Science, y'all.

[melannen]

ETA early morning jan 18: a short follow-up with more poll numbers + things /ETA

I was going to wait and post this later, with a much more elaborate stastistical work-up, population variables and meta-analysis - because I think it's interesting in its own right - but the ongoing conversation I'm seeing, and the extremely clear result I'm getting, is making me think it's more important to get the facts out there, than to make them pretty.

So: Are slashers straight?

I spent an afternoon and evening finding all of the polls & surveys of slash demographics I could that included a question on sexuality. Some I already had bookmarked, some I found through google, delicious, and following citations in academic papers. I'm sure there are more out there, and if you have links to more more polls I would love to add their data to my analysis. But you know what? The results of the ones I've found are pretty consistent, across a large range of survey population. And it is, to be quite honest, not the result I was expecting, even as a slasher who does not herself identify as straight, and is used to finding people like her in fandom.

Are slashers straight?


I present to you the raw numbers on sexuality for the 10 polls & surveys I could find results for, plus several more I could only find references to.

You'll note that there are a variety of categories used for sexuality; for the purposes of the meta-analysis, I am counting as "straight" any poll answer that was straight, heterosexual, primarily heterosexual, heteroflexible, or direct equivalent. I am using "queer" as shorthand for everybody else, including people who self-identified as bi-leaning-straight, questioning, and asexual. (You'll also note that the polls that included options beyond gay, straight, and bi had *significant* numbers of participants choosing them, something you might want to consider in general when talking about fans' sexuality. Just fyi.)

I only listed gender statistics for a few of the polls. That's because I'm lazy, and the way LJ polls work, separating out the responses by gender wouldn't have been terribly meaningful without a lot of annoying hand-collating anyway, so for the record: any poll with no gender statistics here either had no gender question, or over 90% self-identified women respondents. As this analysis is mostly meant to address the question of slashers' sexuality, I'm leaving gender identity unexamined for the quick'n'dirty version. (Though I'll note that only one of the polls had options specifically involving non-gender-binary people and orientation. Other possibilities, fandom: they exist.)

http://www.libraryofmoria.com/jsr/part2.html#21
2003
Library of Moria, a LOTR fic archive
Participants: 275
Heterosexual: 124
Mostly Heterosexual: 39
Bisexual: 84
Mostly Homosexual: 0
Homosexual: 10
Undecided: 6
Non-sexual: 2
Percent identified as queer: 37%

http://rushlight75.livejournal.com/38193.html
2003-10-14
Pre-metafandom, but widely distributed through its precursors
Participants: 1000
Male: 26
Female: 974
Only result available is an average Kinsey Scale rating: 1.8
(which kind of comes out to 40% queer, but not really)

http://idroppedarice.livejournal.com/59133.html
7-28-2004
Harry Potter slashers, by way of Fiction Alley Park
365 participants
straight: 173
bi: 119
gay: 22
undecided: 49
Percent identified as queer: 52.7%

http://lavinialavender.livejournal.com/179885.html
4-28-2005
locked, but currently available through Google's cache; mostly HP and anime slashers
participants: 203
straight: 85
gay: 8
bi: 73
Confused: 36
Percent identifying as queer: 54.6%

http://www.misterpoll.com/polls/242137/results
2006-2-13
posted by Proserpina "For the yaoi girls", but I have no idea where it was linked/promoted.
total: 43
heterosexual: 23
homosexual: 1
bisexual: 11
pansexual: 2
asexual: 1
unsure: 5
Percent identifying as queer: 53% 47%

http://hederahelix.livejournal.com/259632.html
6-29-2006
Mostly the metafandom crowd; specifically slash-focused.
Participants: 402
Heterosexual: 35
Heterosexual but slasher: 62
Bisexual, but heterosexual in practice: 102
Bisexual: 128
Bisexual, but queer in practice: 26
Lesbian, gay, queer, etc but slasher: 30
Lesbian, gay, queer, etc: 19
Percent identified as queer: 76%

