Long time coming: why I like slash
I've been a slasher for about seven years now. (Dear god, where does the time go?) By "slasher," I mean: I read slash. I write slash. I enjoy watching for slashy subtext in movies and TV shows. I enjoy talking about it with other people.
I do sometimes read and enjoy het (especially Spike/Buffy) and gen, but my main fannish interests have always centred around slash.
I've never been entirely sure why.
When I first discovered slash online, I was both thrilled and surprised. When I realized how huge it was, and when I realized that the majority of slash authors were actually straight women, I was even more surprised. I'd reached the age of twenty without really being exposed to the idea that women could have/create/share sexual fantasies; porn had always seemed to be the exclusive domain of men.
Right away, I started wondering what exactly they/we/I found so appealing about the concept. I've read a lot of people's essays over the years in which they try to explain why they like slash-or, equally interesting, why they don't. Most recently, tonight I read speakr2customrs's mini-essay "Gay Now?" in which he talks about why slash doesn't make sense to him, although (to my utter glee) he singles out my Fragments series as an exception.
Tonight, I feel like it's finally time to try to explain to myself why I like slash. This is going to be an entirely personal response, with absolutely no attempts to generalize into ideas like "why slash is so popular."
I think it all started when I watched the documentary The Celluloid Closet in 1998. It's about the representation of homosexuality in movies from the dawn of cinema to the present day (the film came out in 1995). One of the things I learned from the documentary was that in the early 1930's Hollywood adopted a series of censorship rules called the Hayes Code. Among other things, it banned any onscreen representation of homosexuality. (Among many other things. I find the Code both amusing and appalling.)
From the IMDB description of The Celluloid Closet:The effect of the Code was to soften some of the more grotesque stereotypes--but more interesting was the impetus the Code gave to film makers to create homosexual characters and plot lines that would go over the heads of industry censors but which could still be interpreted by astute audiences, with films such as THE MALTESE FALCON, REBECCA, BEN-HUR, and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE cases in point.
One part of the documentary that particularly stuck with me was the interview with Gore Vidal, the screenwriter of Ben-Hur. He explained that he decided that the unspoken story behind Ben-Hur and Messala's emotionally-charged reunion was that as teenagers they'd been lovers, and Messala wants to renew that relationship but he's spurned by Ben-Hur. Vidal explained all this to Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, but they agreed not to tell Charlton Heston, who played Ben-Hur. The whole thing amused me greatly.
The point of this is: The Celluloid Closet taught me to look for subtext. It assured me that the subtext was inserted deliberately at least some of the time. It pointed out that the subtext might even be snuck in by some of the people involved in the creative process without the rest of them knowing about it.
It also pointed out something explicitly that I'd already pretty much worked out for myself: there sure aren't a lot of gay people on TV.
Then I watched the third season of Due South. The season with Ray Kowalski. And I thought I was seeing subtext. I thought I was seeing pretty frikkin' blatant subtext, week after week. I thought, "Those guys are so in love with each other!" The looks, the touching, the "Do you find me attractive?" The buddy breathing (read: thinly-veiled onscreen kiss!), and the "Does this change our relationship?" talk after the buddy breathing.
I desperately wanted someone else to acknowledge what I was seeing. My roommate was uncooperative. But finally (it took a lot longer than you might think), I discovered fanfic and slash pretty much simultaneously. I discovered the Hexwood archive, a huge repository of Due South fic, most of it slash. I was actually surprised to see that there were a lot of stories pairing Fraser with Ray Vecchio rather than Ray Kowalski, as I personally hadn't noticed any subtext in their scenes. However, there were more than enough Fraser/RayK stories to keep me happy. I was also delighted to find out later, through reading fannish meta, that Paul Gross (who played Fraser) and Callum Keith Rennie (who played RayK) were well aware of slash and of at least the potential of subtext between their characters.
So, that's how I came to slash in the first place. I followed up my Fraser/RayK love by 'shipping Mac/Vic from Once A Thief. Both those fandoms were very slash-centric, so it took me a while to realize that fanfic and slash weren't synonymous!
All right. That's enough, for now, about "how I got into slash." Time to really delve into "why I like it" and "why it makes sense to me."
First off: it's not the sex. Not for me. I'm really just not a very strongly sexual person. I'm very pro-sex in theory, and I think women writing porn for other women and sharing it freely over the internet is a wonderful, empowering thing, and that's one of the reasons I like slash in principle, but on a personal level it just doesn't do it for me. I avoid PWPs. I often skip over reading sex scenes in longer stories if they don't seem to be advancing the plot in a way that the phrase "and then they had sex" couldn't do equally well.
