Everyone is wrong about M/M except me

Yaoi, slash, and the complex cultural history of pornography by women, for women

I think it is safe to say that M/M romance has experienced its mainstream breakthrough moment. The Gen-Z girls sitting next to me in a hip Brooklyn coffee shop at this very moment in time are breathlessly discussing Heated Rivalry, which one of them binged in a single horny session yesterday. She confesses aloud that she really hasn’t ever been into porn at all before, but this is different…!

Here’s the thing about Heated Rivalry. It is different, but as with many mainstream breakthroughs that seem to the gen-pop to be blindingly new and original, extremely sudden and unprecedented, it is in fact entirely precedented and quite derivative —NOT IN A BAD WAY !!!!

But its explosive popularity has led to a new flood of uninformed people stumbling through the darkness, attempting to answer from first principles a question that fandoms centered on this material have already spent 50 years fruitlessly trying to resolve amongst themselves: Why Slash?

In fact, the idea that this topic is destined to be completely unending and circular and boring forever was its own fandom meme at one point, when “my thoughts on yaoi” became a phrase to denote a long opinionated online discussion that nobody gave a shit about.

Slash = yaoi = M/M. The first term comes from Western media fandom; the second from Asian boys’ love/BL media; the last is most often used in mainstream romance publishing.

Slash is sex and/or love between two guys, ideally drawn or written—not onscreen, as in much gay porn made by and for gay guys, which is an important distinction. Slash is pornography by women, for women. It is a literary body genre, a lovechild of pornography and melodrama, with a focus on characters, emotions, and relationships alongside and inextricable from the sexy bits, coming in at least 33% romance by volume—often more.

Gay erotica in general has been a thing for a long time, obviously. (Haven’t you heard of Sins of the Cities of the Plain?) But the first nascent motions at the new form of slash, as any reader or writer of the stuff rightfully ought be able tell you, came in the form of fan literature in the 1970s exploring the possibility of a romantic and sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock—called K/S, pronounced K-slash-S, which is where “slash” comes from.

Pon farr… it’s a whole thing.

While some examples may have circulated privately earlier, the first published K/S story appeared in a fanzine in 1974. Around the same time, manga stories with M/M themes, known as yaoi, were being serialized in Japanese shoujo magazines aimed at young women, kicking off the Eastern side of things—which eventually became the formalized, popular genre of Boys’ Love or BL.¹

Both cultures evolved and grew in parallel during the 80s and 90s, until the rise of the global internet massively increased the popularity of Asian BL media in the English-speaking fandom world, and allowed them to mix and mingle and (partially, at least) merge: which is why today you see all gay ships being referred to as “yaoi” (which seems to be winning the linguistic battle of the fittest over “slash”) and female fans of gay ships as “fujoshi” (instead of “slashers” or “slash shippers”) — a Japanese term meaning “rotten women,” originally a slur at yaoi readers, reclaimed by those readers as a proud appellation.

OK, but, so, anyway, get to the point—why slash? What are my thoughts on yaoi?

Well, the main thing I want to emphasize is there is no one answer to the question. Set Deep Thought running on it for 7.5 million years and you would not get anything coherent. This is because slash is erotic, which is personal, which is ineluctably resistant to complete comprehension, especially by outsiders… Explaining anything erotic is like trying to train cats and then get them to take feedback on their KPIs.

We know this: but we keep trying, because anything that opaque and mysterious is also irresistible. Trying to explain it enacts its erotics in miniature, which is addictive, like a scab you can’t stop picking at.

And, importantly, just because it’s impossible to fully explain doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen when people attempt to do so. And it also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep encouraging them to try: for there is a value in that continued effort on an individual and collective level, establishing a diverse archive of meaning throughout time.

Janice Radway approached her seminal 1984 study on 1970s and 80s romance paperback readers, Reading the Romance, by approaching the genre “on the basic assumption that if we wish to explain why romances are selling so well, we must first know what a romance is for the woman who buys and reads it,” and utilizing a methodology that included listening seriously (imagine that) to how the women “have defensively elaborated a coherent explanation for why they find [romances] so satisfying.”

