On the Big Het Poll results
I'm really sorry for not posting this earlier - my reasons are a bit rubbish, first there were holidays, then an extreme case of putting all this off when faced with stats etc. Anyway, this is finally my follow up to my Big Het Poll, based on the results as of 6.00pm GMT 5/9/06. Yes, it's taken me that long to write this up.
Who took this poll?
496 people said they were taking this poll - for which, thank you all (although 508 people answered one question and 487 another). It was set up to try to collect more information about fans who enjoy and create het fic, art and meta. It seems to me that there are a lot of generalisations about hetters, or whatever we're called, when it comes to meta, sometimes based on bad, second-hand or limited experience. The other reason for the poll was to initiate more debate about het shippers, who we are, what we're doing and why - and lots of interesting conversation did result in the comments. As you'll see, I'm ambivalent about the results of the poll, but the discussion it led to was a positive and thought-provoking experience.
I'm aware that can't lead to a truly definitive picture of A Typical Het Fan, or say much that is unquestionably conclusive about who we are as a group. I'd have liked to have asked more questions. It would have also been useful to be able to see if there was a difference in the responses of people who read or write het exclusively and those who don't and all the groups in between. In fact, as the results and comments came in, I became convinced that it'd be much more useful to have a detailed questionnaire to get at the information that I was looking for and to map out the wider patterns of behaviours involved with het fan activity.
One of the limitations of this poll is that it could only capture that part of fandom that is on lj and is within 'reach' of the poll, which, at its broadest, would be anyone who is interested in het, even if it isn't a big part of their fannish identity. There was no way of separating their responses from anyone else's. Also, I'd note that lj is said to be more the ground of slashers, ditto 'meta' meta. I'm not complaining - I wanted as wide a set of responses as possible. If nothing else, these answers should get rid of the idea of het and slash camps as inviolately distinct, and that's a 'note to self'.
To what degree do people consume fanowrks and/or create it?
For the first question, the highest number of respondents (44%) said that they read a 'fair amount' of het fic or consumed het fanart, followed by 32.4% saying that they 'mainly' consumed het fanworks. The differences in the answers to the second question about the production of het fanstuff didn't surprise me - my own reading and writing tendencies don't precisely overlap. The amount of het fanworks creation was more evenly distributed over the various options than het fanworks production, with close to 100 people creating het fanworks 'mainly' 'a fair amount', 'rarely' or never. (The highest perentage of 23% was for those who 'rarely' create het fanworks.)
However, more people (76) exclusively create het fanworks than consume it (54). Also some 43% of respondents said they consumed het fanwoks 'exclusively' or 'mainly' while close to the same percentage, 42%, created it 'rarely' or 'never' - so there seems to be a trend of more consumption than creation of het fanworks. Thinking about it, you only need one writer/artist for a piece that can be appreciated by a huge number of people, so I don't know what I was getting at there, other than there is an audience for het.
This is where I emphasise before considering the rest of the results that I got much more answers from fans of het plus other things than people who are exclusively into het. It would be interesting to find out what those 'pluses' were and whether there was a difference in approach between those who are just into het and those who are into het and gen, or into het and slash but not gen, or into everything.
How people 'ship het pairings
The vast, vast majority of people (83%) said that rather than just 'ship canon, near-canon or non-canonical pairings, they 'shipped a mixture of pairings. When asked the less pointed question of which type of 'ship they mostly went for, more respondents could identify one type - near-canon 'ships. (Of course, we all know that what counts as 'near-canon' can be the cause of endless debate among fans, but the aim of the poll was to find out how people identified themselves.) So, why the popularity of 'near-canon'? One can speculate that canon support is important to het 'shippers, it gives interaction and history to work with, but the fact that canon hasn't gone there leaves 'shippers a space to play in is. However, 27.8% of people taking the poll answered that it was still too close to call/they weren't sure which type of pairing they mainly shipped. (But among those who could answer specifically, the pattern was similar for this question as to the previous one - more people mainly 'shipped or 'shipped 'near-canon' than the other two options. Canonical pairings came next and uncanonical pairings came last.)