http://wisdomeagle.livejournal.com/931805.html
February 2, 2007
Mostly the metafandom crowd; not all slashers - includes het & gen fans.
469 participants
straight women: 206
bi/omni/pansexual women: 186
lesbians: 56
asexual: 30
Straight men: 10
bi men: 5
Gay men: 3
Percent participants who identify as queer: 59.7%

http://jadelennox.livejournal.com/265022.html
Feb 7, 2007
A small poll of one fan writer's circle, not specifically fandom-focused:
Participants: 35
straight: 8
gay: 1
bisexual: 10
sligtly bisexual (kinsey 1 or 5): 9
other: 5
Percent participants who identified as queer: 71%

http://sailorptah.dreamwidth.org/11270.html
Feb 13, 2008
Mostly the metafandom & anime crowd, but not specifically fandom-focused; a freeform survey which emphasized complex & fluid sexuality
Total participants: 71
Identified as some subset of queer: 60
Percent participants who identified as queer: 84.5%

http://kleenexwoman.livejournal.com/248586.html
2-12-2008
Mostly the metafandom crowd, but with some exposure outside it
Participants: 577
gay: 25
bi-leaning-gay: 47
bi: 62
pan: 76
bi-leaning-straight: 84
straight: 192
asexual: 37
other: 23
no labels: 31
Percent identifying as queer: 66.7%

Polls whose results are not included in this analysis:

There are two other polls on FAP, but they were free-response threads and I'd've had to collate the results by hand, which I didn't have time for: http://forums.fictionalley.org/park/showthread.php?s=f041f722f3998ddd1bfbc6055d650507&threadid=19455&highlight=slash+survey and http://forums.fictionalley.org/park/showthread.phps=f041f722f3998ddd1bfbc6055d650507&threadid=133998&highlight=slash+survey

...it's on my list.

blnchflr ran a poll through metafandom sometime in early February, 2007, which was deleted, originally at: http://skuf.livejournal.com/132143.html . The only data I could find was a reference that it was "running closer to just 35% saying they are "strictly het".

I found several fandom demographics polls pre-dating 2003, but none of them had a sexuality question, which is interesting in its own right. (I suspect that the farther you go back in slash's history, the less likely it is that we would have even dared to ask these questions, and the less likely we would have gotten accurate answers, if we did. And in a time when fanfic was getting a *lot* of flak from the straight world, presenting an image to outsiders of "ordinary housewives" was important. I think the time when we need that protective image is fading.)

Finally, Wikipedia's reference for saying that "polls claim most slashers are heterosexual women", which has propagated everywhere, is Anne Kustritz's paper "Slashing the Romance Narrative", first published in the Journal of Amercan Culture in 2003, available in pdf here: http://www.laurientaylor.org/research/sources/slashfic.pdf . She, in turns, cites three informal fandom essays in her fandom demographics section, which is only a small part of the paper - those three essays are no more or less rigorous or inclusive than the 11 I have analysed here, note. The first is a clearly parodic essay on the Sith Academy, http://www.siubhan.com/sithacademy/criticalintro.html , which uses no poll or survey data, and does not even touch on the question of slashers' sexuality (despite Kustritz' citation implying it does.) The second is given the URL http://www.apps4.vantagenet.com/zpolls/count.asp?rlt=91221204045&id=91221204045 , which was a poll of the Darth Maul Estrogen Brigade in 2000. It is no longer available online, nor can I find any other references to it remaining online. The second was at http://www.sockii.com/ma/criticalintro.htm ; it is also no longer online, and I can find no details on it whatsoever except the date given of 1999, though the URL + the other references in the paper strongly imply that it was limited to TPM fandom, like the others.

(I will also note, because it seems worth noting, that the demographics section of that paper was very strongly trying to make the point that slashers are NICE WELL-ADJUSTED WOMEN WHO ARE NOT DEVIANT OR SCARY, so I am inclined to think the author had a bias toward categorizing slashers as heterosexual, especially as she uses the phrase "mostly to totally heterosexual" in the passage with the citation, but does not qualify heterosexual anywhere else. There is a lot of wiggle room in "mostly", as the variety of categories in the polls I listed above demonstrate. ...also, I @#$%&^@$ hate wikipedia's goddamn paternalistic notability and citation rules, since it means those two ten-year-old Phantom Menace polls somehow turned into GOSPEL TRUTH on the way to the printing press.)

