Dear “slash” fandom,
Yes, I’m talking to you.
You, person who shipped Kirk and Spock from day one. You, person who likes to pair up every two good-looking dudes who show up on the screen together. You, person who has that one gay OTP you can’t seem to escape. You, person who carefully looks at character interactions and picks out the pairing you just know would work. You, person who simply loves fanfiction.
All of you.
First of all, I don’t like the term “slash,” but there’s not really a more all-encompassing term other than the shipping of homosexual pairings, which lacks in brevity what slash lacks in felicity, so I’ll just keep saying “slash” against my better judgment for now.
I’m addressing you specifically — rather than people who don’t participate in slash shipping — because there’s a trend I’ve noticed among us. And, obviously, it’s a trend I don’t like.
It’s no secret that slash shipping isn’t exactly smiled upon by society.
We’re usually written off as delusional, horny, fantasy-obsessed fangirls who just want to see those two hot guys have sex, dammit. We obsess about it, write terrible fanfiction about it, draw pornographic fanart of it, painstakingly analyze every last lingering gaze between the characters in question. Delusional, delusional, delusional. It’s something to be ashamed of. Something no decent person who truly understands the show/movie/book/etc. would want to hear about, surely. Something that ought to stay within our private little pockets of fantasy. Something that would clearly never happen in the actual plot, and if you think otherwise, well, you’re a crazy fangirl — you should have known better.
We’re used to hearing all that. We expect it. In fact, we count on it.
But the truly disturbing part of it is, we’ve internalized it.