A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (16 page)

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Authors: Ogi Ogas,Sai Gaddam

BOOK: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire
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Fan fiction does not need to be romantic, let alone erotic. There are fan fiction stories about Luke Skywalker beating Han Solo in a lightsaber duel and about Gollum getting to keep the One Ring. Nevertheless, most fanfic consists of romantic or erotic relationships between the characters. On
FanFiction.net
, about half of the stories are tagged as “romance.”
Some stories, especially by younger writers, feature G-rated nonsexual romance. But fanfic also allows women to explore and express their kinks.
AdultFanFiction.net
contains hundreds of thousands of stories rated NC-17. There are also more than a thousand Web sites devoted to the adult stories of a single fandom, such as Twilighted (
Twilight
), Granger Enchanted (Harry Potter), and Valjean Fan Fiction (
Dark Angel
). Most of the sex in fan fiction emphasizes the emotional and psychological over the physical, just as in romance novels. Here is a passage from “Four Months Later,” a story pairing Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling from
Silence of the Lambs
:
Lecter was waiting for her to say no, for her to slap him or do something. So when he touched her breast and she gasped he was pleased. Her nipples reacted so easily to his touch that he found himself getting more aroused than he already was. When he brought his mouth around a nipple and toyed with it with his tongue and teeth he was pleased that she brought her hands to rest on his shoulders. She was touching him of her own free will, even if it was instinctive. As his mouth focused on her breasts, his hand was busy trying to bring her pleasure. He was surprised at the way she reacted when he slid a finger within her, and he had all he could do not to take her at that very moment. But he wasn’t a thoughtless lover, and he wasn’t about to start now with Clarice. He was slow and deliberate with his movements, careful to gauge her reactions and make the slightest change if necessary to ensure she was being pleased. His mouth moved to her stomach where he nipped gently but hard enough to leave a mark on her when he felt her release was approaching.
Fan fiction, EroRom, and e-romances represent the state-of-the-art of the romance novel. But they share the same fundamental elements as romance novels from the past two and a half centuries—including the hero.
BILLIONAIRES AND BAD BOYS
 
