andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2004-10-22 05:49 pm
andrewducker) wrote2004-10-22 05:49 pm
Some thoughts on slash
Slash is a subject that causes incredibly strong emotional reactions in people. Having engaged in numerous discussions about this, I've been thinking about why this might be, partially because it keeps cropping up on my friends list and partially so that I can get something vaguely final down in words and stop it going round in my head.
I'll be taking my definition of slash as 'Fiction written by fans of a work in which characters who are not canonically gay are written with the assumption that they are'. I would like to point out in advance that this isn't intended to come out either in favour of, or against slash. I firmly believe that people have the right to freedom of speech, and if they choose to write slash then that is their prerogative. I'm merely interested in why slash affects people the way it does, and why it's previously caused the reaction in me that it has.
Now, some people claim that they merely find the idea of slash to be a waste of time, but people waste time in many thousands of ways, and most people have nowhere near the amount of emotional reaction to golf that they do to slash. This argument is therefore easily discounted.
Slash has a tendency mocked in a juvenile "Ewww, that's gross" manner which would tend to indicate that the mocker finds gay sex to be intrinsically gross. This could, indeed, be a major source of the objections people have. It should be noted, however, that this doesn't automatically indicate a homophobic intent - people who aren't interested in sex tend to find the whole area of sexuality pretty icky - only changing this feeling when the instinct to engage in it overcomes them. Without the urge to engage in particular sexual acts, it's entirely possible that those acts still cause the same reactions - a pointer in this direction can be gained from the fact that many gay men find the idea of heterosexual sex somewhat disturbing.
However, this cannot the only reason. After all, I have had no problem with homosexual characters and situations in other works of fiction where they were intrinsic parts (most recently The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, where one of the major characters has his life grimly affected by the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in 1930s America), but I have still had a negative reaction to slash. Nor can it be purely because most slash is erotica - there are many, many sites out there specialising in erotica and while there are people out there who do react negatively to gay porn, it's not something that I encounter nearly as often as people's reaction to slash.
People have an almost personal reaction to slash - as if some part of them had been violated. I believe the only way to explain this is to look at the way that people react to fiction and the characters within. People form emotional connections with the characters in their fiction, along with internalised ideas of who they are and how they behave. We feel (to a certain extent) as if they know them as people. After all, why would people watch most TV shows if they didn’t care about the characters and in some way empathise with them. When these characters then behave in ways that are perceived as uncharacteristic, people feel as if you’re portraying their friends in manner which is just plain wrong. The reaction here is probably somewhat similar to that evoked in horror movies where the characters are replaced by someone (or something) that acts almost, but not quite, the same as the original person – a feeling of unease and wrongness.
When we watched the last episode of Angel,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
green_amber was extremely upset at the act of one character, when they shot another one. She felt emotionally betrayed by the act – that character would _never_ act in that way. Never mind that the character doesn’t actually exist, or that the correct act for a fictional character is whatever the writer chooses for them to do, the way that the character had been written felt so wrong to her that she became quite irate at the way it was portrayed. I believe that it’s this reaction that is seen when most people encounter slash-fiction.
The question remains, however, why does homosexual sex seem so out of character for people that they have this strong reaction? It is, of course, not just possible but likely that there is some latent homophobia in the reaction – Kirk and Spock are heroes, manly men and gallant adventurers, thus obviously not homosexual. The fact that real-life adventurers and ‘manly men’ such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar had homosexual relationships is beside the point – surely Kirk and Spock wouldn’t do such a thing!
This reaction is seems obviously homophobic. If you don’t have a problem with homosexuality, why do you have a problem with your heroes engaging in it? But this response seems oddly simplistic – after all, the reader may not have a negative response to characters originally written as homosexuals (although there aren’t many of those about to have encountered). And if, after all, the character has never been shown to have any homosexual leanings, surely assuming their heterosexuality is perfectly reasonable?
