buggery | oh, what the heck. I stayed quiet about the fanhandling kerfuffle...

oh, what the heck. I stayed quiet about the fanhandling kerfuffle...

For some reason or another, they would read a slash fic or two. They wouldn't like it. But, either because a friend of theirs wrote it or an author they liked did, they'd keep reading it. And, eventually, they'd learn to like it. They would begin reading solely slash. They would eventually become almost anti-shippers of Spuffy (and any other het pairings) and would be 'converted' entirely to slash. It wasn't their original taste, but they acquired it over time, and came to prefer it over what they'd originally enjoyed. The same was true for writers; almost everyone I read who stopped writing Spuffy didn't go for another het pairing, but went straight to slash.

Ladies, gentlemen, and other denizens of my friends list, meet

kantayra and her theory of How Spuffy Traumatized Fandom and Made Fans Gay For Slash.

Lucy was admirably diplomatic: "You seem to have constructed a very elaborate theory here that is hinged on one very simple thing: you don't get slash."

I went a different route: "Congratulations. You have rooted out yet another sub-plot of The Homosexual Agenda. And soon enough we will RECRUIT YOU TOO." And then I appended a "/sarcasm" tag to the end of my comment, and frankly I'm worried that the post's author still may not get it, given the track record displayed just in this post. (Said post goes on and on and on, BTW, without making much if any more sense.)

It almost disturbs me more that so many of the comments are along the lines of "ZOMG you're so analytical I never thought of that" than that anybody would concoct a theory like this to begin with.

Did WAR GAMES turn anybody into a slasher? How about IDENTITY CRISIS, with its message of heterosexual relationships equalling doom? Or maybe it happened back during BRUCE WAYNE: MURDERER?

But wait, slash has been around for a long time. How did the first slashers get traumatised into it? Maybe it was seeing Kirk lose his space-babe-of-the-week week after week...

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ZOMG you're so brilliant I never would have thought of the time travel explanation! That makes so much sense.

I use my Oracle icon because you remind me of her being so heroically brave to get herself shot and paralysed so she could be Oracle for all the other heroes.

I don't think the people reading this have the life experience necessary to realize just how *damaging* this line of thinking is.

The Queer Agenda model has caused more grief, injury and death in the community than can be imagined, as you and I well know. Applying it to slashfic just perpetuates this stereotype in a place where it last needs it.

The OP seems more confused than malicious, which I why I didn't rip into her. Still, it hurts me to see this myth take on a new and unwelcome life in the guise of fic meta.

Just ... ew.

Thanks for commiserating, both here and on the original post.

She certainly did seem confused. Man, my head hurt so much reading that post I had to stop after every couple of paragraphs.

She never came right out and said 'Agenda' and yet she'd clearly been influenced by that model... the paragraph I picked on to quote reads like a fannish-language paraphrase of something Pat Robertson's speechwriters came up with. Which is both why I picked on it and why it impelled me to say something.

The fact that

kantayra et al. don't grasp the dangerousness of the idea they've put forth and praised doesn't make them less dangerous -- if anything, it makes them more so.

::pulls nice safe cosy SANE corner of fandom round self::

It reminds me of a recent post on James Dobson's website:

He (dad) needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

And this will *encourage the son to be heterosexual*!!!

So, the best way to avoid getting into slash would be reading a lot of slash that really emphasizes the penis.

He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

And right there level with the boy's face. And doing what penises naturally do in the shower, one expects. Perhaps 'level' was a poor choice of term.

Well, at least we understand something about why Dobson turned out the way he did...

I have a cartoon in my office of two people at a cocktail party, and one is saying to the other, "I was reading somewhere that people are stupid."

It's interesting, because I'm supposed to do a big presentation on media fandom at my school this fall (for other faculty, not students; I'm so not ready to go there yet), and of course I'll have to discuss slash. And one of the things I keep coming back to are all the elaborate explanations for Why We Do That Freaky Shit. And really, I think slashers en masse have kind of hit a wall with it. We like it, and why does there need to be more of an explanation?

I have a cartoon in my office of two people at a cocktail party, and one is saying to the other, "I was reading somewhere that people are stupid."

It's funny because it's true.

Honestly, I have a hard time understanding why people would write het fanfiction -- not an occasional m/f story in a mixed oeuvre, especially in a fandom like DC comics where so many of us wear all three hats and well, but a dedication to turning out a steady stream of hetfic that's all variants on the same couple or handful of couples. The idea of writing gen fanfic exclusively makes more sense to me, personally.

But you don't see me posting theories that cast aspersions on why other fans write or read mainly or exclusively het-pairing stories. I just figure it's one of those difference-of-opinion things like how some people prefer monogamy or think hot fudge tastes good on ice cream.

