To Boldly Go... (2016 article)
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | To Boldly Go... |
| Commentator: | Helen Joyce for "The Economist" |
| Date(s): | August/September 2016 |
| Venue: | |
| Fandom: | Star Trek: TOS, others |
| External Links: | To Boldly Go... |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
To Boldly Go... is a 2016 article by Helen Joyce in the journal "The Economist."
It has the subtitle: "Slash fiction – a branch of fan fiction that imagines straight heroes getting together – is strangely popular among straight women. Helen Joyce examines the light it sheds on female sexuality."
Some Topics Discussed
- where slash began: Star Trek: TOS
- references several books: Anne Jamison and Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking over the World, Constance Penley and NASA/Trek, Camille Bacon-Smith and Enterprising Women, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam and A Billion Wicked Thoughts, Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons and Warrior Lovers: Erotica, Evolution and Female Sexuality
- the essay Pornography by Women for Women, with Love by Joanna Russ
- quotes from Josh Lanyon, Megan Kent, and Charlotte Hill as well as some other fans; the quote from Hill appears to be from Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Charlotte Hill but this is not credited
- a mention of Escapade
- the "shortage of decent female characters" to write about
- Mary Sues
- m/m romance market
- Harry Potter, Inception, The Avengers
Excerpts
Charlotte Hill (a pen name) started going to “Star Trek” conventions with her mother as a teenager in the 1980s. She read her first slash fic, “Long Way Home”, aged around 16, in an anthology called “The Sensuous Vulcan” that she picked up from a box hidden under a dealer’s table. Kirk is planet-side, bored and drunk, when Spock comes to take him back to the Enterprise. “Spock and me. It could happen,” thinks Kirk. It took the teenager a few seconds to work out what “it” was. “Then I thought: ‘Oh my gosh! It not only could happen; it should happen!’” she recalls. She has been reading and writing slash ever since.
In the decades since the first K/S fic, both fan-fiction in general and slash – now meaning any story about male characters who are not gay in the original – has exploded. Huge fan-sites have replaced the slow and costly business of copying and distributing fanzines. Fanfiction.net and ArchiveOfOurOwn.org (Ao3), two of the biggest, have more than 2m stories each, in hundreds of fandoms (the films, shows and books that provide the source material). Stories can be filtered by explicitness, character, pairing or plot element (in “hurt/comfort”, an ill or injured character is cared for by another; in MPreg, a male character conceives a child). Inexperienced writers can dive in without exposition or character-building; readers’ familiarity with and affection for the show help to compensate for authorial shortcomings. More accomplished writers can stretch themselves in crossovers (Sherlock Holmes as a vampire roaming the world of “Twilight”) or alternate universes (Holmes and Dr Watson as coffee-shop baristas; the cast of “Twilight” no longer as vampires and werewolves but as corporate raiders).
In her book, “NASA/Trek”, Constance Penley, a media theorist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, points out that Spock’s alien nature means that K/S fits rather neatly into Fiedler’s schema. But his discussion related solely to male writers and their readers. K/S is written by women, for women – and plenty of it is far from immaculate. Penley concludes that female fans of “Star Trek” were reshaping the canonical homosocial coupling observed by Fiedler into a form more to their taste. She describes K/S as an “ingenious melding” of the American adventure novel, centred on an intense, often inter-racial, male relationship, and the domestic or sentimental novel written and read by women.
Filming techniques added to the apparent intensity of the relationship between Kirk and Spock. In “Enterprising Women”, her book about female “Star Trek” fans, Camille Bacon-Smith analyses the scenes the pair shared. In the films, and even more in the television shows, she points out, interaction shots are often composed with the characters standing very close to each other, well inside each other’s personal space. Reaction shots close in on the eyes. And the male gaze, it turns out, has special erotic significance for women. Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, two neuroscientists, analyse the text of romance novels in their book, “A Billion Wicked Thoughts”. It is striking how many words are given over to the hero’s eyes and where they are looking. His eyes are intense and blazing; his gaze pierces, fixes or burns the heroine. At the book’s climax, the pair’s eyes lock. As K/S fans often said, the relationship was right there in front of them.
