Slash fiction and human mating psychology

Journal of Sex Research, Feb, 2004 by Catherine Salmon, Don Symons

   Marriage is a romance in which the hero dies in the first
   chapter.

   --Laurence J. Peter

"Slash fiction" or "slash" is a kind of romance fiction, usually but not always very sexually graphic, in which both of the lovers are male. To be considered true slash the lovers must be an expropriated media pairing, such as Captain Kirk/Mr. Spock (K/S) from the original Star Trek series or Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson (H/W). The term "slash" arose from the convention of using the slash punctuation mark to unite the lovers' names or initials.

Like mainstream genre romance novels, slash is written almost exclusively by and for women. It originated in the mid-1970s when female Star Trek fans began to write and disseminate narratives in which Kirk and Spock fall in love and become lovers. As time went by, virtually every cop, spy, adventure, and science fiction television series featuring two male partners was "slashed" (i.e., slash stories focusing on the main characters were written and disseminated) by some of its female fans.

In the early years slash was disseminated primarily via fan magazines ("fanzines" or "zines"), which were sold by mail order and at fan conventions. Today, slash is disseminated primarily via the internet. Enter slash into any search engine and you will find hundreds of sites, most of which are devoted to only one or a few male pairings, though some archives contain thousands of stories featuring many pairings and TV shows.

Slash is not distinctively American. It seems to have arisen spontaneously at about the same time in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia, and Canada, and many of the most frequently slashed TV shows are British. A similar but professionally produced genre (Buckley, 1991; Thorn, 1997), with sales in the millions, arose in Japan: comic books for girls called shounen ai (boy's love).

When most people, including the second author of this article, first learn of the existence of slash they are deeply puzzled. Why, they wonder, would any woman want to write or read such fiction? Our goal, when we began collaborating in 1994, was to answer this question. We also hoped that if we could discover why slash appeals to so many women we would thereby discover something new about human female mating psychology; in other words, we hoped that slash could be used as an unobtrusive measure of human female mating psychology.

An unobtrusive measure is any research method that does not require the cooperation of subjects (Webb, 1966). For example, if one were interested in studying the human walking gait one could employ obtrusive measures, such as using electrodes to record the timing and strength of muscle contractions as subjects walked back and forth in the laboratory, or unobtrusive measures, such as analyzing the wear patterns on old shoes. If one were interested in studying human mating psychology, one could employ standard obtrusive measures, such as surveys, questionnaires, and laboratory measurements of genital blood flow, or one could use less common but perhaps no less useful unobtrusive measures, such as analyses of commercially successful erotica (Ellis & Symons, 1990; Symons, Salmon, & Ellis, 1997). We reasoned that slash exists because a sizable international community of women derives pleasure from writing and reading it; hence, the essential features of this genre must contain information about human female mating psychology.

Our research on slash has not, to date, led to the discovery of a heretofore-undreamed-of psychological mechanism or even to a novel hypothesis about such a mechanism. Instead, slash has turned out to be an exception that proves (tests) the rules, and the rules remain essentially intact. That is to say, it was more the case that our previously held views of female mating psychology led to a deeper understanding of slash than the other way around. We did, however, develop testable hypotheses to account for the appeal of slash, which we describe later in this article (see Salmon & Symons, 2001, for more information).

Before discussing slash and its fans, however, we first consider the general question of why human beings enjoy fiction at all. Our discussion is animated by the premises that mental phenomena, such as enjoyment, are the products of brain states and that the human brain, like every organ in every species, is the product of evolution by natural selection.

WHY Do HUMANS ENJOY FICTION?

In their article "Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds," Tooby and Cosmides (2001) noted that involvement in fictional, imagined worlds appears to be a human universal. They define fiction broadly to include "any representation intended to be understood as nonveridical, whether story, drama, film, painting, sculpture, and so on" (p. 7). To the evolutionist, there are two possible explanations for the human tendency to create and consume fictional representations.

The first explanation is that human engagement in fictional experience is a functionless byproduct of psychological (brain) adaptations that were designed by natural selection to serve other functions. In this view, engagement in fictional experience is not something that we are designed to do but, rather, something that we are susceptible to, as we are susceptible to becoming addicted to drugs. This hypothesis is elaborated and championed by Pinker (1997), who argues that many of the arts are best understood as evolutionarily novel technologies that effectively "pick the locks" of our brain's pleasure circuits.