I will never forget ā and I wish so *badly* I still had a copy ā the essay one of my exes wrote before she gafiated, in which she talked about how the act of writing slash and being part of the slash community in general had allowed her to āwrite herself back into her bodyā.
To, essentially, take off some of the blinders and filters western culture had put on her, all the things that had convinced her that, as an āovertall, fat, awkward, anxious, and altogether unattractiveā person (she did have some anxiety issues, but none of the rest was true by any measure but all the lies weāve ALL been told), she deserved neither happiness, nor romance, nor anything resembling sexual parity or satisfaction.
We met through fandom ā she later told me sheād been quietly lurking on my mailing lists and around my websites for two years before she ever actually spoke to me ā and we had four good years together before our relationship started to fall apart.
And, while not all of our happiness ā together and separately ā can be laid at the feet of the various slash goddesses, quite a lot of it can be.
Slash wrote *me* back into my body, too ā several times, in several ways. Slash connected me to genders I never couldāve imagined, or couldāve imagined being *worth* connecting to in the days before I really understood the possibilities inherent to taking the media I had been given and *transforming* it.
We are *here*, and our pleasure is worth it ā our pleasures, plural, are part and parcel of our identities.
And, you know, some of us, after weāve been writing slash for a good, long while?
Find new ways to express those pleasures when women are there, new ways to understand those aspects of our sexualities ā our *identities* ā which include *hetero*sexuality.
Itās a journey. A process. A continuum. A spectrum. A *multiverse*.
Of *pleasure*.
And itās all allowed.
Because we made it that way.
Because we *make* it that way.
Every day.
janainaart
kianamaiart