On the other hand, I do have my kinks, and fanfic feeds them nicely. I am a big damn sucker for the hurt/comfort dynamic, as anyone who's read my stories is well aware. But h/c can perfectly well exist in het stories; why do I only like it in slash?
Okay, here's part of it: traditional gender roles make my teeth itch. They drive me nuts. I don't want to read stories where characters play by those rules; I don't even want to read stories where they explicitly struggle against those rules. I want to read stories where those rules aren't even taken into consideration. Slash answers that need.
(Spike/Buffy is the only gen pairing I'm really interested in reading, and I think that's partly because it canonically fucks with their gender roles so very thoroughly, without ever being about that.)
Also, I just plain like queering the text. It frustrates me that homosexuality is routinely excised or relegated to barely-there subtext. It's satisfying to put it in, to make it explicit. It feels like fixing an imbalance.
That imbalance is there even in the Buffyverse. There's Willow, of course, who is allowed to date boys and then be "gay now" and date girls. I love Willow and Tara. I think it's completely awesome that over time they're allowed to kiss onscreen, to relax comfortably in bed together, to just plain be a couple on par with all the other couples. And then there's Kennedy, and Willow's great cross-over scene with Fred. So, lesbians, check. We've got lesbians.
But Joss and his team still seem to be very uncomfortable with gay men. There's Larry, sure, but we never see him with anyone. There's Scott Hope, outed in abstentia years later for a joke. There's Andrew's blatantly obvious love for Warren, and then later his obvious crushes on Xander and Spike ... but they're subtext. They're played for laughs, and they're subtext. I say they're only subtext and not text because even though they're blatantly obvious to me, I have (male) friends who argue that I'm wrong-that Andrew's not gay at all. That there's no real evidence. And hey, there isn't! Just the looks he gives them, and things he starts to say but doesn't follow through on. Plus, don't forget Andrew's last seen heading offscreen with a beautiful woman on each arm; the most obvious reading is that Joss is saying "Look, he's straight after all!"
Given no gay characters at all, I'll make some up, dammit.
Okay, next topic: the friendship-relationship continuum. I want to discuss this point because it's one that I've seen a lot of people bring up in explanations of why they don't like slash: the idea that it denies the possibility of close and caring friendships between men who have no sexual interest in each other. And you know, I can see where they're coming from. It's probably true that for every onscreen pair of attractive, canonically straight men who are presented as close friends, there are lots of people online writing them having hot, steamy sex. I just don't think that's a problem. From my point of view, it's not that I'm saying there can't be close friendship without sexual tension-it's just that close friendships are a really good jumping-off point for romantic relationships. And also a really common jumping-off point for romantic relationships.
Think about the canonical het friendships in the Buffyverse. Xander used to have a crush on Buffy. Willow had a crush on Xander for years, and at one point he reciprocated. Xander and Cordelia weren't even friends so much as enemies thrown together by circumstance when they started making out with each other. Joyce and Giles had sex on the hood of a police car. Giles and Anya kissed (under an amnesia spell, but still). Spike and Anya fucked. Xander and Faith fucked. And over in L.A., Doyle, Angel and Connor each got their turn to moon over and/or boink Cordelia, while Gunn and Wesley took turns with Fred. Lorne (who was flaming) was the only sexless one.
My point being: virtually every possible het pairing is fair game for the writers. Opposite-sex friendships are frequently complicated by crushes and unrequited love. Het friendships transition into actual dating sometimes. Whereas, Willow and Tara aside, same-sex ones never, ever do.
In my fantasies, in my ideal world, in my own real life experience, it's unrealistic to differentiate the opposite-sex friendships from the same-sex friendships that way.
Hm, okay. One thing I still haven't addressed is why I'm so thoroughly oriented to m/m slash, even though most of the points I've raised so far support f/f slash just as well.
A simple answer would be that I'm straighter than I think I am. I mean, hell, I'm married to a man. I dated a woman for five months while I was an undergrad and we never even had sex (we were both virgins at the time and we only had three chances to sleep together over the course of our relationship, so we never quite worked up to it). Maybe I like the m/m slash because the boys are so very, very pretty.
