209. Slash Fiction & Healing: What M/M Romance Does For Women With Lucy Neville
209. Slash Fiction & Healing: What M/M Romance Does for Women With Lucy Neville
What happens when a professor who studies crime turns her focus to female desire and queer erotica?
In Episode 207 of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast, Kayla is joined by Lucy Neville—academic, researcher, and fanfic writer—to talk about the wild world of M/M fanfiction, spicy film industry, and what these fantasies reveal about gender, trauma, community, and sexual healing.
🔍 Why Do Women Love M/M Fanfic?
Lucy shares her research on over 500 women who engage with M/M stories—revealing that the appeal goes far beyond aesthetics. Whether it’s removing the self-insert pressure of MF dynamics, escaping objectification, healing from trauma, or simply loving the chemistry between characters, these stories offer something potent and affirming.
🔥 From Shame to Empowerment
We unpack the stigma many women face when enjoying erotic content—especially when it doesn’t fit traditional expectations. Lucy explores the "fat virgin" stereotype, the tension within queer spaces, and how M/M fandom often becomes a space of identity reclamation and activism.
🌀 Fantasy vs. Misogyny
What about the criticism that writing or reading slash fiction is anti-woman? Lucy dives deep into this debate, separating internalized shame from intentional exclusion, and argues that we need more compassion—not judgment—around fantasy.
✨ Gender Fluidity, Tarot & Fanfic as Practice
Kayla and Lucy also discuss how erotic media can help women explore their masculine essence, gender fluidity, and spiritual embodiment practices—yes, even through tarot cards. Plus, they geek out over favorite ships (Marcus/Esca! Clint/Phil!) and the healing magic of online fanfic communities.
📚 For Writers & Readers Alike
If you’ve ever struggled to reconcile your intellectual and erotic selves—or felt shame around what you desire—this episode will meet you at the intersection of academia, kink, and creative self-expression.
Embodied Activation Prompt:
Pull a tarot card today and ask: What energy (masculine, feminine, or fluid) am I being called to explore in my sexual or creative expression right now?
Lucy’s Work & Research
Email Lucy: L.Neville@soton.ac.uk
Transcript
Kayla: Hello Lucy and welcome to the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast.
Lucy: Hi Kayla. Thanks very much for having me.
Kayla: Thank you for being here. So I wanna dive right in with a really cool concept you introduced in your book, and that's the dinner party test. You explain what the dinner party test is and then explain why you pass it with flying colors every time.
Lucy: Well, the dinner party test is, could you explain your research project if you're an academic, in an informal setting, like a dinner party. So it has to be quick and interesting, and not kind of rambling or wandering off into like very deep theoretical constructs that nobody cares about. And you have to explain it in a way that people at the dinner party get and understand so yeah, I think I had an easy sell, 'cause instead of, you know, researching, astrophysics, or the chemical composition of glass, I was like, oh, I'm interested in why women enjoy watching and writing and reading gay male pornography. And people are like, whoa.
Kayla: Yeah. So that's going to be, I think, a very polarizing conversation. So people are either gonna be like, oh my goodness, tell me more. Or they're gonna be like. Get out of here.
Lucy: Yeah, so Or if you're my mother-in-law, you just pretend you haven't heard me.
Kayla: Exactly. And before we dive into your book and what you've learned about this topic, one thing you would love for you to talk about if you're comfortable sharing is you are professor, you have this academic background, and you also write fan fiction and the spicy stories under a pen name.
So do you find it difficult to marry that professional identity with this love of boy on Boy romance and smut?
Lucy: I think it is a struggle for most people. I think I'm quite fortunate that I'm UK based, where I think academia is less uptight, when it comes to academics involved in sex, and then indeed having sex lives of their own, than perhaps some other countries around the world.
I felt for this project it was really important to be honest and open about having that dual identity because I asked my participants for such a huge degree of trust. Fortunately for me, my employers have always been quite supportive of that. So I'm quite open with the students that this work is coming from My own experience too, I don't tell them my pen name, but they probably could find it out if they really, decided to put their research socks up and get stuck in,
and I've just kind of had to make peace with that. It's not ideal, obviously, sometimes it feels a bit vulnerable and exposing. But I also, you know, very much believe in academia that if you are researching something from an insider perspective. That's often a massive boon. And it, and for me it, it was important to be honest about that and kind of own that.
