Slash meta #1: please discuss!

[thrihyrne]

Okay! I've begun reading a couple of recent-ish articles so I can have some non-anecdotal references for this article I'm writing, and came across this rather stunning sentence:

In fact, it has been argued that slash is not really about male homosexuality at all; rather, it is about a female fantasy of heterosexual sex acted out via ostensibly male bodies.

I'll be getting the book from interlibrary loan that has the essay that made this argument. I had an instant response to the comment, but rather than put out my thoughts, I'd like yours. I probably won't respond to these as I'm positing myself as an observer and will organize and interpret what happens later, but for anyone who has a thought on this who would like to share it, please do, and comment among each other. But play nice!!! No bashing on my LJ. Everyone is allowed to her own opinion.

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For those who are interested, that argument came from an essay contained in the book Magic mommas, trembling sisters, puritans & perverts: feminist essays, edited by Joanna Russ and published in 1985. It's a bit older, but that premise still stunned me. And with a title like that, why wouldn't I want to read all of the essays?!

Comments

[callumjames.livejournal.com]

Hiya,
I know! I'm a guy! Not supposed to be contributing here but can't really help myself... Particularly on this topic. I dont' know if it would be helpful or not but it would seem to me that on this issue in particular, the people most qualified to say how much slash fiction has to do with actual male homosexuality might be, well, you know, male homosexuals?
I am not the best example - of a gay male slasher that is - I'm a pretty fine example of a male homosexual! But, I have often felt that, for example, there is something of a difference of tone between slash stories written by women and those by gay men... I don't have broad enough experience of reading slash to justify this as more than a hunch but I'm sure there's something in it.
Also, not so much with the HP slash stories I wrote, but certainly when, under a pseudonym a long time ago, I wrote some Deep Space Nine slash, it felt very much to me as if the largely female 'power base' in the Star Trek fandom were very happy to keep male authors at something of a distance.
Which leads me to my final rambling point which is that I'm sure that one of the things that most slash writers don't realise is how different this activity is from professional writing of either fiction or non-fiction. Slash writing seems to me to be a FUNDAMENTALLY social activity: stories are shared as they unfold, one story may have a number of different betas, stories are discussed openly and feedback/reviews are left (and often responded to by the author in turn). Whilst it might not be true to say that slash stories are written by a community they are certainly written IN community. This requires an ability to network and manage relationships which has always been presented as quite a steroypically female way of being....

just my two penneth...

[elfscribe5.livejournal.com]

Hi callum, I think it's important for male writers to contribute thoughts to this. I know that I've actively sought out some male writers' opinions in the past and become good friends with several male slash writers(admittedly it's a small group in the slash community) and have benefitted as a result. Not to say that male writers or women writers have a single opinion -- certainly it varies with the individuals. What I saw in the LOTR fandom was that male writers were welcomed and honored, so I'm sorry if you had a different experience.
My strong feeling is that the lines between genders are much more fluid than our digital black and white society would like to believe and that we react much more similarly than differently. I'd be curious what you thought about it? Why do you think women write slash?

[elfscribe5.livejournal.com]

And btw, I think your observation about the social nature of fanfic writing is quite accurate.

[callumjames.livejournal.com]

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?

[elfscribe5.livejournal.com]

Hey, very cool that you were writing "slash" back in the day.

Well, I think the dividing line between genders is more fluid than generally supposed, but that doesn't mean I don't think there are any differences. Seems to me, it's more accurate to talk about a spectrum of response rather than the dichotomy we're led to believe in our society, you know the men are from Mars, women from Venus sort of thing, but I agree with you that there are differences. When I first got into writing slash I had the notion that I wanted to do it right and have my characters be men who liked men, rather than women with penises. So I read a lot of gay porn written by men (in the interest of research you understand), in addition to reading women-authored slash. Taken as a whole, I found that sex written by men tends to be more aggressive, more about the power play in the relationship and more focussed on the sex act itself, the physicality of it and the sensations the characters derive. It's more likely to go into detailed description of genitals and the act itself, and also more likely to treat the encounter humorously. Women tend to focus on the romance, the relationship, the long drawn-out encounter, teasing conversation, impediments preventing the couple from getting together culminating at the end with a permanent relationship. Not always, I'm generalizing here, certainly I've read romantic encounters written by men and hot pwps written by women. But I think the differences make sense given what we know about male and female sexual response. A male slasher friend characterized sexual encounters written by men as "spicy" and by women as "sweet," which seems fairly accurate. However, I also found that in many stories written by men, at the end, after all the hot meaningless encounters, the story WAS about finding someone the main character really cared about, someone who was not only hot in bed, but also someone he could love as a companion. Finding love seemed to be the same end goal for both sexes.

Do you think those observations are accurate or do you have a different take?

As I said, I made several good friends among male slash-writers who betaed my stories, and on a couple of occasions called me on it if my men weren't acting like men. It was rare actually that they thought I'd gotten it wrong. You mentioned that you would be unlikely to talk about men with a woman friend in the same way as a male friend, and I understand what you're saying. But I remember the night that a gay friend and I spent pretending that we were in a bar oogling and commenting on the attractiveness of various actors who we imagined had walked into the bar. We had a blast and laughed a lot together. I can't imagine doing something similar with a straight male friend.

As far as your question about whether there are any straight men who've written slash, I know of two mostly straight men who enjoy writing and reading slash. The operative word here being "mostly."