Porn use and men's and women's sexual performance
cambridge.org
cambridge.org
Women in general respond to emotional stimulus better. Their supernormal stimulus is erotic romance, also known to create unrealistic expectations, however these expectations are about men, not the readers themselves.
I don't know porn much, but I know erotic romance, and it's central thesis is that it's a form of fantasy in which the MFC (main female character) is wanted by one, sometimes two (menage) and occasionally more (reverse harem) MMCs (main male characters). The allure is that she is the center of their world. HEA (happily ever after) is usually expected, especially for romance, and cheating is forbidden. Alpha males, billionaires, daddy and stepbrother types are the most popular MMCs, along with aliens and monsters. The pattern is being able to tame, or at least withstand or even enjoy something possessive, dominant and aggressive. Another pattern is being able to lay down the burden of having to be in control, or having adult responsibilities altogether. Women also enjoy reading about gay men, reportedly because they don't have to identify with an MFC. In romance it is important to create an emotional framework that explains why the characters want each other, and in erotic romance this can happen through sexual discovery. Being fated to be together is a popular, if lazy framework. Erotica without an emotional framework is much less popular and hard to monetize because the payment processors are squeamish of adult content in the first place and the readers tend to feel bad about just erotica, which is a recipe for disaster. Reportedly erotic romance actually helps women improve their sexual life, perhaps because it encourages sexual discovery.
This makes me think that this stuff is cultural mimicry resulting in conforming to local gender roles rather than a true gender divide.
Happy to alter beliefs based on evidence that target this specific notion: that it is not subcultural.
not only this is true across different cultures, but also throughout history.
1800 years old Roman penis carving near the Hadrian's wall
https://www.militarytimes.com/resizer/1V8zCb1tPjuWr0elUXTJhd...
1700 years old penis graffiti in ancient Rome
https://i0.wp.com/hyperallergic-newspack.s3.amazonaws.com/up...
Priapus weighting his dick in Pompei
https://images-cdn.bridgemanimages.com/api/1.0/image/600wm.X...
Penis Parinirvana, Edo Japanese scroll
https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2...
Phallic Fertility in the Ancient Near East and Egypt
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRoS-c0...
winged penis in ancient India
https://www.michaellaird.com/pictures/3217_4.jpg?v=160027396...
and so on
At least for the things I've showed.
If you know of female roman soldiers walking the Hadrian's wall, female painters in Pompei or female sculptors in ancient Egypt, I'm eager to read about'em.
We know of women artists in Japanese Edo period, but they did not paint penises (AFAIK)
But that's besides the point, the point wasn't if women sometimes draw penises, the point was that 'boys like to draw dicks on things' and historical records show that they kinda always did.
most penises drawings don't and the overwhelming majority of them is the work of a man.
BUT, that particular Japanese painting is kept at the British Museum [1] and it depict a parody of the death of Buddha...
So yeah, "ahahaha, penis (and vulva) so funny"
This is an hilarious and inventive – not to say scurrilous – parody of the sacred Buddhist subject of the Buddha's death and passing into a state of nirvana (‘nothingness’). Conventional painted versions of the subject have survived in quite large numbers in Japan, dating from the late 11th century onwards. They were displayed in temples each year for rituals held on the anniversary of the Buddha’s passing, traditionally the fifteenth day of the second month. Here the ‘Penis Buddha’, with golden skin, reclines on a dais resting his ‘head’ on one arm, the same pose taken by the Buddha Shakyamuni in conventional versions. Women with vulva faces gather round to lament, in company with paired couplings of various animals and vegetables. Two penis mourners stand in place of Buddhist guardian kings. At the back, pine trees and a river painted on a screen represent the sal trees and Badaiga River of tradition. Between the trees at the back are two esoteric deities with multiple vulva-heads and multiple arms that hold sex toys in place of their normal attributes.
There is a tradition in Japan since at least the late eighteenth century of comic parodies of the Death of the Buddha
[1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_2011-3012-...
For instance, if I said "guys do MDMA" and showed evidence of MDMA use in different cultures, you wouldn't be convinced right?
The point is boys have a penis and they draw penises.
