"But if you look at what men write, and what men want, when they are free to produce their own written erotica, then you find that the rise of the Internet has created, from scratch, the genre which I think is now known as the "erotic romance novel" and means, roughly, "well-written sex stories with plots and emotions in them". Publishers of erotica are only now just beginning to think about trying to sell books like that, after the Internet showed them there was a huge pent-up demand."
You are an unusual example of your gender. You must know that.
Maybe the fact that most men prefer the plotless hardcore scenes found on the various you- and -tube sites, and its the women that are writing and reading erotica, is a coincidence.
But I tend to think it does indicate something about a difference in male and female sexuality, innate or otherwise. The fact that you are an exception to the rule doesn't make it true that men, in general, are consuming written erotica.
P.S. Obviously men do write and read some erotica, but even here there are differences. My favorite erotica writer, Morgan Hawke, wrote a blog post about the differences: http://www.darkerotica.net/WhatGuysWant.html
P.P.S. Would you be willing to read the second draft of my first novel, a sci-fi erotica with plot lines around programming? :D
> "The vast majority of erotica writers AND readers are female."
In the dead tree form, yes. In the online form? I'd beg to differ. Take a look at the popular erotic literature aggregators on the internet, look at the most popular authors (or hell, just all authors) and you will find the vast majority of them to be male (or at least, reportedly male).
Admittedly, this is a self-selected population, and doesn't indicate the preferences of all men, but the image of the erotica scene as mostly women with a few male stragglers is incredibly out of touch. And since when is ehow an authoritative source about anything? ;)
> "Maybe the fact that most men prefer the plotless hardcore scenes found on the various you- and -tube sites"
Look at the -tube sites again. And also look at the porn torrent aggregators. They're dominated by amateur porn, which by a landslide excludes the extremely exploitative/degrading stuff that the article concentrates on.
Now that the production, distribution, and consumption of pornography has been taken out of the hands of the old Porn Kings, and democratized to a large extent, IMHO we have found the real preferences of people, and it indicates that by and large we don't want the exploitative, degrading porn.
> _Look at the -tube sites again... They're dominated by amateur porn, which by a landslide excludes the extremely exploitative/degrading stuff that the article concentrates on._
3 amateur videos out of 20 on the front page of redtube.com. .. hardly _dominating_.
(That's a generous count, as well. "Professional" porn has gone down in production value for various reasons, and they now produce films and market them as "amateur". For that reason, it's hard to get a good count without looking at more than the thumbnails, and I'm not in the mood at the moment.)
And redtube.com out of N is representative? Not to justify the grandparent's probably biased view (which I share btw), but arguing with ambiguous statements doesn't offer much to the discussion or our comprehension of the matter.
Presumably the professionals who have a financial stake in the matter have the time to submit their videos again and again and again, while actual amateurs don't. At least, thats what seems to happen on craigslist in many catagories so I presume the same dynamic holds on "user-created" porn sites.
The only form of literature that women ever invented was the erotic romance novel, and they're even trying to take that away from us. Will wonders never cease?
In dead tree form, yes. In electronic book publishing, yes. In fan fiction, yes. That's the "high quality" stuff he was talking about. Sure, men write some of the graphic and romance-less stuff on the internet, but not the erotic romance novel- at least not as much.
I looked at the tube sites again, and sure there's a lot of amateur, but the popular stuff is the most graphic stuff, as far as I can tell. I don't know about "degrading" since I don't find any pornography particularly degrading, but it is in fact hardcore.
> "Maybe the fact that most men prefer the plotless hardcore scenes found on the various you- and -tube sites, and its the women that are writing and reading erotica, is a coincidence."
Or it's just an artifact of how society dealt with historical pornography that the different genders had access to over time.
There's no shortage of textual porn for men, nor has there been as far back as I've seen porn. Penthouse Letters wouldn't be legendary and universally beloved memory if men went only to the pictures.
It seems to me that that men looking at dirty pictures is just something that society grudgingly accepted. And women reading romance novels is something that society grudgingly accepted. And the rest is selective reporting of what fit the stereotypes, and reinforcing by marketers and porn purveyors who had to carefully aim their productions and so followed 'conventional wisdom'.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd pin the whole mess on the larger social push to posit women as the fairer, more evolved gender. Thus women are cast, taught and expected to need more than 'crude' pictures; to be better than 'simple' men.
Anecdotes being what they are, I've never seen any evidence that 'women don't like graphic porn' anymore than I've seen evidence for 'women don't like videogames' or 'women don't like sport'.
