Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

interhuman connections and the wish and illusion to be on the inside and to
watch, even if only in one’s head and on the screen:
Viscerally, there is the appeal of two beautiful male
bodies, entwined in an embrace that makes my breath catch
whether I am reading it being described or looking at an
image. Symmetry and grace, strength and form. (Still
bowing to the [Feminist] Apologists, I get the same kind of
reaction in a different part of my brain when I see a picture
of a mother embracing her daughter, or women embracing
each other. Non-sexual Symmetry and continuance.)
Intellectually, I don't see myself in those two men, but
I see myself there. Not as voyeur but as an emotional
reaction to something that makes my heart ache to be what
they feel. Even if I am writing what they feel. There is a
connection between two men that I believe a man and
woman can never reach. A connection between two women
as friends or lovers that men will never understand and a
man and a woman can never share.
However, I can understand those connections between
a man and a woman and a woman and a woman. I can
never know what, precisely, two men can feel for each
other. (Maygra 1999)
Maygra also drew MacGeorge, another prolific author into slash. MacGeorge
used to write gen fanfiction before she started writing slash, and in an online
essay debating the why of slash she narrates her entry into that genre:
I was first exposed to slash well after I started writing
Highlander fanfiction. My initial interest was in this
wonderful heroic fantasy world featuring a gorgeous, dark,
angst-ridden hero who had faults, but was a genuinely
“good” man. Like many others who write and read heroic
fantasy, it was not about admiring such a hero. It was about
wanting to be such a hero. Strong, sensitive, caring, stoic,
driven, conflicted -- all those traits so common to our (or at
least my) fantasies.
Then I fell into the clutches of the wonderful and
talented Maygra de Rhema who had the good taste to
actually like some of my fiction, and who gently urged me
to read this stuff called “slash.” My first reaction was
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