LJ angsting, plus wacky poll

Everyone is putting up these polls asking "Where are you going to do most of your posting from now on?" and I am so reluctant to answer that yet. It feels too soon. There's never an answer along the lines of "I'm going to wait and see what happens." I'm actually starting to get a little stressed about it because I'm watching friends scatter to the horizons while they turn around and say, "You coming or not? Decide now plz."

I'm getting used to having two flists, though I agree with many others that all the crossposting is really hurting the connectivity of fandom. So yeah, maybe it would be better if everyone just picked one place to post and stuck to it. I think this will all settle out eventually, but for now it's a bit frustrating to watch everyone flail.

Okay, then, decision: For now, I'm going to stop crossposting to IJ. If you want to read me, LJ is the place to do it. And I'll read two flists for a while and see how that works for me.

( Totally random poll, having nothing whatsoever to do with LJ. )

Two mainstream articles about slash

My husband, sitting next to me on the couch, emailed these two links to me a few minutes ago. He could have just told about them, you know? But still, both are articles in mainstream newpapers that mention slash.

The first is from The Daily Californian last July and probably not new to many of you. It's actually pretty fair to slash, though I have to say I object to her exclusion of fen from "normal people with real jobs". Oh, please. But still, I think the fact that it was written by the paper's regular sex columnist says a lot about its fairness.

Edit: I've been told this is actually the campus newspaper of UC-Berkeley. I was confusing it with something else, heh.

( I'll put the text under a cut here. )

The second article is from today's Scotland on Sunday and is a heck of lot less sympathetic. ( I'll put the relevant part here beneath the cut. )

The main thing I'd like to say about this, though, is that FANDOM IS NOT MAINSTREAM. Anyone who thinks we would get a lick of sympathy from the mundane world for our shit getting TOS'd is wrong and naive -- and is also putting the rest of us in danger when doing things like writing to AGs. THIS is what people think of us, and this guy actually put it pretty mildly. Imagine if it was in a big paper in the southern US?

I'm all for being out within the fandom, because people who are just as geeky about the fandom as me really have no place to judge my ways of participating. But outside of fandom, we are freaks, people. And in the eyes of many, we are dangerous freaks. I'm not happy about it, but I'm content to stay underground and quiet if it means I can keep practicing my favorite hobby.