Fanboys and fangirls

Prompted by kateorman's recent poll, in which she asked what the terms "fanboy" and "fangirl" meant to, well, since I was the one doing it, me. I answered, truthfully, that to me "fangirl" is a self-deprecating term applied by female fans to themselves, and "fanboy" is an offensive and insulting term applied by male fans to other male fans.

This is a personal and partial view, of course. I'm sure some people use "fangirl" in a derogatory sense about people who aren't them, and I know some male fans are prone to describe themselves as "fanboys," though I'm sure from their tone when they do that they are very strenuously expecting the answer "nah, you're all right, mate." But the majority of my experience with those two terms have been along the lines I suggested above--female fans calling themselves "fangirls" for being excited about a new episode or getting a story recommended, male fans remarking that a certain episode of something is "bound to piss off the sad fanboy contingent."

So why should two words, equal on the face of it, have so different an affect? Is it just that males use words for combat and status games while females use them for information exchange? Is it that female fans are able to be more secure in their devotion to a fandom than male fans, or that female fans are used to putting themselves down while male fans are terrified of losing their machismo? Am I generalising to a degree not seen since the Regius Professor of Generalisation at Trinity College Cambridge published his celebrated work Everyone In The Whole World Agrees With Me And So Do You, You Just Don't Realise It?

I don't know. Well, I know about the last one, but not the others. It may be that I have a sense that I am one of those who would be called "fanboys," whereas it would be moderately unlikely that anyone could make "fangirl" stick on me. Any thoughts?

A poem my mother liked, just because

Here.