Catherine Salmon
The sexual psychologies of male and female erotica
A talk given in 2001

Many different kinds of studies can be used to inform us about male and female sexual psychologies. The methodology I've been interested in involves combining questionnaire studies with unobtrusive measures. Unobtrusive measures refer to research methods that do not require the cooperation of respondents and do not themselves contribute to the response.

A few other evolution-minded researchers have employed unobtrusive measures to excellent effect. Earlier in this series, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson used police statistics on spousal homicide to illuminate the psychology of sexual jealousy. Free markets are potential gold mines of unobtrusive measures of human psychology , measures which remain largely untapped.

My particular interests in this area focus on the specific topic of this lecture, erotica designed for men and women and what the differences between them can tell us about sex differences in our evolved sexual psychology. When Don Symons and I were deciding what to put on the cover of our upcoming book on the subject, we went with this statement...

"To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes."

Tonight I want to tell you a bit about that abyss, what it reflects and also a little bit about within sex differences in erotic preferences.

My focus is on commercially available erotica. Male-oriented pornography and female-oriented romance novels--the primary components of commercial erotica--are multi-billion-dollar global industries. Industries whose characteristic features have been shaped in free markets by the cumulative choices made by tens or hundreds of millions of men and women who have "voted" with their money.

Commercial pornography probably exists in every industrialized society and in many developing societies as well. In the U.S. the industry's annual revenues from video sales and rentals exceed four billion dollars per year, and porn videos account for more than 25% of the total video market. The growth of the porn industry has been marked by successes that have acquired mythical proportions. For example, the film Deep Throat cost $25,000 to make and rapidly became a classic, grossing more than fifty million dollars.

Romance novels account for 40% of mass market paperback sales in the U.S., generating annual revenues of four to six billion dollars. In the last year, almost three thousand romances were published in North America, where more than forty-five million women are romance readers. Harlequin Enterprises, one of the largest publishers of romances, boasts annual worldwide sales of over 190 million books, attesting to the enormous appeal of these narratives to women everywhere.

A strength of conducting research on commercial erotica is that the design features of porn and of romances constitute unobtrusive measures of male and female sexual psychologies. Real life heterosexual interactions inevitably involve compromise and therefore blur differences between male and female sexual desires and dispositions. But erotica has no need for such compromises, since it is targeted to sex-specific audiences.

One way in which erotica can be used to illuminate human sexual psychology is to compare commercially successful products with less successful ones. Sales figures and royalty checks provide reliable information about women's psychology. Best- selling romance novels, for example, almost never feature gentle, sensitive heroes, because women readers prefer to fantasize about strong, confident men who ultimately are tamed only by their love for the heroine. Gone with the Wind is a classic example of the popularity of a strong hero; in the end, it is Rhett Butler whom Scarlett desires, not the wimpy Ashley. Romance writers who have experimented with gentle, sensitive heroes have not been rewarded in the marketplace.

Another approach is to attempt to identify the essential ingredients of erotic genres, to distill their essences. For example, a common characteristic of pornographic videos is attempted humour; but humour is not an essential ingredient. Many thousands of humourless porn videos are commercially successful. In contrast, as I will discuss in a few minutes, impersonal sex is an essential ingredient of porn videos.

A third approach, which I will discuss in the last half of my talk, is to analyze smaller, more esoteric erotic genres and to compare them to mainstream forms. The logic behind this is that apparent exceptions can prove the rule, can highlight the essential ingredients in male and female erotica, and can inspire testable hypotheses about the causes of within-sex variation in erotic preferences.

Pornography

The utopian male fantasy realm depicted in pornography-- "pornotopia"-- remains essentially unchanged through time and space. In pornotopia sex is all about lust and physical gratification, totally lacking in courtship, commitment, durable relationships, or mating effort. It is a world in which women are eager to have sex with strangers, easily sexually aroused, and always orgasmic. Porn videos contain minimal plot development, focusing instead on the sex acts themselves and emphasizing the display of female bodies, especially close-ups of faces (which display sexual arousal), breasts, and genitals. The fact that videos and, in the last few years, the internet so thoroughly dominate male-oriented erotica testifies to the deeply visual nature of male sexuality. Men tend to be sexually aroused by "objectified" visual stimuli. As a consequence, porn videos do not require the existence of a POV character to be effective, and scenes of a woman alone, masturbating, are relatively common. The male viewer imagines taking the sexually aroused woman out of the scene and having sex with her. Women porn stars manifest cues of high mate value in that they are young and physically attractive. Pornotopia, in short, is a world of low cost, impersonal sex with an endless succession of lustful, beautiful, orgasmic women.