Though the romances in Radway’s study were heterosexual Harlequins, it follows that her approach would suffice for slash as well. Joanna Russ, in her 1985 essay “Pornography By Women, For Women, With Love” was in agreement:

I’m convinced, after reading through more than fifty volumes of K/S material (most of it “X-rated”) that only those for whom a sexual fantasy “works,” that is, those who are aroused by it, have a chance of telling us to what particular set of conditions that fantasy speaks, and can analyze how and why it works and for whom. Sexual fantasy materials are like icebergs; the one-tenth that shows above the surface is no reliable indicator of the size or significance of the whole thing. Sexual fantasy that doesn’t arouse is boring, funny, or repellent, and unsympathetic outsiders trying to decode these fantasies (or any others) will make all sorts of mistakes.

Russ and Radway are important to keep in the conversation because modern Western slash fandom condensed in the 70s and 80s out of three things women were enjoying and responding to: popular visual media, transformative fanworks, and mainstream romance fiction. Contemporary M/M, even the tradpub stuff, even and perhaps especially Heated Rivalry, cannot be understood outside of the history of all three of those things.

God they’re cute.

The slash experience

Every individual slash shipper or M/M reader has a different reason why it appeals, very much related to one’s experience with the media in question, which is why the real answer to “why slash?” is a multivocal, transnational kaleidoscope of erotic self-definition.

For every woman that enjoys slash because she finds one man hurt or near death while another man comforts him very arousing (a subgenre known as “whump” or “hurt/comfort,” which often includes no sex at all), another one craves the happy-ever-after of two male characters getting married and having kids and/or lots of wholesome fulfilling sex (known as “fluff” or “curtainfic”).

Some readers want pure PWP, a.k.a. porn without plot, a.k.a. media like the original 1979 self-published manga which gave rise to the word “yaoi,” a Japanese acronym for a phrase meaning “there is neither climax, conclusion, or meaning.”² Others want deeply researched, believable stories dealing with serious consequences of homophobia in the context of a canon’s setting.

And it’s important to note that a lot of Thoughts On Yaoi from the past few decades are not hip to the idea, well-known in fan spaces by this point but not readily acknowledged by outside commentators, that a lot of the women who are super into yaoi are not really women at all, but transmasculine/queer individuals discovering and forming their sexual and gender identities through the medium of fandom erotica—for more on this, see James Frankie Thomas’s excellent novel Idlewild.

One is tempted to consider fujoshiism as a third-dimensional axis of sexuality where the Kinsey scale and the gender spectrum are the first and second axes. It has really never been just straight women doing this stuff, despite public perception. As early as 2000, a PhD student found that over half of surveyed slash shippers identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual.

The identity makeup of slash fandom’s demographic may have shifted since 1985, but I think I would not be remiss to note that the actual demographic has not changed very much. It’s the same kinds of people—that is to say, we can’t possibly know how members of those early slash communities would identify today if raised by Tumblr in the same way we were.

I don’t think the proportion of transgender people in slash fandom invalidates the Russ essay at all, nor her basic idea of slash as “pornography by women, for women, with love.” She was a lesbian who loved slash! She knew it was bizarre and incongruent, which was why she made such an impactful attempt to explain it.

What is clear is that women and queer people get many, many different things out of slash and yaoi. 50 years of trope-construction and expectation-building from generation to generation has led to a variety of standardized ways to approach the genre in art and writing and fan experience: the strict Asian seme/uke (top/bottom) dichotomy; the Western queerbaiting exemplified by Sherlock and Supernatural, complete with mortal showrunner/fandom enmity; the bandom stage gay of Panic! at the Disco and 2000s emo.

Heated Rivalry is kind of their fault if you really think about it.

Band slash fandom is in fact the garden from which contemporary hockey slash fandom grew. Circa 2010, so the story goes, Fall Out Boy had just gone on hiatus, and a handful of prominent BNFs (Big Name Fans) who had relocated to Chicago (FOB’s hometown) were left without an active fandom. This happened to be a big year for the Blackhawks and things followed on from there. There was, as I understand it, a legendary ship manifesto which made the rounds on LiveJournal around that time and convinced lots of people to make the leap from shipping band members to shipping hockey players.³ The idea of a romance between the two specific real-life hockey players that Rachel Reid based Heated Rivalry on came from this fandom; before she officially published the previous book in the series, Game Changers, she did so first on AO3 in the guise of a Steve/Bucky (you know, from Marvel) fanfiction; she clearly very much comes from the world that Kirk/Spock made, as do huge numbers of other tradpub romance and SF/F writers.

