A couple of years ago, I sat in on the first class of a seminar on cyberculture at Columbia, taught by Brenda Silver, which I sort of knew I wasn’t going to be able to take due to an over-full schedule, but wanted to check out anyway. In this first, massively overpacked, section, she asked her students what they thought “slash” was. Everyone, the male students in particular, immediately began to look incredibly uncomfortable. “Um,” one of the boys said tentatively, “isn’t it, like…porn?”
“Oh, dear,” I muttered to my friend, and my hand shot up, Hermione Granger-style, because I just couldn’t help myself.
Slash, according to Wikipedia, “is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on interpersonal attraction and sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex.” Conventional wisdom goes that slash as we know it began with Star Trek – specifically, with Kirk/Spock, about which little, really, need be said. Since then, it has been a force in Harry Potter fandom, in X-Men fandom, and has reached a kind of hilarious (to me, anyway) zenith amongst fans of the television show Supernatural. I like to believe, though, that this is a phenomenon that has been going on for quite some time now – I mean, do you really think all those crazy Victorian Sherlock Holmes fans were so desperate for the good detective to come back from the dead for any reason other than poor Watson’s emotional health, or that the teenage girls who got their hands on A Separate Peace in the sixties didn’t titter themselves about Finny making Gene strip his dirty, sweaty clothes while watching? (If any of you had to read that book as a fourteen-year-old and found it dull, I highly recommend a reread.) I can’t prove that either of these hypotheses is true, of course, but they can’t really be disproven, either, so I’ll carry on believing what I’d like to believe.
Still, the explosion of slash as a substantial subculture can be tied directly to two cultural phenomena: the birth of the internet and the rapidly shifting public attitude toward homosexuality. Unlike the pre-Wildean Victorians, we have very clear definitions of what it means to be gay or bisexual, though the ever-expanding umbrella of queer sexuality now includes a wide array of terms whose meanings have yet to penetrate the mainstream. And unlike the Star Trek slash fans who used to pass around zines at fan conventions, we have the entire expansive reach of the internet, where everything exists and everything is Google-able.
Fanfiction and fandom culture is not driven exclusively by slash pairings – Twilight, anyone? – but slash is certainly a dominating force, at least in most mainstream Western media fandom: my friend Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of the Daily Dot reported on Tumblr user destinationtoast’s breakdown of fanfic stories currently hosted at the Archive of Our Own – not the largest fic site out there, but certainly the most reputable. (It’s run by the Organization for Transformative Works, self-styled as a “nonprofit organization run by and for fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures,” and was named one of Time Magazine’s Best Fifty Websites of 2012.)
According to destinationtoast’s statistics, 45.5% of stories hosted on the Archive are M/M (i.e. slash), while 24.3% are classified as “Gen” (i.e. non-romantic), 20.2% are F/M, while F/F takes up only a sliver of the pie chart. (More recently, the same user posted more statistics about the composition of the Archive; the top twenty-four most popular pairings are all M/M, and only eleven of the top fifty-one are M/F. [None were F/F.]) While other archives are somewhat less homogenous than this – Fanfiction.net, the most popular fanfic site, hosts huge numbers of stories about Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Hunger Games, to name only a few, alongside expected slash standards like Supernatural and Sherlock – the Archive of Our Own nevertheless represents a major subset of fandom, and is notably much more welcoming of sexually explicit content than Fanfiction.net, which does not accept stories with explicit content.
Outsiders are pretty routinely baffled by the popularity of slash fic amongst women, even if they haven’t been presented with the cold, hard, numerical truth, given fandom’s (accurate) reputation as a primarily female community. Though there are, of course, no statistics to confirm exactly how few men participate in fandom, they are certainly a minority. Though fandom and fanfiction are technically public – once again, you can find anything on Google, and to quote a movie I don’t otherwise like much, “The internet’s not written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink” – fandom spaces can give the illusion of privacy, of a sort of gated community that isn’t actually gated at all, but simply not of interest to those not in the know. In much the same way that, hundreds of years ago, many women wrote extensively but typically only for private circulation amongst friends and acquaintances, fanfiction is part of an informal, communal cultural exchange, functioning not as a capitalistic enterprise but as a kind of gift economy: I’ll write you this story, a fanfic writer might say, e-mailing her friend snippets of prose; you write me something back.
Like most things, fandom and fanfiction are neither inherently good nor bad; they simply are. In many ways the communal vibe of fandom writing spaces is warm, encouraging, and rewarding; fanfiction’s general refusal to play by the rules of capitalism can be refreshing, rendering it a form of pure play and expression rather than work. From another angle, though, the tendency of young women writers to funnel their efforts into this sphere can be seen as a preemptive act of isolation, of self-protection, of avoidance of the much more brutal world of publishing.
The communal creativity of fandom may enrich the souls of young women across the globe–not at all an insignificant achievement–but while that’s going on, all the sad young literary men who would surely look down their noses at fandom culture and fanfiction writing are busy hacking away at novels they will one day send into publishers and get in the windows of independent bookstores. Those sad young literary men are baby Jonathan Franzens in training and I likely will find them equally intolerable (N.B. I actually love Jonathan Franzen’s writing, but find his public persona is regrettable in the extreme), but they’ll penetrate mainstream literary culture a whole lot faster than girls and women sending each other stories online, and be able to live off their writing, at least in part, which a woman writing only fanfiction will never be able to do. Whether or not individual authors care about achieving Fame and Fortune through writing is, of course, up to them; on the whole, though, the trend is troubling. (Whatever would Virginia Woolf, she of the five hundred a year and a room of one’s own, think of this?)
But slash fiction serves a whole range of functions outside of the purely literary, and, like fanfiction itself, it is neither good nor bad: it is, quite simply, fulfilling a need. The first thing those not in-the-know tend to ask is something along the lines of, but why do you like that? The most facile response to this question is to point out that straight men quite famously get off on watching lesbians make out and have sex; why, then, should women attracted to men not find the inverse arousing? But while this answer is hardly incorrect, it is an oversimplification. Slash as a cultural construct and force goes beyond sheer titillation and gets at much deeper and complex aspects of female sexuality.
As many other people have pointed out before, slash is much more about women and female sexuality than it is about men or male sexuality, for all that the characters on the page (or, well, screen) are male, and in possession of biologically male genitalia. As my friend Caitlin wrote in a Tumblr post on the subject, “any understanding that slash is only meant to or required to depict real world relationships is a false understanding of what slash is.” The psychological attractions of same-sex pairings are myriad, many of them fairly straightforward: when the players in your romantic drama are both men, or both women, the necessary societal complexities that manifest in male/female relationships need never come up. Though slash in the past focused more often on issues of gay oppression and homophobia, internalized and externalized, that trend has mostly been supplanted by a kind of fantasy world in which characters rarely struggle with their sexualities and sexual identities, in which two men falling in love is a remarkably straightforward phenomenon, typically unquestioned not only by the characters in question but also by the world surrounding them.
For, as the statistics above show, these stories are almost always stories about men, and many of them conform to fairly standard romance plot tropes. But though the characters may be male, in many ways they are mere stand-ins for their (female) writers. Caitlin, again: “many women and girls writing slash fanfiction are writing a fictionalized form of maleness, sexuality, and romantic relationship that picks and chooses the elements of our heteronormative society they are comfortable with in their fantasy.” She goes on to point out that many women have some kind of sexual fantasy relating to rape or dubious consent, in which the subject, standing in for the female reader (or writer) is devoid of control, and adds, “Fandom is one space where women, especially young women, can explore this fantasy and other fantasies considered taboo in a space where they’re safe from many of the images of violence against women that are found in mainstream media.” Reading rape fantasy smut wherein a woman is degraded is likely to be massively uncomfortable for many women, including young women; reading an equivalent story with male characters allows the reader to negotiate (however consciously or unconsciously) her own fantasies and desires, imaginary or real, without being presented with the societally problematic image of her own degradation.
There are, of course, many reasons why women like slash, and I would never claim to have found some kind of skeleton key solution explaining every individual person’s involvement in the phenomenon. For queer women in particular, for instance, the notion of “queering” mainstream media (and mainstream romance narratives) is a powerful act of subversion. But the fact remains that M/M slash dominates the online discourse, even amongst queer female fans. Part of that, to be sure, derives from the fact that most mainstream media is regrettably devoid of strong, dynamic female characters, but that can hardly be held up as the only explanation for the rampant dominance of slash in fan culture.
Slash can be understood most simply and potently as an indirect dialogue between women and their bodies. Many fans have historically been eager to categorize this dialogue as inherently sexist, as resulting purely from an internalized misogynistic disgust with female sexuality and specifically with female genitalia. Particularly amongst younger fans, the existence of this trend is undeniable: while researching for a paper I gave this past spring on One Direction fandom, I stumbled across a Tumblr post that exemplified this tendency with breathtaking ignorance:
So I found out that people write Elounor [Louis Tomlinson/Eleanor Calder] smut, and decided to check it out. UHM IM KINDA AN IDIOT!? That was horrible and desgusting and just, ew. If you haven’t read Heterosexual smut, save yourself the trouble and don’t. DONT DO IT. Its horrific. Pray for me. Oh. And they have bad writers tooo. I mean, our larry [Louis Tomlinson/Harry Styles] smut writers are so much better.