The penis has always been a symbol of fertility because it represents the seed. Semen in English translates to the Italian word seme (which means both sperm and seed) and, no wonders, it comes from Latin semen (pronounced /'se|me|n/), but the Latin word meant "from the same roots". In Greek it's σπέρμα (pronounced /'spέrma/), in Italian the same word is sperma, in English it's sperm.
From σπέρμα (seed) comes the Italian word speme, that means "hope"
In Japanese, Chinese, Sino-Tibetan, Vietnamese, the word is always related to "sprout" and "grow".
The Japanese kanji for sperm has two roots from Chinese alphabet, one means energy, perfect, the second means child.
MDMA is just a synthetic drug of this time and place (mostly the west), it doesn't mean anything for anyone.
So, while girls today are (mostly) free to express their artistic abilities, unlike the ancient past, they prefer to draw vulvas (in various forms from the most realistic to the metaphorical ones) and not dicks, because they do not have one.
Ah the origin of priapism, it all makes sense now. Not sure if that's an honor or not for the guy.
It became an auspicious of fertility during Alexander the Great and an important figure in Roman mythology.
So he was born cursed, but then honored.
A cult alternative to nowadays: :banana or :aubergine
Edit: HN trims emojis
I won't address your particular example (“guys like drawing dicks on things”), but a similar one that I'm sure strikes you as cultural as well: the sex difference in toy preferences and play behaviour. The following is an excerpt from the book Perspectives in Male Psychology by Louise Liddon and John Barry, which argues that it's not subcultural:
“Some of the most intriguing evidence supporting the biological basis for sex differences in toy preferences comes, unexpectedly, from animals. There is a large body of evidence in animal research finding strong effects of prenatal and perinatal exposure to sex hormones on a range of sex-related behaviours, including juvenile play (Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2004). Even more intriguingly, some research has found that male monkeys spend longer than females manipulating toys that move (wheeled toys or a ball), whereas female monkeys make more contact with a doll and cooking pot (Alexander & Hines, 2002; Hassett et al., 2008). Most intriguing of all is research that finds a sex difference in how primates play with objects: young females tend to play with objects as if they are nurturing an infant, and young males play with the same objects with more vigour, often as a weapon.
Compelling evidence for a biological basis for play behaviour comes from a 14-year study of ‘stick-carrying’ in Ugandan chimpanzees (Kahlenberg & Wrangham, 2010). These chimps tend to use sticks to signal aggression, to find food (e.g. taking honey from a hole), during play or as ‘stick-carrying’. This latter behaviour accounted for about 40% of stick-related behaviour, and was initially puzzling for researchers. The behaviour was observed to be most common in juvenile females, compared to weapon use, which was most common in males. The researchers noted that stick-carrying sometimes involved cradling of the stick, and the behaviour always occurred prior to the female’s first birth and ended when the female became a mother. The researchers concluded that stick-carrying is a form of play-mothering. The sex difference in stick-carrying appeared to be spontaneous and without any teaching by adult chimps, making social learning an unlikely explanation.
The overall explanation for the sex differences observed in these various human and non-human animal studies is that, in general, males are naturally predisposed to activities such as hunting and building, and females are naturally predisposed to nurturing the young (Hines, 2005). Extrapolating this evidence to humans, when boys are playing with cars this could be an expression of an innate tendency to track moving objects, as might be done in hunting, and when girls play with dolls this could be an expression of an innate tendency to nurturance and mothering.”
There are obviously some newer adaptations (the ability to digest milk as adults in certain populations, or even sickle cell disease in West Africans), but they seem to be the exceptions to the rule.
(All numbers approximate.)
So I think in some respects there are true differences between estrogen and testosterone. The rest of my life has stayed rather constant during this time, and I am 37 years old.
It would be wildly unethical to get people to take these out of hormonal manipulative drugs for purely a psychological study so the only way to get this sort of understanding is through people like yourself sharing your experience, so thank you for sharing your story!
If you don't "vote" you get fined $20, but voting has occured once you turn up and claim your ballot paper and get ticked off on the electroral roll, after that you can do what you want.
There was some talk (rumour) that these particular type of informal votes were being counted up as a means of tallying up general voter disaffection. Not sure if true.
