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Notes -
Romance novels/movies are totally the female equivalent of porn.
The thing to understand is that men and women are attracted to different things. Men are primarily attracted to youth, beauty, and fertility, all of which can be appraised based on appearance[1]. Meanwhile, women are somewhat attracted to physical characteristics, like height and muscles, but what really gets their motor running about a man are his nonphysical attributes; rich, aloof, dominant, confident, dangerous, badass, high status, leader of men, sexually experienced, dark triad traits, etc.
The purpose of porn is to stimulate a man's reproductive instincts. And since men are primarily attracted to visual cues, porn mostly consists of an endless stream of images depicting naked girls who moan a lot. Sometimes there is a plot, but if so it is perfunctory, like the 20 minutes in a horror movie you spend watching random kids act like jerks before the monster shows up and starts fucking them up. Hentai doujinshi has it down to a science; 5-10 pages of setup, followed by 15-30 pages of fucking.
And, likewise, the purpose of romance novels and movies is to stimulate female sexual instincts. But as we stablished, women are attracted to completely different things than men are. So, instead, romance stories depict an endless stream of billionaire athlete demon pirates kings who look great with their shirt off and declare their undying love for the audience surrogate. It is nine hundred pages of the male love interest demonstrating how aloof and alpha he is, a hundred pages where he breaks down, gets weepy, and shows his soft inner core of twu luving betaness, and one page where he tears the lady’s clothes off with his teeth and the couple finally at long last get some action.
Needless to say, both of these can lead to rather... unrealistic expectations.
[1] And secondarily attracted to purity, kindness, fidelity, humility, and obedience, but those are harder to depict in porn. Not that people don't try; the nurse is a popular porn character for a reason, and hentai doujinshi will usually devote what little space is reserved for the plot to making sure you understand that the girl is a virgin.
I appreciate your lengthy response but none of your links convince me of what is I still think is an odd comparison.
You don't have to tell me that women and men's sexuality takes different forms, but I really don't think women masturbate to romance novels or love story films or whatever to even a fraction of a degree that males are spanking it to pornhub (or whatever).
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