I've struggled with this question for a long time, actually. I've asked myself if I'm just attached to my queer identity for ideological reasons, if maybe deep down I'm just an ordinary straight woman. But ... dammit, I am attracted to women, I'm just somehow not interested in 'shipping them. I mean, I find Spike by far the sexiest character on Buffy (in fact, quite possibly the sexiest character in the history of television), but Faith is definitely my second choice, and Willow my third. On Angel, I find S4 Wesley pretty attractive in all his dark, unshaven angstiness, and although Fred never did it for me, Illyria is fucking hot.
So it's not just the guys. It's the dynamic between them that appeals to me. I like the prickliness, the bravado, the snark. I like the fact that they're so damn unlikely to be sweet to each other that when it does finally happen, it has so much more impact.
It may also have to do with the fact that the majority of really strong, interesting characters on TV and in movies are male. It sucks, but there it is.
It suddenly occurs to me that if Willow and Faith had had more scenes together in S7, if they had ever managed to have a dynamic other than cautious animosity, they might have appealed to me as a pairing.
Um. Anyway. This brings me to the oddity of Spike/Xander. It's the pairing I've been infatuated with for over a year now. It's the only 'ship I've written in the Buffyverse. And it's different from any other pairing I've become attached to in any other fandom, because I don't actually see a Spike/Xander subtext onscreen. At best, there are a few moments when they kind of seem like friends. There are a few jokes that indicate the idea of sexual attraction to each other may have occurred to them-Xander's line about Spike being compact and well-muscled, the awkward look they share that time that Nancy asks if there are any of the Scoobies who haven't had sex with each other. But seriously? At no point do they give me a "those two have done it!" vibe, or even a "they want each other, they really want each other!" vibe.
But somehow, they've convinced me that they could be good together. (The fact that eliade's "Sidelines" was the first Buffyverse fic I ever read may be a causal factor here.) I guess that's why I always put so much effort into showing how they develop feelings for each other.
(For the record, Buffyverse pairings that I think have significant slashy subtext in canon: Giles/Ethan, Spike/Angel, Buffy/Faith, Wesley/Angel, Andrew/Warren, Andrew/Xander, Andrew/Spike, Willow/Fred, Drusilla/Darla. And no, not Andrew/Jonathan, though I'm sure some people would argue with me on that one; I really think they were just friends.)
...Good lord, I just spent the entire night writing this thing.
I hope I haven't become rambling and incoherent. I hope I haven't horribly offended anyone. I hope I haven't left out anything important. I think I need to go to sleep now!
I do sometimes read and enjoy het (especially Spike/Buffy) and gen, but my main fannish interests have always centred around slash.
I've never been entirely sure why.
When I first discovered slash online, I was both thrilled and surprised. When I realized how huge it was, and when I realized that the majority of slash authors were actually straight women, I was even more surprised. I'd reached the age of twenty without really being exposed to the idea that women could have/create/share sexual fantasies; porn had always seemed to be the exclusive domain of men.
Right away, I started wondering what exactly they/we/I found so appealing about the concept. I've read a lot of people's essays over the years in which they try to explain why they like slash-or, equally interesting, why they don't. Most recently, tonight I read speakr2customrs's mini-essay "Gay Now?" in which he talks about why slash doesn't make sense to him, although (to my utter glee) he singles out my Fragments series as an exception.
Tonight, I feel like it's finally time to try to explain to myself why I like slash. This is going to be an entirely personal response, with absolutely no attempts to generalize into ideas like "why slash is so popular."
I think it all started when I watched the documentary The Celluloid Closet in 1998. It's about the representation of homosexuality in movies from the dawn of cinema to the present day (the film came out in 1995). One of the things I learned from the documentary was that in the early 1930's Hollywood adopted a series of censorship rules called the Hayes Code. Among other things, it banned any onscreen representation of homosexuality. (Among many other things. I find the Code both amusing and appalling.)
From the IMDB description of The Celluloid Closet:The effect of the Code was to soften some of the more grotesque stereotypes--but more interesting was the impetus the Code gave to film makers to create homosexual characters and plot lines that would go over the heads of industry censors but which could still be interpreted by astute audiences, with films such as THE MALTESE FALCON, REBECCA, BEN-HUR, and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE cases in point.
One part of the documentary that particularly stuck with me was the interview with Gore Vidal, the screenwriter of Ben-Hur. He explained that he decided that the unspoken story behind Ben-Hur and Messala's emotionally-charged reunion was that as teenagers they'd been lovers, and Messala wants to renew that relationship but he's spurned by Ben-Hur. Vidal explained all this to Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, but they agreed not to tell Charlton Heston, who played Ben-Hur. The whole thing amused me greatly.