And, I don't really have much of a sense of embarrassment. I think I've inherited that, from my grandmother who, who was just, I never saw her be embarrassed. So I think for a lot of people they'd really struggle. Whereas for me, it just, I was like, well, if somebody's gonna own it, it should be me.
'cause I'm probably less likely to get, that horrible sense of shame that some other people might get. Very understandably. Yeah.
Kayla: Absolutely. And that was an interesting thing I found in your book was the reservations the Fanfiction community had about sharing why they loved this genre and this pairing.
Yeah. And I think there's also a lot of misconceptions about that community at large.
Lucy: Sure. I mean, I think a lot of previous research, particularly around sort of queer fandom and slash fake has come at it from a perspective that is viewing women who are into that as having some sort of weird kink.
But I think it's been approached from this psychosexual perspective that a lot of families have felt very resentful of. A lot of the research was carried early research was carried out by men. And they came at it very much from like, oh, aren't women weird?
Kind of perspective. And even some of the research that was carried out by fan scholars was, were fan scholars who weren't into mm. So they were still kind of a bit like pearl clutching about it. And yeah. Then I think there's also, you know, a lot of understandable tension I feel in like the L-G-B-T-Q community about straight people kind of appropriating.
Queer literature and queer visual culture and using it, without coming out to bat for that community, you know, in times of political strife and stuff, which I totally understand. But you know, the, the, the majority of the women in my sample of over 500 didn't identify as straight, they identified as bisexual or pansexual, or quite a few identified as lesbians as well.
Which I know might be surprising for some people. So I think there's this sort of trope of like straight women getting off to gay male porn, that's probably not exactly accurate. So I think there's also a lot of tension around that as well.
Kayla: Hmm. I absolutely see that. And there were a lot of.
Tricky things you had to navigate even doing this research about how problematic certain things can be for all these different reasons. It makes it hard for me to know like where we even wanna start. 'cause there's so many places we could. Why don't we start with some of the key reasons you found that women straight, bisexual, otherwise do enjoy this genre and gravitate towards it.
Lucy: Sure. I think, well the kind of overwhelming finding, probably, one of the most straightforward and obvious ones was that women were like, well, you know, boys are hot. I think men are attractive. So why wouldn't I want to watch more men? Which I think is sort of trotted out as the sort of durga reason why straight men would watch lesbian inverted commas, porn.
'cause they're like, yay more boobs. But a lot of women expanded on that a bit more because they were like, why is it that nobody assumes women are sexual? Like, why is there this assumption that there must be some deep and meaningful emotional or trauma related reason as opposed to just, I like looking at attractive men.
And the more, the better. So a lot of them just gave, gave that reason. But, I would say on perhaps a kind of more emotional, psychological level. The two sort of main groups of reasons were that women really disliked heterosexual pornography. They found it of degrading to a lot of the women involved.
And even if they watched ethical porn or feminist porn, they still kind of will watch it and think, well, I wouldn't enjoy it if someone did that to me. I'm not convinced that person's having a real orgasm. None of that seems real. And then even in erotic fiction, you know, the heroin is often described as extremely beautiful.
And even if she's plain right, the hero finds her irresistible. So it's this whole idea that she's not really plain, no one's just seen her beauty before, and a lot of women just sort of struggle. Whereas when they're watching or reading about two men together, any that sort of self insert is removed.
The worries around ethics are less, I think obviously they're still there. But there is, I think, an assumption that most people have, that men have greater sexual agency and that male porn stars. May enjoy their work in a way that perhaps people don't feel about women, rightly or wrongly.
And also for participants who were into BDSM particularly, they found it much less problematic to watch violent sex when it was between two people of the same, of the same sex, be those men or women than in a male female, dynamic. And then there was also a group of women who had, experienced, sexual assault, or sexual abuse.
And who just found anything involving heterosexual sex, really triggering. So for them that was a way to engage with their sexual identity without risking kind of finding the content. Super upsetting. So, yeah.
Kayla: Mm-hmm. I also recently read a book called Girl on Girl, and it talked a lot about the porn industry, the male female porn industry.
