The Original Porn
A Penetrating Analysis
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Today’s topic wrangles with a contradiction between male and female consumption of erotic content. Men tend to prefer visual, and women tend to prefer verbal. This, in itself, isn’t the contradiction; that occurs when we have such different perspectives on the acceptability of those media as well as the twists and turns of female sexuality we aren’t supposed to discuss in polite company. Let’s go deeper!
I’ve been wrestling with a contradiction for a while: the number of women gorging on dark romance and also pearl-clutching about #MeToo. Fifty Shades of Grey, a smut book about a rich and powerful man taking sexual advantage of a young woman, was a blockbuster book and movie, gushed about in thousands of book clubs by women. At the same time, women, often those very readers, were accusing rich and powerful men of taking sexual advantage of women.
What’s even crazier is the number of women who have rape fantasies and use that imagery to orgasm during sex. Yeah, when I heard that I had to uncover the data but I hesitated to just plunge in before handling the nuanced prep work.
According to one study, 62% of women admitted to fantasizing about being forced to have sex.1 Other surveys find that about four in ten women admit to having rape fantasies with a median frequency of about once a month.2 This includes during actual intercourse, where one study noted that many married women used those fantasies to help attain orgasm,3 with a related summary reporting that 48% had fantasies of being “overpowered or forced to surrender” at least some of the time during intercourse.4
These studies are so shocking to our modern yet surprisingly puritanical perspectives that many of us just ‘glitch’ and flip the script. I can hear the justification bubbling up already, but let’s stare at what rises up a little bit first because were not done yet! We’re barely past the foreplay of the argument.
Because I’m going to explain why, when I started looking, I found that I wasn’t as surprised as I thought I’d be. Let me take you on a segue…
When I was a kid, my church held a summer garage sale where people would bring items to sell, with the proceeds benefiting the church. I remember perusing the tables and looking at piles of Louis L’Amour, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and other books. But those piles were dwarfed by those the ladies brought in.
Stacks of erotica; Bodice Rippers, the covers adorned with the shirtless Fabio embracing a darling damsel. The church ladies had brought the hardcovers, the softcovers, and apparently every style in between. As a young man, the covers sent a little jolt of excitement because they were naughty. However, I remember not wanting to get scolded by the church ladies for enjoying the women on the covers. I thought the covers were scandalous, not realizing the real thrust of the matter was inside.
Which really cracks me up now, because those ladies were reading those books by the dozens, trading them with other women, and sharing what they liked most about them. These books, which immerse them in a sexual state where the descriptions never lack, and the man always satisfies everything, often, were openly sold at church.
This wasn’t too shocking as, back then, you’d see these books arrayed at the grocery store checkouts. It was just something that was ‘normal.’ It wasn’t until much later that I ever considered how pornographic they really were!
Pornography
Origin: mid 19th century: from Greek pornographos ‘writing about prostitutes’, from pornē ‘prostitute’ + graphein ‘write’.
The original pornography wasn’t pictures or video; it was written erotica. Now, the astute reader will point out that this term was coined by researchers and observers in the 1840s to describe and categorize “licentious” art and literature, and was later expanded to include imagery as we know it.
And this is key because erotic literature has existed for at least four thousand years, with the Babylonian and Sumerian erotic poetry circa 1800–2100 BCE. These were intimate, often explicit love songs celebrating physical desire and sexual passion. As with modern erotica, they were frequently written from a female perspective and centered on the goddess Inana and her lover Dumuzi. The texts used intense, metaphorical language about the body, with many poems likely performed during sacred marriage rituals.
Fun fact: many modern scholars, literary critics, and theologians consider the Bible’s Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, to be one of the finest examples of erotic poetry in the ancient world. It has everything: intense sensual imagery, breathless longing, intimate dialogue, lush metaphors, and enough “your body is a garden” energy to make a modern romance novelist reach for a fan. So how did it get in there?
I like to imagine some poor scribe, late at night, candle burning low, copying sacred texts like a good and faithful servant. Then, because he’s human, he sneaks a quick read from his favorite little scroll of spicy poetry. Right then, the chief rabbi walks in.
