Young women and slash fiction
An email from a reader, Anna S, on the genre’s link with trans identification
In this issue, I’m sharing (with permission) an edited version of an email I received from a reader, Anna S, who has a lot to say about the impact of slash fiction on young women over the years. Enjoy!
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Fandoms are a form of escapism for women: free, self-regulating places with their own hierarchy and rules. They enable you to appreciate the creativity of ordinary people, some of whom write at least as well as professionals. It fascinates me how much people – well, let’s be honest, women – are willing to do for free: to create, write, edit and read, simply for the sake of their passion.
Fan fiction was my tool for coping with hard times for more than 16 years and it worked like a charm. I don’t mean just reading erotica when I say that: I mean reading the whole story. And I also don’t mean that I read it every day or even every week. For most readers it’s occasional, like reading books.
Slash fan fiction is like Fight Club: tons of women read it, many write it, but no one talks about it in real life. The majority of consumers are straight or bi-curious women, who are open to the idea of homosexual relationships in theory but would prefer to be in a relationship with an opposite sex in real life. You’ve seen the numbers of kudos under stories – there are millions. I once stumbled across an Instagram post discussing Drarry (Draco/Harry), and a lot of young women from [my country] were recommending their favourite fics in the comments. This is rare, because Instagram is mostly personal blogs. I clicked on some profiles and you would never believe how “normal” they were. Married, no signs of depression, no blue hair.
Regarding whether the gay characters are women in disguise, I’d say it’s more like how the women see ideal people in relationships. Not merely the ideal image of men or women: an idealised image of both. Men in fanfics are more open about their feelings, and they’re not looked down on for being the side that “surrenders” by taking the penis, as so often happens with women in real life, in books and films – and also in porn.
Women want to be seen as equals in relationships, without having to be the weak recipient of male sexuality. When one character in a slash fic is the bottom, that is compensated for by them being otherwise equally dominant to the top. Being the recipient isn’t read as something humiliating that they have to do, but as a sacrifice for love, which brings a whole new level of appreciation from their partner.
Fics with more realistic male characters, and not flamboyantly gay, are regarded as of higher quality. The point of slash isn’t to make men feminine. It differs from gay porn in that porn is stereotypical, whereas fan fiction makes little tweaks to both male and female nature, so that the characters can experience relationships without experiencing gender roles as a burden.
For example, when two characters in a slash fiction live together, they are often described in domestic comfort, where one of them often cooks for the other, and the other one really appreciates it, more than if that was done by a female character. By the way, food is a sign of love or sexual desire across many fandoms, and in some there are even code systems, like tea is the code of gay relationships in the Sherlock Holmes fandom.
It’s a form of sexual escapism. Some of the readers and writers would like to be “taken with passion”, to feel truly desired. But a woman who does this in real life may feel submissive and humiliated. So she projects it onto a male character and it’s not demeaning any more, because he’s a man and does only what he wants. And afterwards he goes back to his normal life without negative consequences for having accepted another man.
The idea that you no longer will be perceived as surrendering, that no one will take advantage of you after fulfilling your sexual desires: that’s very attractive. And the attraction can be increased by having experienced trauma, having been sexually assaulted or just feeling uncomfortable with yourself as you go through puberty. I think slash fiction is natural anywhere women are perceived as unequal in sexual dynamics and domestic life.
The sexual experiences of girls and young women are directly affected by fan fiction, and I’m not going to say that’s always a bad thing. It’s an alternative to porn, for a start. It’s true that gagging and slapping and so on are crossing over from porn, but it’s still less hardcore than visual pornography. I think the hardcore, porn-influenced stuff is mostly written for shock value and to stand out from the crowd. I’ve read thousands of slash fics and the sex scenes are all pretty similar. Let’s face it, it’s because the writers are female and can’t experience gay male sex. So when they write penetration scenes, they copy each other. For the longest time it was an echo chamber of vanilla gay sex, but over time some writers started to project their own desires onto the characters and things became more diverse.
I made a lot of friends from different countries (like India or Iran) reading slash on Tumblr. Slash is a global phenomenon: the trans phenomenon really is “brought in from the West”, but this fascination with homoeroticism appears naturally.
