Warrior Lovers by Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, ISBN 0297647016, 拢6.99
A TORRID affair between Captain Kirk and his trusty Vulcan sidekick, Spock?
It may sound faintly odd, but not to readers of slash fiction鈥攆an writing
by and for women based on characters from TV shows, most of it featuring
sexually explicit relationships between two men. The 鈥渟lash鈥� refers to the
punctuation mark connecting the odd couples. But what, you may ask, has this to
do with science?
Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons tackle that question in Warrior
Lovers, a book in the Darwinism Today series that uses slash fiction to
examine aspects of female mating psychology. And while they鈥檙e at it, they want
to unveil the unique appeal of the genre to its fans.
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Salmon and Symons argue that the essential features of slash hold information
about human female psychological adaptations that are rooted in evolution by
natural selection because it鈥檚 a window into sexual fantasies. Comparing slash
fiction with commercial female erotica, and contrasting both with commercial
male erotica is one way to illuminate evolved female mating behaviour.
And after a clear introduction to evolutionary biology, Salmon and Symons
wade in with evidence that mating behaviour has its roots in the needs of our
hunter-gatherer ancestors. Women, they say, still seek secure relationships with
warrior men: tall, strong and brave, yet tamed by love.
There鈥檚 more than a whiff of mainstream romance novels about all this, but
slash fiction has a unique appeal in enabling readers to identify with a
co-warrior rather than a Mrs Warrior. The argument is persuasive and clear, but
slash fiction is rather more diverse and complex than these authors allow, and
so, one suspects, is modern female mating psychology.