Athalia
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2010
- Posts
- 1,211
I saw this article the other day:
http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure
To sum it up, it suggests that men and women have vastly different ideas of what constitutes "good sex." For men, it's good sex if it results in an orgasm. For women, it's good sex if it doesn't cause you pain.
I hasten to add that we deal here with a genre in which sex is always good, and people are always beautiful, and sex isn't painful (except when a woman loses her maidenhead, and even then it's minor and transient), and nobody gets the clap. It's fantasy. I'm OK with that, and I'm as guilty as anybody of using those tropes.
But there was a comment on another thread that people learn about sex from erotica. There are positive aspects of that, in that people learn something about techniques and what turns their partners on, and people have healthy attitudes on sex. But the downside is that people end up with false expectations of what their partners may actually be experiencing.
And it's not confined to porn. Women are discouraged from making their true feelings known, even when the sex is uncomfortable or painful, for a variety of reasons. So men, especially sexually inexperienced young men, take an altogether false impression of a typical woman's first experiences with men.
Most readers of porn are men, I hear, and they probably don't want to read about bad sex, no matter how authentic it is. I have written a few stories that hint of the true female experience, usually in themes where the woman is recovering from the bad sex and being healed of its scars. (Example: "The Pond.") The feedback I've gotten from my female readership has been appreciative. They've told me that I'm telling their story, and they needed to hear it, and they took heart from seeing that they weren't alone.
I invite your comments.
http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure
To sum it up, it suggests that men and women have vastly different ideas of what constitutes "good sex." For men, it's good sex if it results in an orgasm. For women, it's good sex if it doesn't cause you pain.
I hasten to add that we deal here with a genre in which sex is always good, and people are always beautiful, and sex isn't painful (except when a woman loses her maidenhead, and even then it's minor and transient), and nobody gets the clap. It's fantasy. I'm OK with that, and I'm as guilty as anybody of using those tropes.
But there was a comment on another thread that people learn about sex from erotica. There are positive aspects of that, in that people learn something about techniques and what turns their partners on, and people have healthy attitudes on sex. But the downside is that people end up with false expectations of what their partners may actually be experiencing.
And it's not confined to porn. Women are discouraged from making their true feelings known, even when the sex is uncomfortable or painful, for a variety of reasons. So men, especially sexually inexperienced young men, take an altogether false impression of a typical woman's first experiences with men.
Most readers of porn are men, I hear, and they probably don't want to read about bad sex, no matter how authentic it is. I have written a few stories that hint of the true female experience, usually in themes where the woman is recovering from the bad sex and being healed of its scars. (Example: "The Pond.") The feedback I've gotten from my female readership has been appreciative. They've told me that I'm telling their story, and they needed to hear it, and they took heart from seeing that they weren't alone.
I invite your comments.