A puzzle:
– Men appear to consume a lot more fictionalized sex and violence on film than women do.
– Most fiction publishing these days serves a larger female buying base so modern book sales skew heavily toward female tastes, which included (increasingly it seems) high and low end erotica: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/26/more-sex-please-were-bookish-the-rise-of-the-x-rated-novel
– Men do seem to still read a lot fiction, and while I can find no available data about book preferences by gender, based on casual observation it seems to skew heavily toward science fiction, war, humor, and maybe some fantasy.
– The thing absent from this male skewing library is erotica. I never hear any male friends talk about books with sex and I can’t even remember reading any myself with a hardcore sex scene in my whole adult life.
– ASOIAF is close but it’s far, far tamer than ACOTAR.
It seems that while men have a general preference for fictionalized violence and sex in visual mediums, only the preference for chic fictionalized violence extends to written mediums.
Does this sound correct to you?
Am I missing some popular corpus of popular sexy literary content geared for men? What might explain this gap?
Where is the Court of Thorns and Roses for dudes?
by ElbieLG
5 Comments
Have you heard of gay romance?
r/romance_for_men
Watching porn instead
I’m unsure about the idea of men consuming more fictionalized sex on film. To men, I think pornography is the main way they consume sexual content.
You’re right that the romance genre is overwhelmingly written and consumed by women. Meanwhile, men seem to have a lead in most other genres, and they seem to be more invested in nonfiction and self-help books. There’s a joke that the mirror of the smut obssessed female reader is the mirror of the self help obsessed male reader.
Women take 300 pages to cum, men get it done and move on