The romance novel

Although the romance novel has been called, with some justification, "women's pornography," if male-oriented video porn could be said to have an opposite, the romance novel would be it. The goal of a romance novel's heroine is never sex for its own sake, much less impersonal sex with strangers. The core of a romance novel's plot is a love story in the course of which the heroine overcomes obstacles to identify, win the heart of, and ultimately marry the one man who is right for her. That is why there cannot be romance serials featuring the same heroine, as there can be endless iterations of James Bond adventures; each romance must end with the establishment of a permanent union. Unlike male-oriented porn, the existence of a POV character with whom the reader subjectively identifies is an essential feature of romance fiction. The heroine always is the main POV character, but in many successful romances the POV shifts back and forth between heroine and hero. The romance novel is at once women's erotica and women's adventure fiction.

Romances vary dramatically in the extent to which sexual activity is depicted, from not-at-all to highly explicit descriptions. Although the description of sexual activities is common in romances, it is not an essential ingredient. When sex is described it serves the plot rather than dominating it. The hero discovers in the heroine a fulfilling focus for his passion, which binds him to her and ensures his future fidelity. Sex scenes depict the heroine's control of the hero, not her sexual submissiveness. Sexual activity is described subjectively, primarily through the heroine's emotions, rather than through her physical responses or through visual imagery, and the heroine is sexually aroused tactually rather than visually. The emotional focus of a romance is on love, commitment, domesticity, and nurturing.

The Hero

The characteristics of the heroes of successful romances shed considerable light on the psychology of female mate choice. As I mentioned, these romances almost never feature gentle, sensitive heroes.

Anthropologist April Gorry analyzed every description of the heroes of 45 romance novels. Each of the novels in her sample had been independently nominated for its excellence by at least three romance readers or writers. The results of her research serve as an important correction to the widespread belief that women evaluate potential mates primarily on the bases of money and socioeconomic status.

In all, or almost all, of the romances Gorry analyzed, the hero was older than the heroine, by an average of seven years. Heroes were always described as taller than the heroine. The adjectives used most frequently to describe the physical characteristics of heroes were muscular, handsome, strong, large, tanned, masculine, and energetic. That a particular adjective was not mentioned explicitly in a particular novel, however, does not imply that the hero possessed the opposite trait. In not a single case was a hero described as short, skinny, fat, non-muscular, ugly, weak, small, pale, effeminate, or lethargic.

Gorry also found that romance heroes exhibited cues of physical and social "competence." Heroes were described as sexually bold, calm, confident, and impulsive; no hero was described as sexually inhibited, nervous, timid, clumsy, or fearful in the face of a life-threatening challenge. In a majority of novels, the hero was described as "intelligent," and no heroes were described as unintelligent, although some lacked formal education.

The characteristics of heroes that were described most consistently had to do with their feelings for the heroines: sexually desirous; declares his love; wants the heroine more than he has ever wanted a woman; has never been so deeply in love; experiences intrusive thoughts about the heroine; is gentle with the heroine (but not gentle in general); considers the heroine unique; wants to protect her; is possessive of her; is sexually jealous of the heroine. These feelings are virtually a textbook list of the characteristics that universally constitute the experience of romantic love.

