Why? -- A Not-Remotely-Complete Investigation of the "Why Slash/Why Het/Why Femslash" Debate

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Title:	Why? -- A Not-Remotely-Complete Investigation of the "Why Slash/Why Het/Why Femslash" Debate
Creator:	Merlin Missy, Firefox News
Date(s):	14 February 2008
Medium:	online
Fandom:	multifandom
Topic:
External Links:	Why? -- A Not-Remotely-Complete Investigation of the "Why Slash/Why Het/Why Femslash" Debate; Why? -- A Not-Remotely-Complete Investigation of the "Why Slash / Why Het / Why Femslash" Debate, wayback link; WebCite
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Why? -- A Not-Remotely-Complete Investigation of the "Why Slash/Why Het/Why Femslash" Debate is a meta essay by Merlin Missy.

The fan quotes used in this essay were solicited at Merlin Missy's LiveJournal:

This is a general call for interested parties who'd like to be interviewed for "Why Slash?" and "Why Het?" articles on Firefox. The focus of both essays is to let fans speak for their own reasons, so the more people we've got, the better. Goal is publication on or before V-Day. (Which is why we're not asking "Why Gen?" this time around.)

If you'd like to be interviewed, please comment here with your email address of choice. All comments will be screened, and I don't have time to spam people. Also feel free to tell your friends. ETA: Please indicate which essay (or both) you're interested in chatting about!

Series

This essay is part of a series called Dr. Merlin's Soapbox.

Some Topics Discussed

• rare pairings and audience, characters of color, heteronormative assumptions
• the inevitability of asking why slash?
• Merlin Missy says that old-school fans will happily give you a tutorial about a lot of Bible Slash and how slash started there
• after Bible Slash is a big leap to Sherlock Holmes, then Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Star Trek: TOS
• the history of the /
• actual same sex relationships, such as in Torchwood, make "old-timers" "amused" but "accepting"
• het, like femslash and m/m slash doesn't have to be explicit
• comments about femslash: "femslash has been weaved into canonical relationships for some time, if only to titillate the desired 18-35 year old male audience"
• why do people feel the need to analyze and ask "why slash" when they don't ask "why het"?
• comments by fans Tara O'Shea, Celli Lane (Fanfic 101), Lies, Allaine, Yahtzee, Raynos Kai, A.j., Christine Morgan, Sandra Faith, Lyssie, and Aris
  • fills a need that can't be expressed in canon
  • fun to put two non-romantic characters together
  • it's hot
  • slash is more interesting and powerful
  • lots more comments

From the Essay

What is slash? Well, that depends on whom you ask. Old-school fans will happily give you the summary of Slash As We Know It, starting with roots in Biblical times (David/Jonathan, and later Jesus/John, with some Satan/God and Jesus/Judas hatesex thrown in) and moving quickly onto Sherlock Holmes, Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Star Trek. Slash is named for the wee little slashmark between the two names of the pairing, coined in Trek fandom back in the days of Kirk/Spock, and originally, it encompassed any pairing that wasn't in canon. Fandom being fandom, the non-canonical pairings that got the lion's share of the fanfic were male/male, and the term "slash" has since morphed into meaning "male/male relationship fanfic." Canon rarely provided actual male/male sexual relationships, though now that Torchwood is front and center to so many fannish pursuits, with canon Jack/Ianto (okay, also canon Jack/anything with a pulse and at least two robots), the old-timers are amused but accepting of the name.

Fan Comments Embedded in the Essay Itself

[Celli Lane]: I think the thing that I love most about [slash] is creating romance between characters who usually aren't romantic at heart. Rodney McKay and John Sheppard [from Stargate: Atlantis] aren't really hearts-and-flowers guys, and Casey McCall and Dan Rydell [from Sports Night] are sort of infamous for screwing up their relationships with women, so why would men be any different? So you have to get creative in terms of how these guys fall in love and how they demonstrate love, which is a challenge I really enjoy.

[Lies]: I love writing slash for all the reasons I love writing in general – the satisfaction of creating new, interesting stories. Slash pairings just feel more real and powerful to me - just more interesting, and that's why I write slash instead of gen or het. Honestly, my favourite thing about writing slash is writing the sex scenes. M/M sex is hot.