Which is where the other part of the puzzle comes from – personal identification. People don’t just like Kirk – they want to be him, delivering two-fisted Kirk Justice, saving planets and kissing green-skinned women. They want to embrace the whole Kirk way of life. Suddenly discovering that this also means embracing Mr Spock comes as a bit of a shock. It’s as if the slash is telling them that _they_ are homosexual.
And again we come back to asking – if these people aren’t homophobic, why can’t they identify with people who are homosexual? If, after all, we can identify with people who are balding, a bit tubby around the middle and Speak!…Like!…This! then surely we can identify with someone who has sex with men? The answer seems to be that none of those other things seem as intrinsic to our personalities as our sexual identity is – people can base huge decisions about their lives (or, indeed, their whole lives) on their sexual identity, it’s something they care deeply about, and in the majority of cases seem to have little control over. Sexuality seems to be something you are, not something you do, and thus when made into an overt part of a character is too prominent to simply glide past.
This overtness also seems distinctive to slash – while I have encountered a few instances of heterosexual Trek fanfic, it seems much, much rarer. The occasional kiss or ellipsis seems to be all that fans require in the way of sexual content. It’s possible that most people don’t want to think of their heroes explicitly sexually _at all_, and that this also contributes to their reaction.
So the answer seems to be that slash takes characters we emapthise with and/or identify with and changes the depiction of them to act overtly in a way that many of the people encountering it find impossible to empathise/identify with. It’s likely that the strongest reactions (that aren’t merely coming from actual homophobes) will come from those people who are unused to thinking about their role-models in a sexual way at all, let alone in a sexual way that they themselves do not feel any affinity towards. Those people that have less of an emotional attachment to heterosexuality, or who care less about fictional characters will have a correspondingly lower negative reaction to it.
The question remains – why are so many of the slash writers women? Any suggestions?
I'll be taking my definition of slash as 'Fiction written by fans of a work in which characters who are not canonically gay are written with the assumption that they are'. I would like to point out in advance that this isn't intended to come out either in favour of, or against slash. I firmly believe that people have the right to freedom of speech, and if they choose to write slash then that is their prerogative. I'm merely interested in why slash affects people the way it does, and why it's previously caused the reaction in me that it has.
Now, some people claim that they merely find the idea of slash to be a waste of time, but people waste time in many thousands of ways, and most people have nowhere near the amount of emotional reaction to golf that they do to slash. This argument is therefore easily discounted.
Slash has a tendency mocked in a juvenile "Ewww, that's gross" manner which would tend to indicate that the mocker finds gay sex to be intrinsically gross. This could, indeed, be a major source of the objections people have. It should be noted, however, that this doesn't automatically indicate a homophobic intent - people who aren't interested in sex tend to find the whole area of sexuality pretty icky - only changing this feeling when the instinct to engage in it overcomes them. Without the urge to engage in particular sexual acts, it's entirely possible that those acts still cause the same reactions - a pointer in this direction can be gained from the fact that many gay men find the idea of heterosexual sex somewhat disturbing.
However, this cannot the only reason. After all, I have had no problem with homosexual characters and situations in other works of fiction where they were intrinsic parts (most recently The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, where one of the major characters has his life grimly affected by the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in 1930s America), but I have still had a negative reaction to slash. Nor can it be purely because most slash is erotica - there are many, many sites out there specialising in erotica and while there are people out there who do react negatively to gay porn, it's not something that I encounter nearly as often as people's reaction to slash.
People have an almost personal reaction to slash - as if some part of them had been violated. I believe the only way to explain this is to look at the way that people react to fiction and the characters within. People form emotional connections with the characters in their fiction, along with internalised ideas of who they are and how they behave. We feel (to a certain extent) as if they know them as people. After all, why would people watch most TV shows if they didn’t care about the characters and in some way empathise with them. When these characters then behave in ways that are perceived as uncharacteristic, people feel as if you’re portraying their friends in manner which is just plain wrong. The reaction here is probably somewhat similar to that evoked in horror movies where the characters are replaced by someone (or something) that acts almost, but not quite, the same as the original person – a feeling of unease and wrongness.
