Slash and Hurt/Comfort (2002 essay)
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| Title: | "Slash and Hurt/Comfort" (title on the writer's blog), "How Slash Saved Me" (in zine) |
| Creator: | Jessica Ruth/Audrey Lemon |
| Date(s): | March 1, 2003 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | at Good Girl with the title "How Slash Saved Me" at Diary Land |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Slash and Hurt/Comfort is a 2002 essay by Jessica Ruth. It was posted to the author's blog.
The essay was also printed in the Canadian zine called "Good Girl" with the title "How Slash Saved Me" with the byline Audrey Lemon.
For additional context, see Timeline of Slash Meta and Slash Meta.
Introduction
People have been talking about misogyny in slash, and related issues of body-image and idetification with female characters, etc. And while this isn't precisely on-topic, it's my own take on some things that tie into it. This was written as an article for a small canadian magazine called Good Girl, and the issue in which it appeared will eventaully go up online, so I don't think I'm violating too many prinicples by posting a version of it in my blog for the personal consumption of whatever small handful of people actually read it... but if anyone is interested in the magazine itself, you can find it at www.goodgirl.ca.
Looking back at it now, I think it still needs editing, but I think it's in good enough shape to go out in public... though I should warn you that it was aimed primarily at non-slashers, so has some basic explanatory stuff that many people won't need.
Some Topics Discussed
- what is slash?
- why slash
- slash as escapism
- geek culture
- hurt/comfort
- body image, self-acceptance
From the Essay
When I was five, I had a near-religious devotion to the TV show 'Emergency!'. I was fascinated by the paramedics Johnny and Roy, who spent an hour each afternoon rescuing various attractive women and children from disaster before returning to the jolly fire-station bunkhouse together, their matching uniforms barely wrinkled. At night as I fell asleep I used to tell myself stories in which their adventures continued, only now it was each other they had to rescue, braving burning buildings and collapsing bridges to emerge safely reunited at the end.
I was telling a friend about this one day, and she laughed and pushed her newspaper across the table. "There's an article about slash in here that I think you should read," she said.
"Slash?" I said. "What's slash?"
Little did I know that my life was about to be changed.
Theories about slash abound. Some women say that the appeal is simply that of imagining two beautiful naked men in a sexual act, without another woman on the scene to be envious of. Others say that it is a way of re-imagining the power dynamics in a relationship - or, as one woman put it, "Who's on top and who sleeps in the wet spot" - without it being divided along traditional gender lines. Academics theorise that fan-fiction is a way of subverting pop culture by refusing to be merely a passive consumer of it, and that slash has arisen because of the absence of satisfactory female characters on TV with whom women can identify. The men depicted in slash, they argue, are models of an idealised masculinity, able both to have sex with the raunchy abandon of men and to relate emotionally like women. By reading and writing such characters, women get a chance to experience both kinds of roles.
Interesting theories, all of them, and I think they all contain some truth. But none of them feel to me like they entirely capture the nature of slash. If it's just about the beautiful naked men, what's the appeal for the many bi and gay women out there who write and read guy/guy slash? If it's about re-imagining power dynamics, why is the bigger, butcher guy still so often on top? And as for the academic theorists, well, the fascination of slash is not a cerebral one. Its appeal lies much further south of the cranium, and it taps into things that are deeper, more visceral, and sometimes more disturbing than any of these theories touch on.
In the process of pulling this piece together, I spoke with other slashers about what it’s like to try to write about slash, and all agree it's difficult. It's too easy to end up apologising or justifying, trying to explain it all in some way that won't make non-slashers blink and twitch nervously. But the truth of slash is more complicated than any of these tidy explanations, and some of the things that I find most intriguing, even most erotic, are the hardest to explain to outsiders.
For one thing, it seems that my childhood paramedic obsession was no fluke; these fantasies fit perfectly into a well-established type of slash. I call slash a subgenre of fanfiction, and like any other genre writing, slash has its own conventions. Some are borrowed from romance novels, some from gay porn, and some are unique to slash itself. There is curtain fic, where men who may once have been mortal enemies settle together into cozy domesticity and spend a lot of time buying curtains and egyptian cotton sheets. There is cabinfic, in which former men of action retire together into a peaceful rustic existence in the woods. Some fandoms (that is, groups of fans that develop around a particular show or interest) have their own specific slash conventions as well, unique to the circumstances of their particular characters. But one of the most enduring types of story, across all fandoms, is known as hurt/comfort.
The criteria of hurt/comfort fic (h/c) are simple: one of our heroes is sick or wounded, and the other must rescue, comfort, or care for him. They may be stranded together in the wilderness or on hostile planets, feverish with exposure or unnamed alien viruses. They may have been valiantly wounded in battle, and require nursing by their comrades. Sometimes they've been beaten, tortured, or raped by fiendish enemies, and must be rescued and healed both physically and mentally... the list goes on. These situations inevitably lead to true love and/or hot sex, often improbably gymnastic and multi-orgasmic sex, given the ordeals the characters have just survived. Read through the slash archives and you'll find literally hundreds of these stories.
This may not seem like such a big stretch from some of the conventions of the man-falls-in-love-with-nurse variety of romantic novel, where illness forces the man to reveal his vulnerability and accept care. But read a few of these stories, or a few dozen, and it starts to feel like something else is going on. There's something about the care and detail lavished on describing not just the comfort, but the hurt as well. Some h/c stories are deliberately dark and violent, but even the gentler ones often feature page after page of detailed suffering, misery, wounding, or torture. Clearly this part of the story is not just the lead-up to the sex, but carries some kind of psychological weight of its own.
