike up discussions and friendships with people anywhere from your own age to three decades older than you and have none of them automatically, without even thinking, treating you like a silly kid.

Signed with love and frustration,
Pearl-"I Was a Baby Fangirl and I Lived to Tell About It!"-o

Comments

[ladysorka]

I admit that I'm not sure I'd have been able to hide as long as I did if I was a baby fangirl on LJ, in contrast to being 16 and lurking on Sentinel mailing lists. I cheerfully admitted my own age on the one het Farscape list I was on, to the point where I was going to fannish meets at 16, but I did keep my mouth shut in slash fandom until I was of age - but I think a large part of that was that pre-18 I was on mailing lists, and I got my LJ shortly after turning 19.

Those people I did reveal my age to tended to be surpised I was that young, but I... very, very rarely revealed my age. Though, um, yes.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

See, the opposite is true for me -- I totally avoided lists till I turned 18, because I felt that put the list owner in an unfair position in a way lj doesn't directly. Plus I couldn't bring myself to lie outright on age statements.

[ladysorka]

I think part of the thing for me was that my mother was completely aware of my involvement in fandom, and, in fact, encouraged it, to the point that, when I was about 12/13, she was pointing me to her favourite Janeway/Chakotay stories - a number of which happened to be NC-17. So I didn't feel that I was endangering the list owners, because, hey, my mom thought the porn was a nice little hobby. Hell, she had me signing her up for Sam/Jack NC-17 lists under my name.

My, uh, situation was probably a bit unique, though.