When we watched the last episode of Angel,
green_amber was extremely upset at the act of one character, when they shot another one. She felt emotionally betrayed by the act – that character would _never_ act in that way. Never mind that the character doesn’t actually exist, or that the correct act for a fictional character is whatever the writer chooses for them to do, the way that the character had been written felt so wrong to her that she became quite irate at the way it was portrayed. I believe that it’s this reaction that is seen when most people encounter slash-fiction.The question remains, however, why does homosexual sex seem so out of character for people that they have this strong reaction? It is, of course, not just possible but likely that there is some latent homophobia in the reaction – Kirk and Spock are heroes, manly men and gallant adventurers, thus obviously not homosexual. The fact that real-life adventurers and ‘manly men’ such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar had homosexual relationships is beside the point – surely Kirk and Spock wouldn’t do such a thing!
This reaction is seems obviously homophobic. If you don’t have a problem with homosexuality, why do you have a problem with your heroes engaging in it? But this response seems oddly simplistic – after all, the reader may not have a negative response to characters originally written as homosexuals (although there aren’t many of those about to have encountered). And if, after all, the character has never been shown to have any homosexual leanings, surely assuming their heterosexuality is perfectly reasonable?
Which is where the other part of the puzzle comes from – personal identification. People don’t just like Kirk – they want to be him, delivering two-fisted Kirk Justice, saving planets and kissing green-skinned women. They want to embrace the whole Kirk way of life. Suddenly discovering that this also means embracing Mr Spock comes as a bit of a shock. It’s as if the slash is telling them that _they_ are homosexual.
And again we come back to asking – if these people aren’t homophobic, why can’t they identify with people who are homosexual? If, after all, we can identify with people who are balding, a bit tubby around the middle and Speak!…Like!…This! then surely we can identify with someone who has sex with men? The answer seems to be that none of those other things seem as intrinsic to our personalities as our sexual identity is – people can base huge decisions about their lives (or, indeed, their whole lives) on their sexual identity, it’s something they care deeply about, and in the majority of cases seem to have little control over. Sexuality seems to be something you are, not something you do, and thus when made into an overt part of a character is too prominent to simply glide past.
This overtness also seems distinctive to slash – while I have encountered a few instances of heterosexual Trek fanfic, it seems much, much rarer. The occasional kiss or ellipsis seems to be all that fans require in the way of sexual content. It’s possible that most people don’t want to think of their heroes explicitly sexually _at all_, and that this also contributes to their reaction.
So the answer seems to be that slash takes characters we emapthise with and/or identify with and changes the depiction of them to act overtly in a way that many of the people encountering it find impossible to empathise/identify with. It’s likely that the strongest reactions (that aren’t merely coming from actual homophobes) will come from those people who are unused to thinking about their role-models in a sexual way at all, let alone in a sexual way that they themselves do not feel any affinity towards. Those people that have less of an emotional attachment to heterosexuality, or who care less about fictional characters will have a correspondingly lower negative reaction to it.
The question remains – why are so many of the slash writers women? Any suggestions?
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Sexual choice is fairly integral to someone's character, but as I've said usually what I find distressing is that the slash I've seen (and I'm told there's some that's Not Like That) reduces all same-sex friendships to "They want to get into each other's pants." The idea that all friendship, regardless of orientation, is based on sexual attraction is one that personally drives me crazy. Ask me how I felt when Mulder and Scully started makin' it on the X-Files. Gah.
I don't have much of an attachment to heterosexuality, but I do have an attachment to fidelity of character. I think what you're actually saying is, "Those who believe that heterosexuality or homosexuality is a reasonably-firm choice will have a negative reaction, whereas those who believe that everyone's bisexual and thus could fuck anyone at any time under the right circumstances will not have a problem."
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I didn't see any reason for the bit in ROTK where Elrond basically tells Aragorn that he has to stop Sauron or Arwen will die. Because saving the world isn't a good enough reason - he has to be doing it for his girlfriend!
