Insulting the fandom is a bad thing, Mr. Behr. Look at what happened to Star Wars. DS9 ages so well exactly because it manages to attract new unbiased viewers.
Ira Steven Behr said about the fan response to Dukat, "I know that there are women fans who still want to bear his child, but to me that's the whole thing where you want to marry the serial killer. You want to have sex with Gul Dukat? It's all the same thing." ("The Producer's View", Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - The Official Poster Magazine, No. 12) The quotation is from Memory Alpha, the article on Dukat.
This is from an interview with Behr published on trekweb. Trekweb does not exist anymore, but the whole text of the interview can be found on other forums.
Much to the producer/writer's chagrin, many fans began to see the character and the Cardassians as "sexy" rather than horrific: "We'd sit in the writers room and laugh about it sometimes. We'd get the Cardassian newsletter and look at it and think, 'What has gone wrong?' of course it's science fiction; you put makeup on and suddenly it's OK. If it's Idi Amin or Pol Pot no one's thinking of spending a romantic weekend in his arms; but you give him a bony neck and a rubber outfit, and it's a whole different thing."
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/gul-duk ... 978/page-6