But Heated Rivalry has now gone far beyond that world. Despite Jacob Tierney’s laudable attempts to draw on Radway-esque explanations for the popularity of M/M among women, Russ’s prediction holds true and we now have “unsympathetic outsiders trying to decode these fantasies [making] make all sorts of mistakes.”

One thing that has always been a point of contention in slash communities (at least Western ones) is the idea of appropriation. Is women writing about men like this wrong or bad? Since the dawn of slash, gay men have found it within their rights to stomp around and tell women that yes it is very bad and you should stop—see David Gerrold, gay Star Trek writer and convention-circuit pundit of the 70s and 80s who issued various denigratory decrees against (in general) delusional women writing fanfiction and (in specific) imagining Kirk and Spock as romantically involved.

In the Geocities and LiveJournal eras of slash fandom, cis gay men established lordly presences on the platforms as arbiters of how M/M sex ought to be written by women, with female and queer fic writers cowed into obeisance by these guys’ complaints that too many fingers were going into asses in unrealistic ways and suchlike. These guys were generally liked and respected in these communities even if the power dynamic was a bit odd; but these days hardly anyone is putting in that kind of helpful effort. Every day another dude discovers Heated Rivalry’s female fandom and/or AO3 and and/or slash and is like you are fetishizing us!!!!! not realizing this is far from a groundbreaking new take. There is not a clear solution to this and it’s probably going to keep being relitigated endlessly because of misogyny et cetera; but the Jacob Tierneys of the world actually listening to women when we explain why we, as individuals, dig this stuff is certainly a good start.

Slash as social technique

Personally I could not possibly tell you why I like slash. I just do—although I think I am not as much of a die-hard as others, who engage with M/M nearly exclusively in fan and pro work. (I like other stuff too! I go months without reading any M/M at all!)

But I will acknowledge that I am irreversibly fujo-brained, having labored for 15 years in the media fandom mines and in the process gained a variety of triggers. I first logged onto Tumblr to look at pictures of David Tennant for reasons relating to my own tween erotic development; the community that I quickly became a part of loved posting pictures of David Tennant and John Simm together, gazing into each others eyes; the rest was history.

Like you guys don’t even know.

We must consider slash as, like all other fandom practices, a subcultural technique. These techniques are inherently memetic, transmitting themselves from node to node like a virus, situated within a complex network of social relations.

You become a slash shipper because your loins are set afire by a hot gif set of Dean and Cas from Supernatural; your best friend becomes a slash shipper because she wants to enjoy creativity in communion with you, a.k.a. the dominant form of play in fan spaces, which may include roleplaying, sharing fic recommendations, trading erotic headcanons, and producing fanworks for/with each other. (And then by enacting these forms of play her loins eventually are trained to be set afire as well.)

When the fans with the highest status in your community are slash shippers, as is often the case, others fall in line like ducklings.⁴ One BNF inventing a new ship out of whole cloth, or promoting a ship via a manifesto to her immediate social circle, can become the originating event of a self-perpetuating fandom which 10 years later is so popular that its origins have long become obscured.

I find that this social aspect goes vastly underacknowledged in the ongoing “thoughts on yaoi” discussion. The feedback loops that are reinforced by taking active part in a community that puts value on shared fan techniques—shipping, writing, drawing, posting, curation, analysis—can have an enormous impact on individual experience and taste. While some are born fujoshis, others, like me, have fujoshiism thrust upon them by way of participatory culture.