The essential characteristics of the hero of a successful romance novel have to do primarily with his physical appearance, physical and social competence, and intense love for the heroine. In contrast, being rich and having high socioeconomic standing, while surely more common among romance heroes than among the general run of men, are not essential characteristics. In Gorry's research heroes had a high social rank or occupation in about half the novels, but had a low social rank or occupation in some; and although the hero was rich in about a third of them, he was poor in a fourth. When considering the psychological adaptations that underpin human female mate choice it is worth considering that money, social classes, and formal education did not exist for the overwhelming majority of human evolutionary history. The heroes of successful romance novels may or may not be rich, aristocratic, or well educated, but they consistently possess characteristics that would have made them highly desirable mates during the course of human evolutionary history; they are tall, strong, handsome, healthy, intelligent, confident, competent, "dangerous" men whose love for the heroine ensures that she and her children will reap the benefits of these sterling qualities.

Romance writer Robyn Donald summed up these aspects of the hero and his appeal very nicely when she wrote that...

"Until very recently in our historic past, strong, successful, powerful men had the greatest prospects of fathering children who survived. If a woman formed a close bond with a man who was sensible, competent and quick-witted, one high up in the family or tribal pecking order, a man with the ability to provide for her and any children she might have, the chances of her children surviving were greater than those of a woman whose mate was inefficient."

Romance heroes are "warriors," not necessarily in the literal sense of the word, but in the sense that they possess the physical, intellectual, and temperamental qualities of successful warriors.

Basically, the realm of the romance novel, which one might call "romantopia," is a utopian, erotic female counter-fantasy to pornotopia. Just as porn actresses exhibit a suspiciously male-like sexuality, romances are "exercises in the imaginative transformation of masculinity to conform with female standards." The essential ingredients of porn and romance novels imply the existence of deep and abiding differences between male and female mating psychologies.

But if over the course of human evolutionary history most successful reproduction occurred within marriages, and most marriages were monogamous economic and child-rearing partnerships based on a division of labor, how is it possible for male and female sexual psychologies to differ as dramatically as commercial erotica would seem to imply they do?

The answer is that ancestral men and women differed qualitatively in some of the adaptive problems that they encountered in the domain of mating. However similar men's and women's typical parental investments may have been, the sexes differed starkly in their minimum possible investments. If a man sired a child in whom he did not invest he could have reproduced at almost no cost. Even if such opportunities did not come along often in ancestral human populations, capitalizing on them when they did come along was so adaptive that males evolved a sexual psychology that makes low cost sex with new women exciting both to imagine and to engage in and that motivates men to create such sexual opportunities. Pornotopia is a fantasy realm, made possible by evolutionarily-novel technologies, in which impersonal sex with a succession of high- mate-value women is the norm rather than the rare exception.

Ancestral females, by contrast, had nothing to gain and much to lose from engaging in impersonal sex with random strangers and from seeking sexual variety for its own sake, and they had a great deal to gain from choosing their mates carefully. The romance novel is a chronicle of female mate choice in which the heroine overcomes obstacles to identify, win, and marry the hero, who embodies the physical, psychological, and social characteristics that constituted high male mate value during the course of human evolutionary history.

But why, one might wonder, is there no commercial erotic genre that combines the ingredients of pornotopia and romantopia, thereby doubling the potential audience and the potential profit? After all, women are sexual as well as romantic beings, fully capable of being physically aroused by hard-core sex scenes. In fact, a significant proportion of porn video rentals are to women--almost all of whom use them to enhance sexual activities with their partners, not to enhance solitary masturbation. Also, the evidence of romance novels would seem to imply that women, like men, prefer erotica in which the sexual partners are new to each other rather than being an established couple. And men, for their part, are romantic as well as sexual beings who fall in love as regularly as women do. Choosing mates carefully and establishing long term mateships were problems faced by both sexes, not just females, throughout human evolutionary history.

Many commercially-successful romantic comedies and romantic adventures do, in fact, appeal to both sexes, and men and women alike can enjoy the literary works of a Jane Austin; but the unisex appeal of such films and novels is gained at the cost of failing to embody many of pornotopia's and romantopia's essential ingredients. One could imagine a film genre that combined a number of the ingredients of romantopia, pornotopia, and mainstream commercial cinema; romantic comedies and romantic adventures with compelling plots, intelligent and witty dialogue, fully-developed characters, first rate acting, physically attractive stars, happily-ever-after endings, and hard core sex scenes. Such films, however, would be very expensive to produce, could not be widely distributed, would jeopardize the careers of those who participated in them, and, thus, would not be commercially viable.

