Woman's Hour Interview with Catherine Salmon

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Woman's Hour Interview with Catherine Salmon
Interviewer:	unknown, employee for Woman's Hour
Interviewee:	Catherine Salmon
Date(s):	June 18, 2001
Medium:	radio
Fandom(s):	slash
External Links:	A transcript of this interview is at Judith Proctor's site, Archived version
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In 2001, Catherine Salmon did an interview for BBC's "Woman's Hour" to promote her book Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality.

Judith Proctor comments: "The interview began with a reading of a Starsky and Hutch slash story, the kind where one of them confessed to the other that his long-term feelings of friendship have deepened into another kind of love. The transcript picks up shortly after this where the concept of slash in general is being explained to the listener - the tape being transcribed started at this point. I shoud add that the whole interview was done on the fly, Catherine didn't know in advance exactly what she was going to be asked, so if any explanations of hers are less than perfect, then that's why. Some points are a lot better explained in the book. Whether you agree with them or not is a separate matter <grin>, but do read the full argument before disagreeing too much."

Some Excerpts of Salmon's Comments

Well, I think there are a lot of things that are appealing about [slash]; for one thing, in a lot of ways it's like a regular romance novel - that's very appealing to women, it's a genre that's designed to appeal to women. And many of the things that are present in regular romance novels are present in slash; so that really the story is about two people coming to grips and finding this relationship together, finding their one true love. And it just happens that in the case of a slash story it's two men finding their one true love.

...in slash the barriers that they have to get past to come to this mutual recognition of their love for each other are more intense than any that you could have in a heterosexual romance; because in the end, when you pick up the romance - it's, a man falls in love with a woman, you expect them to end up together. And nobody really thinks that the conflict is going to be insurmountable. But ins a slash, you have two heterosexual men who have been best friends for years, somehow coming to this realization that they love each other, and despite the fact that they are sexually attracted in general to women, they love each other so much that that is what becomes of the relationship, that it becomes sexual from that point. So that the angst factor in the story is much more intense in a slash story.

...even if you have a real strong female character, like you could have the Mulder/Scully, X-Files type of situation where, in a sense, they are on a more equal footing, but I think one of the appeals with slash is that the relationship is based in the first place on their friendship and the interdependence that they share. That's not coloured by initial lust, so that when any man meets a woman and there's that initial sexual attraction, I think that women are always aware of the fact that one of the huge factors for men in the appeal of women in general is the physical attractiveness, and that they're attracted to their body before they're attracted to anything else about them, and that in slash stories, what's really the driving factor behind the relationship isn't, you know, that they've got the hots for their body, but that they've got the hots for the person inside. And that's going to survive regardless of what time does to the way you look. And I think that fantasy is extremely appealing for a lot of women.

... As far as Darwinian psychology goes, it's easy to explain differences between erotic material that's produced for men and that what's produced for women. So that for men you have this huge pornography industry where the main body of the material is all about sex and it's about lust and physical gratification, and not about relationships or finding your one true love, which is what the romance novel's all about. And it's easy to look at that from a Darwinian perspective, that for women one of the biggest concerns is finding a mate who will stay with you and remain faithful to you and help you raise your children. And that for males, while that's also a part of their psychology, that they choose a mate and they raise children with them, a little bit of action on the side doesn't have a really high cost for men.

... the descriptions of what goes on in terms of the sexual activities can be very explicit. And so in that sense that might seem on the surface to be a little bit more pornographic, but in fact slash is anything but that, because even romance has, at the very start of the relationship, its basis in a lust for the physical, and that's not present in slash at all, so in some ways slash is even more romantic than a romance novel.