Those questions about canon support and the next set of questions - about types of pairings - were biased towards the monogamous OTP shipper. But most people apparently 'ship a mixture of types of pairings: 89.2 % said they 'ship a mixture when asked what type of pairing they exclusively 'ship, and 53.6% said they couldn't pick one type of 'ship that they mainly went for, but the next largest group - 21.4 % - said that they mainly 'ship 'best friends become lovers'.
When given an opportunity to explain themselves if they said that they preferred a type of 'ship that I hadn't specified in the options (these were best friends become lovers, goodies/baddies, May-Decembers), variants on pairings that banter/bicker or who are adverarial/antagonistic came up. Based on that and what was stated in the comments especially, I wish I'd been able to find a name for this Beatrice/Benedick type, which I also like. Obviously, the 'types' offered as options don't really cover the complexities of what draws us to 'ships, and some respondents clarified that they responded to the dynamics of each 'ship individually. I sympathise with that view, and think I was influenced by the persuasive clarity of discussions where fans talk about their favourite type(s) of pairing.
However, more than half the respondents stated that they 'shipped pairings involving best friends who become lovers, colleagues who become or are lovers and the good girl/bad boy. At the other end, only 22.2 per cent said they shipped May-December pairings where the female character isn't always May and the same percentage said that they 'shipped incestuous pairings. Some people qualified that in the comments, saying they read or wrote incestuous pairings, but wouldn't describe themselves as shippers (although others would and did describe themselves as 'shippers).
This was a good example of a problematic assumption that I made, which comes back to how there is no equivalent term to 'slasher' for hetters, and in fact, we tend to only use the term in relation to slashers and talk about ourselves as fans of a specific pairing. Because my interest in het relationships is usually that of a 'shipper I forgot that you can definitely be interested in the dynamic of a romantic-erotic relationship without 'supporting' it, a distinction that holds particularly for people who read/write incestuous pairings. But the same is true of other pairings, fans create fanworks about what they see as train-wreck pairings or explore canonical relationships as a way of reading more about the world etc. without feeling the 'shipper impulse.
Romance in the mainstream and het 'shippers
The next questions were an attempt to touch on whether het 'shippers (still a problematic phrase but not as ugly as hetters) are catered for by mainstream media, and to bring some numbers to bear on a lot of generalisations made on the topic. The majority of respondents - 57.3% - never read Harlequins and Mills and Boon novels (25.2% rarely read them, 13.7% occasionally read them and 3.8% often read them.) This definitely shows that generic romance novels are not popular among het shippers But, as with other questions, I don't know whether this pattern was across the board or if respondents were more likely to never read generic romances if they only rarely read hetfic than if they read it exclusively etc. Respondents were more likely to read novels that focus on a love story - 34.4% said that they read such novels occasionally and 33.2% read such novels rarely.
41.4% of people said they occasionally watch rom-com films (22.7% of people said they rarely watch them and 22.2% said they often watch them.) The responses about people's attitudes to rom coms back up the neutral responses on the frequency ot which rom coms are watched: 39.3% of respondents said that they were a 'good way of passing the time'. So, it seems as though rom coms are seen as entertainment rather than garnering much loyalty as a genre. (41.8 % of people said that they lurve ticky boxes, suggesting that if Hollywood made a romantic comedy about how one free-spirited fan met a square ticky box it'd have a ready-made audience...) More than a quarter of people answering this question agreed that rom coms aren't as good as they used to be and are rarely romantic and funny, thus reinforcing my views/prejudices. And speaking of my views and biases, that and lack of space was why I concentrated on rom coms over romantic dramas.
Demographics and a non-conclusion
I admit to having screwed up the question of age by not giving over 50-year-olds a box, meaning that some of them ticked the 40-49 option or the 'not going to tell you' option. Even so, the flawed results indicate that more of the people taking the poll are in their twenties (45.8%) and 30s (23.5%) than in their teens or younger (15.1%). Again, this flawed data only relates to this poll and can't be broken down to tell whether some behaviours/levels of fanac are age-based or not.
I deliberately didn't ask about gender, as I had a limited amount of space and I assumed that most 'shippers, particularly in terms of creating/consuming fic, are female. I do think that that would be an obvious question to be covered in a fuller questionnaire - although I'm no social scientist and I have no idea whether it would be possible to get a valid representation of all the people who 'ship het or are interested in it to whatever degree. I tried, I hesitate to present these poll results as definitive, but the endeavour did throw up interesting topics of discussion. Well, I thought so.
