The Boob Tube, and Then Some

News Media Commentary
Title:	The Boob Tube, and Then Some
Commentator:	Daniel Radosh in "Spy Magazine"
Date(s):	May/June 1996
Venue:	print
Fandom:
External Links:	at the Internet Archive; Google
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The Boob Tube, and Then Some is a 1996 article by Daniel Radosh in "Spy Magazine."

first page of the article, black and white photocopy

It is an example of the usual explainers by mainstream press of the subculture of slash writing and "look at the weirdos."

Some Topics Discussed

• it begins with a quote from a Starsky & Hutch story that is likely made up
• the standard examples of very niche fics, with a focus (and cheap shots) of children's shows, sit-coms, and cartoons (The Flintsones, Three's Company, The Brady Bunch, My So-Called Life, Andy Griffith, Judge Judy, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Home Improvement...)
• a fixation on Friends fic
• mentions of Starsky & Hutch, Star Trek, The X-Files
• slash fic as "bizarre"
• basically an excuse to be clever

Excerpts

Even if you think you've seen every episode of The Flintstones, you probably missed the one where Fred goes out bowling while Wilma stays home and pleasures herself with a nine-inch saber tooth. No matter how much of your life was wasted in front of Three's Company, odds are you don't remember the one where Mr. Furley spikes Janet's diet soda with codeine and takes advantage of her in the back of the flower shop. And no matter how big a fan you were of the short-lived underwater action series SeaQuest, you didn't catch Lucas losing his virginity to two swarthy Brazilian male prostitutes. Before you go reaching for your V-chip, chill — these scenes never actually aired on television. But they do exist. They can be found — where else?—on the Internet. Despite what you may have heard about the outre perversities of cyberporn, the really bizarre stuff on-line has nothing to do with sweaty pedophiles, well-endowed Great Danes, or Anglo-Saxon love slaves in the United Arab Emirates. Rather, the hottest thing in cyberspace is, quite simply, TV characters doing it.

Erotic fan fiction is not a new phenomenon. For decades, devotees of various TV series have been appropriating their favorite characters for their own narratives and exploring possibilities that never seem to occur to the shows' writers and producers.

[...]

What is new, however, is the instant circulation boost that the Net offers would-be publishers. In the past, fan fiction was the domain of tiny 'zines, its readership limited by the number of dimes the editors had available for the copy machine.

Sort of a Harlequin romance for the deviant set, "slash" was written almost exclusively by and for women and typically described rollicking man-to-man adventures. But still, slash was something of a secret even within the al ready furtive world of fandom. In the last couple of years, however, slash has gone on-line, allowing impoverished authors to distribute these stories to a potential audience of hundreds of millions. Now anyone with a modem can seek out, and add to, the growing library of quite unauthorized stories featuring theoretically copyrighted characters.

The cynic's perception of the Internet — a not entirely unjustified perception — is that this geek-laden universe is largely given over to the S words: sex, strangeness, and Star Trek. Cyberslash, then, is the very essence of the Net. While other slash stories are randomly scattered across cyberspace, Trekkers have their own private orgy room, the Usenet news group alt.sex.fetish.startrek. If you must know what really goes on in the holodeck, or if you've always wanted to hear Lieutenant Worf mutter, "Hmmmf, Klingon boys can take that!" over the lifeless body of Wesley Crusher, then this is indeed the final frontier. Of course, not all fan fiction is the kind of low-minded, highly descriptive smut that would make free-speech curber Senator Jim Exon think twice about letting his kids watch the Cartoon Network. A lot of these stories are the work of earnest fans who just want to take their favorite characters out for a test drive. The ever growing on-line community of X-Philes, for instance, is a lot more interested in little green men from outer space than the big pink man from David Duchovny's pants. There's some of that to be sure — hey, who could resist titles like "The Sex-Files" and "The XXX-Files"? — but for the most part, X-Files fans are almost alarmingly chaste.

More often, though, fans just get off on the idea of TV people getting it on. Especially if they're really hot TV people and there are enough of them to rotate into diverse combinations, which is prob ably why Friends makes such a strong showing in cyberspace. If the only reason you watch this show is in anticipation of that unlikely moment when Jennifer Aniston walks into the apartment while Courteney [sic] Cox is taking a shower (and what other reason is there?), run off [to] your TV and turn on your modem — you won't be disappointed. Be warned, though, that a slash writer with an insufficient grasp of a show's minutiae can undermine the fantasy with one slightly inconsistent detail. The author of "More Than Just Friends" does a passable job of erotica when he writes, "The tips of [Rachel's] thumbs lightly traced concentric circles around each nipple until they became erect," but any true Friends fan would know that there is never a moment when Rachel's nipples are not already erect. It's in her contract.

Fan Comments

"The Boob Tube and Then Some" was hilarious, and remarkably accurate on all the bits that connect to fandom-as-I-know-it. But are there really more than a few viewers out there who'd pick up on Three's Company or Andy Griffith, or are those just spice to the main theme?

Oh, I enjoyed that article on The Boob Tube, an intelligent well-written piece, what a rare thing.

As mainstream (sort of) articles on slash go, the one you copied from Spy was pretty good. Not smarmy and basically accurate. And some of the more outre ideas -- outre in relation to this corner of fandom, anyway -- were awfully funny. "A Very Brady Orgy"? I laughed out loud. And I'm all in favor of the "lifeless body of Wesley Crusher" idea.