Yeah. And as I'm reading about how degrading the male female porn industry is, I'm just thinking. I'm so glad. The only porn I've ever enjoyed watching is male. Male. Yeah. Because I missed all of that and I can totally see that being why a woman might gravitate to this instead because it takes out all of that unpleasant power dynamic and the potential for even abuse or women going into that field.
Yes. 'cause they don't really have other choices.
Lucy: Absolutely. Yeah. And obviously there's still issues. Like I said, with the male porn industry, there's the whole gay for pay thing, so you can't assume that a man having sex with another man is actually doing it because they want to. It's a job. And you know, there's a lot of issues around having to take Viagra and all the sort of stress that's put on the male actors in that sort of position with the way that porn shot.
And it's like, go again, go again, go again. You know, a lot of women spoke about in visual porn that they get to see an ejaculation so they know there is some sort of orgasm happening. I know orgasm and ejaculation aren't necessarily the same, but it implies some level of pleasure. Whereas I think with women, they're like, I just don't, I don't believe that person has had an orgasm.
I don't believe it. Like they're acting like they have, but how do I know?
Kayla: It is so much harder to tell with a woman unless. They can squirt, and I think that's potentially why that particular type of MF. Foreign seems to be quite popular from my understanding.
Lucy: Yes. Yeah. Although at the time I was first doing the study, female ejaculation had been banned in the uk.
Really? Yes. Under the decision from the government was that this had happened because they'd banned water sports and that, how could anybody tell the difference? Therefore, they had to ban both. That has been relaxed since, 'cause there was quite a lot of pushback, on it. But for a good few years that was the case in the UK that that was banned content. So, yeah.
Kayla: So interesting. So another thing I wanted to chat about is some people believe that if you like. Male, male porn, fan fiction, whatever it might be, you're actually misogynistic in some way, which I found very interesting.
So can you speak to this particular debate?
Lucy: Yeah, I mean, I think in particularly in fan fiction, that's been a line of argument for a while that, you know, if we want to create our own fiction based on source material, why wouldn't we write in strong female characters? If we think they're absent from the source material, why wouldn't we do that instead of just turning the male characters into lovers?
, I understand that. I think. The di that, that's changing a bit because the landscape of media and fiction is changing and I think we do have more strong female characters now. So I can sort of understand where people are coming from with that. I can also understand, you know, if your entire sexual fantasy life excludes women, it could seem slightly self hating.
And there certainly was some responses from women who felt. Very, out of touch with their own bodies and quite disgusted by their own bodies and sexuality. And didn't like to think about women in sexual situations 'cause it just gave them the ick. But I, that's super complex, right? I'm not sure you can chalk that up to just straight up misogyny.
That's like a whole lifetime of internalized nonsense that comes from living like in a patriarchal world. So I, I get why those accusations exist, but sometimes to me it feels a little bit victim blamey, which is not to say I don't think women have no agency or can't do bad things.
But I think in that context, it feels a bit like, well. So what if women feel uncomfortable with women, in their sexual explicit media? That's probably not them making a conscious decision to, persecute women or exclude women. It's their own discomfort with their own identity.
And I think that's something which for me, deserves compassion. Like not judgment.
Kayla: Mm-hmm. We do live in a world where we've come a long way, but. The masculine is still seen as hierarchically superior to the feminine, and there's so many places this shows up. So could you make the argument that women who do really gravitate towards mm, fanfiction slash fiction, maybe even want to experience that?
Gender superiority if only in fantasy.
Lucy: Absolutely. And there was a quite a small portion, but definitely a portion, of women in my sample who spoke quite explicitly about that. Again, particularly women who were into quite hardcore kink. They were like, I like reading about men being degraded. I like watching men, you know, experienced physically dominated by somebody stronger and bigger than them.
They were quite. Explicit about it for some of them that came from places of early adulthood abuse or childhood abuse. For others it was just, yeah, probably coming from a place of low key misre. But again, I think there is a connection between our fantasy lives and our behavior and how we conduct ourselves in our everyday lives.
But I don't think that connection is absolute, you know, plenty of people can fantasize about all manner of things that doesn't really impact on their behaviors or even their attitudes in their day-to-day lives. I'm always wary about making that direct connection and you fantasize about something problematic, therefore, you are problematic.
