(WARNING: Brevity is not a major part of my skill set. Also, this isn't so much a proper structured essay, more me trying to sort my thoughts out.)
"...girls who are boys
who like boys to be girls
who do boys like they're girls
who do girls like they're boys
always should be someone you really love..."
So: slash. Every few years I have these little moments of self awareness, where I say to myself: "Self, what's up with this slash thing, really? What's that about?" I seem to have to write these things periodically, and this post has been brewing for a while. Probably ever since I remember reading someone (and for the life of me I can't think whom) writing a mildly excoriating post dismissing slashers as straight women wallowing in their heterosexual privilege and appropriating the experience of less privileged gay men. I wish I could remember who made the post - not that this is a new assertion, but the poster was somebody I respect, and it gave me pause. I feel some sympathy for (some) gay men's discomfort with the idea of slash, and I agree that lots of (badfic) slash is not at all representative of actual gay men. I don't go trawling for fic because I really don't want to read spork-your-eyes-out lousy badfic - but I know there's plenty of it out there, and that when it comes to slash badfic, that's frequently tied in with embarrassingly poor attempts to write men and/or gayness.
But I still don't think it's that simple or reductive.
I slash. I am a slasher. I read and write the stuff. Not exclusively - I do write gen too, and sometimes femmeslash or het, and I'll happily read anything that's well written and in-character - but when I engage with texts, I have my slash goggles on, and whilst I may enjoy the canonical relationships depicted, I also notice the potential for others where there's sparkage, whether it's between a guy and a girl, or two guys, or two girls. (Or other permutations, for that matter - threesomes et al.) I'm far more liable to read and write stories with noncanonical relationships than with canon relationships (even when I enjoy the canonical relationships) because I best like fanfic to be transformative in some way.
In fact, upon reflection what appeals to me about slash is also what appeals to me about crossovers; taking the details of canon and putting a spin on them that makes perfect sense, even if it's not the lens through which canon is intended to be viewed. With my recent Sherlock/HP crossover, which posits that Sherlock is a squib and Mycroft a Slytherin high up in the Ministry of Magic, I find myself looking at canon through this lens in exactly the same way that I look at canon through the lens of seeing Smallville's Clark and Lex as bitter starcrossed lovers. My Sandman/PotC crossover is canon in my head too - afaic, Captain Jack Sparrow is Anansi's grandson, and Cutler Beckett is trapped at the bottom of the sea. I love this. I love the cleverness of 'Lost in Austen', which was so firmly rooted in canon characterisation and yet gave us entirely new perspectives on Wickham and Miss Bingley et al; I love the way that 'Wicked' meshes together the very disparate 'verses of Baum's books and the movie.
I'm very fond of Jack/Ianto (and Willow/Tara) because fuck yeah queer visability, but that isn't slash, and it doesn't generally move me to read or write fanfic (even though I &hearts the canon relationship like woah) because for the most part it's noncanonical relationships I'm most interested in reading and writing about. There are relationships I love like hell in canon, but don't feel any impulse to read or write fic for because it's already there on the screen, and so it doesn't nag at me to pull out the threads of story that show you how it could all come together in such-and-such a way. (See also Megan/Larry, Spock/Uhura, Mulder/Scully etc.) I might stumble across it and like it well enough, but I'm rarely moved to write it - because generally the engine that moves my stories is either getting character A and B together (building on things in canon) or meshing universe A and universe B together. Or, okay, sometimes just random gennish things that are to do with character development, or simple 'what if...?' thoughts that turn into big sprawly plots.
Still, I would rather read good gen than crappy or out-of-character slash (or het). Even with crack and kink, it needs to be something that I can buy - something in which the characters remain plausibly themselves*. I've written a shedload of Dean/Castiel, but I was very tentative about reading other people's Dean/Castiel after a while, because a sizeable proportion of the fandom are primarily motivated by finding Misha Collins and Jensen Ackles eminently fuckable, and writing fanfic based upon this, rather than upon a fascination with the idea of Castiel being an angel who changes his allegiance from God to Dean Winchester. I mean, I think that is just fabulous, don't get me wrong - but I absolutely don't think it's because Dean has a cute ass. It would still be just as fabulous if Dean were played by Jim Beaver, or by Alona Tal. It's about who Dean is, not what he looks like. It's love, not lust - selfless, not selfish. That doesn't preclude things getting carnal - but if you're working from a premise of lust as the motivating factor for the relationship, you've lost me. That's not at all what I see on screen, and I don't want to just play with the characters like they're puppets.
