What is slash? Well, that depends on whom you ask. Old-school fans will happily give you the summary of Slash As We Know It, starting with roots in Biblical times (David/Jonathan, and later Jesus/John, with some Satan/God and Jesus/Judas hatesex thrown in) and moving quickly onto Sherlock Holmes, Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Star Trek. Slash is named for the wee little slashmark between the two names of the pairing, coined in Trek fandom back in the days of Kirk/Spock, and originally, it encompassed any pairing that wasn't in canon. Fandom being fandom, the non-canonical pairings that got the lion's share of the fanfic were male/male, and the term "slash" has since morphed into meaning "male/male relationship fanfic." Canon rarely provided actual male/male sexual relationships, though now that Torchwood is front and center to so many fannish pursuits, with canon Jack/Ianto (okay, also canon Jack/anything with a pulse and at least two robots), the old-timers are amused but accepting of the name.

Femslash is technically a subgenre of the original definition of slash: non-canonical female/female relationships. Thanks to the Buffy-verse, not to mention Xena: Warrior Princess, Star Trek: DS9 and Babylon 5, femslash has been weaved into canonical relationships for some time, if only to titillate the desired 18-35 year old male audience. In fandom, femslash is often written by men, but at least as often by women.

Het has a few definitions. For the purposes of this essay, I am using the term to mean "stories which focus primarily on a romantic relationship between an opposite sex couple." This can include adult material, but doesn't have to, just like slash and femslash.

So, why?

No one asks "Why Het?" If you cruise on by Metafandom, as a rule you'll find plenty of dissertation-length discussions as to why women turn out in droves to write about two men getting it on, and you'll even find the occasional essay about why they do the same for two women. Het isn't invisible so much as it's omnipresent in so many situations that the word heteronormative is used as a derogatory term in some fannish circles. Yet, women flock just as happily to tales of heterosexual couples doing the deed.

Why?

Why slash? Why het? Why femslash? (We will ask "Why Gen"? for an essay topic on August 14^th, which is exactly six months away. Stay tuned!)

"It fills a need," said Tara O'Shea, a mostly het-based fan who's been writing for nearly twenty years. "The same way plotty gen fills a need. The same way slash fills a need. … Most action/adventure television series aren't structured in such a way as to place emphasis on the inner lives of the characters, or their relationships (romantic or otherwise). Prose fiction as a medium however can and does. It can give us what the source material can't or won't, in a way that is emotionally satisfying in a different way than the source material, but using the medium to its fullest potential and telling a story that can't work in any other medium."

Celli Lane, who runs Fanfic101.com and who has been writing since 1995, said, "I think the thing that I love most about [slash] is creating romance between characters who usually aren't romantic at heart. Rodney McKay and John Sheppard [from Stargate: Atlantis] aren't really hearts-and-flowers guys, and Casey McCall and Dan Rydell [from SportsNight] are sort of infamous for screwing up their relationships with women, so why would men be any different? So you have to get creative in terms of how these guys fall in love and how they demonstrate love, which is a challenge I really enjoy."

A slash writer named Lies said, "I love writing slash for all the reasons I love writing in general – the satisfaction of creating new, interesting stories. Slash pairings just feel more real and powerful to me - just more interesting, and that's why I write slash instead of gen or het. Honestly, my favourite thing about writing slash is writing the sex scenes. M/M sex is hot."

"Slash is hot! Slash is romantic," said Aris, who's been writing since the early '90's. "Slash lets us take these buddy-pairs that, if they were a man and a woman, would obviously be romantic pairings, and extrapolate in that direction if we want to. Slash lets women get together and objectify the male body and enjoy female sexuality in the same way that men have had sanctioned for years, and I think that's very important. There aren't very many avenues for women to enjoy pornography and sexuality in our culture. There's basically romance novels, porn written for men, yaoi manga and anime, and slash."

Yahtzee said, "I don't know that the things I enjoy about writing het are any different than the things I enjoy about writing gen or slash, which I also do. Really, for me, I *don't* see a big difference between the two. If you're writing about two people in love (or in lust), the plumbing is really just a detail, isn't it? The bigger leap is between writing canonical relationships versus noncanonical ones (which most slash is). If I feel like I'm getting at something vital within each character and in their relationship to each other, I'm happy."

