Once More With Feeling...

[shadowkat]

Last one, I promise. All this is probably proving is that I should leave polling to the experts. Hee.

[Poll #976784]

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

My impression is that more women than men write fanfic but the first fanfic I ever saw was of the Spuffy/slash variety so my definition of fanfic tends to centre on that model. I think the problem is that some types of fic that are very heavily female dominated and others aren’t, the genre doesn’t form a single distribution so I’m not sure how informative it is to take an overall mean so to speak.

The poll results are really quite fascinating. Apparently most of the women answering the poll assume it is primarily women who write fanfic, and the men who *don't* write fanfic assume the same. The men who do write fanfic or women who know men who have and have written it with them - say that there is no way of telling for certain. LOL!

I probably should have broken it down into character ships, but that would just make things complicated and I was sneaking these polls in at work on the sly...at lunch and at breaks on a tiny box, so no one could tell what I was doing if they happened to look over my shoulder. Wasn't too worried, the guy who shares the cubicle with me was watching Heroes on his screen at lunch. At any rate - I'd be curious to know if most of the men writing fic wrote non-ship, non-romance, and Xander or Angel centric? Which may explain why people who read mostly Spuffy or Spike or Slash, may not know guys write it or think women primarily write it. People aren't always very good at seeing beyond their own little playground. I noticed that a lot when I was hopping fanboards back in the day. Each one was unique. Some all women. Some mostly men. And some a mix.
Although it was hard to tell at times.

I think the women online tend to talk about fanfic more - its not that women necessarily write more fanfic than men, but they are appear to be better marketers of it and less nervous about sharing it or admitting they write it. Or so I've noticed. This too could be a faulty assumption.

What the poll gets across is you really can't catergorize people - even though it is human nature to do just that. (Heck I'm doing it.) We want to see a pattern, even if there isn't one. People will do their own individual thing and tend to change their minds.

So, no I don't think anyone can claim that the illegality of fanfiction is silencing women's voices. Or at least I don't see any proof of that here.