Those who read fanfiction: please read this

[tzikeh]

on the off chance that you haven't seen it already. PLEASE post this anywhere you feel it might be seen by other fans, including communities (with the permission of the mods, of course). We need to get the word out.

eruthros writes about why you shouldn't take that fanfiction survey --the one that calls itself "neurobiological." Apparently the people behind it are neuroscience researchers and their methods are pretty skeevy:

They are outsiders to fandom. They are outsiders to fanfiction. They are outsiders to slash. And they haven't tried to learn, or to understand, or to think about fannish communities. Instead, they have made assumptions about who we are, about what we read, about what we find hot; they plan to use those to explain what makes women tick, what our brains make us do...they want to look at how we are hard-wired different.

(Found at kassrachel's dreamwidth blog.)

I strongly suggest reading eruthros' entry, and the replies. It's even worse than we originally thought.

Suggestion, in the comments, of who to contact with your displeasure.

Comments

[suaine.livejournal.com]

Other people that might be contacted, in case they are no longer affiliated with the university, which has been suggested in the comments.

The agent for the book, Gail Ross (gail@gailross.com) [source: http://gailross.com/index.html - the book and its rather horrific title can be found under "project list" - "Health, Science & Psychology"]

And the publisher, Dutton/Penguin (ecommerce@us.penguingroup.com) [source: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/aboutus/contactus.html - scroll down the page to the bottom]

[lydiabell.livejournal.com]

I bet LH wishes she had thought of writing a pop-science book to cash in on *her* crappy fandom research.

[nestra.livejournal.com]

I think my favorite part so far is when they said "Oh, we doubt that most fan fiction writers have any idea what the word count of their stories is."

Ha. Signed, she who abuses Word's "word count" feature a lot, in hopes that stories will miraculously grow longer while she's not looking.