Thinking that the flood of badly made, poorly scripted porn on the Internet reveals the secret darkness of male sexuality, is like thinking that an endless succession of awful movies from Hollywood reveals that people secretly want a poorly scripted sequel to the last blockbuster. What it reveals is that making good movies is difficult. It's like thinking that a flood of nitwit Web startups reveals that the economy really wants nitwit Web startups. If you're a venture capitalist, you may want better, but you'll have trouble finding it. Likewise if you're a movie viewer. And likewise if you're a man.
If you look at what the Internet has done to written pornography, you see exactly the reverse effect as what the article describes. I once picked up a book of published erotica that wasn't online, and holy crap was the quality vastly worse than what I now expect. Tawdry, pointless, plotless, emotionless, needlessly violent encounters - because, I presume, that is what the publishers think men want, because the publishers conceive of pornography as a sordid dirty thing and imagine themselves as exploiting it. 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.
"Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price," said Jean Baudrillard. In the days when written erotica was produced by publishers who looked down on it, no publisher knew how to write seduction. And today, when visual erotica is still seen as a tawdry and exploitive affair by the people who produce it, who still see themselves as pandering to the base desires of men, who still see plot as the domain only of real movies, there is no seduction in that visual erotica. You cannot find it, no matter how hard you look online. There are big-budget porn productions but not productions that spend more than five dollars on the script.
But in the domain of written erotica where getting started is as simple as owning a keyboard, and people don't bother writing if they're not having fun writing, and the producer is a lot like the consumer - people who like erotic literature - there you find plot. You find seduction. You find the "erotic romance novel".
That's not what all men want, I suppose; not what all men want all of the time. But it's what I demand as a matter of routine in my written erotica, and what I can't find in online movies (even if it's advertised as big-budget or woman-made, it just doesn't seem to exist).
And before anyone writes the obvious dumb reply, yes I have a girlfriend and no I do not apologize for consuming the form of art known as erotica anymore than I apologize for writing Harry Potter fanfiction.
"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 if there is a genre which fulfills everything you speak of and more, it's the japanese erotic Visual Novel. I never thought I'd ever treat any form of porn with reverence until http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate/stay_night
I wonder if it's a lesson in this. If people can make so successfully animated movies, why so few live ones? Is there an inherent limit? I'd venture to say we're very turned off by any form of pretense in sex. The most successful forms of live porn seem to be either pure amateur, or porn actresses who are basically acting as themselves. If that's the cause, no amount of money or skill will fix it...
I edited the original comment to note that hentai manga (not so much video, though, for some very odd reason) is often of high plot quality, I would guess because in manga the scriptwriter often also is the one who draws it, and when you're putting in all that work to draw something line by line, you won't be able to avoid wanting to make it beautiful and wanting to add plot.
Then I noticed that people were no longer voting up the comment, and edited back out - I would guess that mentioning manga made it seem lower-prestige.
But (he quibbled) I'm not sure I'd classify F/SN as erotica in the first place, even if it's technically in the erogame genre; it's a novel with some sex scenes.
I think the evidence speaks for itself: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/Adult. This is what is mostly visited and the vast majority of that is incredibly tame by the standards of the article.
> ...is like thinking that an endless succession of awful movies from Hollywood reveals that people secretly want a poorly scripted sequel to the last blockbuster. What it reveals is that making good movies is difficult.
I can't see how this squares with box office returns. There are many bad sequels each year, a few great movies (as defined by critics or whichever elite), and lots in between. And the bad sequels tend to make orders of magnitude more money because way, way more people want to see them.
Further, from movie studio's cost perspective, isn't it easier to produce a good movie? For the cost of a single vapid summer blockbuster, they could hire several dozen acclaimed directors to each make their own dream film. But they don't do this because those films would not be nearly as good as an investment.
