A discussion in the Guardian (http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2044573,00.html) of a new film about a black gay romance mentioned the topic of slash fiction and raised the question again of why so much of it is read and written by straight women. I’ve only read slash fiction occasionally, but I can at least vaguely see its appeal, so here are my preliminary thoughts on the traditional male/male version. (I know there has been academic research on the subject, but I’ve not looked at that).

I’ve seen references to slash which imply it’s just a female version of male fantasies about two lesbians, but that isn’t a sufficient answer. It seems to me that it is the relationships, rather than simply the sexual aspect, that is central to slash. Of course it’s nice to have two hunky men to describe/read about rather than one, but it is not generic men that these stories are interested in, but specific characters. Indeed, there is even slash with no explicit sex in it, which makes it rather a failure as porn.

Instead, it seems to me that romance is the key to slash fiction. Behind much of it is the old desire of romantic fiction: to find your own true love, to capture the heart of the hero. If slash includes explicit sex, it simply reflects the way romantic fiction is going these days. The sex is not casual between the characters, but is the reflection and expression of their deeper connection.

So why do women read or write slash rather than ordinary fanfic? Part of it is about role-models. The first alter ego I can remember myself having as a child was as a blond Californian superhero. This character (who still mysteriously shared my female name) was everything I was not: gorgeous, grown-up, physically invincible...and male. I think I had already realised that (at least in the early 1970s) it was better to be a man than a woman. Just as later, when I was in my teens, I wanted to be Sir Lancelot rather than Guinevere and Fred Astaire rather than Ginger Rogers.

I think it’s no coincidence that slash fiction originated and is still dominated by genres (such as sci-fi and crime) and series (Star Trek, Starsky and Hutch, Harry Potter) which don’t have a lot of strong female characters in them. Instead, these stories often feature strong bonds of friendship between the leading male characters. In one sense all that slash fiction is doing is breaking down the rigid demarcations that buddy-buddy stories feel they must preserve between homosociality and homoeroticism. The pairings, on the whole, tend to reflect the dynamics of the original (Spock/Kirk, Blake/Avon, Joey/Chandler, House/Wilson) rather than arbitrarily impose relationships.

Slash then, can be a way for a female reader/writer to place themselves mentally in a sexual relationship with a favoured character without violating the truth of that character. A woman cannot really be Kirk’s eternal love; Spock can be. More than that, slash offers a fantasy about more equal relationships, ones in which the female reader/writer can continue to fight/work/save the universe alongside their lover, unrestricted by social conventions or biological realities. As long as so many popular TV shows simultaneously both attract and exclude women, I think this straight female attraction to slash is going to continue.

L has now got her first Barbie: I wouldn’t have bought it for her myself, but she got it as a Christmas present from a kind friend and I could hardly refuse it. I have no particular feminist objections to L playing with dolls, but I have to admit I find Barbie inferior to the Action Girl I had as a child. It’s not just that her figure is less realistic: at a practical level, she hasn’t got as many moveable joints.

Along with the Barbie has come a new responsibility for me as a mother: making clothes for her. The problem is that it is now quite difficult to buy clothes for Barbies in the shops (I haven’t yet tried eBay). Instead of new outfits, what you get is a different Barbie in a new outfit. Presumably, the economics of this make sense for the manufacturers: from the ecological side (and from the point of view of storage) it’s crazy. It also seems to me wrong at some deeper emotional level. Playing with dolls is a way for a child to recreate the world around them and also create their own world. My Action Girl was, at least some of the time, the person I could not be in reality. Changing a doll’s costume is part of this process of making her do different things. The one/two costumes per Barbie model at some level also suggests limited options for this change. Dancing Princess Barbie cannot the next day become Riding Barbie or Explorer Barbie or Going to the Beach Barbie.

