melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote 2010-01-16 09:38 pm (UTC)

I really suspect that it is true, based on anecdata that most of women I know who write m/m for pay are straight (or at least, straight as far as I know.) As I'm really not involved nor interested in that segment, though, I would find it entirely possible that my assumption is based on invalid stereotyping.

I came in to this thinking, "Well, maybe my metafandom circles are mostly queer, but surely the younger and less political fandoms, like HP and anime, are mostly straight - except wait, they're notorious for having lots of young bi and lesbian women in them. Well, I bet older, less mainstreamed fandoms - no, wait, HH and Voyager and Hercules/Xena were all known for large queer female contingents, weren't they, and I've heard anecdata for others. Maybe non-internet, con-going fandom is where all the straight women hang out - no wait, slash cons are notorious for f/f hookups. ... ...." So I'm pretty hesitant to make assumptions.


But I couldn't find any hard data for the pro-m/m community - I suspect, unless there's a poll someone can dig out, the only way to do it would be to either check a bunch of author bios individually, or for someone in the community to run a survey, and that would pretty contentious in the current climate. Though the only anecdata I've got is that the demographics of the pro-slash panel at con.txt a few years ago were not notably different from the demographics of the con as a whole. Which was pretty darn queer.

It is true that most of the loudest voices on that side of the argument identify as straight, but that might be because (for a variety of reasons) the queer women are less inclined to speak out.

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