Allaine, a femslash author who's been writing for about seven years, said, "I think part of the point of fanfic is to expand the horizons of a community. There are few more satisfying feelings as a writer, than to be one of the first writers to tackle a certain pairing, and to see people's feelings about that pairing grow and evolve, and to realize that you're part of the reason why that happened. I've helped awaken readers' minds to things they never considered before." He added, " I tend to gravitate toward fandoms where women outnumber men, or where women are the dominant characters (or both). This almost always means my favorite characters, the ones who keep me involved, are female. And as a writer, I have always found that I prefer writing female characters over male. (Perhaps it's because I prefer dialogue over action scenes, and women are generally more talkative and open with their feelings.)"

One slash fan, who asked not to be named, said that "reading smut involving gorgeous women with taut stomachs and pert breasts and perfect little butts makes my brain bleed. I kind of don't need to be reminded that 99.9% off the women on this planet (and apparently 100% of the women on all the other planets) are better looking than me. So, if I feel the urge to read erotica I prefer it to be completely absent of women who are five thousand times better looking than I am. Chances are I'm interested in reading fic because I'm in a bad mood to begin with and don't want to read something that will just make me more depressed."

Of course, there are things that drive everyone crazy about their chosen genre or genres. For some people, it's the difficulty in getting their work before a large number of people. For others, it's the in-fighting between genres.

A.j., a mostly-het writer, said, "What drives me kind of fruity batshit about writing het is that in a lot of places - most certainly not ALL places - it feels like writing het isn't very 'edgy', and thus it really doesn't get a lot of the frighteningly dedicated appreciation slash does. I like to relate writing het to being German in the United States. People, as a whole, don't really think about the extremely vast German population of the US as being a culture. They're just white people. There aren't really 'German' parades - and I know a lot of that has to do with the massive downplaying German communities did after WWII - and whenever I say that I'm German, people just nod it off until I mention I also have some Irish decent. It's like this culture is so completely ingrained in the bedrock of the US that it isn't even considered as different anymore. There's an invisibility to it that runs very deep. To me, writing het is like that. There's not a lot of shock value to it as a concept, so there isn't really the encouraging reader response that there is with slash... which is still newly titillating enough to still have that shiny 'This is something NAUGHTY!' to it. Don't get me wrong, I have no ill will to the slash community for this particular line of reasoning. This is just the way things are for the moment; but it's still a bit frustrating as a writer to be considered less worthy of reading because you commit the crime of being mainstream."

Raynos Kai, who's been writing primarily het for eleven years, said, "What drives me crazy about het is that most het writers with different pairings can't seem to stand each other, especially if their pairings tend to share a common character. Most of the time, that tends to dissolve into character bashing." She continued, " Another thing that gets me about het writers is their obsession with the OTP aka One True Pairing. They assume that just because they ship something it excludes all other possible relationships from existing. I think non-het pairings are a lot less prone to being glorified that way, since those pairings tend to be non-canon/based on pure crack. (This is not to say that all het pairings are canon/not based on crack, just that it's more likely for writers/creators to have the leeway to outright state het pairings.) On the other hand, there are some fandoms that don't seem to think het exists. At all. It's either slash or you're weird!"

Celli said, "I … get a little irritated by the fact that after all these years, I still see the 'ick, slash' comments from people who are otherwise friends of mine. I don't make big posts about why het isn't my favorite thing; I just take the attitude that it doesn't turn my crank like slash does, but I don't feel like it has to be discussed. But I'm all too often confronted with arguments against slash. It doesn't have to be argued for or against! I like it and you don't! Stop turning it into a thing where het or gen have to be superior to slash and leave me the heck alone. Sigh."

Allaine shared Celli's annoyance with the anti-slash crowd. "I find the opinions of non-slashers frustrating. No, I'm not a pervert. No, I'm not obsessed with sex, or at least with lesbian sex. (You'll find there's almost no adult sex scenes in any of my fics.) And just because the woman you see on your television screen is straight, that doesn't mean there's no possible way she is gay or could ever become gay, especially younger women. There's time for a LOT of self-discovery along the way, so don't tell me I'm 100% wrong and am completely off-base." He added, "I also find it frustrating (and this is by no means unique to femslash) when I'm virtually the only person writing a certain pairing. I would love to find just ONE good fic longer than five hundred words about that pairing written by someone other than me."

