At 8:04 PM -0500 3/29/98, Tonbo wrote:

And no, I'm *not* really sorry ...

[whirr....clackety-snip]

So, in this case, the situation is more than simply reversed, it is reversed
and amplified.
The question, therefore, isn't "Why are SI's all done by by males?" but
rather, "Why are most of the female SI's about Star Trek, not anime?"

This does raise some interesting issues. One of the more popular early
forms of fanfiction, as I understand, were K/S stories. That's Kirk and
Spock, in stories that invariably involved the two in a homosexual
relationship. Apparently the lion's share of these stories were written,
and read, by females.

Apparently, this was not unique to Star Trek, nor to any single community
of fans. I've hunted down a number of Gundam Wing fanfics, and almost every
single one was a yaoi story written by a female.

This is not, of course, to say that the seeming deficit of female fic
writers is largely due to these rather more limited-appeal pursuits. It
does, I think, say something substantial about each gender's expectations
of fan writing, and how they view the qualities of a particular series.
What, exactly, it does say is a matter of potential debate, but I think
there's a little more going on here than merely demographics.

_________________________________________________________________________
Patrick Mcclanahan

pwm5@cornell.edu