Long after the rest of the world has undoubtedly moved on to newer and more interesting topics, my brain still has a firm, not to say obsessive-compulsive, grip on the question of slash and men and the women who love them both.

I'm thinking about an earlier, dictatorial announcement of mine that slash should not under any circumstances attempt to emulate gay male porn.

That was largely because the percentage of decently-written-versus-crap in porn is about the same that it is in slash.

But it's also about audience. The most self-absorbed, reader-indifferent writer in the genre is probably still writing for a female audience, if only herself.

Working on the theory that one writes out of a desire to communicate, I think it's important to remember that the sexual situations with which you're hoping to enthrall and even titillate your audience have to be situations that are erotic to women.

Thus, while it's important that the men be men (in Anne's World), it's important that this male-to-male sex be, I don't know, translated into a scenario erotic to a woman.

Leaving aside rape fantasies and other improbable scenarios I'm unqualified to discuss, this means that the successful slash writer has to walk a narrow line wherein she shows Manly Men having Manly Sex while allowing her female reader to vicariously participate in the scene.

That's not an easy path to tread but there are a number of things that simplify it.

Men are not women but it is true that the human body (male or female) possesses certain almost "standard" erogenous zones.

The degree of arousal produced by manipulating these zones varies but that holds true from one woman to another as well as between different men and I think it's frequently possible to watch a character on-screen and come up with an idea which zones would be their hot spots.

Remove pointless digression on various characters specifically since the entire paragraph was about to distract my brain from whatever point it is I'm trying to make.

Suffice to say that you can watch how a character responds to a kiss on the cheek, a hand on the back, or their body language when someone gets close to them and make some deductions that should ring true to your readers.

I firmly believe that most people pick up on this stuff subconsciously. It's up to the writer to bring it to the forefront of the reader's mind.

Mouth, neck, ears, elbows, nipples, back, genitals, inner thighs, feet, etc., if it feels good to you, it's probably going to feel good to a man. (The only difference is in penetration, but that's a lost cause in slash and I'm not here to try and fight that fight again.)

The point is that you have to write a male reaction to these caresses in order to stay true to your characters. While it's true that there's no sexual reaction that never happens, it is possible to generalize to a large extent.

(A solely, or primarily heterosexual man is not going to respond to sexual arousal, by feeling a "melting" desire to be penetrated.

Most men enjoy the chance to lay back and be passive*, to allow someone else to take control, upon occasion, but by-and-large men are socially and biologically conditioned to be aggressive in sex. It's natural for them to want to reach out and touch and look and be active. Therefore it rings untrue to the reader to read of a guy, even a comparatively young and inexperienced guy, being willing to take and not give pleasure without questioning the situation. It's actually more likely to be an older man who has learned the control to enjoy being ministered to upon occasion.

*I am not referring here to that pervasive yet inaccurate "top and bottom" terminology that's bandied around in fandom. Just so you know.)

I'm getting distracted from my main topic, which was meant to be the difficulty of writing erotica for a female audience when there are no female characters in a story for the reader to identify with. Although, as the popularity of slash proven, there are plenty of women who can bridge that gap just fine.

And now I'm all distracted by those thousands of stories where one so-called male character is a very thinly disguised female and I know those are amazingly popular with a lot of readers and yet if they want to read about women, why don't they just read het?

Doggone it, when I started this, I was going to be all nice and complimentary to slash writers who manage to write erotic stories while keeping the characters recognizably male, but now that I've meandered all over the place aimlessly for so long, I've lost the thread.