Funny, how one tends not to question whether other people are reading things and enjoying them for the same reason you do yourself. I once wrote a story based on somebody's crack/kink prompt for a Supernatural story based on the movie Secretary; the prompt caught my attention because I could see ways of using the idea of punishment and penitence and control to illuminate characters at this particular point in canon, and because the candy coloured fantasy of corporate drone-dom in the episode 'It's A Terrible Life' had enough resonance with the setting of the movie for it to be workable. It functioned on a number of levels, building on Dean's buried past as a victim and torturer in hell, building on Castiel's sense of guilt towards Dean for his experiences at Heaven's hands, and for his current situation, building on Castiel's own lack of freedom - I mean, for all that it was an outrageously cracky concept, I could still see it being believable the way that I'd set it out. Yes, it was hot - but also sad, and purposeful, and nuanced, and very much focused on character. In spite of the hilariously crackalicious premise, it still had integrity - that was kind of the point. And you tend to assume that people who like something you've written like it for those reasons; it's a bit of a lowering realisation when you twig that actually, they just showed up for the hot guys bumping uglies. (Had I not been on my period, I think I would have been less crushing to the girl whose prompt it was, when she decided that I was now her go-to writing person any time she thought of a cracky kink prompt. But I
felt almost physically ill at the realisation that she saw no difference between the story I'd written and her proposal for a story based on 'Goldilocks and The Three Bears', in which Castiel was Goldilocks & fucked John, Sam and Dean, before concluding that Dean was "just right". Do not want.)
Slash is regularly dismissed as the mirror-image of straight blokes getting off on watching faux!lesbian porn. And, yes, that's definitely one big circle in the complicated Venn diagram that is Slash fandom. But it's not the whole picture. Still, let's take a look at that for a moment, eh? Because even those straight girls who are simply fetishising the two hot blokes getting off (as Little Miss Goldilocks-porn exemplified) , the same way that straight guys fetishise two hot girls getting off - they aren't actually enacting exactly the same power dynamic, imho, because society is still constructed around the objectification of women and the celebration of the male gaze in a way that has consequences for real women on an everyday basis. This is not true of the objectification of men, even though men are increasingly under pressure to take care of their appearances and make an effort to smell good, etc. I mean, personally, I have no problem with straight blokes finding that faux!lesbian idea hot - so long as that doesn't feed into a fetishistic & misogynistic assumption that lesbians exist to cater to this male gaze. THAT is the point at which said male gaze can fuck off and die in a fire, afaic.
But even then, with that most self-indulgent of dynamics, I think it's fair to say that slash - being a written medium concerned with the thoughts of characters as well as their actions - does function a little differently. The characters are subjects, as well as objects. The readers are more likely to identify with the characters emotionally, I suggest, than Joe Q Randomstraightbloke is to identify with the buxom, waxed and skinny pouting blondes with the long red nails who are cheerfully making out for the camera for his gratification.
I might be wrong on that one, I guess. And of course, in each case we're talking about projections of the observer's preconceptions and desires, and pandering to the observer's fantasy of how this kind of interaction should go down. But both objectification and identification are at play in slash - and I don't THINK that's so much the case with mainstream f/f porn that caters to the male gaze.
I maintain that slash isn't simply a matter of privileged straight women co-opting the gay male experience. Not least because many (most?) slashers of my acquaintance aren't straight. They're bi, or gay, or asexual. This leads me to posit that slash IS a wee bit more complex in nature and function than the ersatz lesbian porn so popular with straight guys, even if a large part of its popularity is down to the same simple voyeuristic impulse.
To be clear: I don't think slash (or original m/m fic penned by straight women) is about empowering teh gayz. I don't think slashers deserve a cookie for doing something positive for teh gay blokes; I don't think that most slashers of my acquaintance would claim that they're doing any such thing, but it's a notion I occasionally see bandied about, and it seems to be fairly far off the point. Yes, as a side-effect of stumbling across slash & liking it, people with previously unexamined homophobic attitudes may find those attitudes ameliorated, sure. But there are plenty of slashers who are wildly misogynistic in their writing too, and busy creating heteronormative scenarios with double the oglable manflesh for the price of one, and I just have a hard time seeing that stripe of storytelling as being in any way about actual gay people, or indeed actual men. In fact, honestly, I can't understand "hetsquick" in terms that don't include some measure of homophobia. (If you are squicked by depictions of heterosexual pairings, perhaps you could help me wrap my head around this one? Because I'm pretty much parsing it as "Ew! Girl parts!" which implies a revulsion of self and/or the possibility of finding girls attractive.)