This journal was deleted not long after I found the post, though I have a screenshot of the page (explicit handle redacted for purposes of dignity), and while I of course can’t be entirely certain, all signs point to this blog having been maintained by a young female fan. Many (though certainly not all) “Larry” fans I ran across over the course of doing research for that project were young women who fetishized what they saw as the purity of male homosexuality at the expense of their own sexual experience: Eleanor Calder along with other women were routinely derided and presented as objects of disgust. It’s hard not to laugh while reading the above post, but it is really kind of heart-wrenching, too: if this young woman ever wants to have sex herself (as she very likely does), she is going to have to have sex with her own genitalia, which of course aren’t nearly as repulsive as she seems to think they are.
But it is also an oversimplification to pin the popularity of slash purely on internalized misogyny, or to criticize it for being an outlet of women’s – particularly young women’s – complex relationships with their own sexualities. I’ll quote Caitlin one final time: “For many women, particularly young women […] it’s a way of working out ideas about sexuality and romance without worrying about their own position as women.” I like, particularly, the use of the phrase “without worrying” here. No matter how women want to engage with sex and romance – and that may, indeed, be “not at all” – we all must engage in that complex dialogue with our bodies as sexual (or asexual) objects, and understand ourselves as sexual (or asexual) beings precisely because the prevailing cultural narrative around female sexuality is so dominated by men. It is difficult to be a woman with a body, no matter what kind of body you have, and it is difficult to be a woman with any kind of sexual or erotic identity that does not match up to the narrow – perhaps impossibly so – category the male-dominated culture has deemed suitable for us to inhabit.
Slash, then, is not merely women expending their literary energy on romantic stories: it is also the site of enormous anxiety, and while it is not somehow immune to problematic undercurrents or tendencies, it is also a way of processing that almost impossibly weighty anxiety and turning it into something else, into an act of play, of subversion, of uncomplicated erotic arousal and romantic satisfaction. If the culture were free of misogyny – if the patriarchy, that is, did not exist – it would not be necessary, or would be the simple equivalent of men getting off on watching lesbians get off. But right now that culture is an unattainable dream: all of us women, for the foreseeable future, will have fraught relationships with our bodies. So we have to talk to them, and if we have to do that through the shadows of ourselves we’ve transformed into men – well, as far as I’m concerned, we could be doing a whole lot worse.
Tags: fandom anthropology, morgan davies, slash, the internet
Hi I will be here in the comments all day
SAME. COMMENTS PARTY. WOO.
Also I take the lack of F/F pairings at the top of the list as a CHALLENGE. WHO WILL WRITE THE LESBIAN FIC FOR THE AGES
we shall truly have entered a beautiful new age when tumblr is taken over by a F/F pairing that becomes so ubiquitous that everybody starts to hate it. I LOOK FORWARD TO THE DAY.
I’m in eternal mourning because the BBC cancelled Upstairs/Downstairs (DESPITE ITS CLEAR SUPERIORITY TO DOWNTON ABBEY), which was dominated yb a F/F pairings in tumblr fandom.
Willa Cather/Gwendolyn Brooks?
Mallory have you seen/read Revolutionary Girl Utena?
Good call. Utena x Anthy is practically canon, while every other potential male interests is just a distraction from their love for each other.
Also, adorable mouse.
P.S. I found this super intense two-part tumblr post about Utena and how it draws upon past and current Japanese perspectives of female relationships that may be of interest: Part 1 and Part 2. I’m still trying to absorb it now.
Wait wait, does the F/F pairings include genderswap? Where do we classify lesbian!John/Sherlock? Because if that’s F/F we already have a fic for the ages and it’s called “How the mouth changes its shape” (sorry I can’t give the author because I’m not going to AO3 at work…)
Which is, I think, a huge indicator both of why male slash is so popular and why fem!slash isn’t (I mean, besides mysoginy) – there simply aren’t as many complex female characters on TV, having relationships with other characters that are textually very restrained but with a deep subtext – and for slash you need two of these! Interacting in a complex and subtle way! I guess my thesis is that a show needs to pass the Bechdel Test before it gets femslashed, and maybe if a show already passes the Bechdel test, fans don’t see a need to “fill in” with fanfic? (Which is just another long-winded way to say “mysoginy”)
Yesss. I’m on my phone so I’m not gonna check, but I’m very sure the author goes by havingbeenbreathedout and she is amazing.
YES EXACTLY. I didn’t bring up her name in my comment below because idk it didn’t seem like the thing to do but that is she and she is a treasure. But yeah, HBBO is your girl, everyone, check out her fic.
Personally, I think genderswapped slash totally counts because of fanfic’s inherent subversiveness. Fanfic is where you’ll find homosexual relationships, trans* characters, asexual characters, genderfluid characters, the works, all the stuff that isn’t given to us in main media. So if in fanfic to be able to have intertextually rich slash, you have to genderswap, that’s just in line with everything else.
(I’m thinking now about an Inception fic I read where Arthur was a transman, another where BBC Sherlock was a transman, one with Elementary Sherlock being a (male-identified) crossdresser, a fic with a genderfluid asexual domme Sherlock who is female when on a case or domme-ing and male the rest of the time and dommes Lestrade while being in an asexual romantic relationship with John, loads of great Tony Stark genderswap, the aforementioned fic by havingbeenbreathedout, some asexual Cecil Baldwin things I’ve seen…when fanfic really goes for the gold it can be SO INCREDIBLE in terms of subversion and representation.)
I’ll be honest: the main draw for me as a lesbian to M/M fic is that a lot of the more interesting characters are male? I mean not ALL but a lot of the media I’m drawn to and interested in fic for has a primarily male cast, or the female characters are such stereotypes and broad brush strokes that it’s more interesting to explore the men.
Also, it’s more fun to play with m/m stories since men have so much more power and stuff than women do. It’s one of the reasons why I like BL manga (not all of it – I avoid anything too rapey or caught up in the horrible yaoi seme/uke tropes if possible) is that I get all the fun of a same sex relationship without the shitty misogyny and sexism inherent in society. (Yuri manga is too overrun with stupid innocent schoolgirl they’ll-grow-out-of-it stuff for me, but there are a few really good ones there.)
SO WHAT I’M SAYING is that we just need a lot more really good media with women in the main roles to slash. (And it has to be media that I’m interested in.) I’m actually really interested in the possibilities of Orphan Black, but I don’t really care for the one lesbian relationship already in the show (I don’t like Kasmina very much).
You are right about slash but WRONG ABOUT COSIMA GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
I’m sorry about Cosima (thank you for correcting my spelling). I just think that Allison and even Sarah are waaay more fascinating characters? Like, Cosima is such a hippy dippy crunchy lesbian stereotype in some ways that I was kind of turned off by her. It looks like there will be a lot to explore with her and some of her hypocrisy in the next season, at least, so maybe I’ll find her more interesting then!
I am with you in Cosima disinterest! Alison is my clone queen.
Man, I do not really enjoy Sarah (mostly because I find her such a sullen streetwise reckless cliche) (also, obviously Allison is the best). I also kept waiting for someone to ask/explain why Cosima 1. Wore glasses and 2. Was gay…
I am half-convinced that Cosima wears glasses because she sat too close to the TV and spent too much time peering at computer monitors, just like my mom warned me!
I think this plays a huge part, too. I have definitely written fic about women but really great female characters are so few and far between, especially in mainstream stuff (which is of course where most fandom comes from). I did Homeland for Yuletide last year and it was SO much fun to get inside Carrie’s head, but obviously that’s not a show that’s attracting a huge fandom base, you know? Some of that does have to do with internalized misogyny and sexual exploration as per above, but a lot of it is also just the fact that we can only work with what popular culture gives us, and mostly, it’s giving us dudes.
Totally. I have loved Homeland (I sort of dropped out partway through season 2 but plan to catch up) for Carrie, for Dana, for Saul, for its initially diverse and nuanced presentation of Muslim characters (this got worse in season 2, which is part of why I lost interest), and for the way it handled bipolar (I’m bipolar myself and Carrie is, like, impossibly perfect to me in that regard–and since I study Middle Eastern politics and have spent a lot of time in that region, I identify with her to sometimes uncomfortable degrees), but I can’t even imagine who you’d slash her WITH. I guess Jessica, maybe, but there’s really not much to go on there. In some ways, there are fandoms where the male characters are much more canon-dominant that still give you more femslash opportunities through the supporting characters (Supernatural and the MCU come to mind) simply because more of those characters exist to begin with. I guess this is more or less the argument for the Mako Mori Test vs. Bechdel Test debate.