And I have to admit, these stories get to me. Bring me guilty pleasure, make me weak in the knees. I can't explain just what the appeal is, and I'm troubled by it. These stories start to feel like dangerous ground, the kind of thing that people use to argue that women are inherently masochistic. Or maybe the expression of a fierce, deeply held hostility against men, that these characters we claim to adore should be made to suffer so terribly to earn their happy endings. It made me start to wonder just what hurt, what wounding this is that we all seem to be struggling to write out…
Another troubling thing is the peculiar way that women themselves are depicted in slash. Some people do write guy/guy/girl slash, but they're in the minority. Far more often, women play strange, peripheral, circumscribed roles. Sometimes they are obstacles, or even villains, threatening our heroes' tender love. Sometimes they are safely asexual, their sole purpose apparently to take the two men aside, make them tea, and point out that they are clearly in love. In other slash universes, women are simply absent, to the extreme, in one long-running X-Files serial, of having magically vanished from the earth, leaving men to take over the task of child-bearing through the development of strange hermaphrodite navel-vaginas.
It begs the question, what does it mean that all of these female-authored stories - which, I'd wager, constitute one of the largest existing bodies of erotica written by women, for women - should hardly feature women's bodies at all?
So I started to think more closely about myself, and some of the other women I've gotten to know through slash. Smart women, one and all. Many highly educated and professional, some even professional writers. Many happily married, or in long-term relationships. But...
Right there is one of the things about geek culture that makes people roll their eyes and mutter "get a life". A lot of geek culture is devoted to the construction of fantasy lives of one sort or another, fantasies that often bear little resemblance to our 'real lives'. However, to simply dismiss this, the way so many seem to do, as useless or pathetic does geek culture an injustice. Fantasy is more than simple escapism. Geekdom often attracts people who, for one reason or another, find the culture we live in alienating or unsatisfying. Fantasy, at its best, can be a way of envisioning how the world could be different, and I think that some of these exercises of the imagination can contain the seeds of real change.
And as for me, fat girl, shy girl, queer girl, bookish child and geeky adolescent living in a world that had little time for any of these attributes, my own fantasy lives had helped me to envision and carve out for myself a 'real life' that I thought was pretty good. Except in one respect. And there it seemed like not even fantasy could help me.
That problematic area was sex. I was 26 when I picked up that article; it wasn't like I had never gotten naked with company before. And the gender of that company had ceased to be a source of particular angst. But in many ways sex remained an area of my life that was surrounded by anxiety and discomfort. It wasn't sex in general I was uncomfortable with, not simple prudishness that afflicted me, but sex in the specific - when it came down to me and my own imperfect body. I had an image somewhere inside my head of what sex and Romance looked like, and none of it featured bodies or lives like my own. And even in my fantasy life I couldn't seem to escape this. Just when the fantasies would really get rolling, some cynical inner voice would break through with a deflating comment:
- They don’t make clothes like that in a size 20
- And how would you manage *that* without your glasses on?
- There's no way you could actually say that out loud
And, most of all:
- Who are you kidding? It never, ever, works out like that in real life.
... I don’t think I'm entirely alone in having ambivalent feelings around sex. I think our culture can be tremendously sexually wounding, particularly to women.
Not only are we surrounded by the existence of various kinds of sexual violence, but we are also confronted with unrealistic ideals of beauty and a cultural fixation on image that lead to self-hatred in many women. I would also argue that encoded within those ideals and images is another, more subtle attitude, an attitude that desire is seemly only in the beautiful, and is laughable, pathetic, or offensive in anyone else. And as for desire itself, we're given highly mixed messages about what it means for our bodies to want, and for us to seek for those wants to be fulfilled.
These are intense pressures, and for some of us, all of this conflict and ambivalence comes to focus on, to *inhabit* our individual bodies, until they become locations not of pleasure, but of discomfort, dissonance, even fear, leaving us deeply estranged from our own sexual natures.
And what's more, we don't have to do this alone. For this is one more important thing about slash; it is shared - disseminated and discussed through a peculiar network of zines, email listservs, websites and even conventions, a half-secret community that has grown up around it over the years. It is this, I think, that helps build slash into more than simple escapism. It is a powerful and changing experience to put this material out there, the feelings, struggles and preoccupations that make up your fantasies, and have other people not only accept them, but respond to them, praise them, and beg you for more. Powerful to have other women share their fantasies in turn, and to discover that they are not so different from your own.
I have found it very moving to get to know other women through slash, to meet the female minds and bodies that were behind the stories, and see how they were coded into them in so many ways. I’ve met women of all ages, shapes, and sizes, who accepted, without shock or censure, that the imperfect body they saw before them was the home of the fantasies we had shared, and who talked about their own without embarrassment or shame.
It made me feel like I was entitled to my fantasies. Entitled to my desires, not trespassing on ground reserved for the thin, the hip, the beautiful. And finally, when I met another slasher who was interested not only in my stories but in the troubled body I had excluded from them, I made an important discovery. By writing my body out of my stories I had, somehow, written myself back into my body. It was as though, having come back to it from an unexpected angle, I found it wasn't so dangerous and uncomfortable a place after all. And suddenly it seemed like it might all be worth it after all - like I could move beyond the realm of fantasy and embrace the reality. For now that my body felt like somewhere I could inhabit without fear, I felt I could, for perhaps the first time, truly share it.