And feeding my theory above, I also note that the adjusted positions of those who have accepted women gaming and women sport is that women are, again, better, more advanced and more pure than men. 'Women want more from a game than shooting aliens', 'Women athletes have better fundamentals', etc.
Apparently you didn't read my post carefully, because I said "innate or otherwise." Your point would be about the otherwise bit.
However, since you wanted to argue this when I was specifically avoiding it, I would point out that females are the sex more reluctant to mate in almost all species, with the exception of a few species that prove the rule. It has to do with the expected costs of mating. Females bear most of the cost of child bearing in almost all species, so they are also a bit more choosy as to how often and to whom they mate with.
I would point out that females are the sex more reluctant to mate in almost all species
I always have difficulty with people making points such as this; because we have such drastic differences from all other species that make much of the argument moot.
I think the real reason Women read porn and men watch it is simply because of past gender inequality that still persists. Men could look at porn, it was "dirty" and "naughty", but it was a male world so it got accepted. Women "hacked" around it by reading/writing romance and erotica.
I guess society has just persisted that social structure into the modern day.
To the contrary, anyone who's seen a herd of bulls when the cows are in heat knows there's a big difference between boys and girls -- and that the difference is principally nature, not nurture. Testosterone is powerful stuff.
But you're also comparing animals to humans. Sometimes you can't even compare humans to humans. There are matriarchal societies out there (albiet few).
Humans ARE animals. The only thing humans do that animals don't is abstract reasoning. But the whole span of love and sex are covered pretty well by other animals, and the physiological and even psychological mechanisms are pretty much the same across the bored.
Maybe I should have been more clear. You're comparing between species.
> But the whole span of love and sex are covered
> pretty well by other animals, and the physiological
> and even psychological mechanisms are pretty much
> the same across the bored.
I think that different things are covered by different animals. You can aggregate the whole body of 'non-human animals' to say that 'animals in general are the same as humans with respect to how they approach their sex lives.'
Wow is that WhatGuysWant thing way out of date. This is someone looking at the early days of a story site in the early days of the Internet and being horrified at the bad grammar, and from this she decides what guys really want? Give me a break. She's just looking at bad amateur writing, that's all. She didn't even find the Usenet erotica groups which had already developed to a far higher level of sophistication by that point. (Raise your hand if you remember the Celestial Reviews!)
Seriously, you sound like you're working on some really bad data here. I recall the data being that sex stories, as distinct from romance novels, are read by more men than women - though I don't know about the gender ratio of authors, certainly a lot of them have female pen names at least.
Sure, I'd buy that sex stories, like all sexually explicit material on the internet, is read more by men.
But you didn't say sex stories. You said the erotic romance novel. And that is just decidedly wrong.
My point about the essay, which I think it absolutely true, is that the men get off on the more detailed description of visual information. Whereas most women couldn't give two shits about how veiny some guy's dick was.
You are an unusual example of your gender. You must know that.
I'm not sure this is true. What men say and do in public doesn't indicate a lot about what they'd say and do if the media didn't tell them they had to be violent to be a man. Always framing it as a war between the sexes is probably not the best way to stop it being a war between the sexes.
I'm a guy, and I like both hardcore porn and erotic stories with plots and emotions ... really depends on my mood.
And about Internet porn: those people can barely have sex properly (does anyone believe the "screams" of those women?), making them act (something other than sucking, pumping and taking it) would be a disaster.
IMHO that's why the state of the art is the way it is ... it's cheaper and it gives you a piece of reality (i.e. people with imperfections, instead of models that can't act).
But men didn't invent the erotic romance novel. Women did. The vast majority of erotica writers AND readers are female. (http://www.ehow.com/way_5192600_tips-writing-sensual-books.h...)
You are an unusual example of your gender. You must know that.
Maybe the fact that most men prefer the plotless hardcore scenes found on the various you- and -tube sites, and its the women that are writing and reading erotica, is a coincidence.
But I tend to think it does indicate something about a difference in male and female sexuality, innate or otherwise. The fact that you are an exception to the rule doesn't make it true that men, in general, are consuming written erotica.
P.S. Obviously men do write and read some erotica, but even here there are differences. My favorite erotica writer, Morgan Hawke, wrote a blog post about the differences: http://www.darkerotica.net/WhatGuysWant.html
P.P.S. Would you be willing to read the second draft of my first novel, a sci-fi erotica with plot lines around programming? :D