Hi again, I think maybe my comment about writing as a man in the Star Trek slash community was a little unformed. I meant to say firstly, that we are talking about the mid nineties so, OMG, some 15 years ago now, when the whole set up of 'fandom' (in fact that word wasn't really around then) was a different beast altogether. But more importantly to the question at hand I meant to go on to say that there was a very definite difference between two types of fiction that were being posted to the 'newsgroups' then. On the one hand there were the majority of stories, female authored and which would be recognisable today as slash, and then there were a significant number of guys who were basically writing gay porn based in the Star Trek universe. The two were quite different - I'm sure you can intuit what I mean by that without my having to struggle to articulate it. I think there was a tendency to think at the time that the gay guys just 'didn't get it', but on reflection I think it was simply that they didn't want to write in a 'slash style' and that there was no other place to post their stuff at the time.
I used to be right up there with the genderpolitical elite and would have argued to the death that gender is absolutely fluid and socially constructed but I think as I get older I feel slightly more pragmatic about it. It appears to me that there are differences, be they difficult to define and always confounded by exceptions, but they are there, and particularly in the way the genders think about and participate in sex. A very minor example is that of all my many and varied female friends, I have only one with whom I could gaze at the men in the world and share private lustful comments and give reviews in any way approaching how I would with a gay male friend, there just seems to be a difference in the way that most men and most women 'look'... I *think* that it's possible that this could even spill over into slash - I would hazard the potentially controversial statement that there is a sutble but noticable difference between the tone and content of slash when authored by men or by women. ...I'm now rambling... the bottom line is that I have no idea why women write slash. I don't feel qualified in any way to even guess. I know that as a man I write it occasionally because there are fictional characters that (ahem) I would like to fuck. I enjoy the plot and process of slash (as opposed simply to a piece of pornographic writing) in the same way that sometimes I want to watch a long erotic film rather than a short pornographically explicit clip... depends on the mood.. but the question is not about that so again, I'm rambling. In my experience of reading slash by women, does it seem to me to be about something recognisable as male homosexuality as I know it? Honestly, only occasionally. That's not a criticism: I like what it is, I just think it's often not much to do with what it's like being gay, slash is it's its own thing. It's about being slashsexual rather than homosexual perhaps. And slashsexual is something that lots of women and some gay men can be! It does raise the question of, does anyone know any straight men who've ever written slash?
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regna
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Date: 2010-07-17 11:26 pm (UTC)I think maybe my comment about writing as a man in the Star Trek slash community was a little unformed. I meant to say firstly, that we are talking about the mid nineties so, OMG, some 15 years ago now, when the whole set up of 'fandom' (in fact that word wasn't really around then) was a different beast altogether. But more importantly to the question at hand I meant to go on to say that there was a very definite difference between two types of fiction that were being posted to the 'newsgroups' then. On the one hand there were the majority of stories, female authored and which would be recognisable today as slash, and then there were a significant number of guys who were basically writing gay porn based in the Star Trek universe. The two were quite different - I'm sure you can intuit what I mean by that without my having to struggle to articulate it. I think there was a tendency to think at the time that the gay guys just 'didn't get it', but on reflection I think it was simply that they didn't want to write in a 'slash style' and that there was no other place to post their stuff at the time.
I used to be right up there with the genderpolitical elite and would have argued to the death that gender is absolutely fluid and socially constructed but I think as I get older I feel slightly more pragmatic about it. It appears to me that there are differences, be they difficult to define and always confounded by exceptions, but they are there, and particularly in the way the genders think about and participate in sex. A very minor example is that of all my many and varied female friends, I have only one with whom I could gaze at the men in the world and share private lustful comments and give reviews in any way approaching how I would with a gay male friend, there just seems to be a difference in the way that most men and most women 'look'... I *think* that it's possible that this could even spill over into slash - I would hazard the potentially controversial statement that there is a sutble but noticable difference between the tone and content of slash when authored by men or by women.
...I'm now rambling...
the bottom line is that I have no idea why women write slash. I don't feel qualified in any way to even guess. I know that as a man I write it occasionally because there are fictional characters that (ahem) I would like to fuck. I enjoy the plot and process of slash (as opposed simply to a piece of pornographic writing) in the same way that sometimes I want to watch a long erotic film rather than a short pornographically explicit clip... depends on the mood.. but the question is not about that so again, I'm rambling.
In my experience of reading slash by women, does it seem to me to be about something recognisable as male homosexuality as I know it? Honestly, only occasionally. That's not a criticism: I like what it is, I just think it's often not much to do with what it's like being gay, slash is it's its own thing. It's about being slashsexual rather than homosexual perhaps. And slashsexual is something that lots of women and some gay men can be!
It does raise the question of, does anyone know any straight men who've ever written slash?