Claiming that one can't be homophobic because one writes slash is much like my former coworker who thought she wasn't racist because she had the hots for black guys. (I will spare you descriptions of how luridly she objectified black men, and how consistently and unconsciously racist she regularly was towards Thais.) On the other hand, writing slash is not evidence of homophobia either, any more than being attracted to someone of a different ethnicity is evidence of racism. It just isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card, that's all.
Oftentimes (and this comes under the heading of 'badfic', afaic) slash doesn't make any effort to depict actual men at all, and actively feminises one (or both) of the fictional characters being depicted - more like yaoi. (I'm conscious that my comparative ignorance of the nuances of Japanese culture may colour my interpretation here; still, given that yaoi is apparently primarily written for and consumed by teenage girls, I'm assuming that it is more about this combination of objectification and identification, and not unduly concerned with accurately representing the sexuality or behaviour of actual gay men, any more than the curious faux!Western stuff in some manga is about trying to represent actual western history or experiences.)
Here I'm thinking of the kind of overtly heteronormative slash stories like that Clex one I mentioned the other day - but I understand it happens a lot in most all slash fandoms; there are slash writers who actively want to distort the characterisation and make one bloke "the girl". (My impression is that 'Sentinel' fandom got a lot of this? With Blair being shorter, long haired & more touchy-feely, whilst Jim was a big strapping alpha male type? But I think it probably crops up all over the place.) The appeal of this kind of story seems to be that it feeds into/reproduces the same kind of traditional heteronormative dynamics of traditional mainstream straight fiction, whilst serving up two hot men for the reader to ogle, rather than including a girl. In many ways, 'Twilight' reminds me of this, actually - Meyer is entirely unapologetic in her constant and blatant objectification of the blokes who fancy dear Bella, and is very much All About The Female Gaze when it comes to how sparkly and cream-your-pants hot Edward and Jacob are.
I'm not a big fan of the kind of slash that claims to be canon-complicit but still tries to shove two blokes into one being "the girl" and one "the guy", myself, because I'm not particularly keen on heteronormativity, and because I like my fanfiction to stay as in-character as possible even whilst being transformative - for me, that's the whole point of it being fanfiction in the first place. I'm interested in seeing those characters - reframed by new information that provides a different perspective on them, okay, but still recognisably themselves. But although from my pov it's badfic, and I avoid it, I still think this kind of slash is an interesting expression of female desire and autonomy, and I don't think it's a bad thing. In fact, in terms of controlling and fetishising the objects of desire, and turning the tables, I think it's a pretty good thing. Provided, that is, that the slashers in question are able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Fetishising actual gay people, and pushing your own desires onto them, is utterly creepy and crass behaviour whether you're a straight guy hassling attractive-to-you lesbians or a straight fangirl hassling attractive-to-you gay blokes. (Or even, God help them, straight actors who have played gay blokes, either on-screen or in your fanfic.) Female empowerment and owning your kink? Jolly good. Freaking out innocent bystanders and making them unwilling participants in your kink? Seriously not cricket, people.
(I hope it's clear that I'm not saying all slash pulls this heteronormative schtick. I'm saying that this is one of the many overlapping circles in the big Venn Diagram of What Slash Is.)
Actually, though, I think that at least as large a circle in this elaborate Venn diagram is that of performativity: the action of women writing slash pings me as being much more akin to gay guys performing a pastiche of femininity through drag. And like drag, although it IS arguably appropriating the experience of another group, and in some ways fairly shittily so (since the ones doing the appropriating are privileged in ways that the group being imitated are not), it's not really so much about trying to represent that group. It's performative, and it's actually commenting upon one's own experience and value system, and subverting some of the cultural expectations of one's own group. Drag can be misogynistic, just as slash can be homophobic - but it isn't fundamentally so. Instead, both slash and drag (is it only me calling to mind "sturm und drang" and "smash and grab" with this phrase?) borrow the surfaces and symbols of another group in order to take advantage of particular freedoms and privileges not enjoyed by one's own group. (Which is more than can be said for blackface and minstrel shows. Neither slash nor drag is primarily about belittling the group being imitated, even if it may not be an accurate representation of them - and even if individual iterations of slash or drag may in fact be offensively inaccurate and reveal deep seated bigotry.)
