The Online World of Female Desire

I'd love for someone to correct me, but this conclusion just doesn't ring true to me. They say "the world's most popular 'erotic' site for women is FanFiction.net".. and it only gets 1.5 million visitors a month. Something tells me there are way more women than that surfing the web for erotic material.

Also, this whole article seems to disregard social norms.

I'd be careful taking the word of a WSJ reporter on this. I spent 3 years as a tech admin for one of the largest HP fanfiction sites on the Internet (> 100K users & 40K stories when I left), and made a lot of friends in the fandom, some of whom I still talk to and one of whom got me my job at Google. This article reads a lot like some of the media pieces on Google these days: the author comes in with an idea for a juicy story that'll get readers, does about an hour of research to support it, and then mouths off their conclusions as fact, regardless of how off-base they are.

It is true that fandom is overwhelmingly female (Harry Potter was ~99%), and that there is a romantic overtone to many (but not all) of the stories. Beyond that, very little of the article rang true. There are a wide variety of reasons why people write fanfiction.

A large number of them are aspiring writers (hell, everyone seems to be an aspiring novelist), and view fanfiction as practice for the day when they'll eventually write their own original novel. Others of them are obsessive about their favorite shows, and feel like they must write more adventures of the characters they've grown to love. There is the romantic/sexual aspect for some. Slash fanfiction (fanfiction involving gay pairings of canon characters) has become a way for many young gay men to come to terms with their sexual identity. And some people just do it for community, so that they can be creative and share their creations with like-minded people.

The author got her analogies all mixed up. I'd say that fanfiction.net is overwhelmingly the first two and last categories of people. Its demographics skew pretty young (last I heard, median age was about 15, and a majority of the userbase were under 20). If I had to compare it against a "male" equivalent, I think it's closest match would be reddit.com/r/CarlHProgramming or other "learn programming" communities on the web. Just like on CarlHProgramming, it focuses on being creative, and on fostering a supportive, ego-boosting environment where your early mistakes are tolerated.

Explicitly sexual pairings are usually found on boutique archives like RestrictedSection.org. I think their equivalent are things like "Emma Watson nude!" or "See Lindsay Lohan's firecrotch!" tabloid-ish sites (no, I don't know any actual URLs, I don't exactly go looking for Emma Watson nudes).

The closest thing to outright porn sites would be archives of original erotic fiction, like literotica.com or asstr.org. Or romance novels. I don't know the authorship figures for them, but I assume they also skew heavily female.

There's way more complexity than this - I have a friend that did her master's thesis on online fandom communities. Five paragraphs can barely scratch the surface. But "Oh, fanfiction is just like porn for girls" is a vast oversimplification.

"Female erotica demonstrates how the detective agency operates—and how it differs from the much simpler male brain."

Irritating.