[Aris]: Slash is hot! Slash is romantic. [...] Slash lets us take these buddy-pairs that, if they were a man and a woman, would obviously be romantic pairings, and extrapolate in that direction if we want to. Slash lets women get together and objectify the male body and enjoy female sexuality in the same way that men have had sanctioned for years, and I think that's very important. There aren't very many avenues for women to enjoy pornography and sexuality in our culture. There's basically romance novels, porn written for men, yaoi manga and anime, and slash.

[Yahtzee]: I don't know that the things I enjoy about writing het are any different than the things I enjoy about writing gen or slash, which I also do. Really, for me, I *don't* see a big difference between the two. If you're writing about two people in love (or in lust), the plumbing is really just a detail, isn't it? The bigger leap is between writing canonical relationships versus noncanonical ones (which most slash is). If I feel like I'm getting at something vital within each character and in their relationship to each other, I'm happy.

[Allaine]: I think part of the point of fanfic is to expand the horizons of a community. There are few more satisfying feelings as a writer, than to be one of the first writers to tackle a certain pairing, and to see people's feelings about that pairing grow and evolve, and to realize that you're part of the reason why that happened. I've helped awaken readers' minds to things they never considered before. [He added] I tend to gravitate toward fandoms where women outnumber men, or where women are the dominant characters (or both). This almost always means my favorite characters, the ones who keep me involved, are female. And as a writer, I have always found that I prefer writing female characters over male. (Perhaps it's because I prefer dialogue over action scenes, and women are generally more talkative and open with their feelings.)

[anonymous]: ... reading smut involving gorgeous women with taut stomachs and pert breasts and perfect little butts makes my brain bleed. I kind of don't need to be reminded that 99.9% off the women on this planet (and apparently 100% of the women on all the other planets) are better looking than me. So, if I feel the urge to read erotica I prefer it to be completely absent of women who are five thousand times better looking than I am. Chances are I'm interested in reading fic because I'm in a bad mood to begin with and don't want to read something that will just make me more depressed.

[A.j.]: What drives me kind of fruity batshit about writing het is that in a lot of places - most certainly not ALL places - it feels like writing het isn't very 'edgy', and thus it really doesn't get a lot of the frighteningly dedicated appreciation slash does. I like to relate writing het to being German in the United States. People, as a whole, don't really think about the extremely vast German population of the US as being a culture. They're just white people. There aren't really 'German' parades - and I know a lot of that has to do with the massive downplaying German communities did after WWII - and whenever I say that I'm German, people just nod it off until I mention I also have some Irish decent. It's like this culture is so completely ingrained in the bedrock of the US that it isn't even considered as different anymore. There's an invisibility to it that runs very deep. To me, writing het is like that. There's not a lot of shock value to it as a concept, so there isn't really the encouraging reader response that there is with slash... which is still newly titillating enough to still have that shiny 'This is something NAUGHTY!' to it. Don't get me wrong, I have no ill will to the slash community for this particular line of reasoning. This is just the way things are for the moment; but it's still a bit frustrating as a writer to be considered less worthy of reading because you commit the crime of being mainstream.

[Raynos Kai]: What drives me crazy about het is that most het writers with different pairings can't seem to stand each other, especially if their pairings tend to share a common character. Most of the time, that tends to dissolve into character bashing. Another thing that gets me about het writers is their obsession with the OTP aka One True Pairing. They assume that just because they ship something it excludes all other possible relationships from existing. I think non-het pairings are a lot less prone to being glorified that way, since those pairings tend to be non-canon/based on pure crack. (This is not to say that all het pairings are canon/not based on crack, just that it's more likely for writers/creators to have the leeway to outright state het pairings.) On the other hand, there are some fandoms that don't seem to think het exists. At all. It's either slash or you're weird!

