Insofar as the Telegraph devotes a surprising amount of space to the one phenomenon that unites millions more than anything(I mean, isn't Brokeback Mountain just the ultimate slash movie? And when you slash slashfic, does that make it hetero? It's so confusing):

There have since been two stimuli to its evolution. One was universal access to the web in the mid-1990s, together with the new freedoms from copyright and libel law that came with it. The other has been the overwhelming growth of the pop-music industry, which has redirected the erotic adulation of slash fiction to real-world, as well as fictional, icons...

However, unlike web-porn, slash-fiction is inoffensive to any moderately worldly person (an exception is that which takes as its subject the young people in the Harry Potter books). Much of it is downright soppy. The slash-fiction swirling around this year's likely Oscar winner (see http:// brokebackmountainfanfiction.com/) will probably not bring a blush to any but the most puritanical cheek.

But does slashfic, like John Sutherland says, really "inspire some serious reflections about the human propensity for story telling"? That might be going a bit too far...especially since so much of it is unreadable. And unpublishable. Or both...