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But that's not the same thing as an sexualisation of their relationship.
Aragorn and Arwen canonically have a relationship that is acknowledged on both sides as sexual in the future tense (at least, one trusts that marriage includes sex, even in Tolkien's world).
What made Elrond's speech in RotK unwarranted was the distortion of motive, as if the filmmakers couldn't believe anyone would believe Aragorn was saving Middle Earth because he's a noble and heroic hero. (Maybe it was the scruffy hair.)
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The sexualisation of the relationship would probably be Mulder/Scully.
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I like Mulder/Scully hetfic.
Well, okay, I like it when it's faithful to the relationship as we see it on screen.
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*You know my views on that fucking waste of three hours of my life, so I'll leave it there.
;)
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Tell me more about your afflication.
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One of the other things that really made me dislike the first film was that the first film was so fucking good. The second was bad, but the third was just so badly done - the ending that never ends. You kow, when I went to the cinema and watched it, when the ending came on, I thought "oh thanks god, it's finally ending. Hopefully they'll zip to the Grey Havens and it'll be done". But no. It ended and ended and ended for the rest of my life, or so it seemed. They could have cut huge amounts of vaguely homoerotic hobbits bouncing on beds and put in the scouring of the Shire.
And the Ents didn't look like trees. I mean, really. They're supposed to look like -trees-. TREES. Not stick insects! Not logs with spindly twigs attached!
I'm sure there's more I'm missing, but can't be bothered to type it all. Basically, there was the chance for it to be good, and it made me bitterly disappointed.
To me, this is a far worse travesty than The Phantom Menace.
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It could easily be said that much of film and television these days has that idea (although for heterosexual couples only, for the most part)
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Because you think of homosexuality as something that "pushes boundaries", rather than as a normal human activity?
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Wow, they really can't tell the difference between bad writing and 'something odd is going on' can they?
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Yeah, I can see that for pairings with no canon support, but people who don't like slash often object even to such obvious pairings as Kirk/Spock, Avon/Blake, Sirius/Remus, Trapper/Hawkeye (TV series, anyway), Wooster/Jeeves, Duncan/Methos, and so on.
It's exactly like the way hordes of Buffy fans went nutso when Willow admitted that she was in love with Tara. That romance was absolutely the most foreshadowed of all the relationships in the entire series - yet there were so many Buffy fans who reacted with "But Willow can't be gay!" because, evidently, to them, having someone come out as gay "pushed boundaries": it wasn't something normal people naturally do.
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It seems a bit unlikely to me, sometimes, that ALL sports stars would be straight. Okay, maybe there are a few who are gay that I have missed the media furore about, but still... I think a point is made somewhere in that.
I am reminded of a girl at work who, on finding out that her neighbour was a lesbian, was suddenly terrified and paranoid that this sinister creature might fancy her just because they were both girls. I felt slightly sick at knowing someone that prejudiced.
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Totally agreed on the shamefulness of Buffy fans. I wasn't watching live, but when I saw the reruns I said, "How in God's name did they NOT see that coming?"
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I realize you'd like to think that I believe homosexuality is deviant, but I don't.
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Actually, I'd prefer to believe that you don't think homosexuality is deviant. But interaction with you so far on this topic has mostly consisted of you yelling at me, which is not the way to convince me.
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I hear that point made a lot, but I still don't quite understand it. For me, fanfiction is about exploring possibilities. Exploring the relationship between, say, Wesley and Angel as a sexual one does not exclude the possibility of it being a platonic one. Another day, another fanfic. It's not that *all* friendships are based on sexual attraction. It's that this one could be, and in this fic, what might happen if it were? The very fact of one slash fic existing does not preclude a gen, or het, one from existing. As far as I can see, it is the classification of fics as slash or het or gen or whatever that attaches these um... classifications? gah. Have lost my thread.
Saying that slash reduces (and why reduce?) all same-sex relationships to sexualised relationships seems weird. It's just a way of linking together a disparate lot of fics with a (sometimes the only) common thread. It's not a statement about all relationships.
