A Crash Course In Slash
Any person of a male persuasion who has achieved a certain amount of celebrity past, oh, 2005 or so should expect to have slash written about them. If they didn’t expect it, they haven’t been paying attention! The quiet, guilty swaps of Kirk/Spock slash in the 1970s are no longer clandestine. Authors of original works who also wrote slash (like me) don’t have to worry anymore that if someone connects the slash with the “pro” author, their career will be ruined. And folks from all ways of life who enjoy imagining musician X sucking off tour manager Y can find people of a similar persuasion with nothing more clandestine than a Google search.
Whether this changes how people relate to celebrities is something fun to ask and hard to answer. Certainly it leaves fewer people in the “I’m sure I’m the only one who fantasizes about Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom helping each other out of those pirate costume” boat, and more than one slasher has voiced the fear that if they ever meet their subject, they won’t be able to think of anything to say besides Hi! I’ve written porn about you! But logic suggests that slash communities probably draw more like-minded people together than they “create” more slashers to begin with, and anything that makes people feel less alone or marginalized in their sexual fantasies is probably a good thing.
In many ways, slash is a kind of elaboration on the typical fan fantasy about a celebrity, only instead of inserting ourselves into the celebrity’s love life, we insert some other hottie. Sometimes it’s less an exploration of sexuality and more one of relating; how would these two people get along? What problems would their respective careers cause them? Slash fiction often straddles the line between outright sexual fantasy and sheer authorial bliss — characters your readers already know and would love to read doing the most mundane of things. For many people, slash is a way to do the fun part of writing with none of the heavy lifting, and the sex is almost (or completely) secondary. It’s not a fan creation that’s easily pigeonholed!
Whether this changes how people relate to celebrities is something fun to ask and hard to answer. Certainly it leaves fewer people in the “I’m sure I’m the only one who fantasizes about Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom helping each other out of those pirate costume” boat, and more than one slasher has voiced the fear that if they ever meet their subject, they won’t be able to think of anything to say besides Hi! I’ve written porn about you! But logic suggests that slash communities probably draw more like-minded people together than they “create” more slashers to begin with, and anything that makes people feel less alone or marginalized in their sexual fantasies is probably a good thing.
In many ways, slash is a kind of elaboration on the typical fan fantasy about a celebrity, only instead of inserting ourselves into the celebrity’s love life, we insert some other hottie. Sometimes it’s less an exploration of sexuality and more one of relating; how would these two people get along? What problems would their respective careers cause them? Slash fiction often straddles the line between outright sexual fantasy and sheer authorial bliss — characters your readers already know and would love to read doing the most mundane of things. For many people, slash is a way to do the fun part of writing with none of the heavy lifting, and the sex is almost (or completely) secondary. It’s not a fan creation that’s easily pigeonholed!
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