So that explains the slash fans

Obligatory weekend wrap-up: Thanks to everyone for the kind words about my sister. It's hard to not feel frightened and anxious about all of this, and it would be an understatement to say that I am utterly panicked by surgery of any kind, so the idea of them opening her up possibly into her chest cavity doesn't sit well. And I am deeply afeared of this kind of cancer, so until we know for certain there isn't cancer, I'm going to be a wreck, but it means a lot to me to know that people care.

I had a wonderful time Friday night meeting minim_calibre and onetwomany, who'd come all the way from Australia for Writercon and was tooling around the western states, and whom I've always wanted to meet. I was a terrible hostess, frazzled and with nothing to offer my poor guests, but it was so enjoyable to sit and yammer about everything from con gossip to the price of housing in Australia to comics. I wish I hadn't been so tired and Sabre had to hit the road in the morning; I would have loved to stay up all night chatting.

My writing group continues to be the highlight of my month. This weekend I don't know what it was -- something in the water, the round table as opposed to the rectangular table we usually sit at, or what -- but we were unbelievably silly and wrote great exercise pieces and came up with a title for a fringe play by talking about Firefly and hands-free cellphones -- two different hearing/speaking blunders gave us "Space Catholics and the Headless Cell Phone", for which we wrote reviews and blurbs for the promotional poster. I truly adore my writing group.

*****

And lastly, I usually plow through my issue of Discover magazine quickly, because there's always at least one good article, but mostly it's stuff I can't understand like quantum physics and molecular science and paleontology. If you've never read Discover, it's a great magazine, kind of like Scientific American for Joe Blow. But last month they had many incredible articles, including a piece on twin studies (finally, an article about twins that doesn't mythologize us and spend all its time on that absurd notion that twins share every single possible characteristic and never vary), the myth of recovered memory, and an article about forbidden science -- studies that have come under fire or had funding axed because they're about sex or related social things. I found the whole issue fascinating, because I've often believed what politicians have said regarding these studies -- that they're a waste of money. But this article put it in very clear perspective just how much sexual patterns and practices can affect everyone's lives as well as the public spending for disease control, etc.

Buried in the article were these two paragraphs, which I found completely astonishing:

The first involves probing the brain to understand the nature of sexuality. At Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, for instance, psychologist J. Michael Bailey and his former graduate student, Meredith Chivers, have discovered that men and women are fundamentally different in their arousal patterns. Bailey and Chivers fitted their research subjects with instruments designed to measure blood flow to their genitals, then showed them explicit two-minute video clips. The male participants responded predictably: Heterosexuals were aroused when they watched women having sex with women; gay men responded to watching men having sex with men. But women had a different reaction: All the film clips aroused them equally. “Their sexual arousal doesn’t seem to map onto their stated sexual preference,” says Chivers, who is now a fellow at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. (boldface mine)

The implications of the Northwestern studies are enormous. For one, they start to explain why Viagra doesn’t work for women, even though it stimulates blood flow to the genitals: The relationship between physiological arousal and sexual function is complicated. The results also offer important information to psychotherapists whose clients are struggling with sexual issues. “Because we have a male model of sexuality, women who don’t fit that model feel they’re different or weird,” says University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond. The new findings may help clinicians whose female patients are confused by their erotic reactions to the “wrong” sex, for example.

This fascinated me for a number of reasons, but mostly in regards to the interest by women in male/male slash. I thought this went very far to explain, scientifically, that there really is a valid reason why this might be more attractive to women than people seem to understand. I've certainly seen plenty of soft-science "explanations" for the attraction in academia, and in the popular media, but none have ever adequately explained it from a perspective of wiring. In fact, most of the popular explanations leave me cold or bitter; they're reductive and insulting most of the time. But I like the fact that this takes into account that old male model of sexuality and of women not fitting that model so they feel like freaks, and that many of the women in the study responded to arousing images the same way, without regard to orientation.

For me, that was one of the most concise and cogent arguments for the way women of many different orientations respond, when they respond positively, to slash. I'd be interested to know what others think (though, like herself_nyc did this weekend in her discussion of slash, I'd love to hear people's thoughts if you can behave like an adult and discuss from a reasonable perspective rather than lashing out at others who don't share your POV), because I really latched on to these paragraphs and this story in general as offering more of a concrete understanding of what makes slash a possibility for so many women, and why they would find a male/male model appealing, even if they themselves are lesbians. (While the article focused on truck stop "societies" as a model, it's primarily about studying forbidden topics such as duality in sexual identity, pornography, sex work, and the spread of diseases.)

Instead of seeming reductive, to me, this information felt like it was opening up whole new ideas about the nature of what women find erotic, and a kind of nice, empowering little set of words we could pull out the next time someone chastises us for being into slash.

What do you think?