Essay: Why We Slash

[trinityofone]

Okay, so here it is. I'm very nervous about posting this, because I don't think that, given the time and length constraints, I was really able to do the topic justice--but then, I'm not sure if, had I world enough and time, I would be able to do the topic justice. So really, if you want a fuller picture, and one unmuddled by my own interpretations, I recommend that you go look at the responses to my original post: that's where the truth wealth of information lies. (And to those of you who responded, but have not yet gotten responses from me: I'm getting to you, I really am, but I had to take a break to, y'know, write the paper. *g*)

However, here's what I came up with. I had to address the prompt Given your experience of this course, write an essay on why you think formulaic writing is so popular, and thus my thesis by necessity moved in that direction. There are so many angles that could have been explored, however; one of us needs to write a book about this. Really.

Huge thanks to taelonmahal, kalpurna, refracting, and plainsong_x, who looked this over and offered support and encouragement; and most especially to mciac, who rescued the paper from the land of long-windedness and no-sense-making, and who saved me from a nervous breakdown. Your help was invaluable.

Finally, thank you to everyone who responded to the original post: you all had many more intelligent and insightful things to say than I do. (And in case the people I quoted are wondering, yes, I did use whatever alternate names you gave me in the paper itself, but I switched back to LJ names here, 'cause LJ! Linky! Fun! If you want me to change yours back, please let me know.)

So without any further ado:

Why We Slash

Sixty-one thousand, two hundred and fifty-two. Since entering the Stargate: Atlantis fandom in August of this year, that is the number of words I have written in order to make the show’s two male protagonists, Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard and Doctor Rodney McKay, come together. I was going to say—it would be simpler to say—“have sex,” but over the course of those 17 stories and 61,252 words1, sex does not always occur, and is not, I would like to think, the primary objective. But if slash is not just about sex—not just about the “huge rutting jizz-drenched scrum[s]” that Poppy Z. Brite decries2—then we must consider other explanations for its popularity and proliferation. Why am I writing and reading slash, and why are so many other women doing the same?

Slash fiction has been thoroughly discussed by sociologists, feminist theorists, media studies specialists, and even the mainstream media itself. It has also been discussed by the fans—extensively, and true to fannish nature, obsessively. As Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins, and Henry Jenkins explain in their article, “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking,” the two groups differ considerably in their approach. “Academic accounts have tended to be univocal in their explanations of why fans read and write slash, looking for a theory which can account for the phenomenon as a whole,” they write. “Slash fans, on the other hand, are interested in exploring the multiple and differing motivations that led them to this genre.”3 What this paper will try to do is bridge that gap between outside observer and inside participant by focusing on two aspects of the phenomenon: first I will explore why fans produce and consume slash, then I will look at its reliance on (and subversion of) formulaic writing. I am both an academic and a fan, but unlike Constance Penley, I am offering no disclaimer for my fannish involvement: I am not, like her, “one of the academic fans”4 (read: as opposed to a real one), but rather a slasher who just happens to be an academic. I am not asking “Why do people slash?” but “Why do we slash?” The question is significant because the reasons we slash influence the stories we write and read, as well as the formulae, on the one hand, that we employ to make our characters and stories recognizable, and, on the other hand, that we subvert in order to inject creativity and originality into the universe.

The reasons why fans produce and consume fanfiction are numerous. Explains one fan, jarsy: “Why does anyone read any book, or watch any show or movie? ...For me it really is about escapism.”5 On the most basic level, fanfiction, like mainstream fiction, movies, and television, is about entertainment: finding characters you relate to, travelling to exciting new places with them, living in their worlds for a while. But every movie, every book, every TV series, eventually stops: it has a definitive end. That’s where fanfiction comes in: “Fanfic in general is all about getting more of the canon I love,” says another fan, soupytwist. “I'm a total whore that way; when I like something, I want more.”6

More>, however, should not be confused with more of the same. Fan readers and writers see fanfiction not only as a way to say inside a beloved but closed world, but as a way to push the boundaries of that world, to open it up. In her essay, “Why Read? Why Write?” mirabile_dictu concludes, “I realize now that I was looking not so much for more, but for better.”7 Better, like more, can be interpreted in a number of different ways. Some fans want to see an existing aspect of the source universe expanded upon—for example, minor characters that they “wish to see...given adventures/elaboration of their own.”8 Others see fanfiction as an opportunity for “fixing bad characterisation, or explaining something bizarre that a character’s done that seems very OOC [out of character]”9; for, in other words, correcting perceived problems with the source material, or “retconing.” And still others, perhaps the largest group, want sex.

