Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

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> "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.

I wasn't trying to contradict. I was trying to flesh out a potential 'otherwise' with my own observations and theories.

Not every reply is an argument.

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.'

Humans are far more like bonobos than bovine. And there... not so much difference between male and female.

Thank you. I was already writing something along these lines in my head before I read this.

I'd just like to add: analyzing anything, especially social taboos, without socio-historical context is an exercise in futility.

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