Kayla: Absolutely. I personally would also love to talk a little bit about. Gender fluidity and how that might enter into the conversation. Because I have personally taken a quiz from David Deida that tells you whether you have a feminine essence or a masculine essence. Yeah. And I actually scored as having a masculine essence.
Yeah. Which is so interesting, even though I do identify as a woman. So can you see how this particular genre could actually help women who aren't as traditionally feminine, but still identify as a woman? Kind of feel more seen or invited into this type of fiction?
Lucy: Yeah, absolutely. I think that definitely is a really interesting line of questioning.
I think to start off. The original kind of the, the grandfather of fan fiction research. Henry Jenkins found that in his study, he wrote a lot about how women from a really young age often are taught to identify as the male protagonist of the book. So I think his example was, if you read Peter Pan, you wanna be Peter Pan.
You don't wanna be Wendy 'cause she's a boring or stick in the mud. Right? You wanna be the hero. So, you know, building on the ideas of Simone de Beis, he sort of said all women are kind of taught to be a bit male identified. Because often, you know, that was the visual product we were given or the books we were given.
So you kind of learn that in a way that perhaps men don't. So there, that's a natural fluidity of imagination there that it's easy for you to imagine what it's like to be a male hero in a way. Perhaps a man can't, can't access what it's like to be a heroine as, as in a straightforward way. I also, more than half of my sample, said that they identified as a man during the course of their own sexual fantasies.
Not all the time, but quite often, which is also something I had always done. Again, not exclusively, but I would say a fair chunk of my sexual fantasy is I am a man. So, that seemed quite common. I didn't think it would be at all. That was nice. I felt seen by my community.
So I think, there is that fluidity of identity in a lot of my respondents. A lot of them said that because they didn't necessarily identify as straight, they preferred that sort of non straightness in everything else because they were more interested in two people with great chemistry.
What, what bits those two people have. But there was also, trans women in my sample who spoke about that sort of fluidity in. Thinking about sex and who was having sex with who, helped them come to terms with their own sort of transness.
That was the whole gamut from very cis identified women who still found it useful to Yeah. Women who perhaps always felt. Who were like tomboy, I guess, traditionally growing up and who helped felt that they weren't, always a woman in every single sense of the word to non-binary folks to trans women who it helped make sense of that period of their lives generally in adolescence when they were realizing that they weren't the gender that people thought they were.
Kayla: Hmm, 100%. So in this way slash fanfiction and. Male, male pairings can actually be a very healing kind of genre for a lot of different people.
Lucy: Yes, absolutely. And I, I do talk about it a bit in the book, but not much. But I've now finished my study where I was speaking, with men who have sex with men about how they felt about women consuming their porn and writing fan fiction and, and, you know, writing gay literature like Anne Rice did, for example.
I know there's a sense amongst some queer activists circles that it's sort of appropriating and exploitative, which I completely understand. But the vast majority of, of gay and bisexual men I spoke with were like, great. Like if, if women, if straight women are watching our porn and, and liking it, then they're probably not gonna be as homophobic as they were historically.
And if it makes people more on board with the queer community. Like, that's fine. Uh, and obviously gay men tend to be quite keen on their porn. Um, so they were pretty happy to share it. I don't think it was perhaps something which, which they felt particularly possessive over. They all seemed pretty chill.
All the ones who responded, to, to my call for participants anyway.
Kayla: Definitely. And aside from helping people with that gender aspect, what are some of the other specs of male on male romance for a female audience that you've seen in your studies?
Lucy: I think there was, you know, it helped create a strong sense of community, particularly historically, but still today, you know, on sites like archive of our own.
And Tumblr now it's sort of semi resurrected itself, that that can be really useful. And whilst obviously, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of people who read fan fiction or watch male porn and that's where their participation, any kind of queer life or queer politics ends. But there are a lot of my participants who said, actually, I liked this so much that it became quite a big part of my identity.
And then I was like, hang on a minute. Like all the homophobic like laws in my country, like really suck and I should do something about that. So there was a sense that some, of that community had become activists because of it, which again, I, I think is a good thing. And it reminds me of the kind of academic scholarship on public sex.
Which isn't literally having sex in the park. It's bringing sex out of the bedroom and making it a political issue. So acknowledging that, the vast majority of us are pretty sexual beings and we should probably stand up for our sexual politics more and support other people, because it's a huge part of our lives and happiness.
