Notes on Why Slash?

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So, I’m leery of any and all explanations of why women like m/m slash, particularly because they tend to get thrown back at us is demeaning ways, but also because I think desire and sexuality are very hard to “explain” (just look at the crazy shit Freud came up with). But here’s a rundown of various theories.

• M/F romance has been ruined for women by all the terrible tropes in pop cultures, and M/M romance is able to remain purely fantasy
• M/F romance has been ruined for women by their own lived experiences, and M/M romance is able to remain purely fantasy. There’s two ways to read this one – either women have had so many terrible experiences that they are traumatized by M/F sex, or that women have more of a general understanding of what real M/F sex is like, and cannot suspend their disbelief for fantasy sex scenes.
• Women are obsessed with cock and M/M slash has twice as much cock
• Women are buying into the harmful stereotype that gay men are lustful cock monsters
• Women find it very difficult to imagine women as active agents of their own desire, so if you want two people who are totally hot for each other they need to both be men
• Pop culture (particularly several shows that happen to come up when you google queerbaiting) are so focused on the men that it is very hard to fantasize about the women. The shows build up all this UST between the main characters, and women write fanfic to resolve it. Women characters don’t get enough screen time to develop any UST.
• Because of internalized misogyny, women think pussy is gross
• Women are jealous of other women and don’t want to think about them having sex with their favorite boys (this is a genderswapped version of the most common explanation for why men watch lesbian porn)
• Fanfic writers like to throw lots of obstacles into their stories to ramp up the UST, and gay sex is seen as having the most obstacles, particularly since all these characters are assumed to be straight in canon

I think that covers most of the explanations I’ve heard.

Basically most of them boil down to objectifying gay men or internalized misogyny, which can be a heavy burden to put on something that seems otherwise fun and mostly harmless.

The gentlest explanation is that m/m slash can remain pure fantasy. And honestly, there is only so much time one can spend flagellating oneself for one’s inconvenient desires.
 

I’m actually really interested in pre-“world wide web” M/M slash (or more broadly women reading gay male erotica). There is now a robust online slash community, but it’s not like this is a new phenomenon.

When I was a teenager (late 80s, early 90s), I read:

• Storm Constantine’s Wraethu (a sort of proto-omegaverse)
• John Rechy’s City of Night (memoir of pre-condom gay circuit, kind of an overwhelming avalanche of cock)
• William S Burrough’s Junky and Naked Lunch (maybe more titillating than an actual turn on, and also just weird)
• Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (no sex, but blood-drinking as sexualized exchange of bodily fluids)
• One of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books (which was very important for me in coming to terms with feeling guilty about being attracted to my friends, but in retrospect really gross in light of MZB’s defending of her husband’s sexual abuse of children)
• Orson Scott Card’s Songmaster (though I got creeped out as soon as I figured out how homophobic Card was)
• The High Risk anthology
• I think there is at least one M/M story in Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts
• And I think there is M/M content in Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women 

The first porn movie I saw was gay porn at an 18 plus gay club in Berkeley (I was 17, but they didn’t card). It wasn’t really a turn on.  Just weird and intense, and i was trying really hard to seem cool and grownup. But, in my early 20s, I was dating a bisexual man who watched a lot of porn, and he was actually kind of disturbed by how hot I found gay porn (I found het porn and any F/F porn created for men fake and annoying).

I lived in a university town and spent a lot of time in book stores as a teenager, so I read a lot of weird stuff.

Mainstream filmed porn is such a thorny feminist issue. It just seems easier to avoid it, particularly since so much of it doesn’t really work for me.

At university, my roommate wrote a women’s studies essay on woman-produced porn, so I ended up watching a bunch of porn with her.  The only one I actually thought was hot was Bathroom Sluts (Fatale Productions, 1991) which was very punk and DIY.  Years later a friend of mine was in Christopher Lee’s Sex Flesh in Blood (1999) but it was just weird watching it, because I had heard her talk about it so much, like where she got the body paint for one scene, and how she thought the camera angles for the sex scenes were really trashy and how she was holding the boom in the bathroom scene and dislocated her shoulder.