Flip the script!

[iwatchus]

The version I've heard isn't that they couldn't control themselves. Just that they would never actually be able to sleep.

--Annie

My personal experience is closer to this. It's possible to sleep, but the sleep is hard. Pun unintended, but also true.

 

[Z_TheWriter]

Yes, you want her to do this for specifically you, but that is the same as the unicorn fantasy. It is completely contrived that girl of your dreams makes your day. However, as a woman reading it, I see nothing that makes her specifically want that guy. The male character is so bland, usually invisible and just as often does absolutely nothing to turn her on. he exists, he has an erection. What more does she need?

It doesn't matter if it's one night stand fun. If the male lead does nothing to turn the female lead on (which is always the case) then the female reader can't get turned on. And this is what the male porn writers never understand. There is never anything mutual. It's some contrived situation where she comes onto him, she initiates, she escalates, she climbs him, she does all the heavy lifting and then she cums because SOMEHOW he's awesome in bed??

I don't think it is that contrived or fantastical that someone in a relationship which is fulfilling would do something like that on occasion. I might do something similar in the opposite direction for said 'girl of my dreams' if she wanted. Not that either is actually something I feel much of a need for.

I totally agree though that there has to be a reason for the attraction, a spark for the turn on. That's sort of what I was getting at - why would I as a male think a female character, who has no standards and is just throwing herself at a man because he's there, is particularly hot?
So if I don't, and you don't - who are they for?

I guess I am maybe one of the 'fake men' though, as I have also simply slept next to women I was attracted to - more than once.

 

[cw5523729]

(And we all know women should only exist as a penis receptacle in porn despite Omen's attempts to force us to write them as fully developed people. <- sarcasm, in case it needs to be spelled out.)

Wait, so guys in porn don't need sandwiches made?

 

[Statius]

I don't think it is that contrived or fantastical that someone in a relationship which is fulfilling would do something like that on occasion. I might do something similar in the opposite direction for said 'girl of my dreams' if she wanted. Not that either is actually something I feel much of a need for.

I totally agree though that there has to be a reason for the attraction, a spark for the turn on. That's sort of what I was getting at - why would I as a male think a female character, who has no standards and is just throwing herself at a man because he's there, is particularly hot?
So if I don't, and you don't - who are they for?

I guess I am maybe one of the 'fake men' though, as I have also simply slept next to women I was attracted to - more than once.

Probably more common than not

 

[Statius]

Wait, so guys in porn don't need sandwiches made?

Well, not JUST guys in porn

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I totally agree though that there has to be a reason for the attraction, a spark for the turn on. That's sort of what I was getting at - why would I as a male think a female character, who has no standards and is just throwing herself at a man because he's there, is particularly hot?
So if I don't, and you don't - who are they for?

We are in the minority. We like erotica but the site is overrun with porn. We just have to deal with that. In porn, we don't want sexy men. Sexy men make male readers feel insecure or sometimes even gay. Just like a porn, we see the girl in all of her glory, but the man is holding the camera to point at his dick going in and out of her and that's all that we get of him. We don't want to see anything else of him.

Men find it hot. Tons of them do. The majority here on lit. My hottest story (my ONLY popular story) is about a call girl who diligently performs kinky sex acts sans any emotion whatsoever and they LOVE her to bits. She's awesome. The feedback is in. My only surprise for this is that it is far more popular than I even thought.

Relationship is different because obviously if a woman is already in a relationship with a man, there must be something about him that she likes, and so she will on occasion just take charge. But I'm talking about stories where guy's long time major hot crush is randomly paired up with him in a hotel room and she just decides to jump him. What luck! I'm talking about girl in a bar loses a bet on a dart board and she does her very best to be the perfect whore. Score! There are tons of these stories littered everywhere out there. You can't walk in the halls here without tripping on them. I read a romance once ... a romance!! ... in which the guy seemed to like the girl but made no moves, she just kept coming around and around until eventually they got naked. She did all the work, everything! It was unreal. She nurtured all of the (weak) flirting, all of the escalation, and she climbed on and rode him and he was like, "well okay, cool (shrug)". They guy was literally a dildo requiring food and water. This story was a week old and had a score of 4.79 with 40 glowing comments! It was very badly written too, walls of exposition, no immersion whatsoever, barely a trace of emotion. Why did it score so highly? Two people hurt from previous relationships through no fault of their own, destined for happily ever after ... get their happily ever after. That's it. But a guy wrote it, so the male lead sucked and female lead shagged him anyway.

