Yes. I have the European version of this and yes. over the years, by demonstrating all of its wonders, I have converted several people including a *commercial airline pilot* and motorcycle enthusiast to the Honda Jazz/Fit as simply the ideal car.

this is wonderful. your mum was a hero.

well, I am delighted <3

so yeah. I think slash fiction is politically important. to the fight for LGBT+ people and also to the fight for gender equality, for women's rights, for men to be allowed to be free.

ice hockey players being able to *just come out* is what we wanted.

the stories in Heated Rivalry are like the stories in slash: stories of men wanting love, wanting intimacy, needing to share their lives and being held back by the straitjacket of masculinity.

and the stories of slash fiction are of women saying: we want to see all that. that is when you are hot.

there is some terrible kind of "feminism" now (maybe always) which is about "men are shit, women are great, fuck men they're awful".

and er, yeah, I think the ethos of slash fiction is the opposite of that. it is: we see your sensitivity and tenderness and vulnerability and it is SO HOT. SO SO HOT

we mostly want to be attractive

men can do a lot of good for women by saying "I love how strong you are, I adore your intellect, I find your power in the world incredibly sexy"

and women can do a huge amount of good by saying "male vulnerability is sexy, men's emotions are attractive"

I never really studied "gender theory" and have come to my own conclusions about it all. one of the things I strongly believe is that in our mostly (still) heteronormative culture men have the power to tell women they're OK *and* women have the power to tell men they're OK.

and still meet, trade zines, write etc. Blake's Seven fandom was heavily in print and in person. There will be many more and ofc LJ, other platforms and ultimately AO3 helped enormously. But that origin story feels very important. It was a risk. People were afraid they'd lose their jobs for it.

yes I know, but the internet was what made it become enormous (as it were)

what happened quietly to women who clicked on some slash fiction, read it and went "wait, I like this" was a kind of coming-out process. an understanding that sexual interest ends up being a political and ethical stance. enjoying slash, you eventually have to stand up for LGBT+ rights.

(just for receipts, on page 412 here Friday says: "I said in Men in Love that women are not aroused by the image of sex between men. Well, at that time I'd never heard of the idea")

www.academia.edu/20204163/Wom...

(it is really interesting that slash fiction was written by women, for other women to read. so although it is about men, it is a sexual performance for other women. certainly I know of some women who ended up leaving their male partner for a woman they'd written slash for or with.)

and then after a bit of time quietly thinking "huh. I really really like this", started to question their own politics.

it wasn't a visible-from-the-outside change. these women mostly didn't get divorced (although, sometimes...) but they did start supporting LGBT+ causes.

and slash fiction was (maybe still is?) written and read mostly not by gay men but almost exclusively by women who would otherwise have called themselves straight

in terms of 'oral history' what happened was a real soccer mom radicalisation. women started going "wait. I like this."

(and er, if you watch Heated Rivalry, the characters are essentially Kirk/Spock. The maverick one who does what he likes. The methodical orderly one who obeys the rules.)

The corpus of slash fiction is not just bigger than all other erotic fiction, it is bigger than *all other fan fiction*

slash fiction is a subset of fan fiction. fanfic is stories about your favourite TV show. within that there is erotic fanfic. and within erotic fanfic, slash is erotic fan fiction about same-sex relationships. called 'slash' for the punctuation between the character names. Kirk/Spock. Angel/Spike.

WELL ANYWAY it turned out that even though women would tell Friday their fantasies about being tied up or whatever, fantasies about gay men were *so* taboo that it was only when the anonymity of the internet came along that lots of women could start writing their absolute filth

this was a bit of a mystery, because it was well-known that straight men love a bit of lesbian porn, and lots of thoughts about why women's sexuality is so incredibly different to men that women might fantasise sexually about *animals* (in Friday's work) but not about... two men getting it on?