{"id":15657,"date":"2001-09-17T15:12:39","date_gmt":"2001-09-17T22:12:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2001\/09\/17\/22.html"},"modified":"2001-09-17T15:12:39","modified_gmt":"2001-09-17T22:12:39","slug":"sex-with-stormtroopers-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2001\/09\/17\/sex-with-stormtroopers-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex with Stormtroopers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Annalee Newitz<\/a>, apparently a friend of Charles Anders<\/a>, has a piece at Salon titled \"Sex with Stormtroopers<\/a>,\" about going to Dragoncon over Labor Day weekend.<\/p>\n

It's odd—part of it reads like a typical non-fan experiencing, and being put off by, the wacky world of fandom; part of it is a fairly respectful discussion of what a big convention is like; part of it says some interesting things about sex and social mores and money. My favorite lines:<\/p>\n

\"I keep hearing about this Scandinavian Web site about sex during LARPing . . . and there's this big problem with staying in character while having an orgasm.\"<\/p>\n

\"[Stormtroopers are] like cars, or computers, or giant fascist sex toys.\"<\/p>\n

But the most interesting bit to me is the part where she notes that Dragoncon runs opposite Worldcon, and says that Worldcon is a literary convention (citing the fact that \"postmodern writer-brainiacs like Samuel Delany and Cecilia Tan\" are among the guests) while Dragoncon is \"lowbrow,\" as evidenced by the fact that \"bad boy Harlan Ellison\" spoke there. I'm not sure I understand how Ellison qualifies as lowbrow.<\/p>\n

'sfunny, from my end of the sf world, Worldcon is halfway to being a media con; the real literary cons (Wiscon, Potlatch, Readercon, World Fantasy Con, etc) don't have movie rooms, don't generally have filking, don't have hall costumes or a costume contest.<\/p>\n

But it's also interesting that I've barely heard of Dragoncon, and had no idea it had 20,000 attendees. That's about four times the size of Worldcon.<\/p>\n

From Newitz's description, sounds like it's the epitome of a media con. I haven't been to a real media con since high school, when I used to go to the Creation conventions. It's a world I'm largely out of touch with these days. I wonder how much overlap there is between the media fandom that goes to Dragoncon and the media fandom that I see at mixed-media-and-literary conventions.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Annalee Newitz, apparently a friend of Charles Anders, has a piece at Salon titled “Sex with Stormtroopers,” about going to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}