(SHIP FF SLASH) Re: This Ship stuff sounds like shojo

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 11668

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Simon Biber" <simon at b...> wrote:
                 
> I'm interested in discussing slash with you. If no-one else is,
> we could erhaps take it off-list? Nah, scratch that... off-list
> communications always dwindle away and there's never the chance
> for anyone else to join the conversation.

On the one hand, on-list means I can listen in. OTOH, off-list means 
not adding to list volume with stuff that gradually becomes OT.

> I am interested in slash as a gay man, so nothing to do with
> this phenomenon. I can see on one level why women might like
>  m/m, because many straight men are turned on by f/f action
> in porn. 

Have you read any HP slash? There is a whole egroup nameed hpslash, 
that I haven't joined because I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR MORE LISTS. I 
always wonder what real gay men think of our feminine fantasies of 
men who combine love with sex, struggle with their emotions, etc. On 
ffnet, A Boy's Own Camping Adventure by GrimSlasher was much praised 
as writing, but I felt doubt of its realism, so I asked several gay 
men I know to read it and tell me what they think. Unfortunately, the 
story makes no sense until after one has read Prisoner of Azkaban, 
and most of them weren't going to read *three* HP books just as 
preparation to read a self-published story. The ones who did read 
BOCA gave me non-committal answers...

I was making some generalizations, and realised that it is very 
difficult to generalise when the term 'slash' includes any kind of 
same-sex sex acts or attraction. There are stories labelled 'slash' 
in which the sex acts are rape. I am NOT INTERESTED in rape stories 
intended to be sexually arousing. It seems to me that stories about 
rape which aren't pornography and bodice-rippers are stories about 
the victim needing psychological counselling and the perpetrator 
being hunted down and punished by law enforcement or free-lance 
avengers. My generalizations were about fun sex and love sex, not 
acts of violence. My generalizations relate to the phrase above: 
'pornography and bodice rippers', the similarity and difference 
between straight men liking f/f porn and straight women liking m/m 
slash. But why do so many gay women like m/m slash?

> I like my objects to be proper men, not effeminate nancies (j/k).

I have been told that that is a very Modern, Western attitude (Modern 
meaning post-Industrial Revolution and Western meaning not Third 
World), that men never thought of having homosexual relationships in 
a context of equality and even friendship until the larger 
(heterosexual, sorry) culture invented the new idea of men and women 
having relationships in a context of equality and even friendship. I 
have read Arthur Evans' edition of THE BACCHAE and its notes, so I 
know that the above theory depends on how one chooses to read scanty 
and unclear evidence.