So I have been fiddling around making costumes for Barbie. Again, I don’t feel this is a betrayal of my feminist principles. The disdain that many feminists in the sixties and seventies felt for handicrafts seems to have vanished with compulsory sewing for girls in schools. If you enjoy the process of making something by hand and/or the results are beautiful, why not do it? I don’t have the time or talent to do much creative handicraft, but I don’t see this as a sign of my superior virtue. Instead, like playing a musical instrument, sewing or knitting well come into the category of things I’d like to be good at, but I don’t want that enough to dedicate time to mastering the skills..

Fortunately, at least at the moment, semi-botched jobs are good enough for L’s Barbie. (The great advantage of making clothes for dolls is a) they don’t take anything like as long to sew or knit as real clothes and b) the recipient won’t complain about them being uncomfortable). At the moment I am just making basic things like trousers and hats. Longer-term though, the other feminist advantage of making dolls’ clothes is that you can create costumes for roles that go beyond manufacturers’ stereotypes. I can still remember the judo jacket I made for my Action Girl; indeed I even made her a few pieces of armour. (If you want to know why: I was a medieval nut even as a child. If you want to know how: papier-mâché).

That is advanced stuff: at the moment I am trying to work out the basics, like how to make very small shoes for a doll dumb enough to stand on tiptoe the whole time. Naturally, I went to the internet, to discover that most of the patterns for shoes online are intended for those doing medieval re-enactments. I found a handy one for Viking shoes and thought, maybe sometime in the future, I could do a whole Viking costume for Barbie. Then I made the fatal mistake of googling ‘Viking Barbie’. And there she is, on sale already:

Princess of the Vikings Barbie

(Longer description at http://www.angelicdreamz.com/store/barbie_more_world_dolls.html#viking)

It is staggering. What marketing person thought of this? Who decided that little girls really wanted a Viking doll, but a totally unrealistic Viking doll? That it should have a dinky gold sword and a full-length gown? Why? Why? Why?

L certainly isn’t going to get that Barbie. Instead, she will just have to wait until I get round to making a costume for Unn the Deepminded Barbie (see Laxdaela Saga, http://omacl.org/Laxdaela/chapter4.html). Now that’s a Viking woman for you.

I’ve started thinking about turning my thesis on Carolingian masculinity and morality into a book, which has got me considering some of the more general conceptual framework of it. One possible complaint about the thesis is that I haven’t closely linked moral concerns to political events. Instead, I am largely taking the politics out of morality, concentrating on the broad sweep of norms, rather than seeing particular moral campaigns as being politically driven. Is it justifiable in seeing morality as independent in this way, or should public discussions about morality always be seen as simply political manoeuvres?

There are obviously vast differences between today’s political situation and that in the ninth century, such as democratisation, the mass media and the greater tendency for separation of church and state. But what is noticeable even now is that politicians can manipulate moral sentiments, but they cannot simply create them. For example, in all the recent (and not so recent) affirmations by the Conservatives of the need to support marriage, what they have never done is say that they will make divorce harder. Maybe fifty years ago they could have said that: today it would be electoral suicide. Similarly, there is no serious British movement to ban abortion. Nor will anyone but marginal figures in British society claim to be racist anymore: even the BNP tries to hide their bigotry under more acceptable euphemisms. (In contrast, the Polish government is planning to ban discussions of homosexuality in schools (http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2038272,00.html))

All this suggests society-specific limits to what counts as acceptable moral change, variable over both time and space. Politicians can, of course, sometimes help change wider moral norms: the abolition of the death penalty happened in the UK long before this was a popular view. But legislation in itself does not necessarily result in moral changes: in the US the legitimacy of abortion rights is still hotly debated more than thirty years after Roe v Wade.

The other thing about reducing morality to politics is that to my mind it over-estimates the cynicism of rulers and politicians. There are some blatant manipulations of moral discourse by politicians, such as George W. Bush’s ‘dog-whistle’ speeches for the Christian right (or Philip IV’s suppression of the Templars for financial gain). But more often, I think, politicians do believe what they are saying, even if they may also time/target their pronouncements carefully. Bush and Blair may have lied about the reasons for attacking Iraq, but in their own minds they clearly still see themselves as Saving the Free World. In other words, I think politicians are less cynical and more self-deluding than is commonly reckoned. (I am not necessarily saying this is a desirable thing). Similarly, while being tough on crime may be Blair’s way of protecting himself from the tabloids, it also genuinely reflects an authoritarian streak in himself and some others in New Labour.