Actually, some slash pings me as functioning in much the same way that the TV show & spinoff movies for 'Sex in the City' provide a gay man's take on Candace Bushell's source text. ('Desperate Housewives' pings me similarly, although I like it a lot more.) Yes, it may be appropriation, and it may in some ways idealise and fetishise some aspects of these characters in the same way that drag does, but it's still trying to depict them as rounded and sympathetic individuals with whom the reader/viewer empathises. They're still supposed to be subjects as well as objects. (I know plenty of women who like or indeed love SITC, and who are happy to idealise & fetishise these same aspects of performative femininity; for me, Lindy West's review of SITC2 pretty much hit the nail on the head, and her description of it as "essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls" seemed pretty damn apt as a summary of the show - even if I disagreed with some of her conclusions about the characters. [Little as I like the show, calling the shaggadelic Samantha a prostitute strikes me as missing the point quite spectacularly, and needlessly reinforcing misogynistic gender role bullshit.] But I have no problem with either women or gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls and insanely expensive accessories, if that's their happy place. Just - don't tell me that's about female empowerment, any more than slash is about gay rights, 'kay?)
On a related note: for a while last year I experimented with pottering around in 'Second Life'. I made myself a rather charming female avatar with a penchant for steampunk, and wandered around the grid exploring for a bit. It was interesting (and I especially enjoyed hanging out at live poetry sessions and karaoke bars), and I can see how it could easily suck one in - I'll not be trying World of Warcraft, because if there was a narrative arc involved then I'd be in danger of never coming offline ever again. Anyway, after a while, feeling pissed off at having had my (short, female) avatar occasionally the victim of random sexual harassment/aggression from people wearing big, musclebound bloke avatars, I ended up making a new persona with an appropriately gender neutral name, for whom I created zillions of different avatars in various genders and species, and experimented in ways that one was treated differently on the grid based on whether one presented as male or female (or neither). Now THAT was interesting. I purposely didn't go around forming friendships, because I wasn't trying to hurt anyone, but I WAS interested in seeing how people treated one based upon appearance. And it was all a bit mind-boggling, given that people are perfectly well aware that the avatar does not reflect the real person behind it - that many many female avatars are actually RL men. (Easy enough to spot them, oftentimes, because they've generally got long hair, legs all the way up to their necks, boobs like watermelons, fugly high heels and abbreviated porn star clothes, and they're often claiming to be lesbians. Mmm-hmm. SURE you are, sweetie.)
I interviewed a few people anonymously about this, actually - guys who pass themselves off on the grid as women. The general consensus is that there are LOTS of them, variously presenting as straight and gay girls. When presenting as female, I was occasionally asked (by blokes propositioning me) if I was "a real girl" and it just cracked me up no end - because, what, typing back "yes" is going to safeguard them from inadvertently having virtual sex with a guy? When presenting as male, though, nobody ever doubted my gender. Which did strike me as quite funny.
One person who agreed to speak to me was a transwoman who isn't out in RL, and has no prospects of being able to live as female outwith Second Life. Another was a straight cis-gendered guy who has been 'living' as a lesbian on the grid ever since a friend asked him to help set up a business on the grid, but told him that he would have to assume a female identity since it was supposed to be an all-female environment. He apparently doesn't use his avatar for sexy tiems, but enjoys being able to dress her up in various different outfits (clothing options & accessories are WAY more varied for female avatars) and likes the relaxed and chatty conversations he has with other people when they think he's female. A lot of other straight guys with female avatars said they preferred to have an avatar they enjoyed looking at; some of them presented as lesbians in-world, others were perfectly content to have their avatars be straight girls, and to role play straight girls in sex scenes with male avatars. I know that I thoroughly enjoyed designing avatars I found attractive, and that I was both objectifying them and identifying with them. ...Actually, all this could easily be a massive post in its own right; the whole performative gender thing involved in these virtual worlds is fascinating, and I do think it has a lot of resonance and congruence with slash.
Anyway, point being that there are a number of different reasons why one might choose to write from the pov of someone of another gender. In virtual worlds, assuming a male identity allows one to step outside the whole misogyny-infused prescriptive gender-role palaver, which was its particular appeal to me. And I think that's true of slash too.