But even if such films were produced, I doubt that they would eliminate the markets for porn and romances, because some of the essential ingredients of pornotopia and romantopia are mutually incompatible. Most obviously, impersonal sex, pornotopia's core fantasy, is unacceptable to romantopia. The "plot" of a porn film or video is rarely more than a feebly-connected sequence of sex scenes, each of which typically ends with an external ejaculation, the so-called "money shot." A porn video has as almost as many climaxes as it does scenes, but a romance novel has only one climax, the moment when the hero and the heroine declare their mutual love for one another.

To illustrate this incompatibility, I have here a few movie/novel titles for you. Try and guess which ones are from porno movies and which are the titles of romance novels.

A further illustration is the following two lists. Top 10 New Release Porno rentals and Top 10 Romances. It's very difficult if not impossible to imagine any of these titles appearing on the other list.

Now I want to move away from the pornography/romance comparison for a moment to look at a different genre of erotic stories, one, like romance novels, produced for women.

Slash Fiction

Slash fiction refers to romantic/erotic narratives written almost exclusively by and for women in which both protagonists are expropriated male media characters, the co-stars of various police, detective, adventure, spy, and science fiction television series or literary works. Popular pairings include Kirk and Spock from the original Star Trek series, Starsky and Hutch, from the 70's show Starsky and Hutch, Illya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo from the spy series The Man From UNCLE, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Duncan McCloud and Methos from Highlander the series, and Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Although slash protagonists fall in love with and have sex with each other, they usually are depicted as heterosexual, however improbable this may seem at first, sometimes as bisexual, and only occasionally as homosexual. The term "slash" arose from the convention of using a stroke or slash between the men's initials to signify their relationship.

Ethnography of Slash

Slash as a body of literature distributed among members of a community grew out of Star Trek fandom in the mid-1970s. Female fans began to write stories set in the fictional realm of Star Trek in which the bond between Kirk and Spock went deeper than any other. In the course of these tales Kirk and Spock become lovers, overcoming many obstacles that are placed in their path.

Despite opposition from some Star Trek fans, who disapproved of this version of their heroes, K/S zines , short for fanzines--collections of fan-produced stories, continue to be produced to this day, some very professionally, with slick cover artwork and spiral or perfect binding. They were, and for the most part still are, sold by mail order and at fan conventions.

Slash is by no means just an American phenomenon, nor was it created by a single person. It seems to have arisen spontaneously at about the same time in various places in the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia, and the U.K. Slash fans write, edit, and publish hundreds of stories, and also produce artwork and novels, in a cottage industry that has benefitted enormously from the advent of desktop publishing and cheap photocopying.

Through the 1970s and 80s, when slash consisted mainly of print zines, the community of slash readers and writers in the United States was relatively small, with a core of perhaps 500 active fans. Print runs for most zines were on the order of 200 to 600, with some selling up to a thousand copies. The slash community recently has seen the reprinting of some of these older zines, which are now considered classics.

In her book Enterprising Women, ethnographer Camille Bacon-Smith used her interviews with a sample of women who attended a New England slash convention to characterize the community of slash fans of the 1980s. She concluded that virtually all were female, and that most had university degrees and were middle class, white, and heterosexual. Although her subjects ranged in age from 20 to 70, most were in their thirties. Today this may be changing owing to the influx of young women who are discovering slash on the internet. Enter the word "slash" into any search engine and you will find hundreds of web sites containing slash stories for many pairings. Some sites also advertise conventions and zine publishers. As you can imagine, it is difficult to estimate how many women currently read slash. All one can be sure of is that the number is steadily increasing as more girls and women become aware of the existence of slash and gain cheap, easy access to it.

In Japan there is a similar genre of male/male romances, written largely by and for females, with sales in the millions: the girls' comic books shounen ai , boys' love, which are also referred to as yaoi. The young female audience of yaoi also is largely responsible for the popularity of this type of story in amateur Japanese graphic novels. Yaoi stories describe the development of love relationships between boys or very young men that closely parallel (except for the youth of the protagonists) those between adult men in Western slash. They also resemble mainstream romances in that one boy is the pursuer and the other the pursued. One popular yaoi is Zetsuai and it's sequel Bronze, by Minami Ozaki, which chronicles the relationship between a rock star and the soccer star with whom he falls obsessively in love. In its popularity and in the type of relationship it depicts it is reminiscent of Anne Rice's best-selling novels about the vampire Lestat, which touch on the theme of love between men, though more obliquely than yaoi or slash in general does.

