I nearly think there is a thing about slash vs het going around again. I avoid these discussions, as a rule, because really, I'm not interested in 'which is better/cooler/possessed of more literary merit', and it always seems to go there.

I don't need to go there. The butterfly of cool looks different to everyone, and my likes and dislikes are mine. I consider them entirely defensible, I'll happily discuss them, but (barring the odd bit of overenthusiastic pimpage, and aren't we all prone to that?), I don't need people to share them, and get quite irked when people assume that I'm talking about something because I'm trying to force them to get on board with me, instead of because, you know, I talk a lot.

(If you WANT my opinion, it's this; Genres do not HAVE literary merit. Sometimes they CONTAIN it, and there is no genre that cannot be written in either brilliantly or vilely. Yes, including MPREG, so there *hugs Left Hand Of Darkness*. There. Them's my sentiments.)

Still, it interests me, this whole slash thing.

So I was talking to quigonejinn about old porn and how it was constrained by censorship and how people had to be aware of the filters (the Classical Analogy filter, the Tale of Moral Instruction or Don't Do This Filter, the Art filter...) that people used and read between the lines and interpret the subtext and watch how words are used, and ...

IOW, you have to ... slash it. So to speak, because this is mostly het I'm talking about here. Not always (IIRC I was showing her the slashier bits of Hero and Leander -- which is het. Really, it SAYS SO. at the time), but often.

And you know, subtext is FUN. Sexual subtext is FUN, whether it's double entendres or heroic couplets -- or double entendres IN heroic couplets. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's disturbing, sometimes it's hot -- sometimes all three. But it's fun; we get pleasure from it.

That's the root of a thousand million "I'm sorry, I'll read that again" jokes. It's fun and our brains are wired to find and enjoy sexual double meanings, in a way that is very different from how we respond to straight up sexual content. I recall reading something awhile back about lock-picking the pleasure centres of the brain; yeah. Like that.

And, you know, this isn't necessarily a slash thing; I think it's an erotic fanfic thing, or just a fannish thing.

You know, there's porn out there, there's all sorts of porn out there and lots of it is very good, actually.

We could just go find it. And we do, in increasing numbers, but we still keep going back to the stuff that makes us do the work. Because the work is fun.

Slash has an extra layer of fun, at least for me: the pleasures of the perverse. (I don't mean perverted, as in sexually, I mean perverse, as in 'willfully perverse'.)

When we pick up on het subtext, I think the way it feels to the brain is usually that we're solving the puzzle, doing what people have always done reading porn. Finding what the creator hid there.

With slashy subtext (and maybe with rare het pairings, cross generation pairings, or some of the more exotic cross species stuff in the SF fandoms) there's a feeling of having rebuilt the puzzle. We're finding what by and large wasn't supposed to be there. Hacking the system.

They're both fun ways to play the game. Some people like one more than the other, lots of people like both. I like both, but let's face it, by experience and inclination I'm a system hacker, a rock-tossing anarchist.

Therefore, I slash. Or something like that. It's an interesting possibility, anyway.

ETA: fairestcat very kindly linked back here, and there's an interesting conversation going on over there as well.