Moral campaigns are often full of hypocrisy: but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are insincere. Instead, as I’m sure a psychologist could explain, it is far easier to see the mote in someone else’s eye than the beam in your own. And it is surely all too human to pronounce that some sin is wrong while simultaneously telling yourself that a) you didn’t really commit it and b) that anyway, you’re going to stop committing it from now on. Self-interested, moral and psychological motives are inextricably fused in any decisions as to what moral priorities should be. I *know* my views about discrimination would be subtly different if I were a black working-class man rather than a white middle-class woman, even if I still had the same broadly liberal outlook.

Similarly, I am always unconvinced by the strains of feminism who explain how every social change is just a way for the patriarchy consciously to do down women [I’ve seen that said about the acts in Victorian times fixing maximum working times for women in factories, for example]. I think it’s far more that elite men [like most social groups] have been singularly bad at recognising the interests of other groups with whom they have little in common, while also unreasonably confident that they do know what’s best for such groups. When the church persecuted heretics was it simply because the power of the higher clerics was threatened? Or was it because that threat was to them one example of how a wider God-ordained order would be overturned?

To me, seeing all moral discourses in terms simply of personal or political advantage obscures more than it reveals. More than that, it is not true to life. I know that I (as well as many other Christians) do things as a result of our religion that are not in our material or other interests. I give money to charity that I do not need to; I refrain from doing things I would like to do because I believe they are not morally right. (The same would be true of most people who hold some kind of moral code, religious or not). Of course, I also kid myself constantly that I am not going against my religion when I really am: that I am ‘justified’ in being rude rather than patient to someone, selfish rather than sharing. But not all the time, not every time. Moral codes, particularly publicly articulated moral legislation, are very often largely paying lip service to ideals. But even that lip service is important: it shows what we (or the Carolingians) think is important, or at least what we want to think is important.

I’ve been trying to read up about the early Renaissance in order to give my students an overview. This has been a slightly odd experience since I must be one of the few people around who knew more about the Carolingian ‘Renaissance’ and the twelfth century ‘Renaissance’ than the actual Renaissance. One book I’ve read is Lisa Jardine, Worldly goods: a new history of the Renaissance. This has some very interesting discussions, particularly about the book trade, but in its focus on consumerism it seems to me to share many of the problems with more general materialist explanations of culture. (I’ve heard similar explanations of the earlier ‘Renaissances’).

The most obvious problem with explaining cultural innovation by the new wealth of a state is all the counter-examples. Firstly, developments in wealth are rarely sudden, but a gradual takeoff. Why was there in a Renaissance in 15th but not 14th century Italy? Why did the Venetian contribution to the Renaissance only really develop in the sixteenth century, when it was probably in slow economic decline, rather than earlier? Why do some wealthy states spend their money on art and some not? If money and the search for prestige really are the driving forces of culture why is the modern USA not creating its own Shakespeares, Leonardos or Picassos? Equally, are some of the small Renaissance courts such as Urbino really spending more on consumption than the kings of England, for example? Or is it just that they are spending their money on different types of consumption? Is conspicuous consumption really an invention of the Renaissance, as Jardine seems to imply, or is it a constant of medieval society?

The same problems come if you try and link cultural developments too closely to particular political circumstances. If you argue that the fragmented states of Italy produced the patronage that allowed cultural developments, why is the fragmented and prosperous Germany relatively unimportant in cultural history until substantially later? Why does high culture flourish under imperial Rome, Charlemagne’s empire and expansionist twelfth century France?

