
The Online World of Female Desire - kareemm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704463804576291181510459902.html
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jkincaid
I'd love for someone to correct me, but this conclusion just doesn't ring true
to me. They say "the world's most popular 'erotic' site for women is
FanFiction.net".. and it only gets 1.5 million visitors a month. Something
tells me there are way more women than that surfing the web for erotic
material.

Also, this whole article seems to disregard social norms.

~~~
endlessvoid94
Yep. This definitely doesn't jive with my experiences and I find it pretty
hard to believe this is what the data suggests.

For example -- there are a LOT of women whose "feminine intuition" leads them
so obviously astray.

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nostrademons
I'd be careful taking the word of a WSJ reporter on this. I spent 3 years as a
tech admin for one of the largest HP fanfiction sites on the Internet (> 100K
users & 40K stories when I left), and made a lot of friends in the fandom,
some of whom I still talk to and one of whom got me my job at Google. This
article reads a lot like some of the media pieces on Google these days: the
author comes in with an idea for a juicy story that'll get readers, does about
an hour of research to support it, and then mouths off their conclusions as
fact, regardless of how off-base they are.

It is true that fandom is overwhelmingly female (Harry Potter was ~99%), and
that there is a romantic overtone to many (but not all) of the stories. Beyond
that, very little of the article rang true. There are a wide variety of
reasons why people write fanfiction.

A large number of them are aspiring writers (hell, everyone seems to be an
aspiring novelist), and view fanfiction as practice for the day when they'll
eventually write their own original novel. Others of them are obsessive about
their favorite shows, and feel like they must write more adventures of the
characters they've grown to love. There is the romantic/sexual aspect for
some. Slash fanfiction (fanfiction involving gay pairings of canon characters)
has become a way for many young gay men to come to terms with their sexual
identity. And some people just do it for community, so that they can be
creative and share their creations with like-minded people.

The author got her analogies all mixed up. I'd say that fanfiction.net is
overwhelmingly the first two and last categories of people. Its demographics
skew pretty young (last I heard, median age was about 15, and a majority of
the userbase were under 20). If I had to compare it against a "male"
equivalent, I think it's closest match would be reddit.com/r/CarlHProgramming
or other "learn programming" communities on the web. Just like on
CarlHProgramming, it focuses on being creative, and on fostering a supportive,
ego-boosting environment where your early mistakes are tolerated.

Explicitly sexual pairings are usually found on boutique archives like
RestrictedSection.org. I think their equivalent are things like "Emma Watson
nude!" or "See Lindsay Lohan's firecrotch!" tabloid-ish sites (no, I don't
know any actual URLs, I don't exactly go looking for Emma Watson nudes).

The closest thing to outright porn sites would be archives of original erotic
fiction, like literotica.com or asstr.org. Or romance novels. I don't know the
authorship figures for them, but I assume they also skew heavily female.

There's way more complexity than this - I have a friend that did her master's
thesis on online fandom communities. Five paragraphs can barely scratch the
surface. But "Oh, fanfiction is just like porn for girls" is a vast
oversimplification.

~~~
zach
"WSJ reporter?!" But this is Ogi Ogas! The BU neuroscience researcher who won
$500K on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and had a remarkable showdown with Ken
Jennings that I highly recommend (search YouTube for "ogas jennings grand
slam"). Seriously -- watch it.

Er, sorry, enough quiz show geekery. He's a pretty thoughtful source.

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boboblong
"Female erotica demonstrates how the detective agency operates—and how it
differs from the much simpler male brain."

Irritating.

