The thing is, I’ve seen boys have shipping arguments over anime waifus, but mostly they’re just memeing at each other, and I’ve never seen one do something like the “antis” do. I’m not ruling it out, I just haven’t seen that particular flaw from them.
…if I’m using the term “antis” correctly.
I’m pretty sure that the psychic and cultural incentives that drive anti-ness are not going to be found, in force, at all, amongst any population of men or boys.
@balioc elaborate?
1. The sordid cynical part:
Anti-ness is a part of fandom drama, and like every other part of fandom drama, a lot of it is about status-posturing and winning sympathy points. Cf. MsScribe and all that.
In general, this particular universe of status-posturing works much better for women than for men, which is one of the reasons you see them engaging with it so much more vigorously. And that’s doubly true for the anti strategy in particular. Being an anti essentially means being willing to say “I am hurt, I am offended, this nasty thing has triggered my delicate sensibilities and you should feel very sorry for me” – and as a baseline, a woman who makes that kind of claim is likely to find a receptive audience and may even find her status raised because of it, whereas a man who makes that kind of claim is likely to be seen as a pathetic, melodramatic weakling.
In forums where anonymity is not carefully maintained, men are really very likely to adopt a stance of “I am, personally, much too cool and strong to have serious problems.” That doesn’t mesh well with the kind of hyperbolic presentation of trauma that you need for most anti-ness.
2. The genuinely sad part:
To the extent that anti-ness is a “real” thing rather than a stupid status game, I think it comes mostly from one source: the desire to control one’s own sexualization, and exposure to sexual material, in a world where this is increasingly difficult (and increasingly hard to justify through the classical ideological channels).
This is more a concern for girls than for boys, by like orders of magnitude, because – as we know from Feminism 101 – women are the Sex Class, and femininity basically is sexuality for most intents and purposes.
Look. Different people have very different preferences regarding the amount of exposure they want to sex (in various ways), particularly when they’re young. In the late 20th century and even the early 2000s we used to have a much more repressed culture overall; in particular, there were only a few channels through which sexual content could spread, and they were mostly things that required you to seek them out actively. In that world, the hip rebellion youth culture was a lot more gleefully sex-positive, because it could have an ethos of “give us the stuff that’s being hidden from us!” – and if you didn’t want that, well, you could be a Good Girl and the world wouldn’t do very much to push it on you.
Now it’s basically impossible to escape sex wherever you go. And you can’t try to sequester yourself from it with old-fashioned claims about purity or maidenly virtue or whatever, not unless you want to relegate yourself to the ranks of the contemptible fundies.
But! Our present mainstream liberal culture, while it’s relentlessly sex-positive in the abstract, does have all sorts of rules about what kinds of things constitute Bad Shameful Sex. So if you can make a case that the things that are particularly bothering you fall into those categories, you can maybe get rid of them, or at the very least you can have some cathartic lashing-out.
[It’s also, to be clear, not a binary sex-good-versus-sex-bad kind of thing. People who are interested in exploring whatever-it-is may nonetheless not want to be immersed in a culture that is overall going at a much faster pace.]
Sometimes, “Ship X is problematic” means “I like Ship Y better, and I am going to call upon the totemic forces of victimhood to strike a blow in that conflict and maybe raise my profile.” This is, pretty much by necessity, a woman’s gambit.
Sometimes, “Ship X is problematic” means “I really really don’t want to see things like that in my beloved pure fandom, and if I ask you nicely to stop it of course won’t do anything, but maybe with the right accusatory rhetoric I can make you stop.” This is much likelier to be a problem for [young] women than for men. Men can certainly be made uncomfortable by sexual content – I was very much a prude in my younger days – but they probably aren’t going to feel like the whole universe is an array of hostile forces on that front.
The real key here, to my mind, was the popularity of the “nineteen-year-olds and early-twenty-somethings are basically kids, for purposes of interest in them being equivalent to pedophilia” meme. From the standpoint of human biology or of any historically-extant human culture, this is too bizarre for words. From the standpoint of a young woman who mostly just doesn’t want to deal with sexual interest, and who knows that she can’t push that desire in the abstract…