Oh, I've read the reasoning, but I find to be mostly rationalization. I've also noticed that while their mission statement mentions all levels of fanworks, including videos and fan art, most of their arguments for the history being "predominantly female" revert to fan fiction because, let's face it, that's where their arguments make the most sense.

Fan art, for example, dates back over a thousand years if you count religious works, and for better or worse, the majority of early "fan artists" in ancient times were male. More recently, comic books, a male dominated realm (which is often a bad thing ala Women in Refrigerators) sparked a huge fan art community as everyone tried to make their own super-hero comic, or just draw their own Superman or Batman adventure. If you include fan art, then to say it's "rooted in a primarily female culture" or the like is silly. Granted, it's equally silly to say it's rooted primarily in male culture, as there have and continue to be many, many influential female fan artists.

With fan fiction there is a little more logic to the statement, but while I could debate that too, that's not my main point. The point here is that OTW seems to be ignoring large fan work categories while at the same time claiming that they are representing them. If OTW is truly only talking about fan fiction then it needs to revise its mission statement big time.

That's just the first step, of course, but it needs to be done. OTW needs a firm identity if it wants its claims to be taken seriously.