I was particularly driven by two factors
a) Party voting policy whereby your local member is forced to vote along "party lines" more than 99.9% of the time, even if it is blatantly and severely against their constituants best interests.
b) The nature of the electoral system whereby if your vote is with a losing candidate, it might end up being redistributed on "preferences" that you have no say in, to decide the ultimate winner. This means it is possible that it is very hard to predict where your vote might actually end up at the time you cast it.
>Women in general respond to emotional stimulus better. Their supernormal stimulus is erotic romance, also known to create unrealistic expectations, however these expectations are about men, not the readers themselves.
Do you have a source for this claim? I've heard this claim many times but I've never seen it proven scientifically.
There is however truth to women relying on emotional context more for arousal, but remember it's a biopsychosocial process, so some of that is malleable.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10548-009-0130-5
Within the erotic fiction market stories with an emotional context tend to do better with both men and women, however men are less sensitive to the lack of such context. Erotic fanfiction is also very popular with women, reportedly because the characters and their relationships are already fleshed out. Also lesbian erotic fiction is two different market, men and lesbian women tend to like different stories. Stories that turn men into women (feminization, genderswap) are somewhat popular, but have a cis woman dominate a cis man and the readers vanish. Most women (more than 95%) don't care for it, even if a lot of men do (around 25%), however most of those men prefer watching femdom porn. You can sell maledom diaper age play erotica with shapeshifters or aliens, as long as there is a relationship to be developed between the characters, the female readership is there for it. The 18th best seller in erotica on Amazon is a monster romance book about milking monsters for a living, specifically because it's a love story between a human and a minotaur.
Somewhere in there pure asexuality hides among the subtext.
Women still tend to prefer charming, possesive, dominant men in these though.
I don't know if I'm unusual in this but I'd like to know what other people think. I seriously wonder if a lot of porn produced is aimed at what the studios think the audience want rather than actually finding out if it is. I could well be wrong though.
No judgement on anyone for liking what I don't, that's fine.
So, is it just me?
I think there are plenty of amazing "mainstream" porn scenes out there too, but they tend to get lost in an endless sea of repetitive sub-par pro porn.
Obviously everyone's tastes are different but, broadly speaking, the most popular porn videos do not tend to be the most romantic or sensual. That said, there are many niches in porn, and videos made for women can be very successful within that niche.
Producers are incentivised to create videos that will sell. It's not much good if a video is popular on free tube sites but nobody pays for it. There is evidence to suggest that women are a lot less likely to pay for porn than men are, and there is therefore a lot less of an incentive to create porn for that demographic.
Creating romantic/passionate porn is not easy! The script and casting (amongst many other things) need to be just right for it to work. Therefore it's going to take more time and effort. So many studios will focus on mass producing videos. There's an obvious trade-off between quality and quantity, and many studios will have found that it's just more profitable to churn out videos as quickly as possible.
Male oriented erotica in book form is rare in US culture, but common in the Japanese light novel / visual novel community.
Books focus on characters thoughts and emotions because that's the medium of words.
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Most book-based erotica seems to be aimed at female audiences for some reason, so I think there is a bit of a cultural expectation here.
Still, with the growing popularity of erotic visual novels (and heck, just novels in general) I have to imagine that the male reader base exists out there.
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I'm not saying Hunniepop is the best written piece of literature I've seen. But there are words and emotions there, and a mild focus on what the various women want (albeit with the male sex fantasy slants).
Since the majority of the game is in fact, reading mundane situations and figuring out which gifts work best for each girl (ie gameplay mechanic to force the players into reading the story), it forces the player to at least explore the female characters a bit before you get the porno scene.
Counterpoint: I find this stuff creepy and voyeuristic. I think watching porn to watch normal loving couples having straight sex is somewhere between peeping in windows to watch a healthy, normal family have dinner (and to fantasize about being them), or like going to the circus to watch nonathletic people exercise.
Watching porn to see sexual athletes and performers do what they do for a living, and enjoying the unusual and exceptional, and not really thinking that its something that you're obligated to imitate or emulate, for me, is the least creepy perspective. The opposite, to me, is a strange insistence that the only porn that is worthwhile is porn that is held up as a model, and that people who don't see pornography as a model are perverted. For me, that's like saying it's perverted to watch a trapeze artist, or a gymnast.