So are you going to address the theories of What Makes Those People Write That for your presentation, or focus on other things?

So are you going to address the theories of What Makes Those People Write That for your presentation, or focus on other things?

As currently planned, it's basically an hour of "here's what media fandom is" and an hour of "here's the kind of academic stuff that gets written on it/topics that are/can be explored." I think I'll probably mention the theories, but also bring up that fandom itself is kind of in a "'cause we like it" phase. Actually, one thing I really want to address is the difference between the scholar-fan and the outside scholar, and how so much outside scholarship is still kind of in the "what's up with that?" phase, while scholar-fans are getting into really interesting, meaty stuff.

Cool. It's true, we fen-in-the-know have such interesting meta and analyses and discussions, so often, on so many aspects of what we do; and then when there's an occasional article by some outsider about any aspect of slash, it seems like they almost invariably get hung up on the 'how curious, let's examine how this phenomenon might have come to be' rather than looking at what we're doing now.

I hope you'll post about the presentation when the time comes. Mmm, academia.

Honestly, I have a hard time understanding why people would write het fanfiction -- not an occasional m/f story in a mixed oeuvre, especially in a fandom like DC comics where so many of us wear all three hats and well, but a dedication to turning out a steady stream of hetfic that's all variants on the same couple or handful of couples. The idea of writing gen fanfic exclusively makes more sense to me, personally.

I found this interesting. Of course I'm on my way out of town for a night. But anyway.

I'd like to find this out, find out why the het shippers ship their pairings of choice, if it is a case of "wanting the characters like them" as is sometimes cited for slash, or if it's the couples that *do* ping for them are het for whatever reason, again much as many slashers have cited, or if it's simply that it's about the erotic aspect and for them it's het sex that does it, or if it's just that their OTPs are het. Not to mention if it is different for them if they write canon pairings or UST pairings or "never met but why *not*?" pairings.

*ponders* I think I'm looking for het meta and I don't think there is much of it out there beyond the

ship_manifesto type posts and occasional links on things like

metafandom Which is interesting, because even though there is sometimes more reason to explain - even if only for oneself - why we like slash pairings, one would think there was more out there for het fic.

I'm afraid I can't help - I do everything once, twice if I like it, as far as writing goes.

I've thought about it a little more -- and I do mean a *little* -- and actually I guess it does make sense. Because if hetsex is what pings for you, what pushes your buttons, why should you be stuck with Harlequin romances or Penthouse Forum as your only alternatives?

That's a good point. And also, when you think about it, if it's the *pairing* that pings, even if it's canon, you're not going to find what you want in official sources 99% of the time. Canon tends to screw up het more than slash in that respect - slash isn't likely to be botched onscreen like het can be.

That is just bizarre. I wonder what the reverse theory would be,

I mean, I started out reading gen and slash (in TS and DS), and then got "corrupted" into reading het, and these days I'll read everything, and my best queer intention to avoid the heterosexual norm are all shot to hell. Ruined I tell you. There I was as a teenager baby dyke, happily reading lesbian mystery novels with lots of gratuitous sex, valiantly avoiding all heterosexual romance stories, and then I came into online fandom, which through the intermediate step of m/m romance got me to succumb to the evil het-ickyness... And I didn't even notice any trauma, so insidious was it. *g*

::snickering::

Amusingly enough, I might have become an obverse example for

kantayra's theory, if things had gone just a little differently. I had avoided both the BtVS show and its attendant fandom for years, thinking it would have little if anything to appeal to me (and having now seen the early seasons in repeats, I was right). Then a friend pimped Willow/Tara at me, and I sat up and said, 'Well, why didn't you tell me that before?' and tuned in.

Just in time for the last few episodes of season five.

So I came for the canonical lesbians, but I stayed -- and I even stayed past the end of BtVS into the final season of AtS, despite an intense disinterest in Angel himself, Cordy, Wesley, Harmony and most of the other regular cast -- for the Spuffy. It was a disorienting experience for me, because I'd been a slash fan since the mid-90s when I discovered slash online, and though I'd been a fan in the more general sense (a Trekkie initially and still, with a great many other media layered on afterwards after TOS ended) for years before then, I'd never been all about one or another 'ship in any of the other shows, films or books that made my fannish heart go pitter-pat. But I really was tuning in every week much more for the Spike/Buffy relationship than for any of the other characters, though I was fond of many of them for other reasons.

I did actually look for Spuffy fanfiction online, and found and read some, but... it failed to move me. None of it seemed to quite hit the button that what I was seeing on-screen did.