The scribe does what every guilty man does when caught with forbidden material: he shoves it into the nearest pile of respectable documents and tries to look scholarly. Flustered, he forgets where he stashed it, years pass, and another scribe comes along and finds a stack of holy writings and, tucked between law, wisdom, and prophecy, this suspiciously passionate little poem where everyone is admiring each other’s bodies with the subtlety of a vampire duke in a dark romance. But, instead of saying, “Wait, why is there a bridal boudoir scene in the sacred archive?” he shrugs and incorporates it. Apparently, the line between sacred poetry and smut is mostly binding, age, and how confidently someone says “allegory.”
The fun part is how Christians have been wrestling with this for a very long time. Historians, meanwhile, look at the whole situation and basically see a copy of Playboy slipped into a catechism, preserved by accident, sanctified by tradition, and then defended for centuries by people insisting, “No, no, you don’t understand. The breasts are a metaphor.” Which is probably the oldest recorded case of someone being caught between the covers and insisting it was research.
And this is where we hit an interesting catch. We have a major difference of perspective in how we view men’s sexual consumption versus women's. Let’s go back to that church yard sale. As a man, I’d be chastised for fantasizing about the girls on the cover while these women were finding out how many holes that man could fill between the covers. Just imagine the uproar if those ladies’ husbands brought their Playboy or Hustler magazines to sell and trade! There would have been a whole church intervention and full-throated condemnation while the original porno-graphy weighed down two entire tables.
One was visual, the other was written. And part of that is because men and women are wired differently for sex. Men are much more focused on the visual, and women are much more focused on the whole context, the story, the coffee done right in the morning, the subterfuge, and nuance, and… Same appetite, different entry point.
Simplified, guys like to see naked bodies; women like to read all the intimate details. I’ve also heard that men love with their eyes and women love with their ears.5
And we view the former as worse than the latter. This is why I appreciated what Rohan Ghostwind recently wrote about how Erotic literature is worse than visual porn, where he poignantly observes:
And what are books, exactly? At base, books use text to provide you with a controlled hallucination produced by your own mind, and if you’re reading a particularly good book series, the effects of this hallucination can stay with you for weeks, months, years, or perhaps even a lifetime.
He goes on to point out that while the average porn video session lasts about five to ten minutes, a romance novel lasts for hours to days. Is it addictive? Yes! It targets the exact same dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphines providing pleasure, bonding, and natural pain relief. Porno-graphy addiction, among women, is common. The only real difference is that men get pixels, women get prose.
That’s kind of crazy when you think about it! What’s even crazier is that there’s also no shortage of genres for women to select from:
General Erotic Romance is your Hallmark Films edition with more sex. It can happen across any time in history or even the future. It’s attractive adults, jobs that somehow allow endless time for sexual tension, and a plot powered by misunderstandings that could be solved by one honest conversation. Expect coworkers, neighbors, friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, fake dating, second chances, and emotionally repressed people discovering that communication is hot when paired with abs. Every plot needs conflict, tension, climax, and release. Sometimes several.
Power-position erotica is the fantasy genre for readers who looked at normal dating and thought, “Fine, but what if he owned the company, ruled the castle, controlled the wolf pack, or had been brooding shirtless since the Crusades?” Sometimes he’s a billionaire CEO with control issues or a vampire with cheekbones, trauma, and boundary problems, or a werewolf alpha who can smell desire but still can’t communicate like an adult. It doesn’t matter. The formula is overwhelming power, dangerous attraction, possessive obsession, and a heroine taking it all in, narratively speaking, of course. It actually fuses the desire for resources we explored in Two Rules for Life with the seduction of power and influence that can represent reproductive success.
Dark Romance throws restraint away, and people love it. It plunges into morally gray or outright villainous love interests, coercive situations, captivity, revenge, obsession, stalking, crime, trauma, and non-consent or dubious-consent fantasies. It’s closer to BDSM / Kink Erotica than not, so if you like being spanked or having a train ridden on you,6 this one might be spicy enough, and oh, is it popular!
Now, mix those with any of these other flavors, and you get the picture: Paranormal Romance / Supernatural Erotica, Monster Romance (Orcs, minotaurs, krakens, aliens, gargoyles, dragons, mothmen, and… more) Historical Erotica, Reverse Harem, Taboo / Forbidden Erotica, Religious / Spiritual Transgression Erotica, and… If it can go inside her, it will. If it’s not physically possible, don’t worry, it’s fiction, and it’ll just raw-dog biology and end up being the most fulfilling fit ever.