So, over 9 polls, in a variety of slash subfandoms from the late-teens yaoi set to the mid-thirties meta fans set, dates ranging over 7 years. Only onetwo polls had less than 50% queer participants, and that wasone of them the earliest one, and even they were at 37% and 47%. The median percent of queer participants was 59.7%, and the mean was 61.5% 60.8%.

SO when people say things like "slash fans are appropriating queer experience", what THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER hear is either "you aren't queer enough, your queer identity isn't real" or "male voices are the only ones qualified to speak for the queer community."

I think the question of how queer women can appropriate queer men's identity, and the damage that can be done when gay men speaking about themselves are drowned out by women, are valid discussion topics, and worth addressing. That is not a conversation that is going to happen as long as THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER, are being erased from the discussion. fyi.

And SO when people say things like "slash is a legitimate way for straight women to express their sexuality", what THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER hear is either "you aren't queer enough, your queer identity isn't relevant" or "straight voices are the only ones qualified to speak for the slash community".

I think the question of how straight women's sexuality interacts with queer sexuality, and the ways straight women's sexuality defines slash, are valid discussion topics, and worth addressing. That is not a conversation that is going to happen as long as THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER, are being erased from the discussion. fyi.

Can I say that one more time? I like saying it. Science makes me happy.

THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.

ETA: People in comments have pointed out math errors that change the numbers slightly: I've added corrections in the relevant places. The conclusions still stand, however (for now.)

ETA 2 early morning jan 18: a short follow-up with more poll numbers + things /ETA 2

Comments

[fairestcat]

YOU ARE AWESOME.

Thank you for this, it's really interesting to see all the numbers put together like this.

[melannen]

Numbers! This is not helping my tendency to start making tallies about random comment threads in notepad! :D

I am glad you found it interesting.

[merisunshine36]

(here via....somewhere)

Amazing work, props to you for putting it all together. I'm really glad you did this, because contrary to (what I assume) most people thought, I had been pondering a lot on how it seemed as if everyone in my fandom circles was queer!

I love that the polls you found illustrate the many ways that people identify their sexuality--it is my fondest wish that someday we will throw the gay/straight (or even the queer/straight) binary out the window, and instead accept that human sexuality is way more fluid than we previously thought.

[melannen]

Oh, god, I am waiting for the day when it's about people not categories! (There was one poll where a significant portion of female respondents were like "yeah, my sexual orientation depends on the time of month" ...which I've never really seen talked about anywhere else, but is totally true for me. Fluid!)

I do think there are some people for whom the binaries are valid and important (not all of them straight), so I try to be careful about assuming everybody groks fluid sexuality, and I can visualize a space in which monosexual people are marginalized, too (in fact, I have an original novel I play with sometimes set in a space like that...)

[cesperanza]

Wow, someone who actually did some homework! *applauds you madly*

[melannen]

If only I'd done this much homework in college, I might be a real acafan by now!

Um, I mean, thank you! :)

[jmtorres]

Many years ago I did a poll that might be relevant, trying to correlate between sexual orientation and fannish reading habits. http://jmtorres.livejournal.com/629858.html
The rawest piece of data: 129 straight or mostly straight respondents vs 162 answering some variety of not straight. While not all of them are slashers, only 6 picked het or gen as their primary fannish reading interest; if you adjust those six people out of the numbers, it comes to 125 straight at-least-part-time-slashers vs 160 queer at-least-part-of-the-time-slashers.

Which is to say: I second your conclusions.

[melannen]

Thank you for more data! I have to say, I was expecting the numbers to be less consistent over time than they are. It's pretty heartening.

[intransitive]

I don't have time to read all the other comments just now, but THANK you so much for saying this. I am so sick of this debate being framed as if there are only two kinds of people involved, straight women and gay men.