The point of this is: The Celluloid Closet taught me to look for subtext. It assured me that the subtext was inserted deliberately at least some of the time. It pointed out that the subtext might even be snuck in by some of the people involved in the creative process without the rest of them knowing about it.
It also pointed out something explicitly that I'd already pretty much worked out for myself: there sure aren't a lot of gay people on TV.
Then I watched the third season of Due South. The season with Ray Kowalski. And I thought I was seeing subtext. I thought I was seeing pretty frikkin' blatant subtext, week after week. I thought, "Those guys are so in love with each other!" The looks, the touching, the "Do you find me attractive?" The buddy breathing (read: thinly-veiled onscreen kiss!), and the "Does this change our relationship?" talk after the buddy breathing.
I desperately wanted someone else to acknowledge what I was seeing. My roommate was uncooperative. But finally (it took a lot longer than you might think), I discovered fanfic and slash pretty much simultaneously. I discovered the Hexwood archive, a huge repository of Due South fic, most of it slash. I was actually surprised to see that there were a lot of stories pairing Fraser with Ray Vecchio rather than Ray Kowalski, as I personally hadn't noticed any subtext in their scenes. However, there were more than enough Fraser/RayK stories to keep me happy. I was also delighted to find out later, through reading fannish meta, that Paul Gross (who played Fraser) and Callum Keith Rennie (who played RayK) were well aware of slash and of at least the potential of subtext between their characters.
So, that's how I came to slash in the first place. I followed up my Fraser/RayK love by 'shipping Mac/Vic from Once A Thief. Both those fandoms were very slash-centric, so it took me a while to realize that fanfic and slash weren't synonymous!
All right. That's enough, for now, about "how I got into slash." Time to really delve into "why I like it" and "why it makes sense to me."
First off: it's not the sex. Not for me. I'm really just not a very strongly sexual person. I'm very pro-sex in theory, and I think women writing porn for other women and sharing it freely over the internet is a wonderful, empowering thing, and that's one of the reasons I like slash in principle, but on a personal level it just doesn't do it for me. I avoid PWPs. I often skip over reading sex scenes in longer stories if they don't seem to be advancing the plot in a way that the phrase "and then they had sex" couldn't do equally well.
On the other hand, I do have my kinks, and fanfic feeds them nicely. I am a big damn sucker for the hurt/comfort dynamic, as anyone who's read my stories is well aware. But h/c can perfectly well exist in het stories; why do I only like it in slash?
Okay, here's part of it: traditional gender roles make my teeth itch. They drive me nuts. I don't want to read stories where characters play by those rules; I don't even want to read stories where they explicitly struggle against those rules. I want to read stories where those rules aren't even taken into consideration. Slash answers that need.
(Spike/Buffy is the only gen pairing I'm really interested in reading, and I think that's partly because it canonically fucks with their gender roles so very thoroughly, without ever being about that.)
Also, I just plain like queering the text. It frustrates me that homosexuality is routinely excised or relegated to barely-there subtext. It's satisfying to put it in, to make it explicit. It feels like fixing an imbalance.
That imbalance is there even in the Buffyverse. There's Willow, of course, who is allowed to date boys and then be "gay now" and date girls. I love Willow and Tara. I think it's completely awesome that over time they're allowed to kiss onscreen, to relax comfortably in bed together, to just plain be a couple on par with all the other couples. And then there's Kennedy, and Willow's great cross-over scene with Fred. So, lesbians, check. We've got lesbians.
But Joss and his team still seem to be very uncomfortable with gay men. There's Larry, sure, but we never see him with anyone. There's Scott Hope, outed in abstentia years later for a joke. There's Andrew's blatantly obvious love for Warren, and then later his obvious crushes on Xander and Spike ... but they're subtext. They're played for laughs, and they're subtext. I say they're only subtext and not text because even though they're blatantly obvious to me, I have (male) friends who argue that I'm wrong-that Andrew's not gay at all. That there's no real evidence. And hey, there isn't! Just the looks he gives them, and things he starts to say but doesn't follow through on. Plus, don't forget Andrew's last seen heading offscreen with a beautiful woman on each arm; the most obvious reading is that Joss is saying "Look, he's straight after all!"
Given no gay characters at all, I'll make some up, dammit.