How fulfilling? Well, erotica sells over 50 million units a year in the United States, with dark romance accounting for about 25% of that. A 2026 report indicates 62% of women surveyed are interested in "spicy" or romantic books for fun. We aren’t talking small numbers here, and that 62% also lines up well with our rape fantasy statistics from earlier, and research indicates that those romance novels fuel those fantasies.
The weird thing is that all this is OK in the general consciousness. Until you actually turn one of them into a pornographic video. (apparently Fifty Shades of Grey doesn’t count as it was only rated R, not X) When it becomes a true video porn, it suddenly crosses into a taboo that we need to hide and legislate and people write long, moralizing articles mocking men’s taboo tastes.7
Biology
Well, the fun thing about this whole conversation is that it’s actually not too far from evolutionary biology either. We explored this earlier in Sex, Poop, and Rock ‘n Roll, but it bears repeating here. Did you know that the human penis is unlike any other primate in both shape, size, and persistence? The head, specifically, is uniquely shaped in a manner that can expunge ‘competitor’ semen… and it only gets weirder.
Human women not only have persistent mammary glands signaling sexual capability,8 but also a hidden ovulation, so that even they aren’t typically aware of their full cycle. Add in that this cycle is monthly versus the more typical seasonality, and you have a sexual capacity and drive that is vastly greater than that of other animals.
This culminates in a situation that many want to absolutely ignore about our animal evolution: A woman is biologically wired to act more like a cat in heat9 than a monogamous maiden, and men who proposition and compete have a higher chance of reproductive success over the white knight.10 So, it really does make sense that Fifty Shades of Grey was a bestseller. It’s a billionaire unlocking something deep in our primal brains that tantalizes. Porno-graphy is keyed to something deep in a woman’s reproductive desires, and it’s not so surprising that it’s so popular.
What still needs to be teased apart is how we have a prudish response to male sexuality, i.e., the visual and carnal sex in porn, while ignoring that complicated side of female sexuality, including the shockingly rape adjacent material in porno-graphy.
The Implications
Now that we’ve named erotica for what it is: Pornography, and we understand some of the biology and psychology behind it, we can begin having a more nuanced discussion. Like whether pornstars are empowered or exploited, whether the reduced friction of porn drives poor behavior in men when it comes to pleasing their women, whether the egregiously inflated and unrealistic storytelling in erotica is causing women to make sex more complicated than it needs to be, and more. But I hope, more than anything, we can realize that women binging errotica for hours at a time, over the course of weeks, months, and years, is having an impact on real life.
In fact, in therapy, visual porn has a huge clinical vocabulary around it: porn conflict, porn concealment, porn addiction, compulsive sexual behavior, betrayal trauma, sexual dissatisfaction, escalation, shame, and partner comparison. All of which revolve around the rejection of visual porn as acceptable and the pushing of the material into the realm of taboo and shame, which also increases its addictiveness.
It appears the clinical world has probed every angle of male porn use while barely slipping a finger between the pages of women’s written porn. Annecdotally, I reached out to two therapists I know who both said written porn has similar addiction, dysfunction, and relationship impact. However, what I was able to find in the literature tiptoes around the topic,11 but leans towards the angle that erotica is often used in therapy to improve a woman’s libido, and that’s viewed as a good thing. In fact, feminists celebrate this. Ironically, visual porn does the same for a guy as well, hence that laundry list of terms, but that’s not viewed as a good thing nor celebrated.
And again, this makes sense because women generally have a lower libido, and men aren’t complaining when they find their partner all aroused and randy after a few hours of hallucinating over the bestseller, Morning Glory Milking Farm (Book 1 of 5). However, when men increase their libido, at odds with their partner, many of those negative connotations manifest. One way I’ve heard this described is that women use porno-graphy to get in the mood, whereas men use pornography to finish, which is part of the challenge, but we’re still talking about the same thing, aren’t we?