[melannen]

I am so glad so many people are finding comfort in this post! (I have been just filtering out any posts that don't specifically talk about queer women; I don't have the energy.)

[sqbr]

My main response to this is: yay! Yes!

I do wonder how much self selection there is in the fact that all these polls were done in spaces that were queer friendly enough to ask these sorts of questions. But I'm not sure there's much you can do about that! And the un-straightness is so pronounced in these results that I think it'd have to be significant even in any less queer friendly parts of slash fandom.

(What got me thinking about this is the fact that that yes, most of the slashers I know identify as queer, but so do a disproportionately large proportion of the non-fanfic-fandom parts of my flist)

I would also be curious to see comparisons between people who primarily write/read boyslash, femslash, gen and het. The conventional wisdom is that they're all written by straight women, lesbians, straight men and women, and straight women respectively but I don't know how true that is (and as a mostly-straight woman who writes everything but slash I find such assumptions annoying :))

[melannen]

I have the same thoughts about the self-selection of the polls, and yeah, if the result had been less clear and pronounced I probably wouldn't have made this post (I might have still posted, but it would have been a very different post.) A meta-analysis coming out to 60% allows for a fairly large margin of error...

I was talking with one of the non-fanfic people on my circle about that just tonight! He, too, is curious about how this compares to demographics in a) his countercultural spaces and b) gay-rights-supporting communities in general.

I'm a mostly-queer woman who writes mostly het, gen, and other so I agree that it would be interesting to check the correlations. (Also to see how many people who don't primarily/solely write m/m, or don't write at all, consider themselves slashers anyway.)

[trinity_clare]

Probably not statistically useful but still relevant to your interests: ontd_ai, which doesn't identify as a slash comm but is slash-friendly and has a lot of overlap with the rest of fandom, did a demographics poll last November in which the (98% female) result was 58.8 percent straight, 26.5% queer, and 14.7% "WTF LABELS" (i.e. choose not to label their orientation). JSYK.

[melannen]

Oooh, I have no idea whether to count ontd_ai as slash fandom or not (standard-ontd I'm pretty sure isn't, but ai seems like a special case....) Good to have the data either way, thank you!

Is the demographics poll locked to the community, d'you know?

[shalom]

Oooh glad you grabbed the one on LoM.

And great work for it all, thank you!

[melannen]

I can't figure out where I found the LoM one! I just sort of went into a link-following fugue state and then there were a bunch of open tabs. It was probably the spirits of gafiated slashers past guiding me. *grin*

[carmarthen]

The second is given the URL http://www.apps4.vantagenet.com/zpolls/count.asp?rlt=91221204045&id=91221204045 , which was a poll of the Darth Maul Estrogen Brigade in 2000. It is no longer available online, nor can I find any other references to it remaining online.

It seems weird to me to cite this to say anything about slash--almost everything posted at the DMEB was het. Mostly Mary Sue het. Like, I don't remember EVER seeing any slash there at all, unless it was MAYBE something Sith Academy-related (and the Sith Academy was pretty much my introduction to slash--after I found the DMEB--plus it didn't start out as slash). So unless the poll covered only some DMEB subgroup that also wrote Qui/Obi or something, I'm baffled as to its relevance.

The DMEB was not a slash community. It just wasn't. (And the Sith Academy writers had a significant number of queer women among them, including the founder; plus you're right, that satirical essay says nothing about the writers' sexuality.)

Anyway, dang, I'm impressed that you hunted this all down, and it's very interesting, and it seems to suggest that my fandom experience has not, in fact, been super-anomalous.

[melannen]

That's *very* interesting; I knew that some of the estrogen brigades were more slash-focused than others, I'd been assuming DMEB was one of them. I suppose it's possible that the poll separated people out by what kind of fic they were fans of - though even then it would be a pretty self-selected group of slashers who tolerate large amounts of Mary-sue.

I'm hoping to get more info about those polls; it'll be interesting to see whether the heterosexuality citation in wikipedia was actually based on any slash polls at all.

Here via Network

[blnchflr]

I wouldn't be surprised if the majority (i.e. >50%) of slashers in Fandom were Straight Females.

