Are you willing to work weekends? Holidays? Through the birth of your child? Until you collapse?
It’s the hot new thing in job interviews: Testing whether candidates are willing to sacrifice everything — their home lives, their families, their health — for the good of their company.
The Muse recently wrote that we should be aware of “work-life balance ‘tests’” during interviews, highlighting the chief executive of Barstool Sports, Erika Nardini, who reportedly texts job applicants interviewing with the company on weekends. Nardini said she does this “just to see how fast you’ll respond,” in an interview with The New York Times. She expects to be contacted back “within three hours,” she elaborated. “It’s not that I’m going to bug you all weekend if you work for me, but I want you to be responsive. I think about work all the time,” Nardini said. “Other people don’t have to be working all the time, but I want people who are also always thinking.”
It was also reported recently that Vena Solutions CEO Don Mal asks candidates if they’d “leave [their] family at Disneyland to do something that was really important for the company?” He expects them to say yes.
Honestly they can fuck right off. I don’t want to work for a company with those expectations.
Pre-internet era: You walk into a room and sit down at a table. Someone brings you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Perhaps you are a vegetarian, or gluten-free. Doesn’t matter; you get a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda.
Usenet era: You walk into a room and sit down to your turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Someone tells you that over at the University they are also serving BLTs, pizza, coffee, and beer.
Web 1.0 (aka The Great Schism): You walk into a room. The room is lined with 50 unmarked doors. Someone tells you, “We have enough food to feed you and a hundred more…but we’ve scattered it behind these fifty doors. Good luck!”
Web 2.0 (present): You walk into a room. Someone points at the buffet and says, “Enjoy!” You turn to see a 100-foot-long buffet table, piled high with every kind of food imaginable. To be fair, some of the food is durian, head cheese, and chilled monkey brains, but that’s cool, some people are into those…and trust me, they are even more psyched to be here than you are.
Tumblr (a hell pit): You try to serve yourself a baked potato. An angry child runs up and slaps the plate out of your hand. “NIGHTSHADE PLANTS ARE POISONOUS,” the child yells. You are hungry. The child gives you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a kick on the shin.
The fact that a potato is replaced with a different form of potato is what makes that last one so accurate.
Its like the 80’s all over again, a remorseless madwoman runs the UK, a maniacal bastard runs the US, the world’s on the brink of nuclear war and all I want to do is listen to synthpop
star wars, ghostbusters, and mad max all pass the bechdel test now tho
that helps with the deja vu but tragically not the crushing fear of nuclear apocalypse
But it’s so scary! I was in superwholock phase when I was sixteen. There are MOMS and people over 30 who are still in fandom spaces, who interact with people in THAT way and the older I get, less I understand. You’re a fucking grown ass person. If you still like the shows, nobody’s stopping you from reblogging stuff (of course, DEPENDS what kind of STUFF you’re reblogging but that’s another discussion) but when the adult is an active member of the fandom which is mainly populated by kids… It’s ugly and disgusting and I feel so bad even thinking about that.
I look at posts like this and wonder… when was I supposed to get out?
Was I supposed to get a mortgage and some sensible shoes and learn to play bridge? Shuffle off to the glue factory to die?
Do you know how much many fandoms would lose if you declared everyone over 21 (or whatever the cutoff is) “creepy” and cast them out? As bad as I feel for a 30+ year old mother who is deeply into Superwholock, why should she be unwelcome in the fandom? Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock are none of them Game of Thrones but they aren’t kids shows. Adults on the internet do not have a responsibility to keep everything they do sanitized for hypothetical minors who might see it. I AM over 30, and trust me when I say that this shit got hashed out in court back in the 90s when it was new.
Older fans saw hundreds of thousands of fanworks disappear in the early 21st century, sometimes due to technical and economic reasons (like the loss of mailing lists and the fall of Geocities) but we also saw how ugly things could get when puritanical think-of-the-children handwringing censorship turned into witch hunts and deletions on FF.net, LJ, and more. AO3 was a gift from older fans so new fans of all ages wouldn’t have to worry about that stuff.
