Santorum's Next Target

Yes, I know this pic is shocking, but I would be in violation of my own standards of ethics, journalistic integrity and craven instinct towards gratuitous sensationalism if I avoided it. So there.

In search of the provocative issues everyone is discussing at the moment, Faye Flam, the sex writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, discussed today the job that hands play in interaction among heterosexuals, gays, and lesbians alike (the “hand job,” if you will: ba-dump). As she probed, caressed and explored ever deeper into this subject, she ended up reporting on a genre of literature that made me want to leap from my consol inside my imaginary bridge and shout, “Engage Maximum Warp! Get Us Outta Here!”

Ladies and gentlemen, I now present to you “Kirk and Spock’s Forbidden Lust” (as Flam explains)...

It's a given that many heterosexual men enjoy pornography depicting woman-on-woman sex. It's less common for women to want to think about sex between two men, but some women do enjoy stories featuring male homosexual encounters.

Such guy-on-guy erotica often goes under the name slash fiction, not because there's any violence, but to indicate a slash between the names of the lovers. It's part of a larger genre of "fanzine" literature in which fans of a movie or television show write their own stories about the characters.

Slash started in the 1970s with that sexy Star Trek duo Kirk/Spock. A quick Web search reveals dozens of stories with passages like this shower scene: "Jim ran his free hand through Spock's wet, matted chest hair, rubbing the bronze-green nipples with his fingertips... . Spock moaned...." The action gets much more pornographic at that point, and the pair eventually end up in a mind meld.

I request that a delegation immediately convene from the United Federation of Planets!

What’s next, I wonder? The “True Story” of what happened to James T. Kirk when he exchanged bodies with Dr. Janice Lester? A novella of a series of battles between the crew from “The Next Generation” and a renegade gang of hermaphrodite Klingons? “Bones” McCoy returns from the dead to help solve the mystery of the shape-shifting nipple tweakers of Ameniar Seven?

And if Kirk and Spock together were ever “sexy,” then William Shatner’s acting is a tour de force in subtlety and understatement.

I would expect to see stuff like this inside a men’s room stall in a brown paper bag, not in the pages of what passes for the Philadelphia “newspaper of record.”

Update: In the afterlife somewhere, I predict that Gene Roddenberry is laughing his ass off.

Update 6/20: I think Digby is channeling Faye Flam a bit with this post on lapdog Joe Klein and his "man crush" on Dubya (eeeuuuwwww).