W4M4M?

News Media Commentary
Title:	W4M4M?
Commentator:	Cintra Wilson
Date(s):	August 17, 2010
Venue:	online at Out Magazine
Fandom:	slash, m/m romance
External Links:	online here, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

W4M4M?, is a 2010 article that, among many things, attempts to explain slash's development with male/male mainstream romance fiction. Three writers, Alex Beecroft, Erastes, and Josh Lanyon ("one of the M/M genres few male authors") are featured, and the book NASA/Trek is mentioned.

Excerpts

M/M romance fiction is the latest development to evolve out of the renegade slash fiction phenomenon -- an entire subculture devoted to stories that take straight male buddy characters from various pop culture offerings and write them into steamy gay love scenes. What has been a relatively recent and surprising revelation is that the majority of slash creators (known as 'slashers') and fans are heterosexual, college-educated women -- and that for a rather large number of them, gay erotica is the pornography of choice.

In reading historical M/M romances by Erastes, Beecroft, and a few other M/M authors, I found them structurally similar to straight romance novels'both varieties tended to culminate in a blissful, breeches-ripping penetration scene. But both authors take umbrage when I describe their work as gay pornography.

Cultural studies academics have been intrigued by slash fiction since the 1990s.Slashers have been thought of as fans who resist heteronormative culture and gender stereotypes. Since women are not equal to men in society, a straight romance narrative -- the usual machinations that bring a brutish alpha male and a wasp-waisted young female beauty to the point of bodice-ripping penetration -- can't deliver the same heady emotional frisson as a 'bromance,' which slashers and M/M authors alike view as a courtship between equals, which culminates in the emotional jackpot of a true love based on loyalty, trust, caring, and mutual respect.

The world, however, has not quite caught up to the broad-mindedness of Alex and Erastes -- there is friction even within the slash community itself, which considers M/M romance a sellout. 'There's quite a bit of controversy, because straight women 'shouldn't' write this stuff,' says Beecroft. 'If I don't write about women, I'm a 'misogynist.' If I'm writing gay porn, I'm oppressing gay men, because I'm doing to gay men what [straight] men do to lesbians. That's wrong. It's not like that. It's complicated. People are complicated.'

Reactions and Reviews

I don't know how many of you read OUT magazine regularly. It's sort of the gay Vanity Fair/People wannabe that does a lot of coverage of pop culture trends when they intersect with some segment of the gay community. Anyway, there was an interesting and pertinent article in the September issue I thought people might want to look for. "Meet Alex and Erastes, two straight women who write erotic man-on-man fiction for other women. Confused yet?" The article is by Cintra Wilson and has some great intros with pictures of Alex Beecroft [False Colors) and Erastes [Standish.] ... The article does have a nice sidebar with a small pic of our boyz in a mind meld which has a fairly accurate history of the evolution of slash from K/S born in the mid 70's though the broadening into just about any "hot M/M action"

I read with great interest the article in Out. I do not know any of the people, neither the authors nor the journalist, although it is surely bizarre that an American magazine runs a story on two Cambridgeshire slashers (my neck of the British woods). I peered at the photo to discover where exactly in Cambridgeshire but I couldn't identify the church. Also, quick googling revealed that both the fiction authors are on LJ (huh, the world's a village) and that the journalist twitters.

Several things about this article:

Unfortunately, the women are portrayed in the article as being marginal and even 'freaks'. Fans and slashsibs are of all sorts. The article, by focusing only on two case-studies, reduces the spectrum.

Secondly, the two case-studies reduce the thousand-flowers-blooming reality further by emphasising what the article author takes to be a very unusual, even bizarre, kind of sexuality: I am a penetrative gay man inside. Great, whee, whatever, let those flowers blossom -- but this is not the attitude of the article writer. We are a broad church, and this somewhat glib explanation of the fandom phenomenon is purposely designed to make us look bizarre. I found it very interesting reading about these two women's stories in particular. What I object to is taking their unique lives and making them representative of a) everybody in slash, and b) making them look weird in the process. Which brings me to:

Thirdly, the language reinforces the notion of slash being a very weird and freakish predilection. [for much more, see the rest of this post]

As to the freak quotient? They're talking about women and sex, of course it's freakish (/sarcasm).