A lot of bad sequels make orders of magnitude more money than critically acclaimed films, but the films that make the most money are rarely bad. The highest grossing films of the last three years have been Avatar, The Dark Knight, and Toy Story 3, which were all critical darlings to various degrees. People really want great movies but are willing to settle for mediocre ones that have some of the things they're looking for (e.g., exceptional visuals, or characters in which they're already invested).
I think it would be more accurate to say they are rarely horrible. But what does that prove? The highest selling cars rarely have less than 100hp, but that doesn't mean the public really wants to buy the car with the most power yet, by mistake, keeps buying reliable cars with high resale value.
Even if it were difficult to make a good movie (which I dispute, more or less), that doesn't explain why once the good movie is made the public would still avoid it in favor of "Clash of the Titans". The reviews are widely available.
How exactly should we determine what the public really wants than by what they go out and purchase? I just don't get what you and Eliezer are arguing from.
<b>but the films that make the most money are rarely bad. The highest grossing films of the last three years have been Avatar, The Dark Knight, and Toy Story 3</b>
Which, even if praised by whoring critics, are all quite bad , formulaic, shit.
They aren't gonna be near (random selection of quality stuff): Citizen Kane, On the Waterfront, Arsenic and Old Lace, Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Vertigo et al in any cinephiles list...
The financial structure of making a Hollywood movie is very strange. It's an accounting nightmare with thousands of moving parts built over decades of favors, trades, and union negotiations. The few blockbuster movies of the year sustain the whole system. It's a very difficult business to make money in. I don't understand it all myself, and neither does the screenwriter who tried to explain parts of it to me.
Everyone involved wants to make a good movie, and everyone most of all wants to make a movie that sells, but it's not always possible to tell what will turn out well and what people will like. So we get a lot of bad movies and a few good ones. A lot of flops and a few blockbusters.
Are you disagreeing with my claim that the public doesn't want good movies, or that making good movies (though maybe not great movies) isn't that hard?
If the former, why would we need the opinion of a single screenwriter, when we can just look at what the public chooses to watch?
If the latter, I was claiming that it's easy for the movie studios to come up with a few good movies (just hire directors with good track records to make many movies for the price of a single big-budget shoot-em-up; statistically, you should get a decent film), not that it's easy on any given set to make a single good movie.
Given that if he's right, the vast majority of men would lie about what they want, it's hard to say. We could do a survey of porn, but you've already announced that you think the market for porn is consistently producing a product that most viewers don't want.
You are referring to the quality of porn but the point of the article was the variety of porn (implying there is an active demand of such varied tastes)
If you look at what the Internet has done to written pornography, you see exactly the reverse effect as what the article describes. I once picked up a book of published erotica that wasn't online, and holy crap was the quality vastly worse than what I now expect. Tawdry, pointless, plotless, emotionless, needlessly violent encounters - because, I presume, that is what the publishers think men want, because the publishers conceive of pornography as a sordid dirty thing and imagine themselves as exploiting it. 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.
"Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price," said Jean Baudrillard. In the days when written erotica was produced by publishers who looked down on it, no publisher knew how to write seduction. And today, when visual erotica is still seen as a tawdry and exploitive affair by the people who produce it, who still see themselves as pandering to the base desires of men, who still see plot as the domain only of real movies, there is no seduction in that visual erotica. You cannot find it, no matter how hard you look online. There are big-budget porn productions but not productions that spend more than five dollars on the script.
But in the domain of written erotica where getting started is as simple as owning a keyboard, and people don't bother writing if they're not having fun writing, and the producer is a lot like the consumer - people who like erotic literature - there you find plot. You find seduction. You find the "erotic romance novel".
That's not what all men want, I suppose; not what all men want all of the time. But it's what I demand as a matter of routine in my written erotica, and what I can't find in online movies (even if it's advertised as big-budget or woman-made, it just doesn't seem to exist).
And before anyone writes the obvious dumb reply, yes I have a girlfriend and no I do not apologize for consuming the form of art known as erotica anymore than I apologize for writing Harry Potter fanfiction.