(Man, notwithstanding the fact that I am pretty damn thoroughly cisgendered, I would rather love the chance to try drag in RL at some point - but virtual world is way more viable, because I am five foot three on a good day, and my bosoms enter the room several minutes before I do. A convincing man I would not make. It's nice that I get to explore a little of that performativity of gender roles via podfic, writing and my stint in Second Life, though.)
One of the things people outside of fandom seem to latch onto when they write articles about slash (well, okay, mostly people are all "OMG BUTTSEX", but other than that) is that slash is women writing from the POV of men. As if this is somehow inherently transgressive and unaccountable. As if surely normal women would just be writing about, and empathising with, other women. As if we all want to be Meg Ryan characters, and watch 'Sex In The City', and should be bored by 'Inception' or 'Star Wars' - or at least, should simply fantasise about being saved by Luke Skywalker, or by Harry Potter, rather than having our own light sabres, our own magic wands. (Heh. Thank you, Mr Freud.)
But women readers and women viewers are perfectly accustomed to engaging with a narrative through a male gateway character. That's how we experience most of our texts in the first place. Little girls will read Harry Potter without a second's thought, and identify with Harry just as much as with Hermione; little boys are less likely to have read 'The Worst Witch' or 'Twilight'. Really, it shouldn't be so surprising, I think, that women are writing from the pov of the male heroes of the texts they love, rather than limiting themselves to the perspective of the (often marginalised) female characters. Why shouldn't we?
It would be disingenuous of me, though, to deny that a fair bit of the general sense of !!! is about the anal sex - not that all/most slash actually goes there, even, but that's still the first thing people think of, it seems. (As indeed the mechanics of sex seems to be the thing that freaked out straight people always get hung up on, when thinking about gayness.) Which is funny, when you think about it, since the mainstream porn industry is pretty much "buttsex yay!" So really, perhaps it's more a sense of shock at women being the givers, rather than receivers; at fanfiction as a kind of virtual pegging activity, where women bend their objects of desire into shape like pretzels, and give them a jolly good vicarious seeing to with a borrowed penis.
...I suppose that even the more heteronormative strands of slash are nonheteronormative in function, even if the particular fantasies they're depicting do feed into heteronormative templates.
You know, I would have argued that where slash is objectifying, it's about objectifying straight men. That re-imagining canonically heterosexual characters as gay is one way of dealing with unreconstructed patriarchal images of straight, cis-gendered white guys, rather than a way of fetishising gay men. And I think that IS true - but clearly, from the way that QaF fandom and Torchwood fandom etc objectify the crap out of canonically gay characters, that's not the whole story. Still, I do feel that there's nothing inherently dreadful about women getting a voyeuristic thrill from ogling two hot men making out, or men getting a voyeuristic thrill from ogling two hot women making out. I mean - really, so what? Big deal!
Me, I mostly like fanfic for storytelling and intertextuality. At the same time I think it provides a great sandbox for people (well, mostly women) to build their (our) own porn, exploring agency and desire in a space where nobody is actually being exploited or harmed - and I think that's awesome, regardless of whether or not it's all my cup of tea, and regardless of whether I think that prose or plot or characterisation makes something constitute badfic. And I'm not saying it follows that it must be badfic! I mean, hello, I've read lots of awesome kink - hell, I've written all manner of explicit and gratuitous nonsense, up to and including tentacle porn myself. I'm very fond of the Dean/Cas 'Secretary' fic mentioned above, damn it, and of the sex-in-a-church blasphemalicious one that preceded it. And of the utterly cracktastic crossdressing regency slash I committed for a prompt. Yay for women writing their own filthy porn, of whatever flavour.
I might balk at poor writing or poor characterisation (because these things are what I look for in fiction, be it pro or fan) but I don't have a problem with other people liking said fics because they're getting their bullet-proof kinks catered to, or working through their issues via slash. Each to their own. (I mean, I may disagree & think it's shite, but that doesn't mean I think they shouldn't be reading/writing it if it floats their boat.
) Sometimes it's not about literary merits or canonicity, and provided people aren't implicating innocent bystanders in their kinks, or fetishising actual gay people in RL, then I think Go Team. Let Your Freak Flag Fly.