I think the journalist is conflating fanfic and m/m novels quite a lot. Yes, the novelists often got their start in fanfic, but the two genres (for lack of a better term) are not the same. There a similar yet different rules at play, sort of how the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres are often under the same umbrella, but have different rules. Making things even more confusing is there's a lot more "mashups" of genres these days, such as paranormal romance.

Slash has been around for 40 years, and went through a big "discovery" phase when people first had Internet access in the 90s. In the last few years, I've been seeing a new discovery phase -- gay men and lesbians getting into fandom because there are canon gay couples.

In most fandoms, historically it's been primarily straight women, with some women being lesbian, bi, or trans, but very few men at all. Now there are gay men and women who might otherwise never be in a fandom discovering there's a decades old world of mostly straight women taking male characters who are generally straight in canon and writing them as gay. Instead of waiting for the real thing, we sort of did it ourselves. ;)

On one message board for an American soap opera with a canon gay couple, my guesstimate was the active members were about 50% gay men with the rest being women of various orientations, and not all of the women were familiar with slash either. I actually started a "Slash 101" thread trying to explain the history of slash that was open to questions.

I think most of the guys were more than a bit puzzled by it all, at least at first, but came to see there were a lot of straight women who considered themselves gay allies (note that not all slash writers/readers do though) and they had no idea they were there and are rather intrigued by it. I know some gay men are still a bit skeeved by it though, seeing it as invasion of gay culture by straights.

I'm a fan of fandom history, especially slash, and I'm always interested in how we see ourselves and how others see us. We slashers may not all fall into the same denominations and even have a few holy wars at times, but we do "get in" and share a common interest.

Most with no real experience with slash think of it as one giant alien entity they can judge by reading a few fics and cover blurbs on the books. You can't do that with any genre, especially if you're not really into it in the first place. Sturgeon's Law says "90% percent of everything is crud" and it's very difficult to find the 10% even if you're in familiar territory. Something I lament every time I start following a new fandom.

I've read plenty of m/m erotica written by gay men that read exactly like mediocre slash fic. This isn't to excuse the primarily female-driven m/m romance novel market, but it's not like it's only the silly wimmins writing pointless, raunchy drivel.

I also think that they should have addressed the point that not everyone who writes slash isn't a heterosexual female. Yes, they say "the majority of", but don't explicitly mention the queer female slashers, the straight and queer male slashers, and the other miscellaneous queers who read and write queer fanfic.

I'm not very surprised that this article makes the same sweeping generalisations, but I can't say I'm particularly pleased either. Hello, erasure, how are you today?

"Nursery slope??? I have read stuff within fanfiction that is tons better than much that is published! Nursery slope indeed. Also, I know at least four published authors whose fan fiction is as good as and, frequently, better than their published works"

Yes, yes. Quite. I have experience in the pro-world and the fan world. Trust me, a lot of this stuff is better, for purely market reasons.

Further, I thought there was an odd discrepancy in the article between the supposedly utopian acknowledgement that love knows no gender and the woman's desire to be a man. If she does, ok, fair enough, but you're quite right that that oughtn't be made to look represenative. I'm a woman, thanks, who likes slash, and only dates men who at the very least don't mind that, at sometimes are positively enthusiastic about it.

Oh one other thing - I disagree that fandom is female. There are men here. Fewer, but they are about :).

Cintra Wilson—author of "W4M4?," Out Magazine's 2010 piece on slash and professional m/m fiction, a piece more sensitive and open-minded than Mayor’s editorial by orders of magnitude—explains her discomfort with the phenomenon by saying she finds "something self-assassinating and a little bit politically disturbing" in an erotic tradition by and for women that evacuates the female body. (Wilson ends her article by

comparing the two slashers to drag queens and offering magnanimously, "If the courage of the gay man inside Alex Beecroft inspires her to live openly and proudly as a heterosexual Christian wife —who are we to judge?")