I would much rather get turned on and get my little dopamine rush from watching two people enjoy having intense and romantic sex with each other than by watching some sexual gymnast pull off a zero-g inverse mating press with hammerlocked arms while covered in enough lube and sweat to fill a 55 gallon drum.
This is the case for me about 75% of the time, unless I'm in "a mood."
Free online porn is not optimized for people's tastes. It's optimized to attract the people who are so obsessed that they're going to click through and actually buy products that are advertised at some point.
“The findings reveal the irony that porn – a male-dominated industry that targets a male-dominated audience – is associated with the erosion of the quality of men's sex lives and the improvement of women's sex lives.”
Porn is engineered to suit men's desires and tastes, rather than women's. Watching it teaches both groups to accept norms that are preferential to men. If you're a (hetero) man, this makes you a more selfish partner and vice versa for a woman.
Meanwhile, I think more straight cismen should read the sex section of women magazines (ELLE, Marie-Claire, etc) to get the basics of what women likes and wants.
Sorry if I’ll be somehow offending trans or cat people by saying this, but not everyone has a concrete gender identification above life and always prefixing their thoughts with that.
Or this isn't reflecting the reality as we would think it is
Male and female sexual function aren’t particularly comparable either. If a man can’t get an erection then sexual intercourse just isn’t going to happen. There’s no hard analog for women. That’s just one example, there are many others.
> and enhanced partner-reported sexual satisfaction (for some aspects)."
I read this as something like: women who watch porn are more likely to perform fellatio well.
Tellingly, as far as I can tell, they left out analyses of the relationship between self-reported sexual satisfaction with their partner and porn use. That is, how related is my sexual satisfaction with my partner to how often I seek out porn?
Both of these types of processes play out in sex education and couples therapy settings: women who complain about men who have unrealistic ideas about sex due to porn, and don't seem to care about their satisfaction; but also men complaining about sexually cold female partners who aren't interested in sex, and so they find themselves interested in porn more as a result. It's hard to tell from the study results what's going on, or both.
> In June 2015, the French YouTuber Mathieu Sommet posted an online video that invited his followers to complete a questionnaire entitled ‘Sexual profile of adults’.^2 A total of 171 462 participants (18+ year-olds) started the questionnaire, and 101 572 finished it.
There’s probably some value in the study, but it’s probably inappropriate to draw hard conclusions from it (pun not intended).
As a rough approximation, it's probably fair to assign it the same value as youtube comments.
There’s also the degree and how long one looks at porn. And how that can free up time for other things that are attractive in relationships (financial security etc). As a hypothetical consider a person who looks at porn for 5min every two days, and stays very focused on accumulating wealth for a few years and then reduces this and focuses more on sexual performance.
I think this is sending the wrong signal to readers. Yes, ninety percent of the time it is worth optimizing for. It's literally what we're wired to do and your partner will appreciate it.
That doesn't mean that that ten percent of an outlier doesn't exist but broadcasting doubt that it is worth optimizing for is not the wisdom most people need to hear.
Sorry. :P
I wonder if the effect would hold if there were more porn that caters to women. Or if consumption of romance novels has a similar but inverted effect.
> Accordingly, and contrary to what is often suggested in popular books on the psychology of pornography (e.g. Zimbardo & Coulombe, Reference Zimbardo and Coulombe2015), men who face sexual problems and choose to terminate porn use may experience only marginal improvements in their sexual lives (assuming that we can draw causal inferences from our findings); similarly, women who face sexual problems might be well advised not to consider porn use to be a sexual panacea.
This is interesting for sure but you can't draw sweeping conclusions from this research.
Are ♧ and ♤ true? Or did the paper just make this factoid up on the spot? My gut feeling would have been that it's dominated by women instead, and that the audience skewness would be a reflection of that more than anything.
Latest example: Taylorism, applied to the bedroom.
Result (TLDR): for men, 0; for women, 1.
In broad brush strokes : Women know what arouses men from watching porn. Men know what arouses themselves from watching porn.