It's important to address why we changed from a "gendered" site (the name "FanGirlTastic" was geared towards a female presence) to a non-gendered site. And let me please say that "non-gendered" is not the same as "geared towards dudes."
The world is full of entertainment sites that assume their audience is male simply because it isn't specifically female, and we're not one of them. Planet Fury is for all genders - male, female, somewhere-in-between-or-neither, and we're not going to pretend that women need their news "written differently" than the rest of the world.
Pretty-Scary.net was born in 2004, and was dedicated to news about and for women in horror. At the time, there was nothing like it anywhere on the Internet. All horror websites, as they are now, are all written with heavy emphasis on men and male audiences and only write about women when they are actresses in sexual roles onscreen.
The name "FanGirlTastic" was born when Pretty-Scary.net became limiting - in 2009, we decided that covering only horror wasn't enough for us or our readers. And it wasn't enough for us. We re-branded (that's a bullshit marketing term, "re-branded,") as FanGirlTastic because we wanted to include science fiction, fantasy, and action along with horror. The original idea was for FanGirlTastic.com to be a network of other alternative sites for women: the independent sites PinkRaygun.com and ActionChickFlick.com were to be our partners. We were actively looking to create a conglomerate of smart genre news for women fans - but PinkRaygun and ActionChickFlick backed out and decided to go it alone as single entities in order to preserve their own "brands." FanGirlTastic happened anyway with only the Pretty-Scary staff - and it was okay! We did a good job. We covered genre film news and managed to give equal time and energy to our female fans and female forces in genre news.
But then something horrible happened.
Marketing assholes decided that they needed to get in on the whole "geek girl" phenomenon and created heavily funded, commercialized "geek news sites" geared specifically towards women, and they wrote about and for women as if women were mentally inferior and always in need of buying something stupid with a Star Wars logo on it. Which sites do I mean? TheMarySue.com, GeekSugar.com, and several smaller-scale versions of the same commodity-feminist (look it up), commercial, mainstream, and insulting Gawker-network school of journalism. And now FanGirlTastic was being grouped in with these nerd-versions of Cosmopolitan Magazine, pandering to the sickening idea that women are childlike, incapable of understanding "news for men," and need uplifting soft-feminist-lite news stories about YA fantasy authors in order to feel connected to the world around them.
Fuck that.
This is a visual analagy of what took place
Planet Fury is not just a site about movies. It is an experiment in feminism. We're exploring the radical concept that women just might be able to understand us if we treat them like normal human beings and don't separate what is news for men from what is news for women. What a concept! So while it may not seem like a feminist site anymore because the name doesn't have a chick-reference in it any longer, understand that feminism as a daily constant practice is not about separation of gender roles but treating all genders (yes, I said "all") as equals. This is a site about equality.
What the world needs more of, in any aspect of journalism whether it is entertainment, politics, or any other genre, is alternative outlets that are not run solely to profit advertising clients. We are an alternative news entity and we're damn proud of it. I didn't spend two fucking years getting a master's degree in journalism to pretend that women only want to read about how Strawberry Shortcake is going to be a strong female heroine in the next animated film. It's time for so-called "feminist" genre sites to move into the 21st Century and make a fucking change in the way men and women are treated by marketing, advertising, and filmmakers.
'What the world needs more of, in any aspect of journalism whether it is entertainment, politics, or any other genre, is alternative outlets that are not run solely to profit advertising clients.'
Damn right.