Okay, next topic: the friendship-relationship continuum. I want to discuss this point because it's one that I've seen a lot of people bring up in explanations of why they don't like slash: the idea that it denies the possibility of close and caring friendships between men who have no sexual interest in each other. And you know, I can see where they're coming from. It's probably true that for every onscreen pair of attractive, canonically straight men who are presented as close friends, there are lots of people online writing them having hot, steamy sex. I just don't think that's a problem. From my point of view, it's not that I'm saying there can't be close friendship without sexual tension-it's just that close friendships are a really good jumping-off point for romantic relationships. And also a really common jumping-off point for romantic relationships.
Think about the canonical het friendships in the Buffyverse. Xander used to have a crush on Buffy. Willow had a crush on Xander for years, and at one point he reciprocated. Xander and Cordelia weren't even friends so much as enemies thrown together by circumstance when they started making out with each other. Joyce and Giles had sex on the hood of a police car. Giles and Anya kissed (under an amnesia spell, but still). Spike and Anya fucked. Xander and Faith fucked. And over in L.A., Doyle, Angel and Connor each got their turn to moon over and/or boink Cordelia, while Gunn and Wesley took turns with Fred. Lorne (who was flaming) was the only sexless one.
My point being: virtually every possible het pairing is fair game for the writers. Opposite-sex friendships are frequently complicated by crushes and unrequited love. Het friendships transition into actual dating sometimes. Whereas, Willow and Tara aside, same-sex ones never, ever do.
In my fantasies, in my ideal world, in my own real life experience, it's unrealistic to differentiate the opposite-sex friendships from the same-sex friendships that way.
Hm, okay. One thing I still haven't addressed is why I'm so thoroughly oriented to m/m slash, even though most of the points I've raised so far support f/f slash just as well.
A simple answer would be that I'm straighter than I think I am. I mean, hell, I'm married to a man. I dated a woman for five months while I was an undergrad and we never even had sex (we were both virgins at the time and we only had three chances to sleep together over the course of our relationship, so we never quite worked up to it). Maybe I like the m/m slash because the boys are so very, very pretty.
I've struggled with this question for a long time, actually. I've asked myself if I'm just attached to my queer identity for ideological reasons, if maybe deep down I'm just an ordinary straight woman. But ... dammit, I am attracted to women, I'm just somehow not interested in 'shipping them. I mean, I find Spike by far the sexiest character on Buffy (in fact, quite possibly the sexiest character in the history of television), but Faith is definitely my second choice, and Willow my third. On Angel, I find S4 Wesley pretty attractive in all his dark, unshaven angstiness, and although Fred never did it for me, Illyria is fucking hot.
So it's not just the guys. It's the dynamic between them that appeals to me. I like the prickliness, the bravado, the snark. I like the fact that they're so damn unlikely to be sweet to each other that when it does finally happen, it has so much more impact.
It may also have to do with the fact that the majority of really strong, interesting characters on TV and in movies are male. It sucks, but there it is.
It suddenly occurs to me that if Willow and Faith had had more scenes together in S7, if they had ever managed to have a dynamic other than cautious animosity, they might have appealed to me as a pairing.
Um. Anyway. This brings me to the oddity of Spike/Xander. It's the pairing I've been infatuated with for over a year now. It's the only 'ship I've written in the Buffyverse. And it's different from any other pairing I've become attached to in any other fandom, because I don't actually see a Spike/Xander subtext onscreen. At best, there are a few moments when they kind of seem like friends. There are a few jokes that indicate the idea of sexual attraction to each other may have occurred to them-Xander's line about Spike being compact and well-muscled, the awkward look they share that time that Nancy asks if there are any of the Scoobies who haven't had sex with each other. But seriously? At no point do they give me a "those two have done it!" vibe, or even a "they want each other, they really want each other!" vibe.
But somehow, they've convinced me that they could be good together. (The fact that eliade's "Sidelines" was the first Buffyverse fic I ever read may be a causal factor here.) I guess that's why I always put so much effort into showing how they develop feelings for each other.
(For the record, Buffyverse pairings that I think have significant slashy subtext in canon: Giles/Ethan, Spike/Angel, Buffy/Faith, Wesley/Angel, Andrew/Warren, Andrew/Xander, Andrew/Spike, Willow/Fred, Drusilla/Darla. And no, not Andrew/Jonathan, though I'm sure some people would argue with me on that one; I really think they were just friends.)
...Good lord, I just spent the entire night writing this thing.
I hope I haven't become rambling and incoherent. I hope I haven't horribly offended anyone. I hope I haven't left out anything important. I think I need to go to sleep now!