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RUN A SEACH on “Harry Potter porn” and you’ll come up
with a wealth of smutty spin-off stories, with titles like “Floo
Me Baby” and passages like:
‘Do you want to be ravished...Harry?’
His tone was faintly fond, like a master talking to an obedient pet
But this Potter porn wasn’t just born
from the wandering minds of bored parents forced to read Harry Potter
and the Sorceror’s Stone out loud for the twentieth time; Potter
porn is part of a venerable web tradition, “slash fiction.”
Slash fiction archivist “Ihale” defines slash as “a
genre of fanfic which deals almost exclusively with same-sex homoerotic
relationships.” The actual name “slash fiction” refers
to pairings of characters with a slash between them—for example,
the pair “Kirk/Spock,” who seem to have had such a strong
undercurrent of sexual tension that they brought the genre slash fiction
into being. The twist: slash is written primarily by women, about men.
The authors’ gender becomes embarrassingly clear when some of the
hardcore porn sequences betray a certain lack of knowledge about, well,
the details of male homosexual union. (Standing up? Facing each other?)
Order of the phallus
So how did I, a college junior with some semblance of a life—Okay,
fine, by “life” I mean “addiction to reality TV”—get
so engrossed in Potter porn? I got wind of it from a friend who was researching
it for a Gender Studies paper, and in a spirit of innocent curiosity I
ran a search on Google for “Harry Potter porn.” Lo and behold,
up popped the fic Raincoat! Draco. The piece begins with Harry’s
arch-nemesis Draco Malfoy accidentally “apparating” (Potter-ese
for teleporting) outside Harry’s house, wearing nothing but a red
raincoat. At first, the boys exchange British-sounding gibes, almost passable
for authentic J.K. Rowlings—but soon the characters become unwontedly
wanton:
Harry’s eyes fluttered open as
he felt Draco draw back, and dark lashes parting to reveal green eyes
glazed with confusion and... desire.
By the end of the piece, romance novel clichés
take over:
[E]ven in the midst of the pouring rain
Harry felt warm, and safe, as Draco’s hands wrapped around his waist
and pulled him close, his very own raincoat in the thunderstorm.
Precisely this hodgepodge of styles made
Raincoat! Draco irresistible to me. It was as entertaining as the Harry
Potter novels, as erotic as a cheap porno mag, and as ironically appealing
as a horrendously written bodice-burster. Sort of like sushi, the multiple
sensations boggled my brain into a state of bemused happiness. One read,
and I was hooked.
Row me, Harry
Searching for more slash, I came across hundreds of stories on
the web—they seem to multiply like bunnies. Harry Potter’s
rumpled hair and green eyes have sparked pairings from the standard Harry/Draco,
in which Harry is irresistibly drawn to his snotty nemesis, to the more
creative Fred/George, in which the jokester twins have a bond reminiscent
of The House of Yes. Sometimes the pairs get a little more complicated,
as in the Harry/Draco/Ginny/Ron fics. Harry slash also ranges in style,
from tender romantic vignettes about Harry and his best friend Ron to
hardcore porn where the only nod to the novels is the bonafide British
use of “arse” in anatomical scenes. My personal favorite genre
is the songfic, in which the slash is interspersed with completely Potter-unrelated
song lyrics, sometimes of the authors’ own devising, as in Bad Boy
in Leather:
Whoa-o-oa, it’s the leather, baby...
Give me a guy, whoa-oa, give me a guy
Just give me a guy in that
Hot.
HOT.
Hot, hot leather! Woo!
Harry Potter porn is so prolific that Harry
and friends have been nearly pumped dry—in terms of plotlines, that
is. Now, slashers are beginning to get fancy. The Cabin Boy Who Lived
(NC-17), by Auror Borealis, features the description “Snape is a
19th century sea captain. Harry is his cabin boy.”
All this variation does not mean there aren’t certain constants
in the field of slash fiction. Draco is universally acknowledged to have
“milky skin” and be the most sought after boy in Hogwarts.
Ron’s a virgin. Harry’s a submissive. Snape, the sinister
potions professor, likes to watch. The Hogwarts dungeons are equipped
with handcuffs. Wands contain a handy lube spell.
Potter-philia?
I can read the question in your dirty little minds: does the
slash in slash fiction really stand for pedophilia/penis envy? Well, to
satisfy the censors, Harry often coincidentally turns 16 right before
his sexual encounters—but that doesn’t really answer the question.
Why aren’t these middle-aged women (joined by the occasional 20-year-old
co-ed like yours truly) reading your traditional, run-of-the-mill romances
and fantasizing about being swept away by tall, dark, handsome, suave,
well-muscled 30-something men with twinkling eyes and firm biceps? To
answer this, I have to delve into gender and sexuality; bear with me.
In depictions of women’s sexuality, from health textbooks to mainstream
movies to romance novels to teen fiction, women are depicted as the vulnerable
party—sex for women is a balancing act between desire and danger,
with constant warnings of pregnancy, rape, and being branded a “slut.”
In contrast, men are depicted as incessantly aroused, violently passionate
sex machines. (Ever read Maxim?) Perhaps slash gives its female readers
a chance to escape this dichotomy—to identify with characters who
are male, and therefore actively sexual, yet who possess youthful earnestness
and vulnerability. In fact, the characters in Harry Potter slash are slippery
in terms of gender stereotypes—one moment Harry is “yielding,”
the next he is “pounding.” Harry, you bad boy!
Another explanation for the existence of
Harry Potter porn is that it’s a logical offshoot of queer science
fiction and fantasy, the lovechild of old-school Star Trek and Nicola
Griffith’s Ammonite. Like queer scifi, Harry Potter slash tends
to bend gender like a pretzel. Bisexuality is just the beginning. Sometimes
Harry and Draco nonchalantly impregnate each other…although the
birthing process is left awfully hazy. But after all, other scifi has
proved to be clairvoyant-—the Internet was predicted by sci-fi authors
long before it came to pass. Maybe Harry Potter slash is not mere fantasy
but a picture of things to come. Or maybe the appeal is just the sick
humor.
Jessica Stites B’04.5 has been
seen hanging around Wheeler school wearing only a red raincoat.
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