I don’t want to go back to the simple view that periods of cultural development are just unexplained outpourings of genius. Cultural markets are clearly important: if there is a demand for classicizing painting and more people are taking up the style and artistic careers then clearly you are more likely to get some extremely talented people producing masterpieces. (In the same way the sheer numbers of films developed by the Hollywood studio system and the sucking-in of talent increased the number of great movies). But systems of patronage or markets aren’t creative: artists are. It is only after Giotto had painted work like the Arena Chapel in Padua (http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/g/giotto/padova/index.html) that patrons realised that this was the style they wanted (though in some Italian cities tastes obviously remained ‘old-fashioned’ for a long time, as Duccio’s success shows). Patrons and markets are largely reactive: they want what they’ve seen elsewhere, but a bit different (and better).

Similarly, patronage for scholarship means (at least in the initial stages) poaching people from elsewhere. Charlemagne’s court school of writers came from Italy, Spain and England, the products of earlier ‘mini-Renaissances’. Humanism as a literary form (classicizing Latin) seems to have existed for a hundred years or more before ‘civic humanism’ appears in late 14th century Florence as a way of providing prestige and propaganda for a state in turbulent times. Scholarship can develop and flourish at such centres, gaining from cross-fertilisation and producing new generations of students, but such gatherings are only a later stage of cultural development. Markets and money don’t produce artistic genius - if they did, the twenty-first century would have the greatest cultural achievements of any era.

The Guardian currently seems determined (if inadvertently) to confirm all the right-wing stereotypes about liberalism destroying morality, at least in parenting. After Barbara Ellen’s article (which I discussed a week or so ago), take an article accompanying a recent survey showing that parents often don’t know what their teenagers get up. In the article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,,2020511,00.html) Polly Samson (an otherwise unidentified, but obviously middle-class and prosperous mother) and her son write about their reactions to doing the survey. And this is what the mother says:

At my most optimistic, I imagine my children will try most things - but just once - because there are activities I regret missing out on during my early teens. Shoplifting, for example. I was surprised that 65% of parents didn't think their children had shoplifted, because I assumed that most kids would give it a shot at some point. I would hate to find myself doing a Winona now, but I yearn to try my sleight of hand and it just isn't age-appropriate. So, off you go, children - but remember, only steal from large conglomerates and not from small businesses.

Let’s spell it out plainly for the hard-of-thinking. Shoplifting is theft and as such, morally wrong. It doesn’t matter who you steal from. And it is a morally wrong act when done by anybody capable of understanding right from wrong, whatever their age. The law rightly sets limits below which children are not regarded as morally competent. The law also follows common sense by recognising that although older children can understand the difference between right and wrong, they are still less culpable than an adult committing a similar crime, because they are more easily swayed and have less mature judgement. That does not mean that it is right or acceptable for children to steal, it only means it is less wrong. If you refuse to teach your children about this moral difference, why should they stop stealing after the one try?

Why have some liberals, like this mother, apparently lost all sense of a moral compass? Partly it may be self-centredness: one of her comments is that ‘perhaps I should have spent less of my teens trying to please my parents and more time pleasing myself.’ It is also that liberals are trying to avoid being hypocrites. Most people are tempted to do wrong things sometimes: to pretend you’re not is unrealistic. Part of the liberal approach to looking at crime and misbehaviour has been this understanding of the weaknesses within all of us. Though the best summary of it is in the very un-liberal G. K. Chesterton (in ‘The Secret of Father Brown’(http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/chesterton/gk/c52fb/chapter33.html):

“I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully,” went on Father Brown, “I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.

“I don’t mean just a figure of speech...I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders. I didn’t actually kill the men by material means; but that’s not the point. Any brick or bit of machinery might have killed them by material means. I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realized that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action. It was once suggested to me by a friend of mine, as a sort of religious exercise. I believe he got it from Pope Leo XIII, who was always rather a hero of mine.”

The key here, though, is Chesterton’s reference to ‘final consent to the action’. Polly Samson and her like seem to have concluded from the fact that most people are tempted to misbehave and that teenagers are particularly bad at self-control, that therefore it is not only inevitable but also acceptable for her children to do wrong. It may be good parental sense not to over-react to teenagers misbehaving. Simply to condone their misbehaviour is a disservice to the children you are responsible for.