To be perfectly fair, however, what this largest group of ficcers really wants is more romance. While a significant portion of fanfiction is, as Joanna Russ memorably described it, “pornography written 100% by women for a 100% female readership,”10 Jenkins acknowledges in his book “Textual Poachers” that “sexually explicit sequences often constitute only a small section of lengthy and complex narratives.”11 Furthermore, the fans I spoke to again and again stressed the importance of the emotional aspect of romantic or ‘shipper fic12. “Ideally,” explains devon, “a story will combine character development, romance, and attractive people having sex with each other. I derive more intellectual stimulation and satisfaction from character-oriented fiction...I derive more erotic satisfaction from smut. I am a multi-faceted person with many needs.”13

A good ‘shipper fic will combine those needs, while at the same time giving the reader or writer “something,” says jarsy, “I can’t get from the primary texts...be it groininess or the depth of character and emotion you wouldn't otherwise see.”14 Thus the logical question at this point might become: “If you want a romance, why go to the trouble of adding it to a text when plenty of texts exist with the romance, part, parcel, and indeed purpose of whole endeavour?” In her essay “Fanfic as a Shortcut to Romance,” fairestcat explains, “The problem I had was that the romance characters really didn’t feel alive to me outside the romance plot[;] if you took out the romantic element they were no longer compelling or terribly interesting to read about. I find that I have this problem a lot, not just with books billed as romances but with mainstream chick lit...I can’t care about the romance of the characters if I can't care about the characters’ non-romantic lives.”15

With fanfiction, on the other hand, there’s built-in interest in the characters. “You already know [them], and you’re already emotionally invested in them,” says grey_bard, “taking care of two of the biggest hurdles without any effort on the [fanfic] author’s part,” and thus leaving her free to work on adding emotional depth—or hot sex. “As long as the writer can keep the voices and actions sufficiently in character that you can recognise them as the fictional people you have come to like,” continues grey_bard, “everything is automatically five times hotter than it would be with no name sexbot characters.”16

Romantic fiction, be it mainstream or fan-generated, is almost inevitably formulaic, as its main objective, despite whatever creative obstacles the writer uses to muddle the path, is to get Character A and Character B into Place C (bed). Fanfic does not shy away from this; in fact, there’s a whole genre of stories that promise a very specific type of happy ending and little else: PWP, which stands for “Porn Without Plot” or “Plot, What Plot?” Yet fandom is full of people who would back up cimorene111 in her assertion that “romance, sensuality and erotica have reached a higher evolution in (the good parts of) slash than they have in any mainstream literature.”17 Romantic fanfic, unlike romance novels or chicklit, “is the only sexual fantasy by women for women that’s produced without the control or interposition of censorship by commercial booksellers or the interposition of political intent by writers or editors,”18 says Russ. Unlike mainstream media, where “viewers and readers often know the alternatives for the romantic relationships they watch are either [an] endless loop of thwarted desire, or third rate high school style dreadful melodramatic romance...in really good romantic and relationship fic,” says grey_bard, “fic readers and writers can find satisfying interesting stories wherein everyone stays in character, plot is had, and yet romantic relationships are also explored.”19

Slash takes this need for more and better romantic fiction one step further—in several different directions. First, slash stories—stories where the central, driving romantic relationship is between two men20—allow women to cast off the baggage that is inherently part of their “twentieth-century” (now twenty-first) bodies—and, I would argue, the societal roles into which those bodies are forced. Penley catalogues some of the things that inevitably weigh on the female consciousness, distorting or limiting a traditional romance: “bodies that are a legal, moral, and religious battleground, that are the site of contraceptive failure, that are seen to pose the greatest potential danger to the fetuses they house, that are held to painfully higher standards of physical beauty than those of the other sex.”21 Slash, however, allows women the freedom to leave all that behind by transferring women’s fantasies to male bodies.

But that’s not all it does. Lest we become too clinical, or too dry and academic, let us not forget that there’s also a much simpler reason why women—straight, gay, and bi22—like m/m slash: “slash is hot,” says devon23.