Non-heterosexual slashers of various stripes, regardless of whether they themselves are attracted to men, often enjoy writing slash because it provides an opportunity to write romances which don't pigeonhole people on the basis of their gender. It provides a level playing field in which one can create more complex and interesting interpersonal dynamics, more elaborate power balances, more nuanced push-pulls of desire and control, all stemming from the individuals and how they connect, rather than preconceived ideas of how they should connect.
I don't mean to say that het fics can't do this. Just - there's this whole culture of heteronormative romance cliche which shapes and informs a lot of straight romance, both in the source texts and in fanfiction responses. And a lot of us want to actively eschew that. Over the past decade or so there have been a growing number of heterosexual pairings where the canonical relationships between colleagues or friends of different genders are being depicted in a more nuanced, less overtly heteronormative girl-and-boy manner. The term "hetslash" was bandied around for a while there in an effort to convey this kind of heterosexual pairing that wasn't founded on the standard power balance - where the two characters are interacting in canon primarily in a purposeful, srsbsns way, rather than because the woman is supposed to be the token love interest way.
So, yes, I 'ship some guys with other guys, and some girls with other girls, and some girls with some guys, and some girls with some guys AND girls, and some guys with some girls AND some guys...really, the key thing for me is that two characters interact in an interesting, sparky way. I'm not taking heterosexuality as an unquestioned default setting. (But, you know, I don't rule it out either.) This is a big strand of slash fandom too, I think: writing a pairing simply because those two people have great chemistry in the source text, and because there's no reason not to. Not because they're both guys or both girls, or one of each - just because those two people have great chemistry. I've talked a lot about slash being significant in various ways, but it would be a damn shame to lose sight of the fact that in a lot of fanfic, the main motivation in reading and writing is because those particular people have great chemistry. And especially for the nonheterosexual ficwriters and ficreaders, that's reason enough; we don't necessarily assume that someone is straight in RL or in fictional worlds, even if we've seen them in relationships with/flirting with the opposite sex. We know it's more complicated than that.
And, hell, if Joss Whedon and co can decide to write Willow into embracing her inner dyke after Oz and Xander (with precious little canonical lead-up beyond Vamp!Willow) then I sure as hell can't see why I shouldn't write Wesley, or Lorne, or Xander, or Spike, or Lilah, or Buffy (which, okay, Season 8 finally went there) embracing their inner gayness, when they all have plenty of suggestive backstory implying nonheterosexuality. Because PEOPLE DO THAT. They come out of the closet. Even after dating the opposite sex, or marrying them, or making babies with them. It is a normal thing that falls within the scope of "stuff that might happen," because we are not all straight.
Sometimes that's all it's about - sometimes slashers are equally content writing slash, femmeslash, het or gen, because they're aware that they live in a world where people come in a range of flavours, and their reading of canon reflects this.
These days there isn't the same dearth of nonheteronormative relationships in source texts that there used to be (Megan/Larry, Bones/Booth, Sarah Connor/Derek Reese, Zoe/Wash, Gwen/Rhys etc etc). There are lots more awesome women in my media these days than there used to be, and this makes me a happy bunny. Go Team Awesome Ladies! But since I favour SF/F and procedurals above sitcoms and relationshippy things, there are still a metric buttload more guys than women in the shows I watch. Sometimes their interactions are slashy as hell. Engaging with a source text whilst wearing slash goggles is tremendously good fun - playing at spot-the-subtext, and wondering what if, and (particularly if one isn't straight) enjoying getting to queer an overtly heterocentric narrative.
I like strong women in my texts and I hate misogyny in fanfic; I'll read straight pairings happily, and lesbian ones, and I'm thrilled to bits to be seeing so much asexual romance cropping up in Sherlock fandom. I'm really NOT just all about Any Two Hot (White) Guys, when it comes to my engagement with texts. But slash opens up fascinating new avenues for writing and thinking about canon, and it provides a tool for queering and challenging heteronormative texts. And because it's noncanonical, it inhabits that breathless will-they-won't-they USTy space that appeals to our inner romantic idiot (like 'Pride and Prejudice', or 'Moonlighting' in days of yore - or, God help us, 'Twilight' for the sparklepire-inclined). It is fun, damn it - and although islash as a genre encompasses some bloody awful writing and characterisation, it also encompasses a hell of a lot of stories that are clever and thought-provoking and DON'T make the baby Jesus cry.