 

[Z_TheWriter]

We are in the minority. We like erotica but the site is overrun with porn. We just have to deal with that.

If that's what people want, as long as they're not hurting anyone

Me, I'm here in the first place because I found sex without context or emotion (porn) to be kinda boring. And I stuck around for the romance more than the sex.
Even write romance too now. Although I will not swear to the realism or female-reader appeal of my characters, I do try.

I have found a couple of well written more comedic/absurd sex fantasy pieces I enjoyed, but there's a massive slant to which category I've read most.

 

[EmilyMiller]

The majority of men are entirely capable of controlling themselves. They get tarred by the dysfunctional minority who are not. Many men are respectful of women and view them as both humans and equals. Again the loud disaffected misogynist minority gives all men a bad name (and results in us understandably being wary of unknown men as a sensible risk reduction policy).

A minority of people are assholes (both men and women) and such people invariably look for other people to hate, when their actual issues are insecurity and self-loathing.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Wait, so guys in porn don't need sandwiches made?

https://preview.redd.it/one-of-my-favourite-episodes-who-else-eats-in-bed-v0-teitmgz9ie5d1.jpeg?width=320&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=35d0cf2ca5e533c7d992545d72cf21dbb0c6fb58

 

[pink_silk_glove]

No idea why the image won't show.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

If that's what people want, as long as they're not hurting anyone

Oh, there's nothing wrong with it. It's awesome for male porn fantasy. It sucks for women who want to find something genuinely steamy amidst the swamp of male porn fantasy unicorns.

 

[Britva415]

is not a requirement for good porn or science fiction, at least, not to me.

Still, it's nice to not have what I'm reading violently disrupt my senses of in-universe plausibility, human-condition experience, and general immersion, all of which can result from a clownishly wrong and clueless portrayal of a gender the chucklefuck of an author can't manage to empathize or even sympathize with.

I mean, I don't believe that that's most authors. I'd encourage anyone to try. Even ones who can, do, and have royally fucked it up in the past.

 

[Britva415]

Yeah, I can write from a different POV, and I have. Where I struggle is the mechanics of how sex would feel to someone with different body parts from me. I can imagine how someone thinks and speaks and acts, but exactly *how* a penis feels during sex is a lot harder.
*this next part is one trans man's opinion and others will disagree!*
I think there might also be some internal struggle - I dont have a cis-dick. I will never have one; there's surgeries available but they can't quite get to "the same". (And i dont have a spare $50k for phalloplasty anyway.) So imagining what a dick feel like - something I want but can never have - isn't something I want to spend my time doing. Its just not fun, and I write for fun.

What I really like to write, and read, about is less the tactile, physical, purely somatic explanation of how a sex act feels and more the energetic, cognitive, emotional, psychic, maybe karmic, maybe neurochemical experiences.

 

[Britva415]

I'm a huge fan of so-called "hard" sci-fi.

Doesn't there still have to be verisimilitude to it, though?

No matter how far-out or magical the technology and aliens are, they're still stories about people and humanity, and getting that wrong makes for sprain-inducing eye rolls.

Yes, even stories which are ostensibly "not even" about people. It's impossible for humans to write about or read about to write about aliens, AIs, evolved animals, or radically transhumanized entities without anthropomorphizing them.

 

[ConsiderateBeast]

Also...the very idea of fiction implies you're not writing about yourself. Even if you make the protagonist you, it's still going to be a fictionalized version of you. Memoirists generally don't actually record contemporaneous stream-of-consciousness notes, they set out to make points and define their version of events.