And this is what I always say to people when they're like, why are you researching something like porn? Why don't you research climate change or something important? Climate change, very important. I think to pretend that our sexual citizenship, that that how we feel about sex and the sex we have, and the sex we think about having isn't a core part of our happiness, and our health and, our day-to-day wellbeing, is not right.
Like I think, you know, lots of people are quite preoccupied with sex and has a massive impact on us and, and you know, the quality of our lives. So I think it's a really important topic to look into.
Kayla: I 100% agree because that overall sexual health and also just having. Healthy perspective around your own sexuality is so healing.
It dissolves a lot of shame. It creates more self worth, it creates more energy, it creates more like vibrancy for your everyday life. And all of these things are so powerful and I think I love the work you do so much is because you give women permission to like what they like, even if certain people don't get it.
Lucy: Yes. Give permission to women to be horny. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. And I, you know, I do. It's not that I think it's all a wonderful utopia and that there's no issues at all with women consuming or producing this kind of sexual explicit media. I do accept this pushback on it. Ultimately, you know, I think if it is making people happy.
And it's also doing some active good as well in the world. I think that feels to me more important than, than just sort of debating the philosophy of it in a way. I was very much always been of the opinion that women need to own their sexual identities a bit more.
And that's the way to sort of true equality. And, and you know, if society continues pigeonholing, men as sexual women as less so, or women is always having to be coerced or tricked, or hoodwinked or pushed or bribed into sex, then it's gonna be very hard to actually achieve that kind of sexual equality that I think everybody would like.
Yeah.
Kayla: They really do. And you make another really good point that yes, there are some reservations about it or pushback, and I believe we now live in a world where you can tell a story about anything or make a case for anything.
Writing this type of work, and you can make the case that it's really powerful and helpful. Yes. So I think what it comes down to is exactly what it says. Is it making someone happy? Is it making them more comfortable in their own sexuality? And if that's the case, then letting that be enough for those specific people on an individual basis.
Lucy: Yeah. I would completely agree with you, Kayla. Yeah.
Kayla: Mm-hmm. Another thing you brought up is this. Community aspect. By the way, you talked about Live Journal in your book and that was a blast from the past. I actually quite miss Live journal. Me too. Can you share how powerful, bringing together a community of.
Male, male slash fanfiction writers is because another thing in your book was about, you know, these women almost being marginalized and being seen as like the freak show. But when they can actually come together and have that sort of bonding, what is that experience like?
Lucy: I think particularly historically with, with that marginalized marginalization of that community. So one of the kind of, you know, groundbreaking Fanfic scholars, Camille Bacon Smith, nevertheless, in her book that was published in the early nineties on fat and fiction, just in a throwaway line, said that the vast majority of women who like MM, content, are overweight.
And single. And I think she also said they've never had a meaningful relationship with a man. So it was the, the fat virgin hypothesis as I refer to it. Not unless anything wrong with being, a, a voluptuous virgin. That's absolutely fine, but obviously I think the community was a bit annoyed.
By that because it's this idea that it's this bunch of like, hard, weird days living in their parents' basements. You can't get a real man. So, so they're forced to kind of make up fictional ones and, and make them have sex with each other. So I think, yeah, there was particularly this, this sort of sense that.
This was quite a marginalized group. I can sort of tell from my research, the internet really changed that obviously, because before people were circulating, you know, photocopied zines, and the only time they'd meet other fans would be at conventions. And it'd have to be a bit, you know, you'd go to a Star Trek convention for example, and you'd be on the lookout for people who were into Kirk and Spot, but you couldn't be totally upfront about it.
And now obviously, yeah, there was Live Journal, there was Tumblr, there's a O three, and there's Wapa and all the other online sites where people can write, erotic stories and fan fiction. So I think that's really changed, the community. Some of my respondents have lamented that change 'cause they felt things were, less close knit than they were.
And I know there's been ongoing drama with a O three, for example, around like purity policing and what kind of kinks we are and aren't allowed to have, and what things should the archive be hosting versus what should it ban? So I think, you know, a lot of that came in then to a community which had previously been able to sort of live in its own little bubble to a certain extent.