Do I think it's okay to fetishise and objectify groups of people to which you don't belong? Yeah - not so much. Ick. Men are not, I think, accustomed to being on the receiving end of this kind of attention - and I can understand why they would find it distasteful and distressing. Having somebody you don't desire objectifying you, or people like you, is not particularly pleasant. As I think pretty much every woman who ever lived could attest. Because - well, hello there, entire history of Western art. (And probably everywhere else art, for that matter, but I'll stick to what I know.) And, okay, back in the day the male form was objectified at least as much if not more - but that was Quite Some Time Ago, my friends. There is nothing that any slashy kink meme can come up with that hasn't already been written or painted by men, as happening to women. Generally with the stamp of official approval, as part of a nation's religions or myths.
But equally, just because some guys are dickheads, and many of them (hell, most of them) can't present real women as subjects rather than objects, that doesn't mean I'd want no man to ever be allowed to write about women. Some of them get it right. Some people do successfully make that empathetic leap, and are able to write the Other successfully, with integrity and compassion. Some of them show us as people. I mean, yes, I'd rather have women artists succeeding (and I'd rather have LGBTQ artists being heard, and having their own voices), but there are plenty of male writers whose female characters are okay, or even good, or even wonderful. And however objectifying and one-sided the images of women in paint and ink and stone these past thousand years may have been, I wouldn't want them gone. I don't want them to be ALL there is - but I wouldn't be rid of it either, because even if these words and images often tell us more about men than they do about women, that doesn't make them worthless. Worth questioning, yes. Worth criticising, yes. But still, oftentimes, worth keeping.
So, yes, some slash idealises and actively misrepresents the realities of being gay, all handwaving and rainbow sparkles and hugs'n'puppies in situations where actual gay people would not be benefitting from the privileges that the writers portray (and indeed, in the case of genderswitch, there's a lot of fic that's appallingly clueless about gender and about being trans). Fair enough if you're setting your story in a SF/F setting where homophobia isn't an issue; if it's in the real world, it would behove you to ask questions about whether your characters would actually be able to breeze around being openly gay without fear of consequences. I've tended to just think of that kind of writing as badfic, and avoid it, but maybe it's worth calling out these tropes and flaws properly, and identifying why it is problematic, and why it's worth trying to do better. Fair enough. We can do that.
...eh, if I felt that slash was actually impacting upon the lives of LGBTQ people negatively, this would be a whole other kettle of fish. And if you can show me persuasively that it is - well, okay then. Time for a rethink. But for the moment, I really can't see slash shaping society in a way that is harmful to LGBTQ people - not even the crappiest of heteronormative yaoi-flavoured badfic. And I can see ways in which slash is actively empowering to the (gay, bi, trans, asexual, straight) women who read and write it (whilst itself being a fairly queer pursuit, given that it's mostly women creating romance & erotica to share with other women).
I don't have a problem with drag queens appropriating the signifiers of femininity. Or Shakespeare writing Juliet or Lady Macbeth, or Alexander McCall Smith writing Precious Ramotswe or Isabel Dalhousie. I quite frequently find men's attempts to write or perform female characters make me wince, when they're rife with stereotypes and misogynistic undercurrents - but then again, sometimes they do make that empathetic leap and get it right. (Conleth Hill blew me away in Stones In His Pockets, which was a two-hander in which each actor played about 8 different roles. He nailed the part of the American film starlet - made her human and particular, and not at all a stereotype or a pastiche. Just a person. Hell, even OTT charicatures like Tubbs in LoG can be surprisingly touching, come to that. ) I think that this is true of slash too: sometimes it isn't TRYING to portray actual gay men, any more than drag is trying to portray actual women; sometimes it thinks it is, but it's actually just portraying a bunch of unreflective stereotypes; sometimes slash tries in a stupid, half-assed way and the writers are oblivious to their own privileges, and the fact that these privileges aren't the province of the people they're writing about; sometimes slash tries and is pretty close to the mark; sometimes it tries and gets it brilliantly right.
TL;DR version: Slash is not just one thing.
*the exception to this being RPF AUs. I remain uncomfortable with RPF in general, but RPF AUs are, afaic, original fic in which we're invited to visualise various familiar faces playing various roles. I don't expect canon and characterisation really, because, you know - I don't know these people from Adam, and I don't follow what's going on with their lives. But if you want to tell me that the spy or the pirate or the Olympic ice skater is the spitting image of so-and-so, and stick the name of a famous person onto them to remind me, that's fine. It lives in a different bit of my brain from normal fanfic.