Here are the ten most common professions of the hero, derived from the titles of more than 15,000 Harlequin romance novels:
Doctor
Cowboy
Boss
Prince
Rancher
Knight
Surgeon
King
Bodyguard
Sheriff
Conspicuously absent from the list of romance heroes are blue-collar workers (no janitors or welders), bureaucrats (no claims adjusters or associate marketing managers), and traditionally feminine professions (no hairdressers, secretaries, or kindergarten teachers). All of the hero professions are associated with status, confidence, and competence. As Henry Kissinger famously said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Power is a reflection of a man’s rank in the dominance hierarchy, and women are attracted to the men near the top. The man at the very top is known as the
alpha male
.
“Alphas are natural leaders—that’s pretty much the definition of the alpha—with a strong protective streak and a fierce confidence in their own abilities,” writes EroRom author Angela Knight in her book
Passionate Ink: A Guide to Writing Erotic Romance
. “They’re who women reach for when the bullets start flying.” Most romances introduce their hero with a very clear indication of his alpha status, as in this passage from Angelle Trieste’s
Devil Falls
:
Victoria looked up and to her relief saw a man trotting toward her. An umbrella dangled from his hand, and casual but expensive clothes wrapped his long, lean frame. He was gloriously golden, with a face that rivaled Lucifer’s in the moment of his fall from grace.
Damien Kirk. A cellist celebrated the world over.
The magazine photos didn’t do him justice. They had failed to capture the magnetic vividness of his blue eyes and the electrifying vitality of his presence. She could feel it through the gates, even over the ferocity of the dogs, and she had no doubt he had dominated the vast concert halls, driving the crowds wild. Her heartbeat picked up the pace, and it wasn’t all from relief.
Study after study has demonstrated the erotic appeal of male dominance. Women prefer the voices of dominant men, the scent of dominant men, the movement and gait of dominant men, and the facial features of dominant men. The social organization of most primates features a very clear dominance hierarchy. Chimpanzees and baboons boast alpha males, who obtain that position through a combination of physical strength and political savvy, while alpha gorillas attain their status through brute size and strength. Scientists believe that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex may be responsible for processing cues indicating social status or dominance, and it appears that almost all female brains are susceptible to dominance cues. “I met [Bill Clinton] as part of a governmental panel while he was president. I’m a lesbian, but the powerful attraction I felt toward him for an instant made me question whether I really was!”
Biologists have discovered that the ventromedial region of the prefrontal cortex in female chimpanzees is associated with the determination of other chimps’ position in a dominance hierarchy. The sexual authority of the alpha is also recognized by the Pickup Artist culture made famous by Neil Strauss in his book
The Game
. This male “seduction community” has developed a set of techniques its practitioners use to seduce women. The techniques are designed to activate women’s psychological cues in the same way that Botox, collagen, and implants are designed to artificially trigger men’s visual cues. One of the central commandments of pickup artists is to “always be an alpha.” As seduction community spokesman Roissy states on his blog, “You don’t have to be an asshole, but if you have no choice, being an inconsiderate asshole beats being a polite beta, every time.”
Though romances are dominated by Navy SEALs, knights, and rock stars, some romance writers have felt that always writing alpha heroes was limiting. They’ve experimented with softer, more deferent protagonists, often called
betas
. “What makes the beta hero so great: an unshakable core of pure and stalwart good, so constant and abiding it’s damn near alpha in its strength,” explain Wendell and Tan. The most famous beta hero in romance (and perhaps the first) was Freddy Standen, from Georgette Heyer’s
Cotillion
. Freddy Standen is a slender, “unarresting” man who is oblivious to the events around him. He has a warm and assured place in the hearts of most romance readers. Often, the hero starts out as a beta but then turns into an alpha, such as Avery Thorne in Connie Brockway’s
My Dearest Enemy
, about an eighteenth-century nerd turned unexpectedly hunky.
But for the vast majority of romance readers, the hero should be a strong, confident, swaggering alpha. “I think this is one of the problems we’re having in romance in general right now: our heroes have gotten a little too PC. We’re portraying men the way feminist ideals say they should be—respectful and consensus-building,” muses Angela Knight. “Yet women like bad boys. I suspect that’s because our inner cavewoman knows Doormat Man would become Sabertooth Tiger Lunch in short order. In fact, this may be one reason why EroRom is gaining popularity so fast—writers feel free to write dominant heroes with more of an edge.”
Though women like alpha heroes, in contemporary novels there are some lines that a hero can never cross, such as excessive physical violence against women or extreme psychological abuse. But in romances written in the 1970s and 80s, the hero was often cruel—or worse. In
The Flame and the Flower,
the hero actually rapes the virgin heroine in the opening scene—later excusing his behavior by saying he presumed she was a whore. In Catherine Coulter’s 1982 novel
Devil’s Embrace
, the thirty-four-year-old Earl of Clare kidnaps the eighteen-year-old Cassie Brougham just before her wedding to a nice young man, ties her down, and painfully rapes her; later she falls in love with him.
Can a man be
too
dominant for the Detective Agency’s alpha cue? What about bona fide bad boys—serial killers, violent offenders, and rapists? It turns out that killing people is an effective way to elicit the attention of many women: virtually every serial killer, including Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and David Berkowitz, have received love letters from large numbers of female fans. A woman named Lysosome was one of them. “I used to write to Richard Ramirez [the “Night Stalker”] when I was 16–20, he was nice, told me to get an education and that I’m sweet and should sort my life out and not end up in prison lol. I really liked him. I told him I wanted to chop his wifes feet off and he was cool about it. he’s a nice guy :-).” Another fan describes her attitude toward Andrei Chikatilo, a Soviet serial killer nicknamed the Butcher of Rostov who killed fifty-three women and children: “My personal favorite is Chikatilo, though. If I could have died by his hands,
sigh
.” One woman even managed to have sex with the serial killer Ed Abrams in prison, after marrying him and acquiring conjugal visits.
Among the Yanomamo people of the Amazon, men who have killed the most other men have the most wives and the most offspring. Indeed, killers (known as
chuchu
) are generally regarded by the Yanomamo women as the most desirable. Men from the Ilongots of the Philippines were required to present the shrunken head of a man they had killed to a woman during courtship.
But readers of romance are quick to point out that they
certainly
don’t want their heroes to be rapists or murderers. They’re willing to tolerate a little misogyny and jerkdom in their heroes at the beginning of a story, as long as they don’t stay that way after they meet the heroine. In fact, being an alpha is only half the full hero package. To truly pass Miss Marple’s scrutiny, the hero must find his inner goo.
THE TAMING OF THE WILD COCONUT
 