Who took this poll?
496 people said they were taking this poll - for which, thank you all (although 508 people answered one question and 487 another). It was set up to try to collect more information about fans who enjoy and create het fic, art and meta. It seems to me that there are a lot of generalisations about hetters, or whatever we're called, when it comes to meta, sometimes based on bad, second-hand or limited experience. The other reason for the poll was to initiate more debate about het shippers, who we are, what we're doing and why - and lots of interesting conversation did result in the comments. As you'll see, I'm ambivalent about the results of the poll, but the discussion it led to was a positive and thought-provoking experience.
I'm aware that can't lead to a truly definitive picture of A Typical Het Fan, or say much that is unquestionably conclusive about who we are as a group. I'd have liked to have asked more questions. It would have also been useful to be able to see if there was a difference in the responses of people who read or write het exclusively and those who don't and all the groups in between. In fact, as the results and comments came in, I became convinced that it'd be much more useful to have a detailed questionnaire to get at the information that I was looking for and to map out the wider patterns of behaviours involved with het fan activity.
One of the limitations of this poll is that it could only capture that part of fandom that is on lj and is within 'reach' of the poll, which, at its broadest, would be anyone who is interested in het, even if it isn't a big part of their fannish identity. There was no way of separating their responses from anyone else's. Also, I'd note that lj is said to be more the ground of slashers, ditto 'meta' meta. I'm not complaining - I wanted as wide a set of responses as possible. If nothing else, these answers should get rid of the idea of het and slash camps as inviolately distinct, and that's a 'note to self'.
To what degree do people consume fanowrks and/or create it?
For the first question, the highest number of respondents (44%) said that they read a 'fair amount' of het fic or consumed het fanart, followed by 32.4% saying that they 'mainly' consumed het fanworks. The differences in the answers to the second question about the production of het fanstuff didn't surprise me - my own reading and writing tendencies don't precisely overlap. The amount of het fanworks creation was more evenly distributed over the various options than het fanworks production, with close to 100 people creating het fanworks 'mainly' 'a fair amount', 'rarely' or never. (The highest perentage of 23% was for those who 'rarely' create het fanworks.)
However, more people (76) exclusively create het fanworks than consume it (54). Also some 43% of respondents said they consumed het fanwoks 'exclusively' or 'mainly' while close to the same percentage, 42%, created it 'rarely' or 'never' - so there seems to be a trend of more consumption than creation of het fanworks. Thinking about it, you only need one writer/artist for a piece that can be appreciated by a huge number of people, so I don't know what I was getting at there, other than there is an audience for het.
This is where I emphasise before considering the rest of the results that I got much more answers from fans of het plus other things than people who are exclusively into het. It would be interesting to find out what those 'pluses' were and whether there was a difference in approach between those who are just into het and those who are into het and gen, or into het and slash but not gen, or into everything.
How people 'ship het pairings
The vast, vast majority of people (83%) said that rather than just 'ship canon, near-canon or non-canonical pairings, they 'shipped a mixture of pairings. When asked the less pointed question of which type of 'ship they mostly went for, more respondents could identify one type - near-canon 'ships. (Of course, we all know that what counts as 'near-canon' can be the cause of endless debate among fans, but the aim of the poll was to find out how people identified themselves.) So, why the popularity of 'near-canon'? One can speculate that canon support is important to het 'shippers, it gives interaction and history to work with, but the fact that canon hasn't gone there leaves 'shippers a space to play in is. However, 27.8% of people taking the poll answered that it was still too close to call/they weren't sure which type of pairing they mainly shipped. (But among those who could answer specifically, the pattern was similar for this question as to the previous one - more people mainly 'shipped or 'shipped 'near-canon' than the other two options. Canonical pairings came next and uncanonical pairings came last.)
Those questions about canon support and the next set of questions - about types of pairings - were biased towards the monogamous OTP shipper. But most people apparently 'ship a mixture of types of pairings: 89.2 % said they 'ship a mixture when asked what type of pairing they exclusively 'ship, and 53.6% said they couldn't pick one type of 'ship that they mainly went for, but the next largest group - 21.4 % - said that they mainly 'ship 'best friends become lovers'.