I’m crossing fingers and toes that someone will write me Lucy/Ginevra Villette fic in the Yuletide exchange this year, literary Toasties. could it be u
Been lurking the rare fandoms for ages, but: Femslash_Daily on Livejournal rounds up most of it. A lot of the F/F died out with Harry Potter || Gossip Girl and the best four writers all appear to have gone on to greater things/Skins/teenagers.
The Devil Wears Prada and Gossip Girl are the best fandoms for F/F pairings though, no lie, mostly because of jengrrrl and … god, that pirate author. I can’t remember.
Failing that, the heyday of femslash was Xena. Which spawned an entire line of books and publishing house out of its fandom, called Bold Strokes Books, which has published very many narrowly reimagined Xena/Gabrielle pairings. The best archive on the net for this is (http://www.academyofbards.org/) the Bard’s Academy, and the best entries in this are fifteen years old or so. I recommend eyeballing the evolution of the “Uber” section of the “Alt” world to see how the fandom migrated to cheesy-ass eBook romance novels, it’s an entire secret and doubtless judgey history that is now poorly documented.
Girl power!
Daria / Jane
There is actually some REALLY GREAT F/F fic in Sherlock fandom, either involving some combination of Molly, Irene, and Sally, or just Rule 63ing John and Sherlock. There’s one epic written by a particularly excellent lady I know (who is a lesbian) about fem John and fem Sherlock in an early 20th century boarding school homosocial environment that’s, like, ridiculously great. (I swear I’m not just doing this because she’s a pal, it’s really a wonderful story AND a wonderful subversion of what usually goes on in Sherlock fandom. It’s called How The Mouth Changes Its Shape and it’s on AO3!)
OH, AND WHILE I’M AT IT, have a really wonderful Pepper/Natasha MCU/Good Omens crossover by gyzym, who is, of course, a queen: http://archiveofourown.org/works/358294
This was extremely educational and interesting, as one of the baffled outsiders to this phenomenon. Thanks for the insight.
Thank you so much!
This is so thoughtful and wonderful- it helped me uncover a little of why I find this genre so attractive. I particularly like the discussion of how slash allows women to explore sexuality in a space somewhat separated from cultural pressures (body image, patriarchy, misogyny). I feel like you really hit the nail on the head there (at least as far as my personal experience goes). Thank you for writing it!
And thank YOU for this lovely comment! <3
Confession: I wish someone younger and more conventionally attractive than John Rhys-Davies had been cast as Gimli so I could ship him/Legolas in the wake of this new Hobbit fervor. All this because of my friends on tumblr who suggested that Legolas was like, a lumpy elf prince when compared to the hot shit that was GIMLI, SON OF GLOIN, WITH HIS SUPER LUXURIOUS BEARD AND AXE-WIELDING PROWESS and their fucking Harlequin romance of the ages.
Basically: casting call for a younger hotter Gimli who would look amaaaazing with a giant beard. Help?!
I love you.
I need to ask broodinghunx for input because she would know best about Boys with Beards
Isn’t Robert Armitage already fitting this bill as Thorin? Just recast him as Gimli too.
Thorin is totally hot.
I love L’Armitage, but I feel like a Thorin-ized Gimli would break Orlando Bloom in half?
I thought long and hard about this question, and I’m not sure if I see a downside. Is that wrong?
Methinks you underestimate the strength and stamina of elves. Skinny but wiry.
idk, on the one hand, I feel you, but on the other…one of the oft-bemoaned tropes of fandom is that we always go for the conventionally-attractive young thin white men and ship them above and beyond whoever else. Like, I’ve already seen Ichabod/Headless Horseman fic go up on AO3 for Sleepy Hollow despite the fact that Ichabod/Abbie is RIGHT THERE STARING AT YOU and also really where are you getting this. (Also, that fic was tagged “neck kissing” and I am VERY CONCERNED for what that means when the Headless Horseman is one half of the pairing.) Or the relative paucity of Tony/Rhodey fic or even Tony/Natasha or Steve/Peggy or Natasha/Pepper, or Thor/Loki vs. Jane/Darcy, or Wincest and Destiel vs. Dean/Cassie (WHICH MY GOD IS A CANON RELATIONSHIP) or or or or. (I except Hannibal from this somewhat because while I love me some Will/Beverly or Bev/Freddie or Freddie/Alana, Hannibal/Will is also RIGHT THERE STARING AT YOU.) So like…the character basis for shipping Gimli/Legolas is already there…WHAT’S STOPPING US, EH???? Short grizzly bearded dudes can be hot too, amirite? *tips hat to first boyfriend*
I know, I JUST BEMOANED IT below, but. John Rhys-Davies. Sigh. I guess I want less of a Yosemite Sam vibe from Gimli?
OH MY GOD, SLEEPY HOLLOW. I applaud their creativity but jesus christ. What would their portmanteau be? Ichahead? Ichaless horsebod? Also wait what’s- you know what I’m just going to look it up on the AO3 at home and scream forever in somewhere that is not my office.
Yeah, I get you. And seriously: Ichahorse: WHY. I MEAN, YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE ~ANGRY EYE CONTACT~ TO WORK WITH HERE
For Spanish-speakers who are looking for a telenovela version of this stuff (which gets huge ratings in Argentina, its home country) I highly recommend Farsantes! It’s hilarious to see even kind of staid, male interviewers ask one of the main actors, “When are these two guys going to have sex?” Great script and acting, really. http://www.eltrecetv.com.ar/farsantes
I’m so pleased to see an in-depth piece on slash that doesn’t come from the POV of “sweet jesus, what is this? Hide yo kids, hide yo wives!” I wish I had time to read all of this right now, but I promise to come back and provide my Old Fandom Hag perspective later on!
Oh my godddd I have to go to a meeting right now but then I’m gonna come back and go nuts about this. CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE INAUTHENTIC SEX IN M/M SLASH VS. F/F SLASH.
AUGH the way M/M anal sex gets treated as an exact substitute for PIV sex is just so depressing sometimes. Let alone the incredibly essentialist treatment of top vs. bottom dynamics.
Umm fanfiction.net doesn’t have explicit content? I would heartily beg to differ. But yay talking about this!
Well, they say they don’t! I have no idea how strictly this is enforced, haha. EVIDENTLY NOT VERY STRICTLY.
Ooh ok, I did not even know that was supposed to be a rule. Yes I would say not enforced well at all! A fact I’m very happy for
They go through periods of enforcing it, and then the powers that be (whomever they are?) lose interest again and we all go back to sexing it up. Also occasionally someone with a grudge against a particular writer or ship will go on a reporting spree, and huge amounts of fic will be lost.
I wrote in a very unpopular m/f pairing for a long time, and I saw it happen at least three times.
On the one hand, I completely agree with the point that slash is often used to create safe fantasy spaces for young women to think about sex and masculinity. On the other hand, I’m still troubled by those Ao3 stats, especially because they are likely even more skewed in favor of (white, white, white) M/M than they suggest — people often tag F/M into a story when they only mean to briefly mention or even break apart the pairing. So many young girls in fandom are eager to erase fictional women, and to justify it by setting impossibly high standards for female characters. Does this come from internal anxiety about their own identities? Probably. But it’s still distressing.
Yeah, I mean, I personally feel really ambivalent about slash as a phenomenon? Which I hope comes through in the article. I mean, clearly I have strong feelings about it and I’m really into it, and I think it can be really positive but obviously also that it is often coming from a not-so-great place. I just tend to get leery of, like, posts on tumblr that go too far in one direction or another. I guess that’s my feeling on fandom generally, too – I love fandom obviously, HENCE THIS COLUMN, but I don’t think it is, as a whole, an inherently good or bad thing. It’s just a thing that can have positive or negative effects, often both simultaneously.
I’m with you re: ambivalence & posts that paint the issue with a broad brush. But I think there’s a homogeneity in fan preferences that probably goes beyond this a little bit … it’s not just that the top pairings are all dudes, it’s that they are all dudes of a very similar configuration. Not that people can’t like what they like (and I’ve written / am writing slash myself, in the interest of full disclosure, tho neither of my fandoms made it to that list), but it’s a little bit discomfiting. I’m probably getting beyond the scope of the article, though.
No, I totally feel you. I was reading something recently about how the white male body is the only body seen as neutral and I think that is really true and pretty fucked up and sad. But I don’t know, I think as long as that’s true that it kind of isn’t the end of the world for younger people to explore their sexualities that way. When you get a little bit older and more clued into stuff, then, you know – yeah, this is important stuff to think about and hopefully to try to subvert. But I don’t know that I would have been able to get my head there when I was 18, you know.
This isn’t really an answer or a definitive statement or anything; I think part of what makes the subject interesting to me is that it kind of defies definitive statements or black and white readings. It’s just too complicated for that.
Yeah, it’s definitely a problem, in my view. The tricky thing is how to balance acknowledging all the ways in which fandom is/can be positive and subversive with its own internalized oppressive dynamics, especially when you’re writing for what is potentially a non-fandom audience as in this article. Like, you want to present fanfic as legitimate and not weird creepy derivative crap, but you also want to acknowledge What’s The Matter With Fandom, and I think it’s a tough line to walk.
