Thanks, Sacch -- I totally did not know that. I like Jay Lake's work. And thanks, V, for the slash explanation, which has always confused me. And yes, westerns as romance-for-men -- I love it! That makes a lot of sense.

I think many men write good ff erotica for men. Just as women write good mm romance mainly for women. I find mens ff it a bit sexist and sometimes stereotyped--but it got published by a press who presumably made money from it. I am also reading mainly older stuff, 70s etc and pre-PC.

"with no intention of titillating het men or of implying (or outright showing) that the women are just killing time until a man shows up on the scene to give them the sexual satisfaction they are not able to produce for themselves. " Um . . . aren't you painting a fairly broad picture about the motives of male f/f creators? Or are you assuming that all slash creators who are women are implying that the men in their stories or vids are just killing time until a woman shows up on the scene to give them the sexual satisfaction they are not able to produce for themselves? :) Mind you, I'm sure that's a lot of male-produced f/f videos like that out there. But there are a lot of Mary Sue slash stories too (stories in which the female author inserts herself into the story), and that doesn't detract from the good slash. Following up on the rec of M. Christian, I'd point out that f/f, like m/m, is a genre where you can't always tell what the author's gender is from their name. M. Christian probably adopted his gender-neutral name deliberately, because he writes f/f, m/f, and m/m. (He's heterosexual, by the way.) If he'd been writing as, say, Michael Christian, it would have been harder for him to sell his f/f stories. veinglory wrote: "I would say slash is the name for the sub-genre written mainly by women. Lesbians and men also write slash but a vaste majority are straight women from what I see." Okay, here's the only survey on the topic I know of, and it's a very unscientific one. But it's better than speculation. I'll quote here from what I've written elsewhere, since the survey is no longer online and isn't cached. "An unscientific survey in 2003 of one thousand slash women and men hints that queer folk play a prominent role in the slash community. (The average sexual orientation in the survey was 1.82, with 0 as exclusive heterosexual, 6 as exclusive homosexual, and 3 as equally homosexual and heterosexual. The survey did not address the topic of gender identity.) The same survey found that over half the respondents read the less common female/female slash, with over a quarter of the respondents stating that they enjoyed equally both male/male and female/female slash. . . . Rushlight, 'Slash Demographics Survey' (http://slashcity.org/ rushlight/ slashsurvey.html). The survey's author cautions that the number of female/female slash fans is likely underestimated in the survey, saying, 'The survey circulated throughout a large number of mailing lists and livejournals , but most replies appear to have come from -centric fandoms.'" I can say that, out of the slashers on the Friends list of my private journal, four are bisexual women, three are (I think) heterosexual women, one is a gay transman, and one is a gay man. That just may reflect the type of people whom I befriend. Regarding gender: There's actually a big debate going on in the fan fiction world at the moment about whether fandom is "female space." I'd say that it is in the same sense that the military is male space - it's been strongly influenced by the customs of a particular gender, but it's by no means gender-homogenous. However, I'd say that the fact that it's *fandom* is the biggest factor in shaping its nature. I've gone through the booklists of GLBT SF/F clubs (which are probably made up mainly of male members) and the booklists of slash sites, and they're practically identical. The common factor is that slash grew out of SF/F fandom, so gay guys who read SF/F are likely to be reading the same titles as slashers.

Certainly if f/f is that strong in fandom it hasn't emerged that strongly into the epublishing/erotic romance area where f/f/ remains weak to the point that many of the top epresses would even look at it :(

F/f holds its own pretty well in the print world, although I think I'm seeing a slight shift away from erotica. Romance has always been a big f/f seller, and now both Cleis and Alyson have added Best Romance/Love Stories to their list of regulars.

I have never sorted out in my mind, the difference between erotica and slash. I've always thought that "slash" meant a sexual or romantic pairing between media-created characters-- usually two men. But I hear the word being used for original characters nowadays. *shrug* Anyhoo, women characters... I wonder, how tough and strong can a female character be, before she's judged as "not believable?" And along that vein, in a conversation the other day, a young woman (we were talking about whether or not we'd ever questioned our sexual identity) said "(I) see these couples, and there will be a pretty woman and her girlfriend is big and mannish-- if you want to have a girlfriend, why would you choose a girl that looked like a man?" :roll:

Anything in the Spur series, I believe. Such wanton sex!

Not exactly a prude, myself, but when I glanced through those pages I was a little taken aback. At the time I had looked through the red covered romances, and even the growing stock of 'erotica' that our library. The Spur novels were definitely the most graphic and blunt of all of them. Some of the erotica labeled novels were far more tame than even the romance novels! I didn't think we should be drawing attention to our erotica collection by slapping huge labels of warning on them :)

Stella Omega wrote: "I've always thought that 'slash' meant a sexual or romantic pairing between media-created characters-- usually two men. But I hear the word being used for original characters nowadays. *shrug*" The original definition of slash was Kirk/Spock. Oh, you want something broader than that. :) Well, the next definition was "a sexual or romantic pairing between media-created *male* characters *who are not paired in the canon*," but that definition fell out of favor around the time femslash came along. Then the litslashers started producing stories. Then came Queer As Folk with all its canon m/m pairings. Then came the original fiction authors who were writing stories specifically for slash audiences, and what's a convenient short-hand way of describing that genre except as original slash? Of course, there are plenty of Kirk/Spockers who are still sticking with the original definition. "And along that vein, in a conversation the other day, a young woman (we were talking about whether or not we'd ever questioned our sexual identity) said '(I) see these couples, and there will be a pretty woman and her girlfriend is big and mannish-- if you want to have a girlfriend, why would you choose a girl that looked like a man?'" I take it she's not into butches. :)