Says lay_of_luthien: “1 male pretty<2 males hot.”24

Says _minxy_: “If one hot guy is good, two hot guys are better.”25

Says twistinside82: “Two guys together? Hot. Two good looking guys together? Hotter. Two supposedly-straight men getting together because they just can't deny their attraction? YES PLEASE.”26

Just as it seems easier for those on the outside to “normalise” (or rationalise) slash by erroneously attributing it to only straight women, so too is it possible to over-think and over-politicise an activity that is, at its core, very focused on porn. “I think slash is much more a ‘movement’ for some people,” says plainsong_x. “I’ve definitely entered into debates with people that ended with me backing out going ‘woah, woah, you put way more thought into this than I do.’ I know to a lot of people it’s all tied in with queer rights and women’s rights and probably things like freedom of speech...I'm sort of ‘get your politics out of my porno, plzthx.’”27 Smothering slash in political meanings could be seen as a way for men (and other women, non-slashers) to distance themselves from such a raw display of female sexuality (a statement which of course carries political weight of its own). But whether political or pornographic—or more likely, a combination of both—“slash fandom...doesn’t devalue the things that women find sexy, emotionally or physically,”28 says ceciliaregent. Thus slash works on a multitude of levels. Explains ajora: “I think, for most people, it’s different. For girls, it’s empowering to see equal footings in relationships...And, for some of us, it’s reassurance that there’s nothing wrong with being gay.”29

And across all those levels exists slash’s emotional core. Slash allows women to connect to a type of sexual desire that would otherwise be considered taboo—that is titillating in part because a homosexual relationship between two (often canonically straight) men is “one of the few remaining reliable and efficient ways to introduce a big barrier of taboo and element of the forbidden into a romance”30; moreover, it allows them to express this desire explicitly, to describe it in detail and with words both emotionally and physically charged—cock, fuck, penetrate, come. In doing so, all possible barriers are ripped away, leaving “the emotional connection, the love...completely undiluted,” says kalpurna. “In romance novels or het, there are prescribed gender roles and tropes that are easily recognisable, and we’re expected to identify ourselves with the heroine. It’s basically safe. In slash, though, nothing is safe. There’s nothing to hide behind, sexually, and in terms of identity. Everything is stripped away except the characters and their interaction, and what is left is something which inspires love.”31

This makes slash sound radical and revolutionary, and in some ways—and until both homosexuality and freedom of female sexual expression find secure places in our society—it is. So why, then, does slash as a genre embrace almost as many tropes as it throws off? Jenkins claims that nearly every slash story moves through a standard four-part structure—(1) The Initial Relationship, (2) Masculine Dystopia, (3) Confession, (4) Masculine Utopia32—and while the scope of slash fandom has broadened with the eager embrace of the internet and the plethora of new original sources for slash33 so as to make such a simple breakdown difficult—even ludicrous—to apply, there is undeniably a formulaic feel to a lot of slash writing. Some writers and readers bemoan the wealth of “cliché fic”; others enjoy it, even embrace it. It becomes a kind of game to see how certain clichés can be subverted (a subversion of the subversion—and some people claim that fic isn’t deep!), or even how many stories with different versions of the same plot device can be told. In the Atlantis fandom, for example, there’s an entire site devoted to indexing fics by theme. The McKay/Sheppard Thematic Fic Index introduces itself with these words: “In any fandom (and, sometimes, cross-fandoms) some fic themes repeat themselves. They’re fan favourites because they strike a chord or because they’re fun. Some people love them, some others can’t stand them. This page is an index of those fics.”34 Some of the most popular tropes include Alternate Universe stories, stories involving ESP or other superpowers, and that well-loved classic, Aliens Made Them Do It.

How do you reconcile the aspects of slash that are radically tearing down sexual barriers and embracing taboos with the parts that repeatedly—even joyously—employ the same formulaic story points to get the characters into the situations where such things become possible? Penley claims that K/Sers (old school Kirk/Spock slashers—and, by extension, all slashers) have a “penchant for ‘making do’: when asked why they don’t create original characters”—and again, by extension, original scenarios—“they most often respond that they are just ‘working with what’s out there.’”35 However, in my experience, if there’s anything fandom and fanfiction writers possess in spades, it’s creativity. (When you’ve seen a blow job described in as many different ways as I have, you’ll be forced to agree). No, fanfic writers aren’t “just ‘working with what’s out there’” when they give a character amnesia, or telepathy, or even—yes—wings: they’re working with what they like. Just as working within a pre-established universe is comforting because “the characters are established, recognisable, and dependable,”36 so too is it a comfort to work and re-work the same proven scenarios, both to recapture the pleasure of reading a certain type of story for the first time (the wonder of discovering your first slash fic), and to see if something that seems tired can be renewed and revitalised in the right hands (tearing down the conventional romance novel).