And some of that was quite painful, for some of the people involved. But obviously, ultimately. The expansion I feel of online communities has been a net positive because it's given people even more of that sense of connection. And yes, I was involved in Live Journal back in the day and I loved my little live journal community, and I think it was just great, as a writer as well to get that sort of feedback, on your work, particularly you releasing it in a serial fashion.
It's sort of like being part of a writing circle and getting constant critique in a way that's really useful. And again, that would've been much more tricky prior to the internet. So I think, yeah, that community was great. There were issues, obviously when a community starts becoming quite divisive internally, and rupturing.
But yeah, I think generally there was a positive sense of it's great to feel seen and to feel that there are other people like you and that actually what you feel isn't that uncommon.
Kayla: Definitely and share a bit about what it's like writing an academic book versus what it's like writing your fan fiction.
So what are the big differences between those two?
Lucy: Well, one's much more enjoyable than the other. Not that I always enjoy creative writing, but rarely am I sort of literally crying whilst typing, which I think sometimes happens with academic writing. I mean, obviously creative writing's a lot freer.
And your primary, well not everybody, but a primary motivation certainly for me is to connect with my audience, and that's really important. Whereas in academic writing, really your primary motivation, is. Are other people going to cite it and will it get well reviewed by other academics and therefore help my career?
So you are not writing in that same way to try and touch people and kind of really bring them into the story. And that's not as fun. And I think it's a tension, that quite a lot of. Academics struggle with, but unless you are super famous and can kind of wrangle a, a penguin publication for the general public because you don't need to worry about, you know, research excellence framework we call it in the UK and, and, and citations anymore.
'cause you know, you're a big name professor, it's very difficult. You kind of have to write a book in an academic style, which I don't think is very approachable. I tried my best with this one to not make it too, like stilted and stiff, but it still isn't the book I would write, if I was writing for the general public.
But I do think my creative writing helps my academic writing. A lot of academics aren't good writers. I say to the students all the time, they're just not good at telling a story. This just is not good writing. The better you get at storytelling, I think even your formal writing improves too.
So that's a positive.
Kayla: And say you did land the penguin deal and you got to write the book that you really wanted to write about this. Can you share what that book would be like?
Lucy: It probably would be, you know, similar in kind of theme and content to this one. I would, I really like it when people include more stories about the individual participants.
I think from an academic perspective that can be quite problematic 'cause you very hard to get ethical approval to write too much about a person's life. 'cause even under a pseudonym, there's the risk that they could be identified. But obviously a lot of, books written by academics. For a general audience, have a lot more of those vignettes, like real people's real stories.
And a lot of feedback I got from the book from non-academics was that they wanted more participant quotes and they wanted more kind of contextualization of those quotes. And I agree, like it was, interviewing people for the book was fascinating. And the stories that people told, like some were heartbreaking, some were heartwarming.
But that was so rich and interesting. So I guess my book for the general public would strip more of me out and put more of my participants in
Kayla: was, one of the really cool things about the book was the quotes from the people you interviewed and their thoughts on it. And, you know, there were conflicting opinions sometimes where you would see like the same.
Person showing up repeatedly, which you don't use names, but you use, like this person was this age range, this sexuality and this location. So you kind of knew, oh, there's that person again. Yeah. Did this help you forge deeper connections with the community and maybe even make some longer term friends afterwards?
Lucy: It definitely did. And there was sort of two older women who'd been in found fiction circles for a long time who took me under their wing. They also vouched for me, which was really helpful for the reasons we spoke about before, about the community being quite closed and wary.
And that was super useful. The people who run archive of our own transformative works and cultures people were also super helpful. So that was really, really nice. Yes, there were, I suppose when I was running focus groups and interviews. I was talking to the person, so there was that sense of connection and I've kept, stayed friends with some of them, but I also got a lot of data from a qualitative survey where people wrote massive answers.
But obviously it was all online and it was all, anonymous. And some, some of them I would read it and it'd be so frustrating not to be able to talk back to them because. I wanted to give them a hug and there were things I wanted to say to them. Some of the stories were really sad and I just wanted to reassure them and sort of tell them more about what I was seeing from the rest of the data.
So maybe they would feel a bit less alone. But obviously you can't do that 'cause it's anonymous and I understandably so. But yeah, there were some people who I just wanted to have that more human connection with as well as some people who I was like, I think we'd be really good friends if only I knew who you were.