I mean get off my lawn and etc, but everyone in fandom needs to understand that they are functionally in a public space that does not promise to be “safe” for them personally, no matter their age. You may end up interacting with adult content and like it or not it’s going to be up to you to control your experience- block people, blacklist tags, move to a more moderated community, whatever you have to do, but the whole fandom is not going to keep everything acceptable by any one person’s standards.
Fandom is a place where we all come together, and the only thing we need to have in common is a shared love of whatever Thing we came for.
Is OP saying that existing on the internet while over 21 is inherently abusive?
Also it cracks me up when people assume Tumblr is mostly kids.
Don’t you know that mothers are supposed to have no other interests then children and women are supposed to have no other interests than becoming mothers after the age of 22? We are of course all monsters who have no right to create content, never mind that we (and really our mothers and grandmothers) created the platforms that we created the fandoms & now they’re supposed to be playgrounds for the kiddies and we’re in their spaces.
But it’s OK they will generously allow us to re-blog their contents as long as we don’t get too uppity and think we have the right to have voices ourselves.
Holy shit. I can’t even contemplate how bleak people like this must believe their futures are.
The OP makes me sound like a criminal… Just because you reach a ‘certain age’ doesn’t mean your interests suddenly change. Like it’s bad for people (apparently especially MOMS) to like certain things and damn forbid talk about it with others. I think without fandom, interests,…. life is pretty boring. So please, let me lead my life while you lead yours.
If your opinion aligns with OP, please do not read or reblog anything created by a fandom author who is over age 30.
* Note that this includes Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss.
note, too, that Supernatural, Sherlock, and Doctor Who are all shows about… adults. Written by adults, played by adults, about largely adult characters living largely adult lives. Some of the characters are even–and please, brace yourself, because this might be a shock–MOMS. So how, exactly, do adult fans not have a place in those fandoms, and on the fandom architecture we built?
So I’m the same age, give or take a year or two, as the main characters on Sherlock. When I write Sherlock fic, I’m writing about my generation. My peers.
I’m also a parent. Would it be creepy if I wrote a romance novel? Would it be creepy if I read a book with SEX in it? How about if I wrote a TV script for a show that already exists? Isn’t that exactly what some fanfiction is?
Does having kids mean I have to put away my sexy thoughts, pick up my knitting and sit in the fucking corner for the rest of my life?
“but when the adult is an active member of the fandom which is mainly populated by kids… It’s ugly and disgusting and I feel so bad even thinking about that.” “As bad as I feel for a 30+ year old mother who is deeply into Superwholock…”
Do you ever see people telling older men to stop cheering at sporting events? That it’s gross or disgusting for an old guy to put on a baseball jersey and yell his head off at a home game? No? I wonder why.
I hope you understand that this attitude perpetuates the absolutely raging sexism and ageism that permeates our culture. You’re perpetuating society’s wish that women of a certain age should go away and be silent. That we abandon our personhood as soon as we have kids. That mothers are vessels and not people. That older women are not supposed to be sexy or think about sex or feel passion. That we are supposed to sit in a circle with other mothers sipping wine and planning soccer carpools.
FUCK. THAT.
I was born a fannish person. I still love the same books I loved when I was in elementary school. I love talking about TV and movies and music with other passionate fans. I’ve always written fic, even before the internet, even before I knew what fic was. Having kids did not remove that part of my brain. It changed my life, but it did not change ME.
I’ve been in fandom for decades and have a large circle of wonderful fandom friends who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. Together, we are responsible for hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic. We’ve made podfics, fan art, podcasts, cons, writing groups. We’re not stopping anytime soon. To quote the worst rock n’ roll song ever written, we built this city.
When you call older fans “ugly and disgusting” you are discriminating against people who just happen to have a different fucking birthday. You are telling a female-dominated community that their desire and passion and creativity has an expiration date. And you are feeding our culture’s entirely sexist expectations of how older women, especially mothers, should behave.
I for one, as a MOM and well over 30, hope the OP figures this out before they become a parent (optional) and/or over 30 (not mandatory but this is already tragic enough). Because that’s a ton of baggage to unpack while you’re busy having an adult life.