But as time passed, and fandoms evolved, it became shameful to be an active member of a slash fandom while being straight. As Tumblr grew, more and more women were starting to identify as queer and transmitting the narrative that it’s disgusting to be a straight female and fetishise gay men that way. I don’t know where this moral crusade originated, probably at the same time as all the other virtue-signalling movements. And, I admit that it’s not nice to fetishise gay men, but for the shippers [authors and fans who like to imagine a particular relationship that’s not in “canon” – the original source material] it’s not perceived as a fetish.
That sounds like an excuse, I know, but it’s more like a combination of idealisation, projection, sublimation and coping. Older women just read stuff and go back to work: those who are not a part of a fandom or community can freely consume fan fiction – just go to Archive of our Own, read what you want, leave a comment if you like it – no pressure.
Speaking for myself, I would not enjoy just watching gay porn. I enjoy reading and diving into the story, being invested in it. If that story results in erotica, the payoff is only worth it if you’re emotionally invested in it. But a lot of people would say that I’m a bad “cis straight woman” who gets off on homoerotica and tries to “appopriate” the slash phenomenon by erasing “queer kids” who consume slash.
So this is a subculture that shames you into “being queer or else you’re a fetishist”. If you want to be an active part of the fandom you’re pushed to be part of the queer gang (or even become trans in the case of teenage girls). More and more girls started to feel pressure to identify as at least bi, in order to stay in the fandom and continue to read and write fan fiction.
They have energy and passion that they’re looking to put into something; they think they’ve found themselves. It’s that sweet niche where you can be special and fight with the world, when nobody understands you. “Oh, I’m not like other girls; I’m actually a twink.”
The previous generation of slash consumers had a stable self-understanding and no delusions about real-life dynamics between the two sexes. I personally think that a lot of women who consumed this content established more equal relationships with their male partners as a result, shaping their lives and their men into something more like these ideal m/m relationships. Their sex lives too, were less one-sided and more satisfying.
But when the new wave of young girls came in via Tumblr, their brains were completely fried in that echo chamber of delusion. Girls mature earlier and the difference in emotional intelligence between males and females is, I think, at its highest in the early teenage years. These girls were diving deeply into slash fiction, thinking themselves into idealised imaginary relationships between men written by women, and thinking that’s how gay men are in real life.
The trans movement as we know it was born and raised on Tumblr in the late 2000s and early 2010s. TikTok and Insta pushed it further and accelerated it, but it originated on Tumblr. It was a huge, hive-minded, addictive and comforting platform where all the fandoms coexisted. Thousands of people in each fandom who shared the same interests, sense of humour and values, who were very creative and supported each other, who were in the same age range (14 to late 20s). Basically, the core audience of every television show, book or film of that era with interesting male leads.
I was on Tumblr 24/7 when I was 16, and in 2009 I was just finishing high school when I encountered the first blogs where girls were talking about top surgeries. It was very rare at the time, but the whole thing snowballed right before my eyes. Before the Tumblr era, there were, of course, tendencies of women and girls fantasising about being gay men in early fan fiction. But back then it was never about acting on the idea of transitioning. There were conventions and cosplays and online role-playing games. But only later with Tumblr did it start to be about real surgeries and hormones.
I remember my shock when I first saw a blog post with someone’s post-top-surgery photos. For context, the idea of a trans person wasn’t shocking to me at all because I had one as a classmate – a girl who presented herself as a boy to the point that teachers mistook her for male; she now lives as a man. By 2010 or so there were already posts where girls were sharing tips on testosterone use and asking others in the community to chip in for their surgery. If you ever interview people who transitioned between 2009 and 2017, ask them if they were active on Tumblr and if they were reading or creating fan fiction.
So slash had perfectly logical psychological origins, but it was picked up and corrupted by gender clinics, the pharma companies and more aggressive and fast-paced media like TikTok. The result was an extremist movement that is sterilising a generation of healthy people. And it’s been exploited by political movements – on both sides of the political spectrum. In Russia, Hungary and other countries it’s a great propaganda tool for portraying Western societies as degrading enemies. It could be resolved if we’d relax on the gender stereotypes, but instead we’re going in precisely the opposite direction, butchering bodies so that they fit into the stereotypes.
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P.S from Anna: Objectively, Draco is not straight. All he does throughout the whole seven books is try to get a scrap of attention from Harry.