Sandra Faith, who has been actively writing fanfiction for over twenty years, also has problems finding stories to read and readers for her stories. "It's tough to adore a rare fandom, even if the pairing is very canon."

Tara said, "[W]ithin fandom sometimes it's hard to find your audience when you're in the minority, and [for] a lot of fandoms I enjoy the volume of slash fiction greatly outnumbers the het or gen. So it's hard to connect with your audience, or with a broad audience because you're not offering what the masses are looking for--you're offering what the niche is looking for. And being a niche, it makes it that much harder to get the word out so your readers can find you. And that much harder as a reader to find the stories you want to read."

Aris had a different take on hard-to-find pairings. "I really dislike the trend of slashing the pretty white guys just because they're pretty white guys. I mean, there's statistically less slash out there that involves characters of color, even if the relationship is there and interesting, because fandom is composed of people who have problems talking about race. I also hate the reflexive dismissal of a lot of female characters in slash. And I think it comes from a similar place--we write slash, or I write slash, mainly because the writers of these mainstream television shows and movies are so interested in their handsome white male leads, and thus those relationships are deeper and more convincing than any relationships they have with the characters who are in the minority; the characters of color or women in the ensemble, which is usually where they're relegated to.

Yahtzee had some thoughts about society's place in the context of her own work. "The things that drive me crazy about het itself are that it's so much harder to keep out the detritus of societal ideas about gender and male/female relationships. Some author -- I forget who -- said that no writer could truly know herself until she'd tried to write dialogue for a man and a woman in a rose garden. The call of stereotype and cliché is very strong, no matter how hard you try to recognize it. In some ways, I became (in my opinion, anyway) a much better writer of het only after I also started writing slash. With slash, you can't fall back on those ingrained ideas about "well, this is what the guy does, and this is what the girl does." You have to ask yourself, what would this person do? And once I'd trained myself to always ask that question, I was able to ask it when writing het as well." She continued, " The things that drive me crazy about fandom's perception of het: The idea that it's 'schmaltzy,' 'stereotyped,' 'babyfic,' etc., at least compared to slash. Fact is, if you want to find schmaltzy, stereotyped Mpreg slash, there's plenty of it out there. And if you want to find good het, that's out there too. The thing that drives me absolutely BATTY is the sometimes-slash-rationale, 'I want to write about relationships between equals.' The idea being that this is somehow liberating, when in fact it's writing off the whole idea of women being equals in their relationships with men. I find that profoundly depressing."

Aris echoed Yahtzee's thoughts about gender roles. " One of the things I find while writing het is that I want to be careful not to automatically put the woman in a position where she's subordinate to the guy, either emotionally or physically, because that seems like just doing what Western Civilization has done to women and told women to do for the last however many centuries. So one of the things that's nice about writing slash is that the cultural subordination of one character to another because of gender is gone, and that makes that part of writing easier."

Christine Morgan, a published author who has also been writing fanfiction since 1996, said, "I think we all face the same challenges of telling a good story and getting noticed in a glutted market. There's a lot of stuff out there. It takes something special to stand out. … What drives me crazy is the attitude … of how only sad desperate lonely sickos need to include [sex]. It's a part of life. A major part, and a fun part."

The fun is the important part, at least as far as fanfiction is concerned. We write because we love our subject and want to share that fun.

Celli said, "[S]ome of my favorite romances are Regency romances. I have a thing--I have a real thing--for forbidden love, and Regencies so often use that as a device. When I started reading JAG slash, you had a CIA agent and a military officer, both men, and talk about your forbidden romances. It makes my heart skip a beat just thinking about it. :) Most of my slash pairings since then have had some kind of 'forbidden' aspect to them--the military might be involved, or maybe one or both of them are public figures of some kind, or maybe there's a historical context involved."

A.j. said, "People tend to write what they know, and I know enough about myself that het fic hits my buttons in ways that m/m or f/f fic never can. So, for me it's not really a case for liking writing het more than liking writing slash; it's just me writing what I would want to read."

