Censored (essay)

Meta
Title:	Censored
Creator:	Judith Gran
Date(s):	1999
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS and others
Topic:	see below
External Links:	Censored at Judith's Webpage Censored at COCO CHANNEL
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Censored is an essay by Judith Gran. Her summary: "An essay on print fandom, net fandom, and fear."

In it, she discusses pseuds, K/S, copyright, visibility, TPTB, and zine fandom versus net fandom.

It was originally published on the GeoCities site: Society for Slash Diversity and COCO CHANNEL, circa 1999 and later posted to Judith's own website.

Excerpts

In the latest round of concern about K/S and the internet, I'm struck by the uncanny similarity between the attacks on K/S by anti-K/S fans in the late 1970s and the present attacks by printfen on the Net. The arguments are almost exactly the same. Twenty years ago, anti-K/S fans tried to persuade us not to publish K/S fiction in zines by arguing that this would bring down the wrath of Paramount not only on K/S fandom but on TOS fandom as a whole. They urged that "outing" K/S in zines would draw negative public attention to TOS fandom and turn TOS fans into beleaguered fugitives from mundane scorn. That alarmist scenario didn't materialize then, nor will it now. Twenty years ago, K/S zine fiction survived the scrutiny of The Powers That Be (Paramount and its parent corporation) and emerged unscathed. Nothing has changed in the five years that K/S fan fiction has been available freely on the net.

I think it's important to distinguish between the protection of personal privacy, on the one hand, and the "underground" status of K/S fandom generally, on the other. As Greywolf pointed out, privacy is a very powerful value in the net community. In twenty-one years in K/S fandom, all the violations of K/S fans' privacy that I have witnessed have come, without exception, from within the print community. Some netfen have very specific and valid reasons not to use their real life (RL) identities when they post explicit K/S fiction, and other netfen respect that without question. The majority of net writers do not post under their "real" names or their customary e-mail addresses. It is very easy to get a free, anonymous e-mail account--consult any net fan for the particulars. Ironically, some excellent K/S writers prefer to publish on the net rather than in zines because they feel they have more privacy on the net...

As others have pointed out, K/S fan fiction is only a tiny wrinkle on the vast corpus of slash on the net. It's far, far outnumbered by slash based on other popular TV series such as Xena and the X-Files. In a recent straw poll for "favorite slash couple" at a voting booth site on the web, Kirk and Spock were so far down the list they rated less than 1% of the vote. Dearly as we love our own fandom, we need to put its significance in perspective.

When, twenty years ago, anti-K/S fen attacked the publishing of K/S fan fiction "openly" in zines, I'm sure that some of them believed sincerely that this would be the death-knell of fandom. But others just did not want K/S to be published, period, and used every argument they could think of to stop it from appearing in zines. Similarly, I suspect that some of the in terrorem arguments against K/S online may be coming from fans who are unhappy about net fandom and wish it didn't exist at all.

For those who are unhappy about K/S on the net, I agree that net fandom can be scary. It's different from the printfan community. It's larger, more diverse, and like any community, it has its own norms, values and mores. But wishing won't make it go away. For those who do not have any special animus against net fandom but do have genuine fears, I don't think it's too much to ask that you look at the empirical evidence. Before you conclude that K/S on the net is a mortal threat to all we hold dear, shouldn't you look at facts, history, data and experience rather than relying on your own untested assumptions to reach that conclusion?