Slash In The Gland

All of you out there in Pervertland, if you read this rather obscure little column of mine, are likely bent enough to be familiar with “slash” fiction.

But, until recently, I never had been.

What happened recently is that the medical director of an organization that I work for absolutely lives for slash.

Everyone has his own perversions, and becoming a doctor or lawyer or entertainer or even a priest (especially a priest) does not make them go away.

I really don’t think slash is that perverse, and that is why it is so fascinating to me. I can’t get over the idea that it is really funny. I just cannot take it seriously.

Let me explain: Slash is pornographic fan-fiction. The phenomenon developed in the 1970s with, naturally enough, Star Trek.

Some people really liked Star Trek, but they were not exactly satisfied with the plot. They wanted Captian Kirk and Spock to be lovers. So these fans would write their own stories based on this concept, and they would be titled “K/S” for Kirk/Spock.

So like anything that is fucking geeky-as-hell, slash has drawn a bunch of nuts to it that elaborate on the erotic doings of characters from Harry Potter, Planet of the Apes, and Lord of the Rings.

In fact, Lord of the Rings is intensely popular among slash writers because the story is chock-full of boyish elves and hobbits and what not, and the butt-fucking combinations are nearly endless!

I also have a rather controversial theory about Lord of the Rings, but so far I am the only one who thinks this. As much as I know, I think it might be a lot about boy sex and have a small pedophiliac edge to it, but who knows. I’m not going to go on about that, but the first time I saw slash drawings of Lord of the Rings characters I thought they looked like young boys.

Slash is further more bizarre as a form of pornography that mainly draws women to it. There are some men that are all about slash, but the vast majority of them are women, and most of these women are lesbos.

This makes sense when you read the stories because there is little suck-and-fuck action, but lots of softness and loving. The characters caress and look lovingly into each other’s eyes. The slash reads more like a harlequin romance novel then your basic Penthouse Forum type of story.

So it is a feminine smut. Feminine and nerdy.

Most of what I know about slash came from a long article in a local newspaper last week wherein this highly honored addiction specialist with whom I work came out about her slash obsession. She went so far as to elaborate on how slash actually saved her life!

It came down to this woman kicking chemicals and replacing her obsession for them with slash. Since doing so she has met a lover, made friends, and her life has improved dramatically. I hope she doesn’t read this. Of course I make no judgments about her, because I know that I’m a fucking weird perv, and I only wish I could find something like Hobbits fucking to write stories about because, Lord knows, I need to be saved soon.

Before knowing about the good doctor’s slash proclivities, I had been to her house several times. She often throws Christmas parties, birthday parties, and any other special occasions in her home.

And, in retrospect, I noticed things that could have tipped me off to her slashiness. Like the two bookshelves she had that extended to the ceiling and were filled with J.R.R. Tolkien books or Tolkien-esque novels, or novels on Tolkien, or Tolkien’s novels, or characters from Tolkien’s novels, or . . . you get the idea.

The rest of the doctor’s house is decorated rather lavishly, with frames without pictures in them, and really nice expensive furniture, and everything looks perfect, almost like out of one of those beautiful homes magazines.

But then, amidst this conventional paradise, there are various oddities, like stand-up life-sized cardboard cut-outs of characters like Elijah Wood as Frodo from Lord of the Rings. Sean Astin as Sam is also there, as tall as he would really be, amongst about three other life-sized cut-outs of beautiful boy-men hobbit elves from the Lord of the Rings movies.

The computer room figures as the most important place in the house, because that is where the slash is written, and read, and relationships are made and broken between various slash fans.

Pasted on the computer-room walls are huge collages of various Lord of the Rings characters, some in poses that I really cannot recall being in the movies. It struck me as odd initially. But now it all makes sense.

I am not mocking this woman or her passion. Again, I only wish that I had an outlet like slash where I could drastically help myself with all of my mental-health issues by writing about elves caressing each others privates.

I know that everyone is a pervert, but some porn is just funny and fucking weird to me, and she is a protagonist of geeky hobbit erotica, and this just makes me happy.