Allaine said, "The very [first] time I became attached to a lesbian pairing, I found them so intensely romantic and sweet. Maybe that has made me predisposed to enjoy other femslash pairings, or to see 'subtext' where others may not. Or maybe because there's just so little of it out there, compared to the much larger number of hetero pairings. It's always a little bit more fresh. So most of my all-time favorite fanfics (with the big exception of the hetero fics of my favorite author) are femslash."

Lyssie, a femslasher and het writer, simplified this: "Because girls are pretty naked."

Sandra said, "I enjoy creating the headspace and conveying the sensations of the physicality of love, the romance of sex--I realize, though, this is not limited to het, and I also realize crafting erotica seems to be very typical of women writers in general. It's like painting a scene with words for the most intense emotions a person can feel."

Tara said, "I am a romantic. Unashamedly, unabashedly, have been my whole life. I am the sort of person who as an adult revisited my childhood favourites that were never built for this kind of fiction, and wrote epic romance stories. We're talking Yeoman Diana Prince and Maj. Steve Trevor, from the ABC Wonder Woman series set during WWII. All to appease my inner five year old, who knew what she wanted but had no idea what it was she actually wanted. I am writing Stormer and Riot solely to make my sister--who is a 32 year old teacher, may I add--happy, because we loved Jem when we were teenagers, and it's a grown-up way of playing with dolls. It's fantasy, it's wish-fulfillment, and it's meant to be nothing more than that. So I'm having fun with all the conventions of romance as a genre. I am a sucker for unrequited love, and it is one of my bullet-proof kinks, as they say. Even when I do not think the pairing would work (as good drama OR as a solid relationship) if it were requited. For example, I only really was interested in Spike and Buffy in relation to Spike's unrequited feelings because it made his character more interesting. I am fascinated by Gisbourne's relationship with Marian in the BBC Robin Hood, because it is the only complex relationship on the series, and because putting Lucy Griffiths in scenes with Richard Armitage forces her to bring her A game and put in better performances. The thing is... I am not one of those people who buy into the whole 'soul mates' thing. It's bullshit. More than that, it's usually a cheap excuse not to actually work at characterisation. I don't buy Clark and Lana in canon because it's never presented as an actual relationship. It's just stated as a fact, and a dodgy one at that. But I was fascinated by Chloe and Clark, because you could see exactly why Chloe loved him, and how the twists and turns affected them both, and there was something there for me to hook into as a writer and as a viewer. More colours to paint with, because it was a more complex relationship, and frankly, because Allison Mack was a better actor. It's those same qualities that made me seek out and read Clark/Lex, even though I was still only driven to tell stories about Clark and Chloe. But in both cases, I flat out rejected the show's notion of 'soul mates'. I rarely if ever am interested in Our Hero and Our Heroine settling down with the white picket fence and 2.5 kids and a dog. That is not my goal, as an author. That is not the 'prize' at the end of the long battle. The prize is the battle, and the battle is ongoing. It's how people change each other, how people learn each other, how we grow and regress and fuck up and strive and win and lose, together and alone. That is what interests me about romance as a genre. Because love is basic. Love is something we all seek, love is something we all want. And love is something not all of us get to experience in our day to day lives, so often love is something we get vicariously through fictional characters. This is normal, healthy, and pretty much a basic human fact."

What about where things are going? Is the slash/femslash/het divide just hype? Can't we all just get along?

Tara said, "I don't think either flavour of romance is intrinsically more complex or more interesting by its nature, even though that argument pops up in fandom now and then. I think it's all about the characters and the ability of the authors. Any relationship, if done well, is interesting. I think there are folks out there who genuinely believe that slash is more interesting, not because it is, but it's because it's what they prefer to write or read. And unfortunately, you can't argue that logic because it's not actually based in logic. It's about personal preference, and in some cases, the need to justify our preferences by elevating them from 'this is what I enjoy' to 'I enjoy this because it is inherently better' because at heart, people are still afraid we'll be judged by our preferences. But that attitude can be found anywhere--not just among slashers, but in any arena. It's not unique, and it's also not the majority. At least, it's been my experience in fandom that most folks write and read what they love, without passing judgement on people who don't share their preferences."