Yeah.
Kayla: And are you still doing work in this realm? Do you have other books coming out? Has your research evolved over the last little while? What does that look like?
Lucy: Yes, yes. I'm gonna be publishing, papers on the study I did with many who have sex with men about their feelings on the matter. And my current project is looking at academics who research sex.
From across the whole spectrum, all different disciplines, and how they feel it's impacted on their career if they feel it's taken seriously in the academy. How has it influenced their politics or their personal life at all? So it's a kind of, it is working. Title is like Sex in the Ivory Tower.
I'm gonna give it a snazzy name at the end. But yeah, sort of looking at that, because I've been to a lot of, academic conferences outside of my discipline because I think porn, sex, fan fiction, they're all very cross cutting. They're not necessarily just. It's researched by people who study English or it's researched by people who study psychology.
And it's really interesting watching how different academics approach their work in this area, and how their general day-to-day discipline shapes how they approach studying sex and sexuality. There's a broad sense that it's not taken very seriously, that it is not climate change.
Um, and, and a lot of them have suffered this kind of pushback and they feel, in a way it's hindered their career. So I think, again, like for me it's where it's partly an academic interest and partly a personal and activist interest because I find that really annoying. So I at least want to kind of call attention to the fact.
That I think it's really bad how we don't treat those things seriously. I feel the same in a lot of the way that journalists covered the book. Like it was, it was good. You know, it's great. All publicity is good publicity, right? So I'm not gonna complain, but it was like this bit of fluff, right?
There's silly, fluffy topics, so silly, fluffy women. There's looking at a silly, fluffy topic and let's all laugh at it. It's not that I mind being laughed at, it's fine. I'm quite comfortable with that. But it annoys me that by, by kind of default, they're also laughing at all women who have an interest in, in sex and in in sexual culture and sexual media.
And I just don't think that's okay. So yeah, kind of broadly in the same area, probably a bit less rock and roll, but I'm still interested in looking at, yeah, women's sexual citizenship and day-to-day sort of sexual lives.
Kayla: Hmm. That is a powerful point to make because I don't think people go and research why men like girl on girl porn and then laugh at it because men are just expected to be sexual.
And of course they love women. So it's different with women. So I think that work that you're doing is also very powerful. Are you. Interviewing a combination of male and females or more focusing on the female experience.
Lucy: No combination of both. So there's been sort of no real restrictions on it at all.
I haven't really kind of drilled down to fully analyzing the data yet. I will look at differences between, you know, respondents based on gender identity. But yeah, it's been a pretty mixed sample on that front. And also, you know, a massively mixed sample in how people are choosing to interpret what it means to study sex.
So some people are coming at it from a very natural sciences way other people are historians or people who study kind of racy books in 18th century English literature. So it's a really broad church.
Kayla: Yes, it definitely would be. And through your lens, because you're a criminology teacher, what are some of the key lenses you tend to look through this topic the most?
Lucy: So, although I, yeah, lecture in criminology, obviously my, I feel my work sits more comfortably in cultural studies or media studies. But when I'm trying to kind of push it towards criminology, when I'm talking to my head of department, for example, it's the deviancy lens, right? So criminology is for a long time being interested not in things that are illegal.
Or not legal particularly because that's, we, we make up laws, right? And laws change. So, you know, homosexuality used to be illegal and now it's not. And the actual moral good of homosexuality hasn't changed. And, and the law hasn't changed because suddenly this moral good was or was not realized.
It changed because we changed. And we said, Hey, actually this is a nonsense. This shouldn't be illegal. So criminology is quite interested in deviancy, so behavior that might not be illegal. But it's still viewed by society as sort of suspect and odd, and often subject to informal sanctions in the same way that criminal behavior is like people not wanting to hang out with you or saying, ah, you can't be a teacher anymore 'cause you're a pervert.
So I think that that's sort of part of it is exploring that sort of social stigma. That still exists around this kind of work, be it from, you know, somebody who researches it or somebody who's involved in the industry, or somebody who writes fan fiction or even, you know, a woman who likes erotic romance novels.
There's still that kind of stigma around it. And this idea, you're either doing something odd, or like weird or unpleasant or at best, like it's a bit kind of woo, a bit kind of kinky.