So I never went through the full transformation-of-fannishness-orientation -- does anyone, I wonder, in either direction? -- and when other fandoms *did* grab my pleasure centers with well-written fic, I went there.

I don't have many comics-based het 'ships -- though two of them, Roy/Grace and (sort-of het) Indigo/Shift, are enshrined in my icon there. Recently, Te has turned me into a CSA!verse Tim/Steph 'shipper. (In addition to my 6794 other DCU OTPs.) Maybe we should be trying to unravel her cunning plan -- or Judd Winick's in giving us canonical pairings that can interest slashers...

So I never went through the full transformation-of-fannishness-orientation -- does anyone, I wonder, in either direction?

Not that I have any empirical data (then again, who needs data to posit fannish theories? *g*), but I have a hard time to imagine that such preference transformations from het to slash or vice versa are permanent across a succession of fandoms. I mean, there are people who only like slash or only like het (and probably some who just prefer gen as well), but I think most people who are open to liking both kinds of fanfic will keep reading both, if to different degrees, just like people who go from completely mono-fannish to multiple fandoms, rarely go back to being *strictly* mono-fannish. Even if they may have a main major fandom as a focus again, usually people then still seem to be open to read in different and/or former fandoms under certain circumstances, like if a favorite author wrote something. I've seen in TS that sometimes people went from liking gen to liking gen and slash to reading just slash, and finally felt that gen didn't quite work for them anymore, but that was more that they were new to slash and really looking for things in gen, like certain h/c scenarios, that were better met by slash.

Not that some gen TS really seems all that gen if you look at it from a cross-fandom perspective. And I don't just mean that half the time people looking for stories they vaguely remembered (myself included) couldn't recall whether something was gen or slash. I mean, at its most extreme, I have read "gen" (as per the author's label) TS stories in which they showered together and masturbated each other, as well as "gen" TS stories in which they had anal sex in bizarre "bonding" situations. I never really understood why some writers labeled that kind of story "gen", and my first assumption that the authors had some weird reluctance to just call their stuff slash didn't work out, since some of those same writers also posted other stories to their sites in a slash section. Well in some respects TS fandom had truly weird quirks. *shrug*

I think most often when others point to some fan as having started in het (or gen) and then was 'converted' to slash, more likely what happened was that the fan in question simply *discovered* slash, and it was (as it is for many of us) something she (she as in the gender-neutral pronoun for fen, there) had been yearning for for years without having a name to put to it.

I have read "gen" (as per the author's label) TS stories in which they showered together and masturbated each other, as well as "gen" TS stories in which they had anal sex in bizarre "bonding" situations.

I... that is not gen. I'm sorry. The closest you get to that kind of m/m sexual contact without it crossing out of gen-land is... uh, Deliverance. But yeah, there really were some profoundly weird terminology quirks in TS fandom, insofar as I know from my brief lurking round the edges.

I actually saw a theory elsewhere on comments about this assertion that something about B/S really appealed to people who like or would like slash. Something about the relationship played out pinged for people who more broadly would/did prefer m/m to m/f. I have no idea how true that is (I'm not sure how I feel about the "queerhet" assertion), but it doesn't seem to be totally out there.

Innnteresting. Do send me the link if you should come across the thread(s) in question again...

This. Is exactly why Buffy fandom scares the hell out of me.

You mean this is *normal* there? Oh, Dru. Come to the shiny four-colour world of comics.

Incredibly tempting, but I just...don't get to my local independent comic bookstore enough.

Mostly 'cos when I do go, I spend so much money the clerks whistle and wish they could drop balloons from the ceiling to celebrate.

Have high-speed access, can torrent?

Yeah, that'd be me above.

Well, not in *my* echo chamber, it's not.

But that's why I *have* a fandom echo chamber, especially WRT BtVS/AtS.

One too many crazy people made my brain hurt and made me get snarly. And I rarely get snarly.

Yes. Yes, I can be the first to admit it:

*stands up bravely, clears throat* My name is Zeelee, and Bill Willingham's run on ROBIN turned me into a slasher.

...

In all seriousnes, if I see Veronica/Logan compared to Spike/Buffy one more time I may have to go out and kill small defenseless animals.

Bill Willingham's [sic] run on ROBIN turned me into a slasher.

Nonsense. If anyone had come to us that way, that would mean that something good had come of Willinghamfucktard's desecration of the title. And, since Dan Didio is infallible, the universe would end (all due props to Kevin Smith for originating Dogma-logic cosmology).

I think I'm glad I know even less about VM than I do about HP.

