I read a blog post today (thanks, Cindy) on Hoyden About Town, “Slash and Teh Magick Testicles of Perspicacity,” which I thought might amuse you:
You don’t even have to know anything about slash to get a few giggles and more than a few eyerolls out of this interview with evolutionary psychologist Don Symons, author of Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality [eta: see comments 1 & 2].
Like all good evolutionary psychologists who focus on gender, Don hasn’t bothered to talk to any actual *whispers* women. Especially not to any women who write and/or study this, erm, *whispers* smut. Because women can’t define their own experience, can’t tell their own stories, can’t have any useful insights into their own motivations. Because women’s fan academia doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense, not until chest-beaters come along and put their stamp of Knowledge onto it. Because women’s culture is there to be picked apart with tweezers and analysed with a touch of distanced fascination, a modicum of distaste, and a whopping serve of wilful ignorance. For lo, he has Teh Magick Testicles of Perspicacity. Here, let him show you them.
[Followed by video of the Fount of all Knowledge, an evolutionary psychologist without research skills, recorded earlier this year.]
Do read the comments at the end of the post. I learnt some stuff I didn’t know*: Bible slash, Tudor slash… Wow.
* There again I admit to a vast ignorance of slash fiction; I haven’t co-written** a pompous tome on the subject. ** Yep, The Fount co-wrote the book with a woman but gives no acknowledgement of that fact in the interview.
Nicola Griffith 
To the best of my knowledge, the first “authoritative” discussion of fanfic and slash fan fic was the discussion of K/S fanfic in Star Trek Lives, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston from Bantam in 1975. I note that there was also lesbian Trek slash at the time, though nobody much talked or talks about it historically, now.
Heh, in the Encyclopedia of Sex, 1950 edition, the researchers, all men, referred to orgasmic women as ‘uncivilized’. I rolled around on the bed laughing and laughing over that one. Once the laughter died away, Caty and I behaved in a completely uncivilized manner.
Nicola, would you mind terribly if I squeaked “Oh, gods, i love you!” for this? (I have a tendency to squeak when excited). Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. It’s so wonderful!
So was there any slash fiction featuring Sulu? Must’ve been, yes?
Jennifer from Pittsburgh. i’m shocked. Shocked i tell you. And Lisa S? You just gave me such a flasback (says the former co-chair of a couple of Trek con.)
<>lisa<>, I think I read that, long ago…
<>jennifer from p<>, I think being civilised is seriously overrated.
<>andi<>, squeaking permitted :)
Well, my introduction to slash fanfic was Joanna Russ’s essay, I think called “Pornography by Women for Women with Love,” in her collection Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts. Published in 1985, it sez here. She drew on the work of some other writers, possibly the women mentioned in Lisa’s post, and her own reading of fanfiction. I never managed to get my hands on any of the K/S fanfiction myself, more’s the pity.
The thing is, though, much of what Symons says about slash that is supposedly so wrong is exactly what Russ said about it in her essay — the stuff about anal sex without lube, etc. But that was decades ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the field/genre has changed since then. Symons does seem to be a silly git, though, all right.