Women's Mating Psychology: Lessons from Slash

The first thing that I want to point out here is that slash is romance. Some feminist and pop culture theorists have claimed that slash is pornography. And while one can argue about labels and what is and what is not pornographic, when one reads slash and romance and watches porn, there is no doubt as to which slash is more like.

The romance novel is a love story in the course of which the heroine overcomes obstacles to identify, win the heart of, and marry the one man who is right for her. With a few superficial changes in terminology, like substituting "form a permanent monogamous union with" for "marry", most students of slash probably would agree that this description also applies to slash.

And there are many other features of romance that are just as strongly embodied in slash stories.

The romance hero, according to Barlow and Krentz , editors of a collection of essays on the romance, is "...a man in every sense of the word, and for most women the word man reverberates with thousands of years of connotative meanings which touch upon everything from sexual prowess, capacity for honor/loyalty, to an ability to protect and defend the family unit. He is no weakling...he will be forced in the course of the plot to prove his commitment to the relationship..." This description also characterizes slash protagonists. They are men "in every sense of the word," cops, space explorers, secret agents, soldiers, and each must prove that his love is strong enough to survive not only the plot twists typical of cop/spy/SF stories, but also the conflicts that arise from the fact that he and his partner are usually heterosexual. These include internal conflict with the protagonist's own self-image as well as external conflict with friends, family, co-workers, and an often homophobic world. It has been said that today, as in the past, the greatest adventure for the majority of women is finding a mate. In slash, the finding and accepting is the adventure.

Now the average slash story no doubt is more sexually graphic than the average romance novel. But graphic sex is not an essential ingredient of either genre; one can find X, R, and PG versions of both, and in some slash stories all the sex takes place "off screen." Although slash stories may include detailed descriptions of sexual acts, the emphasis always is on the emotional quality of the sex rather than on physical sensations, just as it is in mainstream romances.

In slash, as in mainstream romance, sex occurs within committed relationships as part of an emotionally-meaningful exchange, and the story of developing love takes precedence over anatomical details. In mainstream romances and slash alike, sex serves the plot, whereas in male-oriented porn it is the other way around. Furthermore, the artwork that illustrates many slash stories is unabashedly romantic and highly reminiscent of romance novel cover art; it may portray nudity, but it almost never portrays penetration.

Perhaps one reason why descriptions of sexual acts constitute a greater proportion of the average slash story than they do of the average romance novel is simply that a smaller proportion of slash needs to be devoted to character development and setting, since slash writers assume that their readers (who are fans of the tv show the couple comes from) already possess this information.

The heroine of a romance novel is its primary POV [point of view] character, but it is commonplace for the POV to shift between heroine and hero, as many romance readers enjoy having a direct pipeline to the hero's feelings and thoughts. Similarly, although a shifting POV is characteristic of slash, there is almost always a primary POV character, and, what's more, this character is often portrayed as possessing some of the physical and psychological traits of a romance novel's heroine. In describing their protagonists' physical traits, writers of slash are to some extent constrained by the actual traits of the actors who play the parts; nevertheless, poetic license frequently enables the main POV character to be the smaller of the two, lighter in colouring, physically weaker, more seductive, more in touch with his emotions, and quicker to perceive the existence of mutual love.

Although both protagonists are ostensibly male, much is made of their physical and emotional differences. Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin from "The Man from UNCLE" are good examples:

"Kuryakin's cool air of superiority and chilling competence often allowed Solo to forget how slight of stature his partner actually was, but in this incredibly intimate embrace, there was no disguising it" ("The Damage Control Affair," by Rosemary Callahan).