But in my corner of fandom, there have always seemed to be way too many non-straight and/or non-females for me to consider slasher = straight female. So that myth has always annoyed me like whoa.

I did another poll in 2009 (DW/IJ polls), phrasing the poll question as "Do you self-identify as a 100% heterosexual woman?". Currently (09:23 CET, 17-01-2010) only 6.5% (=3 voters) identify as 100% heterosexual women - the rest identify as not 100% heterosexual and/or not as women.

Again, I think the high number of non-100%-heterosexual-women is indicative of my corner of fandom, but at the same time I also think it adds validity to questioning the myth of slashers being Straight Women as default.

Re: Here via Network

[melannen]

Thank you for the link to the new poll! (Do you still have any saved numbers from the earlier one on lj, and if so would you be willing to share them?)

I wouldn't be surprised if the proportion if you included all the different communities that identify as slash was someone around an even split, or 60/40 either way. I haven't found any of the the heavily-het corners of slash fandom yet, but they're probably out there somewhere. Maybe.

THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.

[pine]

I feel so much less lonely now! :D :D :D Thank you for this.

THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.
THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.
THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.

Yes, it sounds very satisfying. Needs to be inserted into every one of those LambdaFail/ slash vs. m/m vs. gay author discussions.

And definitely, I hope you write up something on this for TWC or similar, pointing out two things, actually. First, that regardless of their statistical design, taken as the polls over the years all show that THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER. \o/

Second, that articles based on a few then-available, now-vanished apocrydata need to be updated - to be ground-truthed - at fairly frequent intervals! This is not like citing Shakespeare, people, where the sources can be consulted by all, for hundreds of years. It's cyberdata, fleeting and changeable. Rather appalling to think how many journalists, in particular, have probably based their descriptions of fandom on that Wikipedia entry.

Re: THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.

[torachan]

Um. The Lambda thing was very specifically about straight authors, because the whole thing they were getting their panties in a knot about was that the award was for queer authors, and as straight women writing m/m romance, they felt entitled to those awards.

[petra]

Thank you for putting together the data that shows that my lived experience is real. It's so great when that happens.

[melannen]

Yes, it was nice finding out my lived experience was real, too!

[true_statement]

It occurs to me that in 10+ years of online slash fannishness I've been answering all these surveys in a rather misleading fashion. It's taken all that time to go from "oh well, I guess I'm default straight for lack of a better answer" to "yeah, forget that late-bloomer theory and let's just call an asexual an asexual".

[melannen]

Same here! (Well, I'm at >9 years, but, close.)

Of course, over those years, asexual has been showing up as a poll option a lot more often, too. (yay!)

[lavendertook]

Yay for our side! :-D Thank you so much for doing this!

[melannen]

I am glad so many people share my appreciation of it. :D

[blueswan]

Thanks for doing the math. Science is a happy making thing.

[linkspam_mod]

Your post has been included in a Linkspam.

[maryaminx.livejournal.com]

Via somewhere.

This surprised me; despite most of the people I've come into contact with in fandom being some form of queer I still considered straight (cis) female to be at least 80% of slashdom. This makes me very happy. (And makes the "slash is always appropriation!" argument more wtf than ever.)

[melannen]

I hestitate to completely dismiss the slash is appropriation argument, because I think there is a point to gay men feeling drowned out or misrepresented, but, yeah. The thing is a lot more complicated than that. And the self-erasure of so many queer people in fandom is relevant.

Here via Metafandom

[espreite]

First of all, as a statistics fan/geek/person, you make me yay for doing this whole analysis. I hang out mostly in the fakenews fandom, which I'd always got the impression was more queer-populated than most fandoms, but wow! This is really awesome to see the facts laid out, and I hope it comes up more and changes how the context of the slash conversation is viewed.

only one of the polls had options specifically involving non-gender-binary people and orientation. Other possibilities, fandom: they exist. Heh. As a nonbinary asexual person, I've been watching this whole debate going, "...I don't even know where I fit into all of this."