 

[nice90sguy]

Doesn't there still have to be verisimilitude to it, though?

I think that was the point they were making -- for hard sf (which I also really like) the science has to be resonably accurate. Larry Niven made a ton of changes to his "Ringworld" story after a bunch of nerds explained the engineering errors in his first novel.

 

[Lector77]

No idea why the image won't show.

Scratch chin, fold arms across chest, speak in deep, authoritative voice:

“Vapor lock.”

You have perfected the art of the stereotypical male, as perceived by a stereotypical fictional female.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

You have perfected the art of the stereotypical male, as perceived by a stereotypical fictional female.

And you have perfected not getting the joke.

 

[Lector77]

And you have perfected not getting the joke.

Oh! The one about clicking random links? Bet it was cuddly and cute.

 

[Husky_Embrace]

Yeah, I can write from a different POV, and I have. Where I struggle is the mechanics of how sex would feel to someone with different body parts from me. I can imagine how someone thinks and speaks and acts, but exactly *how* a penis feels during sex is a lot harder.
*this next part is one trans man's opinion and others will disagree!*
I think there might also be some internal struggle - I dont have a cis-dick. I will never have one; there's surgeries available but they can't quite get to "the same". (And i dont have a spare $50k for phalloplasty anyway.) So imagining what a dick feel like - something I want but can never have - isn't something I want to spend my time doing. Its just not fun, and I write for fun.

To add to @Britva415 his statement, I would liken the "mechanical" part to grabbing a cup of coffee. Some people might be satisfied if they read that the male character get a cup of coffee. Most of us would read it and read it only as filler.

Grabbing a cup of coffee needs to have an impact. Maybe it's the first time in twenty years they got a cup. Maybe the cup of coffee was the very best they have tasted. It might have been the very best experience for the barista as well to serve this cup of coffee.

The mechanics of it are still filler. It is the impact of getting a cup of coffee that matters.

Say you write about getting a phalloplasty and it is exactly the same feelings as a man would have. You can describe how it feels, and the reader goes "so?" If you then say "it was highly overrated," or "it was everything he dreamed it would be," then we have an emotional link to the character. Then how it feels matters.

 

[Britva415]

It's impossible for humans to write about or read about to write about aliens, AIs, evolved animals, or radically transhumanized entities without anthropomorphizing them

On the other hand, maybe I'm taking too strong of a stance here.

Because in another thread today I made reference to those authors who can barely even anthropomorphize the ostensibly human 34DDDDD 5'0" ass-made-of-pure-sin 8th grade sketches of purpose-made-fuckdoll characters they populate their stories with.

I guess it amounts to the same thing: Anthropomorphizing something which is utterly alien to their concept of humanity, while also getting the humanization of these imaginary creatures so wrong that it would be laughable if it weren't so sad.

I guess I still think that anthropomorphization can't be avoided, even when the anthropomorphization and the alien subject are both very, very shitty.

Just reinforcing the need for certain dimensions of verisimilitude, I suppose.

I think that was the point they were making -- for hard sf (which I also really like) the science has to be resonably accurate. Larry Niven made a ton of changes to his "Ringworld" story after a bunch of nerds explained the engineering errors in his first novel.

ah, I took it more like "hard sci-fi" was so far out-there that it couldn't be expected to appeal to realism.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I think that was the point they were making -- for hard sf (which I also really like) the science has to be resonably accurate. Larry Niven made a ton of changes to his "Ringworld" story after a bunch of nerds explained the engineering errors in his first novel.

A group of MIT students at a convention actually started a chant "the Ringworld is unstable!" at him.

Nowadays that's "toxic fandom", back then it was just empathetic feedback.

 

[nice90sguy]

A group of MIT students at a convention actually started a chant "the Ringworld is unstable!" at him.

Nowadays that's "toxic fandom", back then it was just empathetic feedback.

Neither the Ring or Niven had an attitude jet back then.