Warrior Lovers; Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality

by Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons

• ISBN13: 9780300093544
• ISBN10: 0300093543
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2003-08-11
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

The stark contrasts between romance novels and pornography underscore how different female and male erotic fantasies are. These differences relflect human evolotionary history and the disparate selection pressures women and men experienced, say the authors of this thought-provoking book. Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons review the fundamental importance of evolutionary history to human psychology, discuss how male and female sexual psychologies differ, and then demonstrate how sex differences in erotica illustrate this. The authors focus particular attention on slash fiction, an erotic subgenre written by and for women and found on-line and in fan magazines. Slash--so-called for the punctuation mark indicating a romantic pair--depicts sexual relationships between heterosexual male television and film characters such as Starsky and Hutch (S/H) and Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock (K/S). Salmon and Symons argue that--despite some differences--slash fiction has much in common with romance novels. The authors examine the essential ingredients of female sexual fantasy a

Author Biography

Catherine Salmon is assistant professor of psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Redlands.

Table of Contents

foreword	vii
Prologue	1	(6)
1 Introduction	7	(3)
2 The Adaptationist Programme in Biology	10	(10)
Pursuing the adaptationist programme	13	(2)
The environment of evolutionary adaptedness	15	(5)
3 Evolutionary Psychology	20	(11)
Specialized psychological mechanisms	22	(3)
Misinterpretations of Darwinism	25	(2)
The human environment of evolutionary adaptedness	27	(4)
4 Human Mating Psychology	31	(6)
Why attractiveness perception is neither arbitrary nor culturally constructed	33	(4)
5 Male-Female Differences in Mating Psychology	37	(18)
Sex with strangers	40	(4)
Would you go to bed with me tonight?	44	(4)
Prostitution	48	(2)
Homosexuals	50	(5)
6 Commercial Eroticas; Unobtrusive Measures of Male and Female Sexual Psychologies	55	(15)
Pornography	59	(2)
The romance novel	61	(5)
The psychological significance of commercial eroticas	66	(4)
7 Slash Fiction	70	(11)
The history of slash	71	(3)
Academic views: romance and pornography, rewritten, retooled	74	(3)
Our research on romance readers	77	(4)
8 Women's Mating Psychology Lessons from Slash	81	(16)
Graphic descriptions of sexual activities	83	(1)
Androgynous protagonists	84	(1)
Shifting point of view/multiple identifications	85	(1)
Egalitarian love relationships	86	(1)
Other similarities between slash and mainstream romances	86	(3)
Why slash?	89	(1)
What's special about slash fans?	90	(1)
Slash mitigates difficulties inherent in the romance formula	91	(3)
Happily ever after?	94	(3)
Suggestions for Further Reading	97