Slash Fic: Just Me and the Boys

Okay, I must confess that I started this entirely other website just to write an entry about slash fic. How much do I love slash fic? It's positively indecent. Well, I'm a true believer in all the many many permutations and complexities of human sexuality, so I won't judge myself on this one. But lately I've been trying to make sense of my complete obsession with this romantic fan fiction with a gay love story at the center. Written mostly by, I believe, women, and definitely read by women. In my case, given my Snape proclivity, in my spare time I've gone through quite an amount of the Harry Potter stuff.

I have to say first that I began by surreptitiously taking a look at the heterosexual Severus writing--really Byronic heroish, standard stuff (much of it beautifully written, though, I must say), weeping and gnashing of teeth and a lot of girlish yearning and chilly reception from the Potions Master, culminating in bodice-ripping, tearing off of cloaks and waistcoats, and finally hot sex on the Potions classroom desk...eh, old hat.

But the gay stories were immediately of interest to me. Let me say that there's a ton of them out there. I mean a TON. REAMS of it. Web site after web site, page after page, devoted especially to the erotic romantic entanglements of Severus and Remus. Everybody and their sister and their sister's sister-in-law appears to be writing these. Anyway, these stories are very romantic (the lead-up to the sex is logical and has narrative flow and character development) and VERY graphic. Which brings me to my question: why do I (and apparently many other women) find these gay sex narratives so appealing? In fact, much more appealing than heterosexual written porn?

A first obvious and rather disappointing explanation is that this sort of porn is safe. I mean, women are generally not realized as erotic beings in these stories, so that a female reader can be a bystander of sorts; there's no participation possible even in imagination, and therefore no pressure even imaginary. A gay Severus and a gay Remus just wouldn't be interested in me, LOL! But I didn't like this idea, though--it struck me as too simplistic.

These stories, at least some of them, tend to have a violence to their eroticism (although, even in the heterosexual Snape pieces, there's quite a bit of S & M, some of it really savage, far beyond a humble spanking. That just makes good sense in the context of that character, if I do say so). I don't know if this has to do with a womanly (girlish?) perception of gay sex? Is it a weird way of romanticizing something we're not privy to? Is it accurate? I don't know. But this brings me around to the idea that I like the speculative nature of these romances. The mystery of it, that it's something I can't really ever know about. So being allowed to peek in the imaginary window as it were, on an intimate scene and see not just acts but be given insight into feelings, is an adventure. The fact that these men's emotions are completely fake, and in fact generated by women, is almost beside the point. It's a way of playing pretend, a really super exotic pretend that would be completely off-limits otherwise.

Or maybe, because I happen to like boys like that, it's fun to read about them.