Both words appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, within the larger entry for ‘fan’. ‘Fanboy’ is pinned as slang, with the earliest discovered quotation a surprisingly early reference to a 1919 newspaper article about baseball. ‘Fangirl’ also appears, althoug the earliest quotation is a 1990 reference to rec.arts.comics - definitely a word of the internet age.

Another victory for descriptive dictionaries over prescriptive ones, then.

@gia I don’t mean it to be sexist. I guess it’s just the attitude of fandom in general.

in before fanperson

Gia, I think you’re right. I think we’re an underrepresented group, even though our numbers seem pretty commensurate. (Anybody got any numbers on con attendees by sex?) I think we’re especially underrepresented in the upper levels of the geek industries where the print references are “trusted”. (If we were equally represented, maybe I could get some decent guy figures…)

I also don’t think you’re overreacting, based on simple logic. If there is a female equivalent to a term, even if it’s not well-represented in print, it still deserves to be included.

@Kitsune: I’ve never heard specific numbers, but I remember hearing several different convention staffers note that attendance at anime cons was pretty even between men and women.

Now, I’d be more interested in getting a demographic breakdown of San Diego Comic Con, which is a much more broadly focused convention (probably the closest thing we have in the US to simply just a “fan con”).

I’ve heard fangirl used a lot! Just hang out online in various geeky forums and there you go. Extensive usage.

It could also be that, in their perspective, fangirl may necessarily have a derogatory connotation, and they would like to avoid a offending the feminist movement.

Besides, no one cares about offending loser males ;)

Having “only have a handful of citations” for fangirl doesn’t mean fangirls don’t exist.

We’re not a word waiting to be legitimized, we exist. We’re here today, we’ll be here in 2017 or whenever there are enough citations.

It’s like saying the word “she” should not make it into the dictionary in 1808 because not enough text citations use it.

Put us in now and more people will become conscious of the fact that not only boys are fans of movies, television and comic books.

Don’t put us in now and it becomes the same old cycle of having to fight to get texts and everything else in the world to stop saying “he” as a pronoun for human, male or female.

Just my two cents.

@ed: I’m enough of a nerd that I thought about that before posting. I decided that while Saki would destroy anyone who tried to call her a fangirl in any way shape or form, she would probably think it was seriously lame that fangirls don’t get recognized like fanboys do.

She hates otaku, but I bet she’d figure “if there have to be otaku, the female ones should get at least as much respect as the male ones! (…Not that I respect them…)”

That’s my justification and I’m sticking with it! ;)