[Celli Lane]: I … get a little irritated by the fact that after all these years, I still see the 'ick, slash' comments from people who are otherwise friends of mine. I don't make big posts about why het isn't my favorite thing; I just take the attitude that it doesn't turn my crank like slash does, but I don't feel like it has to be discussed. But I'm all too often confronted with arguments against slash. It doesn't have to be argued for or against! I like it and you don't! Stop turning it into a thing where het or gen have to be superior to slash and leave me the heck alone. Sigh.

[Allaine]: I find the opinions of non-slashers frustrating. No, I'm not a pervert. No, I'm not obsessed with sex, or at least with lesbian sex. (You'll find there's almost no adult sex scenes in any of my fics.) And just because the woman you see on your television screen is straight, that doesn't mean there's no possible way she is gay or could ever become gay, especially younger women. There's time for a LOT of self-discovery along the way, so don't tell me I'm 100% wrong and am completely off-base. I also find it frustrating (and this is by no means unique to femslash) when I'm virtually the only person writing a certain pairing. I would love to find just ONE good fic longer than five hundred words about that pairing written by someone other than me.

[...]

The very [first] time I became attached to a lesbian pairing, I found them so intensely romantic and sweet. Maybe that has made me predisposed to enjoy other femslash pairings, or to see 'subtext' where others may not. Or maybe because there's just so little of it out there, compared to the much larger number of hetero pairings. It's always a little bit more fresh. So most of my all-time favorite fanfics (with the big exception of the hetero fics of my favorite author) are femslash.

[Aris]: I really dislike the trend of slashing the pretty white guys just because they're pretty white guys. I mean, there's statistically less slash out there that involves characters of color, even if the relationship is there and interesting, because fandom is composed of people who have problems talking about race. I also hate the reflexive dismissal of a lot of female characters in slash. And I think it comes from a similar place--we write slash, or I write slash, mainly because the writers of these mainstream television shows and movies are so interested in their handsome white male leads, and thus those relationships are deeper and more convincing than any relationships they have with the characters who are in the minority; the characters of color or women in the ensemble, which is usually where they're relegated to.

And I love that we're breaking the gender barrier and telling these love stories about these guys who are obviously set up as the important people on the show, that we're not afraid to break that norm and write the stories we want to read about the characters we love, but I wish that people could break the narrative boundaries more often and tell stories about the minorities on the show. Because as much as we're breaking one huge societal boundary by telling these homoerotic stories, we're still accepting these other boundaries which are coming from the same societal power structure. I'd go for more boundary-breaking in slash.

[Yahtzee]:The things that drive me crazy about het itself are that it's so much harder to keep out the detritus of societal ideas about gender and male/female relationships. Some author -- I forget who -- said that no writer could truly know herself until she'd tried to write dialogue for a man and a woman in a rose garden. The call of stereotype and cliché is very strong, no matter how hard you try to recognize it. In some ways, I became (in my opinion, anyway) a much better writer of het only after I also started writing slash. With slash, you can't fall back on those ingrained ideas about "well, this is what the guy does, and this is what the girl does." You have to ask yourself, what would this person do? And once I'd trained myself to always ask that question, I was able to ask it when writing het as well. The things that drive me crazy about fandom's perception of het: The idea that it's 'schmaltzy,' 'stereotyped,' 'babyfic,' etc., at least compared to slash. Fact is, if you want to find schmaltzy, stereotyped Mpreg slash, there's plenty of it out there. And if you want to find good het, that's out there too. The thing that drives me absolutely BATTY is the sometimes-slash-rationale, 'I want to write about relationships between equals.' The idea being that this is somehow liberating, when in fact it's writing off the whole idea of women being equals in their relationships with men. I find that profoundly depressing.

[Aris]: One of the things I find while writing het is that I want to be careful not to automatically put the woman in a position where she's subordinate to the guy, either emotionally or physically, because that seems like just doing what Western Civilization has done to women and told women to do for the last however many centuries. So one of the things that's nice about writing slash is that the cultural subordination of one character to another because of gender is gone, and that makes that part of writing easier.