I mean, I can think of many fics off the top of my head that either use genderbending to create femslash or het, or just rewrite characters to be trans*, asexual, queer, D/s, etc., but even though the corner of fandom that I inhabit is pretty heavy on those subversions (relatively), I’m aware that overall there’s an issue in terms of prevailing preferences. I mean, look at a relatively new fandom like Welcome to Night Vale and look at the fanart–overwhelmingly Cecil is white and cis and has a third eye (which is an instance of terrible cultural appropriation); like, he’s more likely to have tentacles than he is to be non-white, and that tells you a whole lot, especially given that since there’s basically no physical description of him he could look like anyone or thing you want. And yet the default is to a white dude, usually blond. Hell, I’ve seen people making arguments for why “dark-skinned” Carlos might actually be white. It can be really depressing. But at the same time, some writers and artists keep trucking, subverting all these dynamics, and I think that’s important to acknowledge too.
Lovely article! I’m always gleefully excited to read thoughtful articles about fandom and especially slash. Buuut I’m afraid I’m bothered by one significant oversight of the article, and since no-one’s brought it up in the comments either, I feel compelled to point this out.
I used to be involved with the AO3 since before it went live (2008. My private and, er, rather pathetic claims to fame are that during testing I posted the first fic in my mother tongue there, and the very first translation. Heh.)
So I think it’s *enormously* important factor that the archive was initially proposed, funded and founded almost exclusively by slash fans, and that heritage lingers. It’s true that it’s an archive for everyone, but the original community that built and supported it was almost exclusively LJ-based slash fandom (case in point: me). It set a precedent in attracting slashers and making other fans slightly alienated and slowing down its adoption in anime/manga andoms, for example. It’s neither coincidence nor an exact mirror of general fandom trends — the AO3 isn’t a ‘neutral’ archive (yet! I think we’re getting there, and I’m glad for it.)
Uhm, sorry for sounding patronizing -_-; But it’s sort of like extrapolating the state of fandom from an archive that started out as a het archive, and deducting homophobia from the dearth of slash there! Or an international archive started by Spanish fans — how odd that Spanish fics are disproportionally represented…duh, you know?
Het is alive and well. But you’ll absolutely get a skewed sample if you take AO3 as a baseline, as many of the commenters do. I don’t think it invalidates your article at all! Just, I’m not expecting everyone to know that history, so I wanted to contribute that necessary grain of salt.
Yeah, thank you! I do know some of the history of the AO3 but: word limits, basically. I mean I could have gone on for A VERY LONG TIME with a lot more detail/sources/etc but: time and a place, haha. Now wishing I’d thrown in a sentence to this effect, but alas: too late.
Basically this is a totally valid point though! AO3 is definitely a skewed sample of fandom but it’s also the most easily surveyed in this way, which is why I used it. But certainly my intention was not to argue that all fanfic is slash but rather that it’s a really strong subculture/fandom presence – which may not come across as clearly as I’d like in the article, but again: the word limit sort of calls for generalizations.
Next time I’m planning on writing about Jane Austen, though, which should swing pretty firmly in the other direction, haha. I don’t want to write about just slash all the time! Though realistically I know that’s largely what is going to happen, given, um, my fandom history. KNOW THYSELF, etc etc.
Right! I absolutely get that — and I think you did a great (and entertaining!) job in so little space. *hat tip* It’s really more that the commenters ran with that one stat aspect and are unwittingly blowing it out of proportion, IMO, because they don’t have that background info.
But then, I freely admit that I’m a bit tired of the eternally recurring “slash is so mysoginist!” debate, it’s like a bugbear. I don’t even disagree with you (or most commenters) much, because I’m pretty sensitive to mysoginist undercurrents like female character-bashing. I’ve just been through too many iterations of this where it descends into “slash = categorically problematic!” where enlightened non-slashers preen in their ~moral superiority so, yeah, tired. But eh, from your fandom history you’ll know all about that.
I’m definitely looking forward to your Austen article — I’m not an Janeite, exactly, but I’ve read a share bit of both fan and published fanfic (have “Austenland” lying right here, actually…) Anyway, just discovered the Toast from Mallory’s Franzen-roasting, so your article confirmed that I should stick (read: lurk) around 🙂
My only hesitation with this line of thinking is that it kind of strikes me as telling girls, yet again, that you’re doing your sexuality/sexual curiosity wrong, you know? Like you should really be into something that maybe you aren’t, and you’re doing it wrong if you aren’t socially conscious enough. I don’t know. It all makes me a bit hesitant.
Well, I kinda think girls should be socially conscious. And everyone else, for that matter. I mean, I’m not trying to be flippant … and I agree that, ultimately, everyone should work out their anxieties and concerns and etc in their own way. But I also don’t think it’s wrong to ask for and expect some reflection on why we make the choices we make. You know?
I agree with you, totally, but I’ve read these arguments before and often time it does cross into the “you girls (especially you teenagers) are doing your sexual curiosity wrong why aren’t you doing it right like me?” And that does sort of hit me the wrong way, because basically girls are always doing their sexual curiosity/interest wrong. So there should be reflection, but I’m wary of the way it’s always coated in some degree of shame.
Aw, naw, I definitely don’t think there should be a shame game thing going on. But I think you can broach the topic without also wagging your finger. I don’t think it’s a matter of right and wrong, necessarily — more a matter of, hey, maybe there are unconsidered dimensions here. And, like Morgan wrote upthread, it’s maybe not even necessarily a conversation for the young fans. But the sameness and myopia that these Ao3 statistics reveal are definitely things that the older fans need to think about.
Yeah, totally. It’s a delicate balance.
For sure. I think what’s happened in fanart for the Welcome to Night Vale fandom (which, since it’s a podcast, gives you near-total free rein in what the characters should look like) is really illustrative. On the one hand, people are embracing this show that includes a canon queer romance and multiple characters of color, and denounces cultural appropriation…and yet, the fandom overwhelmingly imagines the not-very-described characters as white (not all, but many) and even goes so far as to make arguments for how explicitly of-color characters might secretly be white. And I think that’s something really worth talking about. But at the same time I don’t want to shame people for liking slash, because, hell, I like slash, and also all the reasons given above for why that should be okay. COMPLICATED!!!
Yeah, that’s messed up. I don’t know much about that fandom as I never listen to podcasts, but seriously, why are you making those arguments? Bizarre.
What’s interesting is that in the arguments here about What Fandom Is Into, people want teenagers to be into the things that they’re into now, and being slightly annoyed that the teens of today are into what they themselves were into as teens. It’s great that you’ve grown, but you didn’t get there immediately, did you?
Yeah, it’s starting to get really distressing and discouraging to see the same trends across so many different fandoms where the M/F relationships are just completely ignored in favor of dudeslash between two white dudes. Like, if it was just with Joan/Sherlock in Elementary, or Mako/Raleigh in Pacific Rim, or Tony/Pepper from Avengers, you could pass it off as an unfortunate quirk of the fandom. But when all of these pairings are seemingly crushed under the deluge of more popular M/M pairings, it really makes me uncomfortable with the direction of fandom.
And I mean, I have done my fair share of dudeslash shipping, and I have read many hundreds of thousands of words of slash! But I feel like I’m becoming a bitter old fandom hag when I look at the hottest new slash pairing and think, “well this is boring and vastly inferior to the M/F or M/M pairing featuring a PoC that is far more interesting and has more than two minutes of canon to recommend it.”
(Also, do not even get me started on people tagging their fic Tony/Pepper [or insert canon M/F pairing here] when it’s just them breaking up on the way to Steve/Tony or whatever. YOU ARE RUINING THE UTILITY OF TAG SEARCHES AND FILTERS, UGH.)
If you specifically filter out the juggernaut slash pairing from the het pairing tag search in my fandom on AO3, the number of stories drops literally by half.
GOD YES. Seriously, when I see Chuck/Raleigh fics, I’m just…HOW. WHY. WHAT. Oh right, you want the white dudes, okay, go away while I look for some Female Kaidonovsky (I’m not giving a first name because there seems to have been some confusion over which is which)/Mako fic, or Raleigh Mako, or Stacker/Herc not in the background, or Stacker/Raleigh, or ANYTHING INVOLVING THE WEI TRIPLETS, etc.
Eh, I give a pass to Chuck/Raleigh, because some people do like antagonism-becoming-sexy as a trope, which none of the others you mention offer unless you do a lot of work/ignore wide swaths of what is in the movie. What bothers me more is people deciding that Chuck/Herc is the way to go.
Yeah, I’ve seen this happen in several fandoms. Also, as someone who prefers women in her stories, this cen get very frustrating very quickly.
Although, if we’re talking about Pacific Rim and Elementary, I think a BIG reason is it’s popular among people BECAUSE it doesn’t push the het pairing in canon. Joan/Sherlock is typical – lot of people are absolutely extatic the writers are not pushing them into a sexual relationship, so why would they write fics about it?