In academic analyses of the romance novel much is made of the heroine's giving her virginity to the hero. It is a common slash convention for one or both protagonists-- who usually have had a great deal of sexual experience with women--to be an "anal virgin," which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "no one has ever made me feel this way before." In both genres the loss of "virginity" provides emotional resonance, affirming the couple's commitment to a bond they share with no one else. The prevalence and popularity in slash of so-called "first time" stories echoes the core theme of the romance novel: the search for the one right partner and the resolution of that search in sexual union.

The theme of exclusivity that permeates mainstream romances, seen in possessiveness, jealousy, and monogamy, is equally common in slash. The romance hero is very attractive and usually very sexually experienced, yet he loses interest in other women because the heroine is the only woman in the world who can make him happy. In historical romances the entrance of a male rival often precipitates a duel, with the hero stating that he has come to claim what is his. In the UNCLE slash novel City of Byzantium, by Eros, Illya says to Napoleon: "I don't mind if you look, I don't mind if you flirt. Both are as natural to you as breathing. But you unzip, and it's over." New Age pundits and self-help gurus may claim that "real" love is not possessive, but cross-cultural and historical research has documented conclusively that one of the suite of features that, universally, comprises the experience of romantic love is sexual jealousy.

Why slash?

It is easy to think of reasons why a woman might prefer mainstream romances to slash: e.g., she can identify more easily with a female protagonist; she prefers to fantasize about a union that can produce children; she is uncomfortable with, or actually repelled by, the thought of sex between men; she prefers to identify with a protagonist who is a "sex object" in the sense that her physical appearance arouses men's lust, slash protagonists aren't sex objects to each other in that sense; she cannot suspend disbelief that two heterosexual men would fall in love with one another.

If slash is so similar to the mainstream romance novel that it can be regarded as a species of that genus, why would anyone prefer slash? I think there are a couple of reasons. First, slash solves some of the dramatic problems inherent in the romance formula more successfully than mainstream romances do. And second, some women prefer the slash fantasy of being a co-warrior to the romance novel fantasy of being Mrs. Warrior.

All romance fiction requires conflict, a barrier to temporarily keep the lovers apart. The more difficult the barrier is to surmount the more intense the story and the stronger the protagonists' love must be to prevail. But the genre romance writer has a problem. On the one hand, to animate her plot she must create a conflict between hero and heroine; but, on the other hand, this conflict must be capable of being resolved so completely that by the end of the story not a trace remains to mar the perfect union. A "real" conflict--say, for example, religious differences between hero and heroine--might well be resolved, perhaps by compromise, but it could not plausibly be resolved completely. Romance writers typically solve this problem by making the conflict trivial-- often a misunderstanding so simple that if either of the protagonists had bothered to say "What?!" there would have been no conflict. In slash, however, the conflict is inherent and compelling: two heterosexual men must overcome psychological and social barriers to recognize, accept, and consummate their love.

Slash protagonists are partners, co-workers and usually friends long before a sexual relationship develops. With a male/female pairing, sexual tension (or, at least, mutual recognition of sexual possibilities) is inevitably present from the outset, muddying the motivational waters and making it impossible to be certain whether the friendship would have been as strong in its absence. In fact, if a relationship based on lust, love, and friendship can be assumed to be more durable than one based on lust and love alone, it could be argued that the problem of making the happily-ever-after ending seem credible is solved more successfully in slash than in mainstream romances

Another problem faced by the romance writer is that to conclude her story successfully she, and her heroine, must vanquish male sexual psychology. This problem can be solved only to the extent that the reader is able and willing to suspend disbelief that such a triumph is possible. Shakespeare wrote of Cleopatra that "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety"; but "other women cloy/The appetites they feed" and their charms presumably wither with age. For the perfect-union ending of a romance novel to be credible the reader must believe that its heroine is another Cleopatra, and that in the years to come the hero will not be tempted by the opportunities that are bound to come the way of a high-mate-value "warrior."

The slash reader, of course, must suspend disbelief that two heterosexual men could fall in love with each other, but once she does, the problem of having to vanquish male sexual psychology is automatically mitigated, even if it isn't completely solved, by the protagonists' heterosexuality. A slash protagonist need never wonder, "Does he really love me, or does he merely lust for my body?" His partner is heterosexual and lusts for women's bodies; for a heterosexual man to give up women for another man...it must be love. And a slash protagonist need never wonder, "Will he become bored with my body or love me less as my body withers with age?" because his partner's love didn't depend on physical appearance in the first place.

