Sorry, this got overlooked for a day. (My ISP is delivering my mail in random order these days -- I get replies before the original posts, for example.)
Neil Faulkner wrote:
I can't help thinking that they're being their own worst enemies in cultivating this air of secrecy.
Very likely.
First of all, what makes them think
they've got a right to be immune to investigation?
I don't think I said they thought they had a "right" to be immune to investigation, just that they *preferred* it that way. (I don't have a right not to have a family with a beginning bagpipe player move in next door, but I'd sure prefer it that way.)
Secondly, they are overestimating their own importance, because the principle line of inquiry is not one of who is doing what, but of what is being done and why.
Nope. At least the ones I spoke with. They weren't worried about being outed personally, they objected to having the "why" part dug into. I suspect this was in many cases due to those people themselves having internal conflicts over why they liked slash -- they were reared in the "good girls aren't interested in sex" beliefs and yet found themselves very interested indeed not only in sex, but a kind of sex that society mostly condemns as deviant. IOW, on some level they still believed they were morally wrong or psychologically sick, and had no wish to have that confirmed.
BTW, the objection was not just to *outsiders* researching them. Before either Bacon or Jenkins, two K/S fans were curious as well. Judith Gran and someone whose name I can't pull out of my data bank at the moment drew up a lengthy questionnaire that they distributed at slash cons and to the subscribers of "Not Tonight, Spock" (a K/S letterzine) among other routes. The questionnaire was aimed at discovering the demographics of the slash fan: age, marital status, religious background, geographic area you grew up in, profession, whether you had children, and so on, plus how they'd come to discover slash. The results were to be compiled and reported in NTS mainly...IOW, this was a survey BY K/S fans, ABOUT K/S fans and with the results to be reported TO K/S fans.
Doesn't sound very controversial, does it? But even before I got the questionnaire, I'd received mailings from three other small groups of fans, all urging that we not cooperate with the questionnaire.
Mind, this was around twenty years ago, and the last two decades have seen a great deal more openness and tolerance to "alternative" sexuality develop.
Susan Beth (susanbeth33@mindspring.com)