As for MCU, I’m still amazed how little love the canon het pairings get. Maybe it’s (as someone in the comments said) because the canon is good enough and so it’s just not written? Or, sadly, it’s all “die for my ship” problem.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand – my interest level in fanfic about canon pairings (like Tony/Pepper) that I like tends to be minimal, since I, you know, get it from the source material. And canon pairings tend to be het (and often involve a lot of white people, because society). (This is me personally, though, and I am also pretty fond of F/F as well as M/M, so I’m not exactly an average representative.)
GUYS I pretty much found out about manga like a month ago (I KNOW) and the first thing I read was ‘A Cruel God Reigns’ and I really need someone to hold me and talk me through my feels
go to september scans and read their translations of “Honto Yajuu” which is my current favorite romantic comedy. It’s sweet and funny and is about a neighborhood policeman falling in love with a yakuza, but they’re both utter dorks and adorable.
Honto Yajuu is the best. Run, do not walk.
I don’t really read manga much anymore, but I did find a pretty good list of good yaoi/yuri (yuri is the girl version) manga for you: http://manga.about.com/od/recommendedreading/tp/Y…
I remember a couple years ago on the Pinto (Chris Pine/Zach Quinto) community, they had a poll up where members could choose from multiple options about why they liked slash. SURPRISINGLY the overwhelming majority of self-reported answers was “I just like imagining pretty boys together, OK?” and not “I’m threatened by my own sexuality” or “Focusing on two males allows me to subvert patriarchal expectations and roles about relationships.” It was interesting because I think a lot of people in fandom probably don’t even realize why they’re doing what they’re doing… I certainly did not at the time.
I mean, I think it can definitely be both. There are lots of young women who get a ton out of writing and reading slash, and there are a lot of grown-ass women who are centered and reasonably well-adjusted and who have given a lot of critical thought to sexuality and culture and still love the stuff, so it’s not necessarily something that needs to be examined away.
Oh, for sure! I’m sure a ton of the people in that comm really truly were just into imagining pretty boys making out, which can be a great and lovely thing. But I’d never stopped to think, for me, that there even COULD BE a larger issue at play. It was one of those things where I thought I was operating in a vacuum, but in actuality the patriarchy was waving its ghost dick in my face as I was trying to research Vulcan weiners, and now that I’ve gained the knowledge and can flash back to that earlier scene in the movie, I can see all the ghost dicks for what they truly were.
#insidious2spoilers
I remember reading a thing a while ago that was basically saying that slash, really, is women making love to one another mentally via male bodies (and that that is great but please at least understand some basics about how anal sex works), and I think that’s a huge part of it. I haven’t done this, but I personally know women who write back and forth to each other in the form of porn not even about two male characters but about some male character/actor making love to the other woman. At that point, it really does become something very close to sexting at length by proxy, and I think that’s very telling about how fanfic or slash culture can be a medium for female relationships and desire.
HMMMM yes but Pinto fandom dissolved in a forest fire of slut shaming. so.
Ahhhhh Olivia? Or was that later? I was mostly in the main ST comm on LJ but the Pinto group always had the best news/updates. Luckily I had had my epiphany earlier, so I could see it all for what it truly was.
which a woman writing only fanfiction will never be able to do.
Unless her name is E.L. James or Cassandra Clare, no matter how much that dismays either the sad young literary men, Jonathan Franzen, or anyone who appreciates well-written fiction.
Just so you know, every time somebody from the fanfic/fanworks community uses the term “fandom” to refer exclusively to that community, as you did several times in this piece, I hate that community a little more.
Duly noted. We have written it down in our Book of Souls.
Thank you for your kind attention to this matter.
from the perspective of someone in that community who often sees “fandom” used to refer to sci-fi/fantasy-based communities that seem to stop just short of roping in fanfiction and other fanworks, to me the choice of fans within those community to self-identify as “fandom” is done in part to make those other communities aware that we exist, not to claim that we are the only fandom or the end of fandom. Lately I try to clarify that when I say “fandom” I am referring to “fanworks-based, internet-based fandom community” 🙂
I went to Japan on a cultural exchange when I was 16 year old (2005?). It was an amazing month. I shared my host sister’s bedroom with her, and when she went to her summer band camp, I sometimes stayed at home alone. One day I was organizing my belongings in the closet when I stumbled upon a hidden manga collection — chock full of very pornographic slash. Naruto slash, One Piece slash, baseball guys slash — about fifteen tantalizing books in all. I read the forbidden fruit voraciously (not that I could read them) and soaked up all the very pornographic illustrations with lustful delight. It was a great day all alone, let’s just say. I kind of think this experience alone set the tone for my future porno preferences. The end.
This is a beautiful comment and I shall treasure it always.
I remember long long ago, many many moons ago, pre internet ago, attending a wonderful slash convention in Santa Barbara where everyone was trading zines and duping videotapes and there were only a few men registered (one as a guest, the rest attendee) and by “few” I mean “fewer than I can count on one hand”. I forget who the guest was but one of the attendees was Henry Jenkins, author of “Textual Poachers” and former MIT professor who actually taught classes on media consumption and the role of fanfiction in the way consumers experience media by making it interactive.
Now all you kids get off my lawn 😀
The main reason I was drawn to slash as a wee teen in the 90s is that I’m a lesbian and I like romance stories, but I was really tired of the male/female couplings. The first slash I ever read (and does it really count as slash) was Xena/Gabrielle at the tender age of 13 and also that was how I realized my sexuality (well, partly) (turns out I’m an asexual lesbian and I didn’t learn that word until I was 20) (I have little to no sex drive or urge, but what little there is likes the ladies). ANYWAY I learned that it doesn’t have to be m/f, but the only place to get not m/f was in fandom and slashing and m/m was more popular, so I’ll take what I get and be happy that it’s not more heteronormative stuff (even if it often wraps itself up in male-female rolls, which, ugh).
Weirdly, I haven’t been in a fandom since Xena where there were two strong female leads that I liked enough to put together. There were a few people in HP fandom that did good f/f stuff, but I only read it because of the writer, not the pairing. The characterizations and the way two characters play off each other are way more important to me than the hotness of the sex or mashing them up just because.
Yes, this. I’m a lesbian and I can get heterosexual fiction literally anywhere. And I do! I love romance novels. But sometimes, you just get tired of straight people, you know? So I tend to look for what I can’t get elsewhere.
Really enjoyed this piece, especially the mention of the generous gift-giving ethos that informs fan culture. I tend to write stories not for general consumption (even if I post them publicly) but as birthday and Christmas gifts for close friends, or cheer-up stories for bad days, and love receiving the same. It’s a way of expending effort and care on someone in a non-financial and imaginative way, and I really value that aspect of my life. I and a good number of my friends who write are not what I would consider candidates for professional-writerhood, at least not of fiction — it’s nice to have an outlet for writing that is low-stakes. But I have at least one friend that I would like to propel out of fanwriting-for-free and into the literary limelight, so your point about the isolation of the young female writer is still well taken.
I have very diverse pairing interests now, but I was more exclusively into m/m when I was a teenager or in college, which makes me think that part of it was due to a more distinct dearth of queer representational options in media. Things are by no means as utopian and widespread now as I (or anyone) would like, but I find myself more eager to seek out media with canonical queer ships rather than constructing my own. This was the Torchwood turning point in my life. (Hence an overlong struggle to justify watching Glee, now ended. I love you, Santana, but I can’t do it anymore.)
I ship you/Santana
From your lips to God’s ears.
I salute and respect your long commitment to Glee. I was out after one season because I COULD NOT DO IT ANYMORE, I could not. I enjoyed that season fine but I could tell it was going to go to hell quickly and I feel so good about having made that decision, I tell you truly.
I love the gift-giving culture of fandom, too, and I know a lot of people who write fic who either aren’t quite good enough to get published for real and/or just don’t have any interest in that, and I love that there’s a space for them to be creative that’s so welcoming and positive so much of the time. I find myself more and more irritated as time goes by, though, by how many people I know who are actually INSANELY talented and should really have book deals and who I think are just kind of afraid to leave that comfortable space. I mean, I totally understand why they feel that way – it can be really hard! But it’s also important that women (generally speaking) do that, so that we get to be part of the mainstream literary culture and conversation too. AT LEAST, THAT’S HOW I FEEL ABOUT IT.
I watched and enjoyed the first season, and then a few eps into the second season I noped out of there so fast. Everything that was great about the first season just…dissipated into the ether.
Slightly OT!
So actually, because of the fanfic/publishing intersection — have you heard of the Captive Prince phenomenon? I mean, I’m a huge fan, but it’s also simply interesting to watch a fandom-inspired, self-published origfic get picked up by a major publisher. Makes you sit up and pay attention — if this succeeds, what’s next, you know? tl;dr 50 Shades forced even major publisher to look at fandom as a resource?