When given an opportunity to explain themselves if they said that they preferred a type of 'ship that I hadn't specified in the options (these were best friends become lovers, goodies/baddies, May-Decembers), variants on pairings that banter/bicker or who are adverarial/antagonistic came up. Based on that and what was stated in the comments especially, I wish I'd been able to find a name for this Beatrice/Benedick type, which I also like. Obviously, the 'types' offered as options don't really cover the complexities of what draws us to 'ships, and some respondents clarified that they responded to the dynamics of each 'ship individually. I sympathise with that view, and think I was influenced by the persuasive clarity of discussions where fans talk about their favourite type(s) of pairing.
However, more than half the respondents stated that they 'shipped pairings involving best friends who become lovers, colleagues who become or are lovers and the good girl/bad boy. At the other end, only 22.2 per cent said they shipped May-December pairings where the female character isn't always May and the same percentage said that they 'shipped incestuous pairings. Some people qualified that in the comments, saying they read or wrote incestuous pairings, but wouldn't describe themselves as shippers (although others would and did describe themselves as 'shippers).
This was a good example of a problematic assumption that I made, which comes back to how there is no equivalent term to 'slasher' for hetters, and in fact, we tend to only use the term in relation to slashers and talk about ourselves as fans of a specific pairing. Because my interest in het relationships is usually that of a 'shipper I forgot that you can definitely be interested in the dynamic of a romantic-erotic relationship without 'supporting' it, a distinction that holds particularly for people who read/write incestuous pairings. But the same is true of other pairings, fans create fanworks about what they see as train-wreck pairings or explore canonical relationships as a way of reading more about the world etc. without feeling the 'shipper impulse.
Romance in the mainstream and het 'shippers
The next questions were an attempt to touch on whether het 'shippers (still a problematic phrase but not as ugly as hetters) are catered for by mainstream media, and to bring some numbers to bear on a lot of generalisations made on the topic. The majority of respondents - 57.3% - never read Harlequins and Mills and Boon novels (25.2% rarely read them, 13.7% occasionally read them and 3.8% often read them.) This definitely shows that generic romance novels are not popular among het shippers But, as with other questions, I don't know whether this pattern was across the board or if respondents were more likely to never read generic romances if they only rarely read hetfic than if they read it exclusively etc. Respondents were more likely to read novels that focus on a love story - 34.4% said that they read such novels occasionally and 33.2% read such novels rarely.
41.4% of people said they occasionally watch rom-com films (22.7% of people said they rarely watch them and 22.2% said they often watch them.) The responses about people's attitudes to rom coms back up the neutral responses on the frequency ot which rom coms are watched: 39.3% of respondents said that they were a 'good way of passing the time'. So, it seems as though rom coms are seen as entertainment rather than garnering much loyalty as a genre. (41.8 % of people said that they lurve ticky boxes, suggesting that if Hollywood made a romantic comedy about how one free-spirited fan met a square ticky box it'd have a ready-made audience...) More than a quarter of people answering this question agreed that rom coms aren't as good as they used to be and are rarely romantic and funny, thus reinforcing my views/prejudices. And speaking of my views and biases, that and lack of space was why I concentrated on rom coms over romantic dramas.
Demographics and a non-conclusion
I admit to having screwed up the question of age by not giving over 50-year-olds a box, meaning that some of them ticked the 40-49 option or the 'not going to tell you' option. Even so, the flawed results indicate that more of the people taking the poll are in their twenties (45.8%) and 30s (23.5%) than in their teens or younger (15.1%). Again, this flawed data only relates to this poll and can't be broken down to tell whether some behaviours/levels of fanac are age-based or not.
I deliberately didn't ask about gender, as I had a limited amount of space and I assumed that most 'shippers, particularly in terms of creating/consuming fic, are female. I do think that that would be an obvious question to be covered in a fuller questionnaire - although I'm no social scientist and I have no idea whether it would be possible to get a valid representation of all the people who 'ship het or are interested in it to whatever degree. I tried, I hesitate to present these poll results as definitive, but the endeavour did throw up interesting topics of discussion. Well, I thought so.