Celli said, "I think that these days, within fandom, slash is pretty mainstream. Maybe that's the challenge--to get used to not being different and subversive."

Aris said, "I think that fandom as a whole, internally, has mostly gotten past the whole 'you can't write guys as gay if they're canonically straight' thing. I mean, you still get that complaint, a lot of the time, but I see it as coming from people who are new to fandom and who are external to fandom. There certainly isn't a problem finding a sympathetic audience for slash! I think the biggest problems that are remaining for slashers are just technical ones--most of us aren't men, and we don't know what it's like to be a guy, and there's the line we're walking where we know we're writing idealized, fictional men who are in our porn for our purposes, not 'real gay men,' so some of the problems can just be elided over, and the physical writing-sex parts can be researched on the internet."

Not everyone was quite so verdant about the grass on both sides Lies said, "Slash brings the naughty. There's nothing more delicious than an illicit pairing you know will never, ever occur. Het pairings all seem very boring in comparison. Slash is also about denying gender roles, or at least messing with them, and I'm all over that."

Christine said, "In many fandoms, most of the canon pairings tend to be het anyway, so writing that way often seems to be less forced in terms of character and believable behavior. To take a character presented as het, and then write that character in slash, can be a big challenge. One that, honestly, many writers aren't up to doing in a plausible way. Of course, as I well know, just about ANYTHING can be done if you are clever / creative / twisted enough."

Sandra said, "I admit my biggest hesitance with writing slash / femslash has more to do with the difficulty of getting past pronoun confusion! My reading preferences are pretty much anything goes that's consensual, het, femslash or slash alike, though I don't care for slash as much. This may have to do with the fact that I don't prefer men, given the choice. :)"

A.j. said, "Mostly, I think someone who writes slash is just as often bashing their head against a desk trying to GET THE IDEA ON THE PAPER WHERE IT SHOULD BE rather than rattling around in my/their brain. Writers are writers, whether they're writing about tab a going into slot b, slot b and slot b going to town, or tab a and tab a going interesting places. I think it all boils down to wanting to set your computer on fire."

So, seriously now, why slash? Why het? Why femslash?

Celli: "Because it makes me happy. And what else is fandom for?"

Tara: "For me, it's not so much 'why het?' as it is 'why 'ship?' (het or slash). And the simple answer is: Because I like kissing books." (Editor's note: Tara means books about kissing, not actually locking lips with her book collection. Trust me on this.)

Sandra: "I've often pondered and theorized that I must be drawn to het for similar reasons that ostensibly straight women seem to be drawn to slash, though I've never bothered to track down studies (formal or informal) on why that is. I can very easily relate to and convey the male's point of view, and equally easily relate to the woman's."

Christine: "Since I've had het sex, I feel at least a little bit more qualified to write with some kind of knowledge on the subject. Of course, when I'm also writing about characters who aren't even HUMAN, that kind of makes it a moot point. What do I know about gargoyles, or elves, or the like? I have to use a lot of imagination either way."

Aris: "[W]hile earlier I was critical of stuff written just for the pretty pretty men, I have to admit that I'm all about women enjoying pretty pretty men. Slash lets us have a forum to talk about and appreciate sexuality in a supportive environment. And it's hot! If women didn't find slash hot, it wouldn't be so successful."

Lies: "Because it's hot. Because those who like it like it a lot. Because it's wonderfully counter-cultural and sometimes just a little bit wrong, and you can love it all the moreso for that."

Allaine: "[T]here's a special sweetness, a connection my female characters share that make their relationships seem all the more romantic."

A.j.: "Because, societally engineered or not, I wanna read about men and women making out! It's what I like, it's what pushes my buttons, and it makes me happy."

Yahtzee: "Why not?"

I'd like to thank everyone who took time to talk about this. I'm not sure if you have come to any stronger conclusions, gentle reader, but I suggest conclusions aren't the point. Learning where the other questioners are coming from, that's the fun part, and that's how you figure out the real "Why?" to anything you do.

And now we open the floor to you. What do you like about your favorite genre? What about what you read makes you happy?