I have to say as a fanfic author, one of the joys is the responsiveness of the community as well. When I did get published in a more mainstream way, the lack of instant critique was a jarring change. It’s a wonderful thing to put out your stories and hours later have comments from people who love what you love immediately.
Yeah, I totally agree. Writing original stuff is such a long process, if you’re trying to get published – I mean, I’m prepping a manuscript to send out to agents right now and I know perfectly well that even if everything goes dazzlingly well and all my dreams come true, it won’t be in the hands of the general public for… a couple of years, at the ABSOLUTE minimum. I don’t really mind that; it’s just how it works. But I grew up writing original fiction and then got into writing fanfiction later, so that doesn’t seem unusual for me – I can imagine that for people for whom the opposite is true, it would be really tough to go from getting instant gratification to having to wait so long, and then be more separated from your readers post-publication, too.
So this is probably impossible for anyone to compile in any meaningfully comprehensive way, but what I’d really like to see is some data on what people ship as a whole, versus what they read and write about. On the main English-language fansite for Ace Attorney, for example, there was once a poll on what ships people liked. According to the poll, the two most popular were het pairings, the third was a femslash pairing, and the fourth was a (m/m) slash pairing. But in fanfic, that fourth pairing is the most popular by a huge margin.
Also, I’m surprised that John/Dave is the biggest ship in Homestuck’s AO3 fandom. I would have thought it would be John/Karkat. Although, I don’t ship either pairing, so what do I know?
Yeah, I would love this data, too; ALAS, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. I think that het pairings probably get written less in certain circles because they’re more often fulfilled in canon – like, I am a huge crazy Homeland fangirl, but a) there’s not a real fandom presence around that show, and b) THE SHOW IS PRACTICALLY FANFICTION ANYWAY. I did do Homeland for Yuletide last year which was incredibly fun and rewarding, but like, I don’t need to read a ton of fanfic about Carrie and Brody’s fucked up relationship; it’s already all there on the screen, you know? Whereas slash tends to thrive on subtext and the fact that the fan’s desires will never be gratified within the text of the show – hence, the satisfaction of writing about it yourself.
I think that’s a lot of it. Fanfiction does best in those little lightless (and possibly moist?) gaps where plot sunshine doesn’t reach. Like, I cheerfully ship the hell out of Black Widow and Bucky Barnes, say, or CJ and Danny on the West Wing but I expect the show to actually fulfill my needs and I am not picking up your slack, Sorkin, goddammit.
But I also keep having a think about this re: femmeslash, as someone who is basically only active in a fandom with one gay and one lesbian pairing, both canon, who has very little interest writing about the latter, even though I am devoted to it in the context of the original source media. Part of me wants to distill it down to ‘the gay dudes are funny and the lesbians are tragic and banter is the sole reason for my existence’ but that is super reductive because the lesbians are also hilarious (well, one of them) and the gay dudes keep making me sad. So.
Well I think sometimes we just like things that we like, also. I mean, I am all for self-analysis (SEE ABOVE), but I think at a certain point just being able to say, like, “I like this thing because REASONS” is kind of nice/important, too. Like, lots of fangirls like lots of white dudes making out – so yeah, we should think about why that is and what societally has created that situation and critique it, but that doesn’t mean we have to, you know, stop liking those ships, or problematic things generally. I have watched and enjoyed a lot of TV that had seriously problematic aspects and I was aware of them but I liked the shows anyway. WHICH IS FINE.
You don’t think there could be some serious Mike/Brody ragesex fic? I’m pretty sure I know some people who would read that…
I generally feel like shipping het pairings is a lot less fan fiction-focused than slash pairings are, because the het pairings either are/become canon, so fans feel less need/desire for fic, and the bar for shipping it is lower. Like, you can say you ship Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny, because they’re canon and you like those pairings in canon and maybe you enjoy some fanart or fic about them sometimes, but that’s about the extent of your engagement with shipping it. But if you ship Harry/Draco or Remus/Sirius, well, there’s a bit more work involved there. The canon there is limited to subtext and a few interactions, so your energy in shipping it tends to go towards long-ass meta essays on why the pairings work and fic about the pairings.
Obviously this is not true of all fandoms, but it’s been my experience that het ships get less attention by virtue of being canon.
Yeah. I watch a lot of TV, but only want fanfiction for a fraction of it. I like fanfiction for what canon doesn’t provide, and usually for shows/movies that, for whatever reason, feel incomplete to me. Like, when the Tudors and Rome were both on TV, I wanted fanfiction for the Tudors, but not for Rome, because I was getting more out of the Rome canon. Whereas the Tudors was a lot sillier and had great shirtless wrestling scenes,. If the canon works, I don’t need fanworks. But I’ve got a friend who is really into reading more of the canon pairings, so I guess that’s not how it works for everyone.
When I was like 15 I didn’t get why people wanted to read fic that wasn’t about pairings that weren’t ultimately going to become canon (or that didn’t stand a very good chance of becoming canon) – but I still liked the ambiguity of it, you know. But basically I didn’t get slash at ALL until a couple years later because I was just kind of like, but what’s the POINT?? (NB I was one of those girls in middle school who didn’t understand why her friends had crushes on celebrities since they weren’t going to ever MEET them or anything.) Anyway I think it depends on the person, of course, but certainly for me now I don’t find reading about pairings that happened in canon very interesting, and I DEFINITELY wouldn’t want to write them. Where’s the fun in that??
I got into slash earlier, but basically, yeah. I know what happens in canon- it’s there, in canon. What’s not going to happen in canon but what I still want is what fanfiction is for. (Maybe it’s too early an exposure to RPF? Like, it was never going to happen, but it was way more interesting than what could actually happen, and I stopped caring about what was ‘real’ or not.)
Mostly though I find myself wanting fanfiction for canons that I half-like. Like, I want it for X-Men First Class, but not the Venture Brothers. I don’t know. Everyone has different reasons for things!
YES to wanting fic for sort-of-good canons. I read SO MUCH XM:FC and that movie was a nightmare but ALSO A BEAUTIFUL R+J ROMANCE. Or, like, I love Teen Wolf but it’s kinda shitty, obviously. Whereas the pop culture that I love with the purest and truest love is, like, Breaking Bad, which is already perfect and therefore doesn’t need fanfic. No fanfic of that show (or, you know, fill in the blank) is going to be as good as the canon, in which case, why bother? I think a lot of the fun of fandom for me is improving on something that I enjoyed but thought could have been a lot better.
Yeah, exactly. There’s nothing in Venture Bros (to speak of something I love that’s also heavily dude-heavy and genre-y) that I think can be done better than the canon. But XMFC or the Tudors? Rewrite on!
The first fanfic I read was for The West Wing, and while the vast majority of what went on in that fic I would never have wanted to happen in canon, it was sort of fun to explore the possibility, you know? Like, I didn’t see it as improving or rewriting canon, really; it was just fun to imagine how the characters I felt like I knew well would interact in these completely different situations. Which is sort of a half and half of “rewriting deficient canon” and “enjoying sufficient canon,” I think. (Granted, though, I was like fourteen, so I may have missed a lot of what was going on there and what I was getting out of it. Now when I think of the majority of those ships I cringe, and I’m way more into ships from the show I never thought of at the time, like Carol/CJ.)
I’ve read a /lot/ of writers trying to explain slash, but this is the most complete and parsimonious piece I’ve seen that hits all the right notes. Slash offered me a safe way to explore sexual fantasy without heterosexual politics, and it offers others their own outlets.
Also I wrote a TON of lesbian fic. FYI.
Eeee, thank you SO MUCH! This is truly lovely to hear. <3
So, I’m curious if the dominance of m/m slash is because women are uncomfortable with channeling their sexuality through female bodies, or if it’s because fictional women, for the most part, fill fundamentally different roles from fictional men. When I think of my most feelz-inducing fictional relationship formula – relatively balanced m/f protags do some exciting shit, spend some time together, learn to respect each other, build up some tension, and get together in the end – that formula (minus the end) is by and large mirrored by all these men and their sidekicks/nemeses. It seems like an abundance of well-balanced m/m duos and a dearth of non-love-interest lady costars leaves the fans to write their own emotional endings that are m/m by default. If there was a better balance of badass leading dudes and ladies (not to mention an all-woman cast) who aren’t already banging in canon, we might see a more balanced representation in fanfiction.
tl;dr: representation in fanfiction mirrors representation of interesting characters in canon?
Correct.
I think it’s definitely a combination of both. Obviously partially I think the interest in slash stems from what I’ve written in the article, but the simple fact of the matter is also that mainstream culture suffers from a serious dearth of interesting female characters. Which leads to a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, I think.
That’s definitely my opinion, too, and I think that goes a long way towards explaining why there was a lot of femslash related to properties like Xena: Warrior Princess, which is one of the only shows I can point to that follows the “two main characters adventure together and grow closer” theme with two women. I can name dozens and dozens off the top of my head that feature men, and surprise surprise they are all slasherific.
