Where No Man Has Gone Before

• Reply
• Report Abuse

Posted By: gitarslinger @ 05/07/2009 2:53:56 PM

• • Reply
  • Report Abuse

  Posted By: calicokat @ 05/07/2009 3:23:29 PM

  I do really appreciate your comment and think it's a great one, but they may have been complaining about the first paragraph which does slight exoticize foriegn countries where there are, at least in most of Europe and in Japan and South America, thousands of equally enthusiastic slash fans. It is somewhat inaccurate to suggest this is a U.S. (or even English) phenomenon, as I have talked to a number of fans from Portugal, Brazil, Japan, India, and the Pacific Islands over the years, and that's just in my experience.

  • • Reply
    • Report Abuse

    Posted By: gitarslinger @ 05/07/2009 4:00:24 PM

    Perhaps the phrasing was misleading. I mentioned countries "like the US where (etc)." That's true in many countries in the West, and some in the East, and was meant to be inclusive of all cultures where open male/male affection is repressed.
    
    Adding that individual fans in a country don't make for a cultural phenomenon, there being always individual exceptions to cultural standards (like me, for instance), I'm interested in fans from, as you say, India and the Pacific Islands. Is slash nearly as widespread there as in Western countries?
    
    My first reaction to all this is that there are at least a couple of wonderful research papers in it, from a cultural anthropological perspective in comparative traits of the primary cultures where slash is produced, to a cultural psychology perspective exploring why its producer base is largely made of up heterosexual females. On the latter, one of the commenters made a comparison to men enjoying lesbian porn; merely as a hunch, I would suspect that the reasons are not at all similar, that they are in fact quite unique phenomena.
    
    As to the fellow who saw cultural insensitivity in the perceived disinclusion of fans from other parts of the world, I can only suggest a closer reading of the language. "Primarily" a phenomenon, not "only." Countries "like" the US, not just the US. What is cultural sensitivity, after all, if we take the world at face value and fail to be curious and wonder about our differences? How do we differ; why do we differ? "Tolerance" is a fine thing to promote, but I like "interest" and "acceptance" even better.

    • • Reply
      • Report Abuse

      Posted By: cyberwench @ 05/07/2009 6:47:52 PM

      Finally, a good discussion on this! Regarding the point about the men enjoying lesbian porn comparison - I believe that this is actually borne out by the numbers. The last study I saw showed men and women who enjoyed porn/slash/etc. with same-sex partners of the opposite sex comprised almost exactly the same percentage of the population. While I'd love to think that the reasons are completely different, I'm afraid that may not be the case.

      • • Reply
        • Report Abuse

        Posted By: gitarslinger @ 05/07/2009 7:08:08 PM

        I'm not sure it's valid to toss porn and slash into the same barrel. Separating it out a bit, can you see men reading lesbian romances without sex scenes in the same numbers as women reading male/male romances without sex scenes? Do women watch male/male porn in the same numbers as men watching female/female porn? (It's probably better not to call it "lesbian" porn, because that's a distinct sub-genre aimed specifically at female viewers). If it turns out that when separated the romance is skewed towards women viewers, and the porn towards male viewers (or even if only one of the two is skewed) we may be looking at very different motivations. Can you recall where you ran across that study? It's an interesting topic.

        • • Reply
          • Report Abuse

          Posted By: gitarslinger @ 05/07/2009 7:13:51 PM

          I should clarify that my initial comment was based on the comparison by another commenter between men watching female/female porn and women reading and writing slash fiction, which, according to the article, is mostly based on romance and relationships rather than on sex. It certainly seems likely that the motivations for watching same-sex porn of the opposite sex are similar for men or women. Although I sometimes suspect that for men, it's often simply a matter of being able to watch lots of porn without having to look at a naked man. :-)

          • • Reply
            • Report Abuse

            Posted By: calicokat @ 05/07/2009 8:38:54 PM

            It's interesting, because I do know a lot of lesbians and bisexuals into slash. I'm a lesbian myself. I wish it wasn't so subjective on my part, but observationally I would agree that slash fic plays to women's love of romance. That isn't, of course, to say men don't enjoy a good romance--my friends are one professional romance writing persona and their husbands, one of them an ex-marine, used to publically get caught up in the occasional romance novel and weren't afraid to read it in the same room their other guy pals are kicking around Guitar Hero in. They rate the books high on entertainment value. And, I think if men were culturally "allowed" to read more romance more of them might kick it around.
            
            But, mostly what I've observed in the slash fandom is a love of romance and of the taboo. Slash involves a lot of men in positions where pursuing a homosexual realtionship may be comprimising to their careers or even their lives, sometimes because of homophobic society (which is addressed in some but not all cases), but also because the stories are made otherwise particularly dramatic! I think there is a level where some slash is about societal male repression roaring out in a torrent as the two lovers fall into love and/or bed together. (This is also why people don't bother to make it about "canon" pairings, if they've been denying their love or incapable of seeing it because of external forces (*cough*the writers*cough*) it's that much more dramatic. ;)
            
            At any rate, as a lesbian, I don't take "that" kind of interest in slash and it's not a part of my fantasies in a sexual sense. I eat the stuff up, and I'm happy to write down and dirty hot sex scenes into my own slash, for my readers, but I often skim the sex in the stories themselves. Even my friend who's more into boys has admitted to doing this, on occassion, because she wants to get to "the good stuff," and that's not always the sex. A lot of times it's the angst, the fallout, and/or the intimacy.

    • • Reply
      • Report Abuse

      Posted By: cyberwench @ 05/07/2009 6:42:46 PM

      Fantastic discussion! I believe, however that the comparison to men enjoying lesbian porn is borne out by the numbers - the last study I saw said that the percentage of male and female populations who enjoyed their opposite's same-sex porn/slash/etc. was almost exactly the same. So the roots may be quite similar, although I would love to think that they are different.