Heroes of romance novels are "warriors"; heroines--however spunky, intelligent, self-sufficient, successful, and competent--are not. But in slash both protagonists are "warriors." They are long-term partners in a dangerous and honorable profession who have risked their lives for one another in the past and will likely do so again in the future. They were comrades long before the scales fell from their eyes and they realized the existence of mutual love. In slash fiction a deep, abiding, and tested friendship-- developed in the absence of sexual attraction--is the rock-solid foundation upon which is erected the superstructure of romantic love, sexual passion, and a permanent mateship.

Those who view co-warrior relationships as inherently more "equal" than Mr. and Mrs. Warrior relationships will perceive slash pairings as being uniquely egalitarian. In fact, the "equality" of the protagonists is often made explicit in slash;

"He was holding Bodie now as Bodie had held him at first. Partners--equals" ("Noises at Dawn," by Fanny Adams).

Slash is often said to be more pornographic than other forms of women's erotica because it tends to contain more graphic sex, but in a sense it is actually less pornographic. The essence of male-oriented porn is not really the graphic depiction of sex (there is, after all, soft-core porn), but, rather, the depiction of sex as an end in itself. No form of women's erotica depicts sex that way, but in the mainstream romance novel sexual attraction and, usually, sexual behavior are integral to the establishment of the bond between hero and heroine, whereas in slash the bond of friendship is firmly in place long before sex rears its head.

So you might be wondering what's special about slash fans?

People used to ask this question about romance readers themselves. When Coles and Shamp a few years back compared readers and non-readers of romances on various personality and demographic measures, they found no differences between the two groups except that romance readers engaged in sex much more frequently than non-readers did, and readers were much more likely than non-readers to use fantasies to enhance intercourse.

Slash fiction is based on friendship and shared adventure; its protagonists slay each others' dragons, both physical and emotional. Some women may prefer the fantasy of being a co-warrior to that of being a Mrs. Warrior, and the fantasy of being a hero who triumphs over the forces of evil to that of being a heroine who triumphs over an alpha male.

Who might such women be? Research that I've done in collaboration with Don Symons which involved giving slash to women who had never read slash before and getting their reactions to it as well as demographic information suggests at least one plausible, testable hypothesis: they might be, disproportionately, former tomboys who as adults enjoy buddy, action, SF, and horror movies; i.e., women who are "feminine" in their sexual psychology but somewhat "masculine" in certain nonsexual respects.

Summary

• there are significant differences between erotica for men and women and these differences reflect evolved differences in male and female sexual psycholgies
• and while within sex differences exist, they do not change the between sex differences

Implications for public policy

Now I want to briefly touch on some more, in a sense, political issues related to erotica. There is and has been for years, controversy over the porn industry, that it's bad for the performers, who are rarely the ones complaining, and that it influences men's attitudes toward women and not for the better.

Like prostitution, porn is often said to evidence male contempt for, or lack of respect for, women. But there exists an ideal test case for such claims: gay male porn. If these claims were accurate, we would expect gay male porn either not to exist at all, or, if it did exist, to differ in significant ways from straight male porn (it might emphasize the development of enduring relationships or be less relentlessly focused on genitals). But, in fact, gay and straight porn are essentially identical, differing only in the sex of the actors. In fact, gay porn often gives the impression of being more "real" than straight porn does: for one thing, the actors in gay porn almost invariably seem to be having a genuinely good time, which is not always true of the actresses in straight porn; for another, the impersonal sex depicted in gay porn is not very different from the real life sexual relations of many gay men.

I mentioned earlier that pornography imposes a male-like sexuality on females, a fantasy of sexual utopia for men. But romance also imposes a female-like sexuality on men, that is in many ways perhaps no more "realistic" than that of pornotopia. So if we are to condemn or ban pornography for doing this, should we not consider the same fate for the romance novel?