I think there’s also some element of knowledge about sex, especially with younger writers. Like, we get so much more information about what sex is like for men than it is for women, and a lot of M/M slashfic basically features M/M penetrative (i.e. anal) sex as a thinly veiled stand-in for PIV sex, whereas if you’re not LOOKING for it, you’re not going to find a lot of information about what lady-on-lady sex is like just floating around in the media, or even PIV sex from the woman’s perspective. So M/M–especially M/M as a stand-in for M/F–just becomes straight-up easier to write about (no pun intended).
I used to follow several Livejournal fandom communities as a teen, and slash would occasionally pop up…to be honest, I felt like the appeal for me had something to do with two (often previously “straight”) men expressing physical affection for each other in a way that’s not really normalized at least in the United States. I’m not sure what was so fascinating / titillating about men just blatantly loving each other and showing it, but it made me feel warm and fuzzy. And meanwhile I was reading romance novels and such, so I don’t think it had anything to do with fearing my own M/F sexuality or lady parts, as far as I know. I guess different people get different things out of it!
(And meanwhile a few of my friends and I are completely different visually, preferring to watch only F/F pairings, but to read M/M ones…ahh sexuality, you are so varied and unique and interesting.)
So as a former fanfic author who also happens to be male and straight, I have to admit that the prevalence of slash in the Buffy fandom (which is where i lay the vast majority of my tales) was (to my then-19-year-old-self) very surprising, but also one of those things that I eventually just didn’t even really register unless it was something truly weird.
Unfortunately, the *vast* majority of men who wrote in the Buffy fandom were: a) militantly anti-slash; b) huge, huge fans of making Xander into a Marty Stu; c) horrible writers; d) thought the concept of teenage girls fighting monsters was a stupid one and whoever came up with it should be shot, which, why are you in Buffy fandom again? They also mostly hated Buffy. So again with the why.
Anyway, I really appreciated this piece! Took me back a number of years to when I was still functionally writing, and that’s always a good time. Also one of the best fics I ever read was a Stargate Atlantis fic that was subtly slashy of McKay/Sheppard and also completely amazeballs. One of three or four fics to ever get my eyes watery.
Was it Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose?
Yes! Brilliant fic. It also had the sciencey bits, which in addition to the emotiony bits was amazing.
Freedom’s Just Another Word, right? Guess who still re-reads that and quietly weeps? (ME.)
SGA was my first major slash fandom, and I am still full of warm fuzzies for it despite recognizing that the show was kind of terrible and the inexplicable (ahahaha, no, totally explicable) lack of Ronon and Teyla-centered fic.
Yes it absolutely was. SUCH a good fic. I never got much into SGA fandom, but there were a lot of fics there that surpassed the quality of the show in many, many ways. Same with SG1, really…
But what does MsScribe think about this??? Inquiring minds want to know.
screaaaaam
I wonder how much Slash/Axl slash there is out there. Because it took me a minute to realize that you weren’t talking about GNR. I need to get more sleep.
Great piece. I read some research a few years back that either slash, the term/typography for it, or both, originated not with Star Trek, but with Starsky and Hutch. Obviously not terribly important to the actual issues in and around slash and slashfic, but interesting re: timing and the question of origins from genre fandom.
Ooooh, this is super interesting! I am going to have to look into this.
This rings as potentially really true to me, because one of my best friends in high school (who is a lady-leaning bisexual person) was OBSESSED with Starsky & Hutch, despite the fact that we were in high school in the 2000s, nowhere near when that show was airing. I have wondered before, when reading essays on fandom, whether Starsky & Hutch deserved a place in this history.
I think one of the main reasons I ended up with my husband is because he was so cool when I told him I loved hockey RPS. And he actually read the fic I sent him with a cyborg Evgeni Malkin and human Sidney Crosby falling in love.
Well I did inflict Courtship of Princess Leia on you…
And I still have only read one of your fics. Clearly, I am the worst. But I gave you The Toast!
This whole piece is amazing, especially the point about the baby Franzens of the world.
I wonder if there isn’t also a subconscious (or maybe conscious) desire to see men more sensitive and submissive. Not just talking about who tops but in a lot of the fic I’ve read the men usually talk about feelings more and the acts described seem to be het substitutes. For instance, I don’t think spontaneous rim jobs happen as often in real life as they do in fic.
This is why Harry Potter is the best fandom. Need a wash down and some lube? There’s a spell for that.
Thank you!! Yeah, I think “men talking about feelings” is also a huge draw for people – be it sexually or emotionally or societally or whatever. Lots of dudes actually ARE sensitive! But they aren’t depicted that way in media very often, that’s for sure.
I have read very little slash but in pondering the phenomenon and reading this post and comments, it seems likely to me that the preference for M/M pairings is a rebellion against our culture’s obsessive glorification of machismo. It strikes me as an ingenious method of undermining traditional straight white male dominance. (Take Mallory’s amazing Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan tweets, for example.)
I really appreciate this article actually talking about misogyny in fandom and how that is a problem when out of the 100 or so top pairings on the archive only 3 are F/F. I write a decent amount of femslash and hell even my het pairings are more Queer than anything else. But I’ve noticed a massive difference in views and kudos if I post some m/m slash. Like astronomical difference. So it’s not just what people are writing but it’s what they think they want to read as well.
One issue I did take with this is that it mentions that fandom is a mostly woman dominated space and seemed to hint that most of the people partaking were heterosexual using male characters as proxy. Which does account for a good number of people I won’t deny but I feel like this excludes a sizeable portion of fandom as well. Women who are Queer and trans*/non-binary folk.
I’m going to be honest and mention that all the people I know who are trans*/non-binary and Queer are all nerdy people. All of them find comfortable spaces there in one fashion or another. The ones I know who write specifically write mostly m/m stuff which is insteresting. I think it might just be the first thing we were exposed to as young Queers looking for love stories about people like us on the internet and we imprinted a bit.
I actually never read much slash in fic but I read all of the yaoi in book form. So much yaoi. So I know where people who are super into m/m are coming from.
But now that I’m an older Queer non-binary personage and once again in fandom I find that the sole obsession with guy on guy slash kind of less engaging. I want to hear more about women, Queer women, women of color, non-binary people, genderfluid Queer people, trans* people, all the people who I never see mainstream representation of. Because that is half the battle of fandom spaces, to take the mainstream media that doesn’t do what we want it to and make it better, more diverse, more Queer, more radical. But for the most part fandom seems to leave it male and try to add the rest in. It’s troubling.
This is interesting for me, because a) I thought Morgan made a pretty clear effort not to be binarist and to be inclusive of trans* and asexual people in the phrasing of her article (though I’m sure I may be missing things! I’m bi, but cis), and b) because my first fic fandom was The West Wing, which actually did feature a fair amount of het (though, IIRC, almost no F/F).
Also, though, I share your interest in off the beaten path stuff–don’t get me wrong, I still read plenty of M/M, but I’m always intrigued by femslash, fic with trans* or genderfluid or asexual characters, pairings that (COULD IT BE??) include POC, etc. I think I’m very lucky in having found my way into corners of fandom that are pretty explicitly interested in/promoting of so-called “offbeat” or rarepair fics, especially because I really got into the scene pretty late in life, relatively. (I didn’t really properly enter fandom until I was 23 or so, and my impression is that most people get into it earlier. I read The West Wing fic when I was fourteen or fifteen but sort of as a diversion–it wasn’t important to me the way fandom is important to me now–and I dropped out completely between then and a couple years ago.)
Thank you thank you – I certainly tried to do so but may have missed things, and honestly it mostly comes down to only having so many words and therefore having to make generalizations. Obviously I focused on cis women here because we are the most predominant group and I only had so much space, but I am really interested in how trans* and asexual people engage with slash and fandom generally – I know a few asexual women but not any trans* people (in fandom).
There are a million things to say under this general topic and I only said a few of them, basically. But I am interested in them all.
Just poking my head in – as a male slash writer. We are definitely few and far between, but we’re out here! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been referred to as a woman; but then again, I’m one of only two slash writers in my LJ communities… Plus, it’s fun to play with people’s heads a bit when they realize they think they’re talking to a woman, when it’s really a guy.
We’re having a “Squee Weekend” at the end of September – a bunch of us slashers in the Stargate Atlantis community are gathering for a weekend of McShep (McKay/Sheppard) and Porne (Parrish/Lorne). Just me, a gay guy, and about twenty women. FUN!!!!
(I’m situating myself chronologically within the late stages of Yahoo Group mailing lists and the rise of Livejournal up to Tumblr. It really fascinates me how the comment thread runs the gamut of 40 plus years of the fandom experience, btw.)
The use of the word “anxieties” in the last paragraph really resonated with me. For the longest time, I’ve been uncomfortable with the rah-rah empowerment meta that surrounds discourse of slash within the fandom community, because while queering texts and primarily female-identified writing space are definitely parts of the appeal, I can’t really ascribe a consciously activist viewpoint on the 14-year old me voraciously reading frankly misogynist Gundam Wing slash fiction.