Kayla: Yes, it makes a lot of sense and I think the more you do this research and make it very clear that these things are only seen as deviant because of the societal messages, it's not an absolute that's gonna, again, do so much powerful work to release a lot of the shame or the misconceptions about this as a whole.
So thank you so much for the work you do.
Lucy: Oh, thank you. That means a lot. Thank you.
Kayla: You are welcome. So two more questions as we wrap up. I love to get my guests to give the listener some kind of an embodied activation. So it can be a journal prompt, it can be to go read a dean and Castiel, fanfic.
It can be anything that, by the way, that's okay. Just something that our listeners can go and do after this.
Lucy: Yeah. I feel I've been pretty good answering all the questions, keeping it flowing, no dead air, I think for me it would be, you've given a really good example of going and picking a fanfic and I think there are some amazing fanfics out there.
I mean, I'll come out to bat for Fanfic every day. There's obviously amazing published literature out there, but some of my top 100 novels would be fanfiction. Some of the writers are incredible. Some of them are also quite famous published authors who write Fanfic on the side.
But Fanfiction got me into Game of Thrones, for example. There's an incredible writer, in Game of Thrones fan fiction who I, who I would take over good old George any day. So, and she actually finishes her story, so that's amazing. So that, that's really great embodied. For me, my sort of spiritual practice is tarot.
And I've found that a really useful way to think about sex and sexuality as well. Particularly 'cause there are some amazing kind of sex themed and queer themed tarot decks out there. So I guess if listeners did have that, it would be interesting to sort of, for them maybe to look through their tarot deck and make some connections with that sense of masculine and feminine inside of them.
'cause Tarot is very interested in. I think very much comes from a position that we all contain, both the masculine and the feminine, and indeed the genderless, and that part of our day-to-day lives should be balancing those things out and coming to peace with them instead of like trying to shove them into binaries all the time.
Kayla: I love that one because I am a big Tarot card person as well, and I think you're right. You can pull the emperor one day and be very much in your masculine, and then another day you can hold the Queen of Cups and then you're like all water, all feminine. So it gives you permission to not be the same every single day.
What are some of your favorite male, male ships?
Lucy: Oh, okay. Well, my original, ship was, Marcus and Esker from The Eagle, which is an obscure Channing Tatum movie about a Roman Legionnaire in England. So I dunno if anyone would necessarily watch that, but that was my kind of gateway drug.
And then. I've been really into Kirk Spock. I sort of started reading those because they're sort of seen as the original kind of slash fan fiction. And then I genuinely got pretty into them. And then I got weirdly into, Clint Barton, and Phil, oh, what's his surname? The guy from Avengers.
Phil Olson. That's it. So a weird little side bearing, like not main characters in the Avengers, like Phil Olson's obviously the kind of business suit who like does their accounts or whatever. And then Clin, Barton's Hawkeye, he's kind of a bit sidelined in in the films and stuff, isn't he? 'cause he is not a superhero.
He's just a really good archer. But again, there are some amazing fix written. I started reading it 'cause somebody I liked from an author I liked had written a fiction in that fandom. So I was like, sure. I'll bite. And then I got really into it. And then yes, the, the kind of series of, fixed by asla, which are generally.
Mf, although there are some mm ones as well, and some ff ones on Game of Thrones. They're all stupendous. Like her writing is just incredible. Her knowledge of military strategy is incredible. So the sex is great, but the plot is also great. So I think it's sort of a win-win really. You can feel intellectually satisfied and sexually satisfied reading one of those.
Kayla: That is often the best combination. So thank you so much for being here and sharing this powerful conversation with us. If listeners do wanna connect with you further, what are the best ways for them to do so?
Lucy: So obviously back in the day it used to be Twitter, which I loved. Now it's been taken over by fascists.
So I'm not really on there anymore. I don't really do much social media anymore, which I guess is a bit of a shame, but I feel it's become such a difficult uncontested space. Obviously people are welcome to reach out to me at my university email address, if they've gone to share feedback or have any questions about the book.
And I, I'm also very firmly of the belief that academic scholarships should be freely available. People are free to reach out if they're interested in the book, but can't afford it and we'll see what we can do.
Kayla: Perfect. Thank you so much again. It has been so awesome talking to you.
Lucy: You too. Thanks for having me on Kayla. It's been great.