Slash fans used to have their own spaces, but since Tumblr, media fandom is (for better and for worse) one big stewing pot of context collapse, and everyone ships, and everyone reads fic, and the lines between fandom and the mainstream continue to blur. M/M romance as a subset of the traditional publishing industry has nothing, sales-wise, on its counterpart F/M juggernaut, but the success of Casey McQuiston (an erstwhile Tumblr mutual of mine, I must disclose) with Red, White, and Royal Blue was the first indicator of how an AO3 slash shipper to NYT bestseller to film/TV adaptation pipeline was now well within the realm of possibility. Now we have reached the next level.⁵

The week before Heated Rivalry aired, only its existing diehard fans were tweeting about it: BookTok girls, romance girls, hockey girls, and people in the relatively small middle of that Venn diagram who had been following the production of the show for months if not years. And I took notice… I shan’t dox my fandom account here but on November 22, a week before it premiered, I tweeted something along the lines of “not sure if I’m going to be watching the hockey show, but I am closely tracking its impact on the culture” … because I could already tell that something was going on.

I was right. Heated Rivalry pulled off the spectacularly difficult acrobatics of making a show based on niche M/M erotica for women which appeals also to gay men as well as people completely and totally outside the slash fandom orbit. Hats off to Jacob Tierney and may we see more fujo writer x gay showrunner collabs in the future.⁶

Thanks to the fact that it’s quite good and (importantly) something new and exciting in the barren, desiccated TV landscape, Heated Rivalry is getting watched by people who would be very unlikely to have engaged with M/M subculture otherwise. Straight girl fans of beach reads and fairy smut; straight guy hockey fans; gay guy fans of TV shows about gay guys; moms and grandmas and, it seems, pretty much everyone in Hollywood.

Heated Rivalry might well be the first M/M adaptation that manages to effectively transport the whole kit and caboodle of written M/M—all the different reasons women love it—from the page to the screen. It doesn’t skimp on sex but it also doesn’t skimp on feelings—the romance stuff, the character stuff, the goopy chewy tropey smarmy stuff that differentiates slash from other types of erotica and pornography for other audiences. It fully embraces slash’s origins in the holy trinity of visual media, transformative fanworks, and romance fiction.

Also, I think many analyses underestimate the importance of Shane and Ilya being celebrities within the world of the show, or at the very least well-known people who are often on television. This creates a kind of mirrored parallax effect that amplifies the effect of the plot. RPF (real person fiction) is transgressive in a highly erotic way; the people who ship real-life hockey players and band members have long known this, and now fans of Heated Rivalry get to experience a diluted but still powerful version of that transgression within the canon of the show. (They can certainly also ship the actual actors if they want to—and uhhhh let’s just say there is a whole… situation… happening right now re: that.)

The girls next to me at the coffee shop, emerging born-again into the glorious world of M/M, now have the opportunity to become caught by those fandom feedback loops I mentioned earlier, which play to a variety of needs in a woman’s life: a new context to think about hot men in sexual situations; an erotic object to joyfully connect with friends over without involving one’s own personal sexuality or intimate desires; a generic unresisting canvas upon which to enact tropey narrative fantasies like bodyswaps, soulmate AUs, and of course omegaverse.

But in part because of the gateway they came in through, the world they are entering is very different than the slash world of 10, even 5 years ago: one far more intimately connected to cultural producers, high-level decision makers, and the grinding industrial combine of the pop mainstream.

I hope that these new fans will take the time to look back at the history of slash, yaoi, and M/M in order to understand how things have changed, and understand how Heated Rivalry in no small part part owes its success to decades of fan practices building the cultural scaffolding necessary for it to break through.

Banger of the week

1. Disclaimer: I know much much less about BL than I do its western counterpart! Feel free to let me know if I get things wrong!

2. See: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Lovely_(doujinshi)

3. Going back even earlier, the first band fandom which wrote slash fanfiction about band members was Popslash, which focused on N*SYNC and the Backstreet Boys around the turn of the millennium; its members had likewise migrated from more traditional media fandoms like Buffy and The Sentinel.

4. For more on status in fan spaces see Bertha Chin, “It’s About Who You Know: Social Capital, Hierarchies and Fandom” in A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (2018).

5. For the record, this pipeline has already been well established in Asia for many years, from (censored) slashy cdramas to the advanced and prolific realm of Thai BL.

6. Russell T Davies x Freya Marske? Francis Lee x Emily Tesh? Luca Guadagnino x ME???? I HAVE IDEAS!!!! CALL ME!!!!!