I think part of the appeal came from the negotiation between “received” knowledge (ie. from school, mass media, family etc.) and the kind of culture I had to seek out for myself as a fairly sheltered person who studied in an all girls’ Catholic school in a Cathoic society. Queer relationships have been pretty much present throughout my young adulthood but it was often vilified and characterized as deviant. It was a weird space for me to inhabit as a person who is largely straight-leaning but with obvious queer desires and no inclination to have sexual or romantic relationships. So I had to negotiate a lot for myself, and slash was one of the ways I could piggyback on the explorations of sexuality politics (since I’m primarily a reader and not a producer) without having to, horror of horrors, talk about it with people in real life.
Without slash fandom to engage with at a young age, I would still end up being the sort of emotional and anxious mess I am now, but those energies would most likely be channeled differently. Though I can’t even fathom how. However, it’s also interesting that while I read novels that span a wide number of genres, the kind of books that really hit the pleasure centers of my brain still involve male romantic relationships such as Brideshead Revisited, Mary Renault, etc. So my “it’s underground” ethos doesn’ fly that well anymore.
I don’t quite agree with your point re: young Franzens accumulating more potential cultural capital than largely pseudonymous young women who write slash, however. While they don’t necessarily put their names on the slash fics they write, these women still develop relationships with their betas and fans, many of whom are often connected with academia or the publishing industry. Just think of the numerous YA and genre writers who have leveraged their fandom popularity into actual meatspace book contracts. I think we’re a generation or two away from award-winning female literary writers with a firm background on slash.
I’m also skeptical that a woman engaging in a Franzenesque literary landscape instead of accruing slash writing experience would be in any kind of level playing field, or would end up writing the kind of stories they really want anyway.
Yes to pretty much all of this.
I hope one day we find a cache of letters from the Victorian era by a bunch of women to each other that is essentially round robin Sherlock Holmes slash. But I guess even if we don’t, we’re kind of making up for that lack now.
I would cry endless tears of profound joy if this ever happened. IN FACT I THINK SOMEONE NEEDS TO WRITE A POSSESSION-STYLE NOVEL ABOUT THIS VERY TOPIC.
A really interesting article – I’ve done my share of silent pondering why slash is so popular (and why femslash… isn’t) and some of these points I’ve never even considered.
Personally, I suspect a part of the reason is that we are taught to relate to, and focus on, primarily the male characters – even if we ourselves are female. Even when the show/book/movie has female characters, their stories are told from the male perspective, in relation to the male characters, furthering their character arcs etc. (there was a great post about this in relation to Amy from Doctor Who, but I sadly lost the link) When you relate more to the male characters, you’re more likely to care about their emotions and relationships.
All this ends in a disaster for femslash – not only you don’t get that many characters to choose from, you’re also not paying them enough attention to even think about them as “shippable”.
I’m a former slash writer, but I still write *and* I make a living off of it. I just transitioned into writing gay romance, which is great. Original characters and I had years of experience writing slash in the early and mid 2000s (so I hopefully don’t suck) ^_^
I never thought about why I enjoyed slash (beyond yeah! pretty boys kissing!), but I agree with you. It’s something to think about.
I’m a lesbian who gets my queer fiction fix mostly through slash. I read more slash than femslash because there are far fewer shows that have at least two female characters who are single, have personalities, and get along. And then, from among that pool, I need to find pairings I like! … And then I need to find fic about them. It narrows the field.
I read a lot of gen (no sexual or non-canonical romantic content) for all of my canons, but frankly, I don’t read heterosexual fic unless I’m really in love with the pairing. Partly because heterosexual fiction is everywhere, and partly because many het fics fall into gendered romantic cliches even when they don’t fit the characters. Not because people who write slash fics are better writers, but because when you write het fic, you’re fighting a lot of cultural force and inertia to tell a story that says anything other than “They bickered, she swooned, he became the center of her entire life and then they had 2.5 kids”. The level of history and assumptions behind that template isn’t as strong when you’re writing a story that isn’t heterosexual. Not that a huge percentage of het fics don’t manage to defy that pressure, but it’s an extra step. When you’re reading about Mulder and Scully you don’t want to get to chapter 30 and find she’s basically turned into a Stepford Wife and quit the FBI to have babies and not investigate weird stuff.
+1 both on the greater difficulty of finding good f/f pairings to ship (which in my case is made harder by the fact that I largely prefer genre fiction and most television shows with predominantly female casts suffer from a fatal lack of shoot-outs, explosions, aliens, superheroes, or crime-fighting) and on the fact that some het fanfiction has a bad tendency to replace the female lead with a Stepford Wife pod-person. A lot of slash and yaoi does the same thing to half of the pairing and uses the same sexist storytelling tropes copied straight from het romance, but at least when Tony Stark is being turned into a swooning fragile flower for Steve Rogers to rescue the gendered implications are less blatant.
Methinks you underestimate the strength and stamina of elves. Skinny but wiry.
I’m only a newbie slash writer (Lewis & Hathaway 4eva), and though I was involved in XF fic for many years, wasn’t particularly interested in slash in that ‘verse. Having said that, there are some wicked awesome slash fics in that fandom.
I truly got into slash because I love Lewis & Hathaway, John & Sherlock/Homes & Watson (canon)…and for me, I love slash – in these particular fandoms – because I love the characters and I like the ‘romantic’ aspect between them. Can’t stand romance fiction otherwise (unless it’s Eng. Lit, with lots of Tragedy). Interestingly, I can read genderswap, but don’t find it as…fun? Arousing? But I like the peen, so I think that has a lot to do with it. Again, I have read some fantastic Scully Slash, so maybe it really is all about character in the end…
I’ve gotten way into gay porn precisely because of body issues (I’m a headless fatty, so, obvs straight porn sucks for me because hey, I have no need to feel even less like a human being, and I’m talking porn, for gods sakes, which is pathetic, but there we go).
But I digress. Sometimes it’s also Hey, pretty boys gettin’ it on! That’s a discussion for kpop rpf…
For me, m/m slash definitely helped me process anxiety about sexuality, but it was less anxiety about my own female body and more anxiety over being LGB. Slash introduced me to the idea of same-sex desire as something normativised and even idealized, and since it was focused on men and written by straight women as well as queer women, it was less ‘scary’ to my teenage self than purely lesbian-focused stories would have been. Joining slash (and yaoi) fandom let me “baby-step” my way into queerness.
Oh hey, same. Kinda “if these characters I like and admire can be queer and that’s alright, then I too can be queer and that’s really truly alright”. I found myself reading impassioned defences of slash and unpicking internalised homophobia. When I became more interested in the gen coming-out stories than the m/m smut, it was the first tiny step out of the closet.
I like this article a lot! I didn’t agree 100% with the your conclusions, but since slashers have been discussing this question FOREVER, that’s not surprising. I’m also glad that I read your other article about Teen Wolf fandom as well, because it clarified your relationship with slash a little bit for me (that you are young, and yet still have realized you will probably never “grow up” and get over fandom). At 28, I feel the same way.
When I initially read this piece, I was troubled by your emphasis on “young” slash readers: you constantly refer to “young” women writers and, in particular, your comments about One Direction fans tend to suggest that all slash writers and readers are young and impressionable. I don’t think that’s the case now, and I doubt it ever was. AO3 is proof of that, surely–it could never have been founded by a bunch of teenage or even early 20s people. It was founded and is still maintained by a group of mature, highly intelligent women. Virtually all of my favorite slash authors are grown women, many with babies and husbands and fancypants professional or academic jobs–all the markers of conventional success–and many have been writing for, quite literally, decades. (I emphasize this not because I think those things are necessary, but because the stereotype of a slash writer is either confused teen or pathetic old cat lady.) These are not people incapable of self-reflective thinking. Many of them have masters degrees or PhDs, and fandom has been asking itself these “meta” questions since it begun. I don’t think you necessarily down-played this, but I think you perhaps overlooked it a little bit.
Nonetheless, I really liked your comment that “we all must engage in that complex dialogue with our bodies as sexual (or asexual) objects, and understand ourselves as sexual (or asexual) beings precisely because the prevailing cultural narrative around female sexuality is so dominated by men” in particular rung very true for me, although–as always–I think there’s more to it than that!
I’m looking forward to reading more of your stuff. Always interested in smart writing on this kind of thing!
1998?? Slash was around in fandom a LONG time before that — it's simply not correct to talk about "the rise of slash" as if it were something that began in the '90s. My involvement in fandom goes back at least to the '70s, and there was a lot of slash available back then. It started in the 1960s with Kirk/Spock, although arguably there were Sherlock Holmes/Watson m/m stories that date back further (I haven't personally seen those, but if Holmes expert Les Klinger says they existed, I believe him!) – one might say that Holmes/Watson was the original slash fanfic, and maybe the original fanfic. Ah, you youngster, you think it begins and ends with you and your times. Get off my lawn!