* Gay men are quite attracted to Straight men (glance through Gay male personals. ”Str8t acting” is probably the single most desired trait in a paramour), but they know that Straight guys are just not interested. Men are just too consistent in their sexual orientation. Therefore, tension between Gay men and Straight women is quite low.
For Lesbians, though, it is quite different. Female sexuality is less fixed, more open to ideology and contingency. Hence, Lesbians can fantasize about how they can get Straight women. It’s just a matter of separating them from Straight men (cf Lesbian Separatist SF novels like Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, etc). This being the case, Lesbians strongly resent Straight men. They are two predators seeking the same prey.
* Let’s be fair – romance novels are usually pornography, and pornography reflects what gets the target audience hot and bothered. It’s not a great guide to the totality of that audience’s desires, which are usually a bit more complex than what pushes their buttons; just as what men want from a sexual or romantic relationship is generally more complex than breasts and buttocks, although those visual signals tend to dominate characteristically-visual male porn, ‘what women want’ isn’t simple or invariant across time.
* The goal of a population is maximizing local longer-term reproduction (long-term reproduction=sustained reproduction, implies good quality offspring).
Sexual reproduction has advantages (adaptivity to changing environments..), but two main bottlenecks: 1) large investment in growing/caring for the child, and 2) eliminating deleterious mutations from the population.
Instead of loading two bottlenecks on all individuals (and have no sex-differentiation), reproduction becomes more efficient if each bottleneck is handled by separate types of individuals.
Female and males have evolved to take care of these two bottlenecks, respectively.
The female specialization is clear. The male one means that males must compete fiercely for a rank in a hierarchy. The position in this hierarchy assigns ‘reproduction rights’. Most males left without reproducing, and a small minority at the top that reproduce widely.
The females then choose the highest ranked men for mating. The non-mating, low-ranked males are ‘filtering out’ bad genes (typically deleterious mutations) by simply not reproducing.
Two examples of this: sports, and duels. Sports happen to have a tournament structure, with enough fighting to establish a ranking, but not all pairs fight, which would be wasteful.
Women like it when two men fight for her. This establishes which is the ‘better’ one, and she goes with the winner.
* Female sexual arousal is switched on by attention from men (and sometimes just attention in general, hence lesbians’ occasional success with normal women). The higher status the man, the stronger the effect. The man’s arousal also arouses her.
Men have objective sexuality — they see something they like and they want it, and are notoriously obtuse when it comes to the feelings of the object of their desire. Women have far more subjective sexuality in that when something they like notices them it turns them on. This is why professional photographers have such great success with women.
The reason 50 shades is so popular is that all the bondage is taking sexual attention to an extreme. It’s like Cinderella on crack.
* Ironically women never seem to have anything interesting to say about what they want when it comes to men. They want everything and its opposite and they want both without having to ask for it because that ruins the whole thing and makes them not want it anymore. Women are not very interesting on the topic of women.
* There are all kinds of sexual deviancies but why do homos get special privilege?
Why no incest pride parade?
Why no S&M pride parade?
Why no polygamy pride parade?
Why no food sex pride parade?
Why no wife-swapping pride parade?
Why no cuckold pride parade?
Why no masturbation pride parade?
Why no granny fetish pride parade? (Aka Harold and Maude pride parade)
Why no costume sex pride parade?
It’s because people who indulge in such stuff have no special relation to any special talent?
But homos do have great talent apart from sexual deviance. And that made all the difference. If most homos were poor trash living in trailers, I doubt if anyone would have cared.
But many homos became writers, poets, artists, movie makers, fashionistas, agents, etc.
* After many decades, I have concluded that women want utopia and are continually frustrated that they can’t have it. Men are more content with their circumstances. To Wit the 70% of divorces initiated by women. Also it seems that most women stop even thinking about sex after 40.
* It always struck me that girls have competing desires when I had sex with them the first time. During pillow talk, they’d confess they’d made up their mind to have sex with me long ago. But leading up to sex there would be this faux prudishness: slapping my hand , giggling while saying no, and pretending to be offended by my sexual overtures. It was a case where no meant “not yet, but keep trying.” I knew another who acted not interested and then completely dropped the facade when she saw me with somebody else . It’s like they wanted to feel that A). They weren’t easy. B). I’m not easy, and I had options C) sex just happened, there was no burden of making a logical decision to have sex on her part. So I guess the fantasy is have it both ways, not having to consent to a guy she obviously would have consented to. It’s not a rape fantasy, it’s a passionate consensual sex without explicit consent fantasy.