In psychologist David Buss’s classic cross-cultural survey of mate preferences across thirty-seven different cultures, women’s number one preference in men was “kindness and understanding.” If that’s the case, what happened to cartoonist Robert Crumb?
“There was this guy named Skutch . . . he was like this mean bully, but he was also very charming and all the girls liked him. He was the
dreamboat
, but he was also a bully,” laments the cartoonist in the biographical film
Crumb
. Robert Crumb is a scrawny, hunched artist with Coke-bottle glasses. The kind of guy teased in high school for being a nerd. “I couldn’t understand why girls liked these cruel, aggressive guys and not me, ’cause I was more kind and sensitive. . . . I was not very attractive physically, but I didn’t think those things really mattered, it was what’s inside that was important.”
Crumb clearly never read romances or he would have known that when it comes to women’s preferences, they don’t just want a nice guy—they want an alpha who learns to be nice to
her
. In other words, women want their romance heroes to be like coconuts: hard and tough on the outside, but soft and sweet on the inside. But the hero’s sweet interior can’t be available to just anyone. Only the heroine gets to crack him open. The hero is granted free reign to be a badass with everyone else, as long as he’s tender and attentive with the heroine.
The heroine’s Detective Agency is designed to look for clues indicating that there is a sweet interior worth getting at. Once Miss Marple gathers enough evidence, the female brain then sets out on a mission to tame, heal, or soften the alpha hero’s wild heart. The process of the hero getting in touch with his tender side is one of the greatest pleasures of the romance. Scenes where an alpha male expresses his feelings are always described in rich detail. In the same way that women often find the breathless gasping and moaning of female porn stars to be absurdly inauthentic, male readers of romances might find the emotional confessions of romance heroes to be strangely unfamiliar. Consider this scene from Elizabeth Hoyt’s
The Serpent Prince
:
He stumbled forward and dropped to his knees before her.
“I’m sorry,” she started, and then realised she was speaking over his words.
“Stay.” He grasped her shoulders with both hands, squeezing as if he couldn’t believe she was solid. “Stay with me. I love you. God, I love you. Lucy. I can’t . . .”
Her heart seemed to expand with his words. “I’m sorry. I . . .”
“I can’t live without you,” he was saying, his lips skimming her face. “I tried. There isn’t any light without you.”
“I won’t leave again.”
“I become a creature with a blackened soul . . .”
“I love you Simon . . .”
“Without hope or redemption . . .”
“I love you.”
“You are my salvation.”
“I love you.”
The coconut template of romance heroes has been central to romances for a long time. In the novel
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert, the narrator describes Emma Bovary’s nineteenth-century reading material as full of “gentlemen brave as lions, tender as lambs . . . always well-dressed, and weeping pints.” Such men are difficult to find in real life, though one female psychologist suggests that a man who seems to epitomize the male ideal is Denzel Washington: “He is strong, confident, and can be very aggressive. At the same time, you just feel that he is a good man.”

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