Comment by Comevius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Comevius | Hacker News Reader

This wasn't in the paper, but men in general tend to be geared toward non-emotional stimulus and action-oriented thinking. Their supernormal stimulus is hardcore and paraphilic porn for this reason, which then of course invokes unfavorable comparisons, because of how unrealistic they are.

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.

>but men in general tend to be geared toward non-emotional stimulus and action-oriented thinking. Their supernormal stimulus is hardcore and paraphilic porn for this reason, which then of course invokes unfavorable comparisons, because of how unrealistic they are.

>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.

Humans are pretty complicated and arousal is a dynamic and malleable, biopsychosocial process. The individual differences, variability is what makes humans so successful.

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.

> arousal is a dynamic and malleable, biopsychosocial process

Somewhere in there pure asexuality hides among the subtext.

Source: interacting with the opposite sex for more than 30 days

Interestingly, I can see basically almost all of the tropes described in the last paragraph in many male-targeted manga/anime/visual novel with romance elements.

Manga is a rich tapestry, but men tend to prefer younger women in those, often inexperienced ones. Even feisty women (tsundere) are expected to be inexperienced and sooner or later lovestruck. The pattern is a partner who can't compare you to anyone else, so you are automatically the best. Nobody sexualizes young girls quite like the Japanese. Also family members, probably because of how paternal their government is, and how suddenly parents stop coddling their children, like one minute you are spoiled, and the next you are on your own and much is expected of you.

Women still tend to prefer charming, possesive, dominant men in these though.

I think your view is biased. In practice I see a lot of Japanese couples where the woman is slightly older than the man, which I don’t see as often in Europe. And there are many Anime where there is a dominant, sexually experienced woman (“MILF”). I guess that also fits the trope of “being allowed to hand over control”. So I’d agree that male and female fiction is not as different as some make it out to be.

This strikes me as cultural. In the vein of "guys like drawing dicks on things". Not only do I not do that but I know few who do across many countries.

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.

> "guys like drawing dicks on things"

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

How do we know all of those artists were men?

because we know.

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.

I don't think that Japanese painting supports your point. It also contains vagina-headed people, and appears to have some deeper layers beyond "haha penis so funny".

> and appears to have some deeper layers beyond "haha penis so funny".

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-...

I'm specifically perfectly okay with "there exist guys who like doing this in every culture". I do not question that. It appears true even today. Personally I interpret "guys do X" as "among guys, doing X is common".

For instance, if I said "guys do MDMA" and showed evidence of MDMA use in different cultures, you wouldn't be convinced right?

MDMA is not ancestral and you won't find guys doing it in ancient Babylon

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.

>Priapus weighting his dick in Pompei

Ah the origin of priapism, it all makes sense now. Not sure if that's an honor or not for the guy.

the cult of Priapus it's very old, it was born in ancient Greece and the story says that he was the son of Aphrodite and another god (some say Dionysus some Zeus himself) and Hera, jealous of her unfaithful husband, gave him a grotesque look and a giant phallus.

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.

There is an Egyptian hieroglyph for penis or at least there is a Unicode character: 𓂸

A cult alternative to nowadays: :banana or :aubergine

Edit: HN trims emojis

TIL!

> Happy to alter beliefs based on evidence that target this specific notion: that it is not subcultural.

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.”

Humans have not been hunter-gatherers for 5 thousand years now. This is approximately the time it took to make wolves into dogs, domesticate cats, etc. You can’t possibly assume everything men/women do is related to that time when we were primal humans because there was already thousands of years of evolution that separated us from those people.

You're right, we are beyond melee weapons, real grown men play with guns.

Interesting argument. Wolves and dogs are behaviorally almost identical. Domestic cats and wild cats are as well. If you've ever been around feral cats or stray dogs, you know to stay well clear of them, as they revert to wild behavior pretty quickly. Their domestic performances depend on their living experience being carefully controlled by humans.

5 thousand of years aren't nothing, but they aren't that much either, at least when it comes to the course of human evolution. We seem to be anatomically indistinguishable from people who lived not 5, but 50 thousand years ago.

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.

Reproductive cycle for humans is about 15 years. Dogs: two years. Cats: one year. So they have had a few times as many generations to evolve.

(All numbers approximate.)

You've obviously never had a cat or a dog if you think all (any?) Of their natural instincts have been bred out.

Well I am only one example but I am transgender and started taking estrogen six months ago. As my dosage has increased, my porn preferences have changed. I used to be interested in live performance porn with no interest in comics, but recently the live performance stuff has lost almost all appeal and I have found that erotic comics are very interesting and arousing.

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.

I find these sorts of personal stories fascinating, it’s a unique and valuable window into the hormonal tides our psychological foundations are floating upon.

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!

Yes! If you are in trans circles this stuff is all common knowledge as everyone wants to talk about this stuff, but I understand the stories don't get in to the wider discourse as often.

HN is almost ready for jokes about programming socks and salt.

I no longer remember who said that, but it was a woman who started taking testosterone for some medical reason. She said something like "wow, that was a change, suddenly I wanted to fight or fuck almost everyone I met".

Yes this is a well known effect of trans men taking testosterone. But trans issues in the wider discourse currently still boil down to some very basic stuff with no real nuance or understanding.

Thanks for calling this out. The twitter meme of "anything I like is natural, anything I don't like is cultural" is pretty braindead. Even just one aspect of our biology like hormones impacts human behavior considerably.

Well there is this issue right of for example men saying women aren't good at programming because of hormones, which is nonsense. But the real answer isn't to assume anything in one direction or the other it is to look for scientific evidence. And in this case trans people going either way provide for some great information on this topic and trans people are also often very willing to talk about these changes (when its safe).

I voted dick and balls this year - great Australian tradition of saying "you are all fucked and I am not taking any responsibility for any of you getting in"

Was that actually a candidate (like the monster raving loony party), or did you have to add your own box?

No, I took a fat permenant marker and drew a giant dick and balls symbol on the ballot sheet and then stuffed it in the box.

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.

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