* Men are into almost an infinite number of fetishes.
I’m familiar with fetish sites and men are into absolutely anything you can imagine, no matter how weird, how vile, how innocuous sounding (like the guys who get off on popping balloons), how painful, you name it, there are guys into it and they have a forum where they discuss it. The breadth of male dominated fetishes is astonishing and you just can’t imagine them all.
For women it’s quite different.
In most fetish forums, you have 100 guys trying to grab the attention of the 5 women who are part of the group. Among the 5 women, 2 are professionals, 1 is there because her man is into the weird fetish and the last 2 are into the fetish.
For what fetishes do you find ratios more like 100 guys for 30 women ? In any fetish forum that’s about “daddies” punishing their bad girls, rape fantasies, fantasies about strong guys humiliating and treating the woman like dirt and fantasies about women being “forced” to do horrible things to please “daddy”, etc. You’ll also find a disturbing number of women who participate in death fantasy forums where they fantasize about some predator guy killing them then eating them, etc. Those are the kind of fetishes that women really get into and in a sick way. You won’t find women in the groups about having sex with car engines (you will find guys into that though, for sure).
* 50 Shades of Grey is not a Cinderella story, as far as I can determine (not having read it). It’s a Beauty and the Beast story. If you’re going to use archetypes to carry out cultural criticism, you need to label the archetype correctly.
I don’t know if female competition has much of a part in 50 Shades, but it sounds as if the book’s primary emotional impact comes from the transformation of a rich, unfeeling Strong Man into an emotionally available one, thanks to the loving submission of a good woman. It’s her submissiveness that is attracting feminist criticism. The heroine of the story is supposed to be a virgin when she meets the “hero”. I can’t recall the last time I came across one of those in a book not written for children.
Cinderella doesn’t fit your template either. It’s the story of a girl who is unjustly treated by her father’s new wife and step-daughters, and who is rescued from a life of poverty by her prince. She doesn’t remove any of the competition; they try to remove her, and almost succeed. It’s only thanks to the intervention of her fairy godmother that she’s able to go to the ball and meet the prince at all.
* There’s anal fisting in 50 Shades (look it up if you don’t believe me). It’s been a while since I’ve read the Cinderella story, but if memory serves, there’s no anal fisting in Cinderella.
* 50 seems more a class fantasy than a sexual one as Douther mentioned.
Would all these women have cared about it if it were about a woman treated this way by some poor guy in a run-down trailer?
The appeal is in his riches and privilege and power. More Fifty Shades of Green.
It’s like hazing ritual for a woman to be allowed into the world of the super-rich. No pain, no gain.
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
* This novel appealed to millions of women. I have not read it, but I work at a major public library and it has been on hold in more than one language, for years and years now. Whether it is badly written or not, and I think it is, given the few pages I have been subjected to during processing the books, it hits the spot of many, many women. I sense that many men feel threatened by the book. No one is reading it for “the articles”, as they used to say about Playboy.
Porn for men is based on the desires of men, porn for women, written by women, is based on the desires of women. I have never understood the basically gay male nature of male directed porn, men seem to desire to look at, up close and very personal, endless penises. I, on the other hand, have zero desire to see female sexual organs. I would much rather watch gay male porn than lesbian or straight porn. The male habit of looking at other naked males seems very gay to me and makes me feel uncomfortable toward the men who get off on such things. I don’t like it, it creeps me out, but I let it slide, obviously, it serves some purpose.
You need to let women slide on Fifty Shades of Gray. It turns them on, they can’t help it, no matter how silly it may seem to you. Roll with it. Pull some hair, do some spanking! Pin somebody down, make them take it!
When I was in my teens, a friend’s mom, trapped in a hideous and abusive marriage, used to buy a lot of romance novels. My friend and I babysat for a lot of women’s kids. We would pass the naughtiest romance novels around. One of the women we babysat for had a husband who loved for his wife to read romance novels. He told us, “She reads them next to me in bed. She will read a bit, then she will molest me! She’ll read a bit more, then she will attack me! I don’t know what’s in them, but I love them!”
