Harry loves Draco

It's all J.K. Rowling's fault. "In particular, fans have pounced on a subplot" in the newest doorstopper, Whosits, I mean, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," "that has 16-year-old Harry compulsively stalking his teen nemesis: Rowling writes that he was 'rapidly becoming obsessed with Draco Malfoy.'"

Thus leading to the latest slash fiction obsession, reports the August 30 Advocate. "Draco's hands crept up to Harry's face and grabbed his cheeks," one fan writes. "Harry thought for sure he meant to push him away, but instead, Draco tilted Harry's head slightly and deepened the kiss." Found somewhere here, I believe.

Slash fiction -- endless porn stories of sex between male pop culture characters -- is largely a straight girl thing.

Lefties are desperate to claim slash fiction writing as culture-jamming -- the equivalent of putting your foot through your television set. Culture-jammers "introduce noise into the signal as it passes transmitter to receiver, encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations," wrote cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993. It's culture-jammer as Groucho Marxist.

Slash perhaps first featured Kirk/Spock sex stories (K slash S, geddit?), according to Constance Penley's 1991 essay "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology." "Women have been writing Star Trek pornography since at least 1976, mostly in the United States, but also in Britain, Canada, and Australia. The idea did not begin with one person who then spread it to others, but seems to have arisen spontaneously in various places... as fans recognized, through seeing the episodes countless times in syndication and on their own taped copies, that there was an erotic homosexual attraction there." And by the way Penley's piece is written, we're talkin' heterosexual women.

Penley says slash is most pervasive in a sci-fi context. The women writers' "solidarity as a group... rests on their pride in having created both a unique, hybridized genre that ingeniously blends romance, pornography, and utopian science fiction and a comfortable yet stimulating social space in which women can manipulate the products of mass-produced culture to stage a popular debate around issues of technology, fantasy, and everyday life. This, of course, is my version of it. The fans would say they are just having fun." In fact, Penley adds, most of these female fans and amateur auteurs categorically reject academia's efforts to call them feminists (and whatever other big tedious words come to mind).

Penley writes that this writing is nonetheless an effort to resist or renegotiate "alternative and unexpected ways of thinking and speaking about women's relation to the new technologies of science, the body, and the mind."

If you say so, perfessor. They're certainly appropriating pop culture icons and normalizing homosexuality. Penley goes on to note that those slash writers who formalize Star Trek technology are mostly male (like publishing instructions on shuttle landing approach methods). "The women Star Trek fans... have defined technology in a way that includes the technologies of the body, the mind, and everyday life."

More: "The K/Sers are constantly asking themselves why they are drawn to writing their sexual and social utopian romances across the bodies of two men, and why those two men in particular. The answers -- and there are surely more than one -- range from the pleasures of writing explicit same-sex erotica to the fact that writing a story about two men avoids the built-in inequality of the romance formula, in which dominance and submission are invariably the respective roles of male and female. There are also advantages to writing about a futuristic couple: it is far from incidental that women have chosen to write their erotic stories about a couple living in a fully automated world in which there will never be fights over who has to scrub the tub, take care of the kids, cook, or do the laundry. Indeed, one reason the fans give for their difficulty thus far in slashing 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' is that children and families now live on the Enterprise (albeit in a detachable section!) and that those circumstances severely cut into the erotic possibilities.

"All the same, one still wonders why these futuristic bodies -- this couple of the 23rd century -- must be imagined and written as male bodies. Why are the women fans so alienated from their bodies that they choose to write erotic fantasies only in relation to a non-female body?"

Nowadays, slash is everywhere. Starsky/Hutch, Simon/Simon, Crockett/Tubbs, even grrrls like Xena/Gabrielle -- do a search on your own fave pairing, you'll find something. And the pool of writers has grown dramatically, perhaps even including straight men. Still, with the beginning of mainstreaming (especially easy on the 'net), slash t'ain't terribly revolutionary seeming any more.

Except when it comes to two teen boys like Harry and Draco having sex. And it's especially risque when based on a kids' book. Acknowledging teen sexuality (rather than just teen mash notes) makes H/D pretty darned amazing. And it's undoubtedly illegal under Canada's new kiddie porn law.