[Celli Lane]: Some of my favorite romances are Regency romances. I have a thing -- I have a real thing -- for forbidden love, and Regencies so often use that as a device. When I started reading JAG slash, you had a CIA agent and a military officer, both men, and talk about your forbidden romances. It makes my heart skip a beat just thinking about it. :) Most of my slash pairings since then have had some kind of 'forbidden' aspect to them -- the military might be involved, or maybe one or both of them are public figures of some kind, or maybe there's a historical context involved.

[Tara O'Shea]: I am a romantic. Unashamedly, unabashedly, have been my whole life. I am the sort of person who as an adult revisited my childhood favourites that were never built for this kind of fiction, and wrote epic romance stories. We're talking Yeoman Diana Prince and Maj. Steve Trevor, from the ABC Wonder Woman series set during WWII. All to appease my inner five year old, who knew what she wanted but had no idea what it was she actually wanted.

[...]

I rarely if ever am interested in Our Hero and Our Heroine settling down with the white picket fence and 2.5 kids and a dog. That is not my goal, as an author. That is not the 'prize' at the end of the long battle. The prize is the battle, and the battle is ongoing. It's how people change each other, how people learn each other, how we grow and regress and fuck up and strive and win and lose, together and alone. That is what interests me about romance as a genre. Because love is basic. Love is something we all seek, love is something we all want. And love is something not all of us get to experience in our day to day lives, so often love is something we get vicariously through fictional characters. This is normal, healthy, and pretty much a basic human fact.

[...]

Any relationship, if done well, is interesting. I think there are folks out there who genuinely believe that slash is more interesting, not because it is, but it's because it's what they prefer to write or read. And unfortunately, you can't argue that logic because it's not actually based in logic. It's about personal preference, and in some cases, the need to justify our preferences by elevating them from 'this is what I enjoy' to 'I enjoy this because it is inherently better' because at heart, people are still afraid we'll be judged by our preferences. But that attitude can be found anywhere--not just among slashers, but in any arena. It's not unique, and it's also not the majority. At least, it's been my experience in fandom that most folks write and read what they love, without passing judgement on people who don't share their preferences.

[Aris]:I think that fandom as a whole, internally, has mostly gotten past the whole 'you can't write guys as gay if they're canonically straight' thing. I mean, you still get that complaint, a lot of the time, but I see it as coming from people who are new to fandom and who are external to fandom. There certainly isn't a problem finding a sympathetic audience for slash! I think the biggest problems that are remaining for slashers are just technical ones--most of us aren't men, and we don't know what it's like to be a guy, and there's the line we're walking where we know we're writing idealized, fictional men who are in our porn for our purposes, not 'real gay men,' so some of the problems can just be elided over, and the physical writing-sex parts can be researched on the internet.

Fan Comments, Responses to the Essay

[A.j.]: In reference to this line, "In fandom, femslash is often written by men, but at least as often by women.", I just have to say that the vast majority of femslash that I read is written by women. Finding men who write femslash is rare in the vast majority of fandoms I and my friends are hugely active in.

[Kar]: You touched on some of the issues surrounding slash and the gender topics it raises. However, I've always maintained that there's a couple of Phd's in the study of slash writing and the reflection on gender. Do you know where I could find some scholar pieces on this?

[WiliQueen]: Wow! Nicely done overview of a VERY broad topic. I'm all in favor of "whatever floats your boat," but it's nice to see a little more of the anatomy of the squee articulated.

[H. Savinien]: I only found this today, but I'm very glad I did. I'm interested in the queering of fandom. I tend to write more fem/slash than het, myself, primarily because that's just the way things work out.

[...]

In many fandoms, I have solely het pairings I like, in some I am not comfortable reading non-gen. In my favorites, though, I often like the queering.

[Sarah]: I'm much more fond of slash fanfiction than anything personally, and I hate to see people complain about other people's likes, whether it's het/slash/femmeslash/some sort of kink/whatever. If you don't like it, then darlin', don't read it. Very nice coverage of an exceptionally large topic :) Though I will also argue that (at least in the fandoms I travel in, which are numerous) I find it very rare to see femmeslash written by men. On yet another note...since you mentioned it...it is awfully nice to have Torchwood around...you name it, it's probably canon with that show XD.