Or have I missed the point?
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You may be correct that fan-fiction is a way for people to explore various facets of any universe, but many of those facets are so far away from the original that I cannot enjoy them because they bear no relationship to the original. Why ape something if you're just going to make it so your own creation that it's not at all like the original? Why not just write a novel or story that actually has the characters you want to see, instead of turning X into Y so you can have the easy cred of a background?
Yeah, it's a possibility. I could set "Gone with the Wind" as a William Gibson cyberpunk adventure... But at that point, to me, it ceases to be like the original at all and a new creation, without the benefit and excitement of actually being new.
You are correct that slash is simply a catch-all term for a narrow band of fan fiction, but usually I dislike the pairings simply because of the reasons I stated. Your mileage may vary, and often does, but I want the evolution of the characters in any given media source to be organic and logical, not just "Han's an ice-cream salesman because I LOVES ME SOME ICE CREAM!"
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I'm happy to hear your opinion. I'm relatively new to fanfic, and don't have my thoughts enclosed in any particular camp, except for in the sense of really just being in the Angel: the Series fandom and not much else. I seem to spend a lot more time talking about fanfiction than writing it at the moment. Fandom is just so interesting!
I suppose I'm coming at it from a different angle. I mean, I love the characters, to a deeply tragic and possibly unhealthy degree, but I'm completely *fascinated* by the universe. The structure, the metaphors and the language, that's what really gets my love. To me it really isn't just background.
Aanyway. I'm rambling and senseless again, and Have I Got News For You is on. And every time someone says, 'you shouldn't' or 'you can't', I go and do it. Because I'm like that.
::puts down the thread and backs away::
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OMG, yes! I've had that exact same thought about lots of badfic.
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That bit I have already discussed about with many other writers (slashers to be exact) and what resulted from those chats was that A) we love the uuniverse that was created and like the borders, boundaries that were set by the author in the first place, B) we don'T want to write our own universe, create our own characters (as for that there are so many motives I won'T start to enumerate all of them) and C) we love the (our) fandom(s). It's like being in big, friendly families or sort.
Or at least that's what we came to realise. But no one's like us, so ...
And bad characterisation (or feminised and/or overly emotional) of males in slash (the male/male bit, at least) makes me cringe. I know there are readers who adore to see their fav pairng going all mushy and flowery and sugary but it makes me sick. Men are men, gay or not. Manly, thinking with their dick, drinking beer *g* (how cliché can this become?) and won't spend 3 horus overanalysing their feelings for another person and calling them every hour to remind them that they love them indeed. Most of them, at least. It's not as though 95% of the gay population was camp and frivolly. Having many gay friends, I got this info first hand and thus despise seeing all those poor blokes being written as though they had a pussy and not a dick between their legs. All these feelings and this need to talk about things ... *shudders*
[/rambling]
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"I prefer women."
"You're a lesbian?"
"Yep."
*stare* "No, you're not."
And every time someone says it's "out of character" for a certain person to be gay or lesbian, what I'm hearing is, "I know what homosexuals are like. They all walk around with a big red H on their forehead so I can see them a mile off. This character doesn't have that big red H and doesn't act like how I consider a real gay man or lesbian to act, therefore they cannot be gay or lesbian." Gay men all act like the guys on "Queer Eye" and lesbians are all heavyset, with buzz cuts and tool belts. (Some are, some aren't.)
This whole "out of character" defense smacks too much of all those (very often) heterosexual males who are utterly convinced that it's "out of character" for a woman who looks like me, with my hobbies and my educational background, to be lesbian. If someone made a character exactly like me in a TV show, you would quite probably consider it equally out of character for that person to be queer, and state it as patently, with as much false confidence as you are doing now. I've seen it. Believe me, I've seen it. Many times.
I've had 100%, total, up-close and personal experience with just how anyone can be queer. It's not out of character to me, not by any means.
Then again, I write in a fandom set in a historical universe where sodomy was illegal until you were two weeks out of port, upon which point it was compulsory. :-)