Furthermore, since fanfiction is, at its core, an active, participatory hobby—“the fan community tends to assume that everyone can write and that some people simply haven’t done so (yet),”37—that pair of revitalising hands could just as easily be yours as anybody else’s. “I get...pleasure from writing, because I get to create the experience for the characters, and throw in the wrenches that I would like to see, and in the process, I get to create a story that I think other people will enjoy reading,”38 says kelex, with her repeat use of create emphasising how hands-on fandom can be. Every reader, every writer, is in control, is firmly in the driver’s seat with both hands on the wheel. And where do we choose to take ourselves? Both everywhere and nowhere. Fanfiction, says stakebait, has “a ‘road not taken’ sense of infinite branching possibilities in the fictional universe, instead of one linear narrative...[It’s] a bunch of tiny self-contained worlds like so many soap bubbles—we can resolve each relationship a thousand times and still have the baseline yearning of canon to come back to.”39

“Why do we slash?” I think it’s that “baseline yearning of canon” mixed in with our own private yearnings. Yearnings to be loved, to be accepted, as equals; yearnings to have really fantastically hot sex outside or beyond the limitations of our physical bodies; yearnings to see the people—and yes, the characters—we love find happiness, because it makes us happy, and helps us to hope. Thus the formulaic nature of slash is a sort of eternal optimism, a belief that even if things didn’t work out before the screen’s final fade to black, they can still get there—we can take them there. And then we can do it again. And again. And again.

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1. trinityofone, Control Freaks in Love.
2. Poppy Z. Brite in Elanor Toland, Fan Nine from Outer Space, at Salient.
3. Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins, and Henry Jenkins, Normal Female Interest in Male Bonking: Selections from the Terra Nostra Underground and Strange Bedfellows, at MIT: Henry Jenkins.
4. Constance Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: 1997), p. 101.
5. jarsy, here.
6. soupytwist, here.
7. mirabile_dictu, Why Read? Why Write?.
8. galadhir, here.
9. kelex, here.
10. Joanna Russ, “Pornography By Women For Women, With Love,” Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (Trumansburg: 1985), pp. 79-99, at totse.com.
11. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers (New York: 1992), p. 190.
12. Many terms in fandom have a multitude of meanings; for the purpose of this essay and the sanity of all involved, I am defining “‘shipper fic” (from “relationship fic”) as a story where the romantic coupling of two characters—be it m/f, m/m, or f/f—forms a large part, if not the central focus, of the narrative.
13. devon, here.
14. jarsy.
15. fairestcat, Fanfic as a Shortcut to Romance.
16. grey_bard, here.
17. cimorene111, here.
18. Russ.
19. grey_bard, here.
20. There are also, of course, f/f stories (known as femslash), but they are far less common, and for the purposes of this paper, we will be limiting our discussion to the m/m variety.
21. Penley, p. 126.
22. Green, Jenkins, and Jenkins, as well as my own 1) research specifically for this paper and 2) long-time experience in fandom.
23. devon.
24. lay_of_luthien, here.
25. _minxy_, here.
26. twistinside82, here.
27. plainsong_x, here.
28. ceciliaregent, here.
29. ajora, here.
30. cimorene111.
31. kalpurna, here.
32. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, pp. 206-219.
33. Fanfiction.net, an open-access site where authors, even those with extremely limited technical expertise, can upload their stories for free, lists 505 different fandoms (i.e., individual sources) in the television category alone.
34. flordeneu, Double Treat: A McKay/Sheppard fansite.
35. Penley, p. 126.
36. lostakasha, here.
37. Green, Jenkins, and Jenkins.
38. kelex.
39. stakebait, here.

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Questions? Comments? Any communities you think might be interested in seeing this? Or, um, any comms where I can never show my face ever, ever again? ;-)