Um, and also, you appear to be rather awesome and we seem to have some interests in common, so I think I will add you, if you don't mind. :)

Here from Metafandom

[gwenfrankenstien]

THANK YOU for this. "Straight middle-aged, middle-class housewives" or whatever the conventional wisdom is has never been my fandom experience at all, it's nice to see numbers to back that up.

Re: Here from Metafandom

[nic]

"Straight middle-aged, middle-class housewives"

I think this is what slash fans USED to be, because getting married and becoming a housewife was what you did. Even if someone was queer, culture would have encouraged them to follow the marriage path.

I think of the housewives writing Star Trek slash in the 70's... if they were in fandom today, they'd probably be living a very different lifestyle while still embedded in fandom!

[attackfish]

THANK YOU!

Here via Metafandom

[sakru909]

This post is awesome and you are awesome for making it. Most of the slashers I know, including myself, don't really identify as 100% straight.

[amalnahurriyeh]

So this is brilliant and data and yay, etc. I'm particularly interested in the way the shortness of internet generations is skewing data--ten year old data is basically useless at this point, even if many of the same people are involved, because the broader grouping has just moved on. (I also cheer you on with the getting-this-shit-published thing, because, citable data yay!).

Tangential note, and little to do with the original question: has anybody counted how many het fangirls/fen are queer? I ask because I hang out in mainly het-oriented circles (everybody started out in X-Files, nearly all as Mulder/Scully shippers, though some are primarily in other fandoms now), and, holy hell, there's a lot of queer on my flist. It's brilliant, and feeds into my (not-so-)faint separatist leanings. I think I might have to do a pollish thing on this subject myself.

[nic]

Thank you.

This correlates with my experience in a real-life slash group; where not only was there a 'token gay boy' but there was also the 'token straight girl'.

[jame_alec]

1: Entirely female except for one participant.

2: 2.6% male.

3: 3.6% male.

4: 1.0% male.

5: Advertised as for women that like yaoi, so I'm going with the assumption no men participated.

6: 2.5% male.

7: 3.68% male

8: Gender not specified.

9: Not in poll form, I honestly do not have the time or inclination to weed through the comments.

10: Again, no gender specified.

I'd just like to point out that even if every guy that responded in those polls is gay and write stuff rather than just reading stuff... they don't make up more than 4% of the slash writers out there according to the numbers you put up here.

I think you are seriously downplaying the issue of someone other than queer men appropriating the experiences of queer men in slash. 96% of slash being written by women? It doesn't matter if 90% of them are queer, it's still appropriative.

[melannen]

I was not really attempting to address the questions being brought up by gay men in this post, tbh, because I was more interested in, first, correcting the false assumptions that were being made (by both sides, by queer and straight fans) about where most fans actually are coming from in terms of queer experience. And then maybe the discussions about appropriation can be had more productively, because I wish they could be.

Because yes, I do agree that there are appropriation issues around women writing about gay men, especially when that writing leaves the slash context and starts to dominate previously gay male spaces and mainstream spaces.

However, I think that slash is also, to a large extent, queer people, many of whom feel as if their sexuality is excluded or erased by the gay and lesbian community as well as by the straight world, writing about queer people, many of whom are not a part of the gay and lesbian community. That is a large part of what slash has always been to *me*, and I think the response I've gotten is evidence that I am far from the only one, and I think that is *really valuable*, because there *are* a lot of queer people who feel erased by the gay and lesbian community.

So when people, outside or inside the community, say things to us like "heterosexual women (let's face it, whether they identify as queer or not is irrelevant)" like I saw in a post today, or talk about the gay male experience as if it's the only queer experience, a lot of us react emotionally to that as one more person trying to tell us we're not queer enough, and doing it by dismissing the first community we've found that *doesn't* try to police our identity. And a lot of us are *really damn sick of that*.

And that anger, and the misunderstanding on both sides, is going to prevent any progress from being made on the issue of how some slash perpetuates straight privilege (which queer slashers have also brought up repeatedly from inside the community).

[hivesofactivity]

I think this is fascinating, and I am grateful for the work you've put into this!