Implications for private policy

Here the issue at stake is a little different. Women often seem to worry that their partners are buying Playboy or watching porn and that this will effect their relationship. Are they right to be concerned?

The answer is yes and no.

Doug Kenrick and some of his colleagues have done a couple studies that relate to this. In one study, they had men involved in a monogamous relationship view a series of images. Before and after looking at the images, the men were asked to rate their commitment to their partner. Those males that viewed images of attractive models reported being less committed to their partner after the viewing.

In another study, he used Playboy centerfolds as the images and got the same results.

What this implies is that it's not the viewing of naked women or porn specifically that women should be concerned about but rather their partners seeing very attractive women in general.

If ancestrally, men were living in small groups of 50 to 100 people, they would regularly see about 25-50 women, some of whom would be older, few who would be as attractive as the typical supermodel today. But maybe one or two would be. But regardless, the number of extremely attractive women in the population would be small and he would evaluate the attractiveness of his mate with regard to the other available females (the ones he sees face to face). Our modern media filled society bombards men and women with images of beautiful women, perhaps giving men an unrealistic view of how many attractive available women are out there.

So Playboy and porn videos are no more to blame than Cosmo or Maxim or the tv industry. Perhaps the best bet for women worried about this is to not leave her own fashion and beauty magazines around and to go with her partner to the video store, try and find a porn flick from the amateur section where at least the women aren't as likely to be artificially enhanced or supermodel attractive.

For those of you who are interested in reading more about this subject. This is an upcoming book, to be released in May of this year, by myself and Don Symons on erotic fiction and female sexuality.

Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons
Warrior Lovers
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001

Publisher's presentation

This book looks at the evolutionary forces behind the origin and development of the slash-literature culture: an on-line community of women writers who concoct erotic fantasies about fictional -- and exclusively male -- film and television characters, from the X-Files' Mulder to Star War's Luke Skywalker to Star Trek's Mr Spock. Symons and Salmon show how the world of Slash literature illuminates deep truths about how fictional narratives affect our every day activities and what this extraordinary (and, now, extraordinarily popular genre) says about our private sexual fantasies, the purposes that they serve and where they came from.

Darwinism Today series

The application of Darwinian ideas to social and political thinking is one of the most controversial intellectual developments of our time, stirring up fierce debate among a wide range of people including scientists, social scientists, journalists, economists, psychiatrists, philosophers and lawyers. Darwinism Today is a series of short books that introduces readers to the cutting edge of these debates. Written by leading Darwinian scholars, the books show how issues as disparate as the nature of aggression and the definition of female beauty can be illuminated in unexpected ways by recent advances in evolutionary biology, and reveal the implications of such findings for society.

Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons
Warrior Lovers
London, UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 10 May 2001
80 pages, £6.99, available from Amazon UK

Reviewed by Elizabeth Sourbut in New Scientist

A TORRID affair between Captain Kirk and his trusty Vulcan sidekick, Spock? It may sound faintly odd, but not to readers of slash fiction--fan writing by and for women based on characters from TV shows, most of it featuring sexually explicit relationships between two men. The "slash" refers to the punctuation mark connecting the odd couples. But what, you may ask, has this to do with science?

Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons tackle that question in Warrior Lovers, a book in the Darwinism Today series that uses slash fiction to examine aspects of female mating psychology. And while they're at it, they want to unveil the unique appeal of the genre to its fans.

Salmon and Symons argue that the essential features of slash hold information about human female psychological adaptations that are rooted in evolution by natural selection because it's a window into sexual fantasies. Comparing slash fiction with commercial female erotica, and contrasting both with commercial male erotica is one way to illuminate evolved female mating behaviour.

And after a clear introduction to evolutionary biology, Salmon and Symons wade in with evidence that mating behaviour has its roots in the needs of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Women, they say, still seek secure relationships with warrior men: tall, strong and brave, yet tamed by love.

There's more than a whiff of mainstream romance novels about all this, but slash fiction has a unique appeal in enabling readers to identify with a co-warrior rather than a Mrs Warrior. The argument is persuasive and clear, but slash fiction is rather more diverse and complex than these authors allow, and so, one suspects, is modern female mating psychology.

Elizabeth Sourbut is a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award

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