Frankly, I’m not sure what to do with all of this. It’s a weird cultural glitch when we can have Fifty Shades of Grey and #MeToo at the same time. Where we can have more than 50% of women fantasizing about forced sex, while an awkward pickup line can ruin a man’s career. Where a relationship can be violated by video porn, as the argument escalates in front of a bookshelf full of erotic porno-graphy.
It really is a great example of the Angel and the Animal that Ernest Becker writes about in The Denial of Death. I think it’s a conversation that needs to be open and analyzed so we can better understand who we are. It’s certainly something we need to reconcile on why it’s denigrated for men and ignored or even celebrated with women. That’s the fun adventure of learning what it means to be human!
So, what do you think? Why do we have such a double standard? Why is written porn viewed as innocent, whereas video porn returns such condemnation?
Are they fundamentally different, and I missed something obvious?
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Similar finding here:
Castleman, M. (2015, August 1). Why do women have rape fantasies? Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201508/why-do-women-have-rape-fantasies
Lehmiller, J. J. (2020, March 11). Why are “rape fantasies” so common? Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-myths-sex/202003/why-are-rape-fantasies-so-common
Wahl, D. W. (2021, January 22). Understanding and indulging in rape fantasy. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sexual-self/202101/understanding-and-indulging-in-rape-fantasy
Also, explored here:
Castleman, M. (2010, January 14). Women’s rape fantasies: How common? What do they mean? Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/all-about-sex/201001/womens-rape-fantasies-how-common-what-do-they-mean
Ley, D. J. (2010, December 28). The rape fantasy. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/201012/the-rape-fantasy
Persaud, R., & Bivona, J. (2015, August 28). Women’s sexual fantasies: The latest scientific research. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/slightly-blighty/201508/womens-sexual-fantasies-the-latest-scientific-research
Hutson, M. (2008, May 29). Why do women have erotic rape fantasies? Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched/200805/why-do-women-have-erotic-rape-fantasies
Hariton, E. B., & Singer, J. L. (1974). Women’s fantasies during sexual intercourse: Normative and theoretical implications. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(3), 313–322. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036669
Bivona & Critelli sampled 355 female undergraduates, finding 62% reported having had a rape fantasy. For those women, the median frequency was about four times per year, and 14% reported such fantasies at least once per week.
Bivona, J. M., & Critelli, J. W. (2009). The nature of women’s rape fantasies: An analysis of prevalence, frequency, and contents. Journal of Sex Research, 46(1), 33–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490802624406
Because I know you’d love to know but don’t dare to Google it, “running a train” describes a situation where a woman is penetrated by multiple men, one after another, in a single event.
I’ve seen a lot of ink spilled on what’s called ‘incest’ porn which typically is stepsister/brother/father relationships. People point to PornHub data and freak out without realizing three things. 1. The actors aren’t related and 2. Neither are step-relationships and 3. it’s taboo and so ‘spicy,’ not unlike a woman reading how a minotaur defies physics for her pleasure.
Oh, and unlike porn where true incest is deep in illegal smut movies, erotica actually pens stories of real incest. where AO3 data identifies 193,555 works tagged “Incest,” about 97,861 tagged “Sibling Incest,” about 36,864 tagged “Parent/Child Incest,” So, very rough math: “Incest” appears on about 1.1% of all AO3 works. Sources:
Archive of Our Own. (n.d.). Incest - Works. Retrieved May 19, 2026, from https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Incest/works
Archive of Our Own. (n.d.). Sibling incest - Works. Retrieved May 19, 2026, from https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Sibling%20Incest/works
Archive of Our Own. (n.d.). Parent/child incest - Works. Retrieved May 19, 2026, from https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Parent*s*Child%20Incest/works
Simply put, no boobs, too young; high and firm, sexually mature; low and saggy, too old. This is critical because women are also one of the few animals that have a menopause. You can read more on the stages of female maturity in Maiden, Mother, and Crone
If you don’t get this reference, let’s just say that a lady cat, in heat, will engage in coitus with multiple male cats, which is why litters of kittens can look so vastly different.
And if this description offended your sensibilities, that’s exactly the contradiction I’m talking about.
Lanciano, T., Soleti, E., Guglielmi, F., Mangiulli, I., & Curci, A. (2016). Fifty shades of unsaid: Women’s explicit and implicit attitudes towards sexual morality. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 12(4), 550–566. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v12i4.1124