Nooooo. People keep saying that, but it's such a wonderful show! With lovely, violent slashy boys and teenagers that are *more* fucked-up than the DCU kids! Sadly, it just has a lot of really, really moronic fans. *sigh*

Willinghamfucktard made me write Bruce/Tim. Other than that, I got nothin'.

...Yeah, I got nothin' either.

(deleted comment)

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I'd still rather watch Chuck Dixon beat the snot out of Willinghamfucktard than do any violence to him myself. And not simply because I'm a pacifist (though there's that); there's a certain poetry to the notion.

Nooo, I got turned on to slash because someone was all, "come on guys, help me out, if I recruit one more I get a toaster," and I was all, "well,... maybe if you occasionally share the toast?" It's a sad and sordid tale.

The other bizarre thing in her post is I think she makes the assertion that the reason women write het is because they can fantasize about being with the male, and if they write slash they can't because they've turned him gay. [headhurty]

I keep *meaning* to share the toast. Honest.

She did seem to be saying something to the effect of, if the characters are in a m/m relationship there's no room for her, or that she wouldn't fit because her anatomy's wrong, or some such. I'm not sure she means either that she's identifying as the female character in het, or that she edits the actual character out and inserts herself, but in any case I don't know of anyone, male, female or otherwise, who says they read slash based on that kind of 'reasoning.'

But wait, slash has been around for a long time. How did the first slashers get traumatised into it? Maybe it was seeing Kirk lose his space-babe-of-the-week week after week...

Because we took nothing at all from the Greeks.

I was watching ye olde Star Trek this morn too. Ah, Kirk totally had it for Spock. And his ship.

And Spock on his ship.

...

Sorry, I was lost in the mental image. We were talking about Batman here?

(Srsly, I thought your point was very well put.)

70s Porn Star Buddha says: Pon farr, the ancient Vulcan art of getting your beloved to fight for you by making him believe there is another.

Oh. My. God.

Spock is a genius!

:-0 This is the gaping mouth of WTF!

I had to stop reading shortly after her Good Boy vs. Bad Boy examples, because the illogic made me choke.

I’m trying to come up with some kind of well structured argument, but all I end up with is picking up stray sentences, waving them around, and shouting, “What the hell is this?

Like this: In fact, some of these people turned into those batshit slash fans. You know the ones. The ones who say that heterosexual sex is wrong and icky, and real romance only happens with gay relationships. Yet these people claim themselves to be heterosexual women! What. The. Hell? o.O

Indeed. Has anyone met such a person? Because it’s entirely possible that I’m a cloistered slasher who just hasn’t had the right world experiences. But I doubt it.

Or: these people had been traumatized by the Spuffy ship.

Whoa. Taking fandom way to seriously.

Or any sentence with the word “convert” in it.

Actually, that attitude does exist in certain slash circles, but generally the older the writers/readers involved get the less they adhere to that. But hey, if Plato said something similar, it must be true. :D

Well, that's what I get for making assumptions based on the people I hang around.

*Bows to your superior knowledge*

And I never argue with Plato. Damn gadfly makes my head hurt.

I got nothin'. Trying to find sense in that post isn't only, or even mostly, complicated by the way the 'argument' wandered all over the place.

Oops. I've been a slasher since I was eight. Damn that Trojan War and its pretty men in skirts! Those pretty men who were in love with other men!

*shakes puny fist*

So, yes. If you count reading the Iliad as trauma, then I was traumatised. Maybe it was even the Achilles/Briseis that turned me off het forver! Except that it, you know, didn't.

I admire your self restraint. I was rolling my eyes so hard they were about to get lost and rattle forever inside my empty skull.

Do you realise what this means?

Homer caused the decline of Western civilisation by writing the Illiad!

And let's not even get into the Odyssey.

It's the child of the mindset that gave us the comics code, to my eyes.

Damn, I forget how insane my first fandom can be outside my nice little personal comfort zone.

It's the child of the mindset that gave us the comics code, to my eyes.

Did Wertham come right out and say that comics were going to turn good American boys homosexual? Or did he just *hint* at it?

You're right, though. Ugh.

I-- Just-- That-- She--

::headdesk::

I have a new, all-purpose excuse: "Spuffy made me do it. No, really."

Her whole argument makes my head hurt, but especially what she and a lot of commenters said/implied: "I associate with people like me, therefore everyone is like me"?

Hell, you know all this, and said it more articulately than I can. Just adding my confusion to the pot. ::sigh:: (And didn't Spike/Buffy turn up on the show because there was so much fan support/writing for it? Wait, that might be logical. Nevermind.)

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oh, what the heck. I stayed quiet about the fanhandling kerfuffle...

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