In an influential essay in 1985, “Pornography by Women for Women, with Love”, the late Joanna Russ, a science-fiction author and feminist theorist, argued that the characters in slash were “not exactly male”. The sex scenes were often vague about what exactly was being penetrated, and the feelings and emotions of the receiving partner were reminiscent of those of a woman making love with a man. The constant references to the characters’ genitalia, Russ thought, were disguises: badges that said: “Hello, I have a penis, I’m a man.” The “endless hesitations and yearnings” of the plots resembled the manufactured misunderstandings of the romance genre. This raises the question: why project it all onto male bodies? “Why don’t the women who read [slash] simply read romances and be done with it?” she asked. “Why the ‘drag’?”
Russ concluded that K/S allowed its readers and writers to imagine a relationship that combined the sexual intensity and everlasting love that are the ideal of the romance novel with the excitement and meaningfulness of men’s activities, in this case interplanetary derring-do. The love between Kirk and Spock was also blissfully egalitarian, she noted. A love story about a man and a woman, she thought, would inevitably get caught up in sexual politics and rigid gender roles.
It is tempting to make up for the lack of strong female characters by creating your own. And indeed such “self-inserts” feature in many first attempts at fic. But as the writer will quickly discover, they are despised by other fans, who call them “Mary Sues”. The name comes from the heroine of a short story lampooning the genre published in a fanzine in 1973. Mary Sue is the youngest lieutenant in Starfleet, aged 15 and a half. Kirk is smitten by her; Spock admires her brilliant mind. She frees the senior officers from an alien prison and runs the ship when other crew members fall ill. After receiving the Nobel prize and Vulcan Order of Gallantry she dies, to be mourned by all. Such transparent adolescent wish-fulfilment is embarrassing to read, and gave all self-insert fic a bad name.
People sometimes dismiss the “why slash” question, comparing it to men’s taste for lesbian porn. But why do men like lesbian porn? The most common answers are: because I like women and two are better than one; and I don’t like some other man blocking my view. Some men probably see the male protagonist as a rival. A woman may have similar reasons for liking slash: that two men are better than one, or because she likes to visualise male objects of desire without a woman intruding, or because she regards the heroine as a rival rather than a placeholder. Penley adds another possibility, stemming from the observation that in slash the authorial point of view typically shifts, with the writer identifying with each protagonist in turn. Perhaps its fans like to imagine what the objects of their desire feel during sex, and to identify with them as both the giver and recipient of sexual pleasure? And perhaps the possibility of a similar shifting point of view is also why some men like to watch or think about two women together?
The women in pornography act out a male version of sexuality: they are keen on impersonal, no-strings sex, need no foreplay and are focused much more on how things look than how they feel. There is no back-story or character or plot development. Erotica aimed at women, conversely, reimagines men as women would like them to be, at least in their wooing and screwing. They are tough, talented, widely admired and complex. They talk about their feelings and notice what women wear. Most importantly, they prove their worth by going through some sort of ordeal for the beloved’s sake. For women, what is erotic about the hero is the effort he puts into winning his true love, says Salmon, now at the University of Redlands, California – and here, the heroes of slash excel. “How much more could you do to prove your love than change your sexual orientation to be with someone?”
“To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes,” Symons wrote. And slash, the pair concluded, was firmly on the “romance” side of that abyss. Though it was sometimes called “gay fiction”, that was a misnomer. When Salmon showed some sexually explicit slash to gay friends, they found it merely entertaining. Female romance fans, by contrast, commented favourably on a male/male romance. “Slash is romance, even though it’s two guys,” says Salmon. “They’re men who behave the same way as the men in romances.”