If you're trying to figure out what SurveyFail is,
this is a pretty good roundup. Linkspam at Dreamwidth is following things, here's
their master post.Short version: Newly minted Ph.Ds Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam get a book deal about, we think, sexuality and the Internet. They decide part of their research should involve this strange beast called 'slash,' create a survey intended for slash readers, and have long conversations with
![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shaggirl, best known as a mod of
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
crack_van, about the best way to get more responses to this survey. They claim to be learning from her, though the evidence of this is dubious at best. At any rate, they create a survey.
They ask shaggirl how to promote it on fanfiction.net.Now there's a problem here, as you might know:
1. They are under the (mistaken) impression that slash is primarily or exclusively sexually explicit.
2. Fanfiction.net is not only mostly underage, NC-17 fic is prohibited there.
3. The survey questions are (
Set One;
Set Two, one question in Set Two might be triggery) increasingly sexual and intimate.
So Ogas and Gaddam at least
intended, I can't find any evidence as to whether they were successful or not, to ask questions like
39. If you read erotic fan fiction, what kinks (erotic situations) do you enjoy? to people as young as 13. This information is not a big secret, it's available right at ff.net's
Wikipedia page. (Please note I did click through to the survey back when it was up, and there was
no indication you should be 18 or any minimum age before taking the survey.)
Other problems:
1. Using the word 'tranny' while not actually being transgendered, and then
replacing it with 'shemale.' FLAMES. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE.
2. Pretending to be affiliated with Boston University while merely being graduates.
3. Not pointing out the survey is for a book deal; instead pretending it was for 'research.'
4. Erasing men who write slash, lesbians who write slash, and...hell, anyone who's not a heterosexual cisgendered female slash writer.
5. Assuming everyone who reads and writes slash is
a lonely, undereducated housewife completely incapable of understanding basic principles of science and their Big Words.
...there's more but if you want it, it's easy to find. Ogas, after
making a post to defend the word I used above, locked his journal, but fandom in its infinite wisdom has been screencapping.
Thank heavens for fandom, seriously. We have our stupidity and our wanks and our fails, but oooh we can close ranks and put up the barriers when we need to. And we clearly need to this time around.
Also, we have better macros than
anyone.
