[LMB] Re: Slash (was OT) now Bujold Romance/Slash Meta

[Marna Nightingale]

Kirsten, then Lois:

> To which I reply (as she no doubt expects me to) that we live in a
> Dionysian age, those of us in the West (the rest of you can pipe up
> with your local zietgeist, of course) and hence have rather more
> use for Apollonian correctives.

I HAVE been known to quote Auden's Hermetic Decalogue from Under Which 
Lyre ... even though I have committed a social science or two in my 
time. So, it's a fair cop, they'll never make an Apollonian out of me.

More seriously, it seems to me we live in a pseudo-Dionysian age (no, 
not the Areopagite).

Lots of tease and titillation, lots of consumerism and materialism, but 
speaking as a sex educator and activist, what we mostly have is pleasure 
in service to something else, usually selling things, not pleasure for 
the sake of pleasure.

But anyway.

Lois:

> *** We might if they were correcting the right things.  Alas...  *** 

What she said. But also, because slash is a subgenre of erotic/romantic 
fiction. So the other answer is "well, they could, but in this genre, 
the odds are right up there with the odds that the handsome plumber is 
just going to fix the sink and leave."

I have many theories about 'why slash', all operating at once, the most 
recent being "because certain tv shows and books, many of which I for 
whatever reason like a lot, contain numerous cases of men behaving as no 
men on earth do, leading to plot and characterisation holes of a size 
and shape which can ONLY be satisfactorily plugged by assuming that the 
two buddies are in fact at it like crazed weasels."

Due South comes to mind, as does Man From Uncle.

Also also, antagonists get slashed with almost as much alacrity (and 
often with more smuttiness) as friends. And for parsing this, neither 
the Dionysian nor the Apollonian models have a lot of good leads.

Lois McMaster Bujold wrote:

> Remember, a key sign of a status emergency is a heated or violent 
> response disproportionate to the apparent cause.  It's not a concept to 
> be blithely applied to every human interaction to come down the pike.  
> Just to certain bewilderingly whacko ones.  ***

Riffing off that bit:

One thing worth remembering is that there really _is_ a there there. 
Slashers are not the only people who pick up on this sort of subtext 
between male characters, only the people who find it narratively or 
erotically intriguing enough to actually produce or go looking for 
fiction that deals with.

So if "status emergency" plays a part in slash, I rather suspect that 
it's not in the slashers' arena, but rather in the various ways in which 
writers and actors manage whatever anxiety about meal-male relations (of 
all sorts, not necessarily rumpy-pumpy) presents itself in the attempt 
to write or perform male friendship (or antagonism).

Marna.