I came to fandom late. Past 30 late. I wish I could say I never worried what would happen if anyone found out, but that’s not true. But I got there. I decided I DO NOT CARE if PTO Moms or Soccer Moms or My Mom think this is an unseemly enthusiasm for me to engage. Fuck that shit. I was miserable, as miserable as you can be when you forget who you are. Now I’m not. I could argue that I’m a better parent, a better person, because of it. That’s true, but it’s not the damn point. I am HAPPIER now than I was before. That’s enough.
@marsdaydream & @kestrel337 saved me a good bit of typing.
^^
As another 40yo mom who’s been in fandom since she 15, y’all kids can get the fuck off my fannish lawn.
If I’d had fandom when I was 16 and had the content written by older, sexually experienced Fandom Grandmas, I could have saved myself decades of suffering.
I’m very late to the party because I only knew of MALE fandom – fandom that called you a poser if you didn’t speak fluent Klingon or couldn’t recite every story line of every X-Men comic ever published.
Finding fandom and fic late in life validated things I’d been feeling since I was 13 but didn’t have words or concepts to express. I hope that other girls like I was can use fanfic to help figure themselves out. And guess what – the fic written by other teens won’t help them a bit!! It’s the fic written by the Oldies who’ve been around the block a few times that can help the Youngsters figure out this insane game called Life.
People like OP don’t even realize how they’re perpetuating the cultural erasure of women past their twenties.Hopefully by that fateful age where she’s supposed to shrivel up and go away she’ll have gained some wisdom and maturity about these things. I’m not super optimistic, though.
Tbh this whole thing is terrifying to me. I got into fandom when I was…32?? I didn’t even know what I was missing until that point and I was missing SO MUCH. It makes me sad to know there’s a dividing line here. There’s no way I’m stopping now when I’ve just got going, I’m going to keep fanning and keep writing because I forget how old I am fairly regularly in amongst the scary crazy amazing parenting world I’m in now, and fandom helps with that nicely 🙂
Actually, how about you kids get out of my fandom? I mean, y’all should be watching cartoons, and KC Undercover and Raven’s Home. You know, shows about kids. You’re too young to watch Supernatural, Dr Who and Sherlock, I mean those shows are for adults and quite frankly, having kids watching shows meant for adults is just creepy, so go back to your own space, and play with your dolls and Legos and stay out of mine.
Now, how fucked up is that. Me, an adult with a spouse,and kids and a mortgage, presuming to tell you, a non-related person younger than me, what you should or should not do and how you should interact with other people who enjoy the same things. So child, you may no longer be 16, and you may no longer be in a superwholock “phase” but fuck you for telling me, or anyone else who doesn’t meet your criteria of “kid” how they should interact. If you’re underage, and aren’t comfortable with my posting a smut-fic of Cas & Dean doing the do, or an explicit pic of Dean balls-deep in Cas’s ass, then don’t follow me. If you’re old enough to participate in fandom, then you’re old enough to police yourself and avoid things you aren’t comfortable with. I may be a mom, but I’m not your mom, and I’ll be damned if I self-censor because you’re uncomfortable.
I love everyone in this bar full of old farts.
I’m so confused! I’m not a mom but I am over 30. What am I allowed to enjoy and participate in???
Fandom. ❤
Funny, I’ve always experienced fandom as a primarily adult space where kids are allowed to be as long as they mind the rules and stay out of specifically 18+ spaces (special colored badges at cons and whatnot). I have no problem with kids in fandom as long as they stay in THEIR lane and don’t try to follow my clearly minors-unwelcome blog, or lecture me about how what I write is naughty-naughty-icky-boo-boo. (Yes, it is. I know it is. That’s how I like it.) Kids are great in energy and enthusiasm. Not so much when they start appointing themselves hall monitors.
But if it comes down to a question of who fandom really “belongs to,” there’s really no question that it “belongs to” the people who do the bulk of the work of creating it. Which is definitely adults – always has been and still is.
Just because you reach a ‘certain age’ doesn’t mean your interests suddenly change. Like it’s bad for people (apparently especially MOMS) to like certain things and damn forbid talk about it with others. I think without fandom, interests,…. life is pretty boring. So please, let me lead my life while you lead yours.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 