Compare and Contrast

[lillibet]

On Friday I was talking with some friends and it occurred to me that there's an interesting parallel between the differences in what men and women find engaging in porn and video games.

For women, the most popular forms of porn (romance novels, fanfic, rom-coms, etc.) involve story, character, conversation, etc. with the sex embedded in that. Whereas when it comes to video games, the most popular ones are short, quick, simple games like Tetris or Zuma or Bejeweled--that kind of thing.

Whereas for men, the popular forms of porn are still photos and cut-to-the-chase sex films. But when it comes to video games there's all this backstory, cut scenes, elaborate graphics, complex gameplay, online interaction, etc.

Obviously, there's a wide range of tastes in genres and genders. But I wonder what's up with that.

Comments

[dpolicar]

No, but, see, that's completely invalid, because I'm different!

Huh. Interesting.

Something that occurs to me that might be related is that the immersive video games are generally first-person perspectives... that is, the player gets to "be" the viewpoint character. Which is a very different experience from something like Zuma, or solitaire, where there is no perspective or character or viewpoint.

And there's undoubtedly something to be said about the related experience of projective exercise of empathy in consuming story (both porn and nonporn), vs. the experience of it in consuming action (ditto).

Which reminds me of an amusing summary of the difference between genre and "literary" fiction... genre fiction is stories in which events occur, and literary fiction is stories in which events don't occur.

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

huh! I don't like narrative in my porn or my video games. I'm a solitaire, tetris, scramble sort, though I like first person shooters. But the first time I had a first person shooter take a "break" from the shooting to update me on what was "happening". Right outta there. As for porn, that's why a lot of what I watch is gay male porn. They don't even bother getting pizza delivered a lot of the time.

The odd thing, now that you mention it, is that in other arenas, I'm totally addicted to narrative. I CANNOT stop watching a television series even if it has gotten really bad. I can't not read the next sequel in books. Considering that they are still churning them out, it's a miracle I ever managed to stop reading Sweet Valley High.


Does this mean I've got the 50/50 male/female split just about exact...again?

[jelazakazone.livejournal.com]

Life is all about narrative to me. If there is no narrative, there is no point.

Video games are escape. I don't want to be thinking about life. I used to play tetris obsessively in college. Now it's solitaire. It puts me in an almost meditative state and calms me down. I don't like video games with action. Life provides enough of that for me.

(uses favorite "porn" icon:))

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I *love* that icon.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I hope you'll be amused and pleased that I wrote this thinking of you.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I was recently amused by someone pointing out that the way you tell the difference between fairy tales and war stories is that the former start with "Once upon a time..." while the latter begin "No shit, there I was..."

[jelazakazone.livejournal.com]

Someone else grabbed it for me. I love Firefly and I love Fillion. And that episode is probably my favorite too! I have been watching Castle because of Fillion. He's a very interesting actor.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I was a little worried about him after last week's episode, though--he looked tired and old and it seemed like he wasn't finding the funny much of the time. I prefer Mal to Rick, but I enjoy the levels he manages to bring to both characters.

Just what I need - another project

[dhs.livejournal.com]

Now I have to start writing fairy tales that start out with "No shit, there I was..."

... in my copious spare time.

Re: Just what I need - another project

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had much the same reaction.

[jelazakazone.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. I love me some Mal. But I'll take Rick. I actually didn't watch most of season 1. Only the first episode and the last two, I think.

Last week's episode had such a strong plot and I loved it at the end when Both Castle and the detective reach the same conclusion at the same time (trying not to be spoilery here...).

[dpolicar]

(nods) I'm frequently amused by the thing where someone starts a story with "So $event occurs..." and it takes me a while to work out whether they're telling a joke or actually reporting an event.

Re: Just what I need - another project

[dhs.livejournal.com]

No shit, there I was, standing in the tower window, watching Prince Charming wake up my girl from enchanted sleep with a kiss. If only I could have gotten here even a moment earlier, but the trolls were persistent. Not to mention the difficulty of climbing up here without having my own personal siege tower.

[ Your turn! ]

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

That reminds me; I want to go play some Scramble on Facebook.

[argentla.livejournal.com]

I think this is a truism, and just the fact that it's repeated so often impacts the answer to the question. Reinforcing the cultural demarcation between masculine and feminine media affects how willing people are to admit to challenging those assumptions, out of fear of gender transgression (something our culture generally punishes quite brutally).

The way people respond to media of different types of focus (visual vs. verbal) and immediacy (subjective/first-person, real time vs. distanced/detached) depend on a lot of different things, ranging from mood to neurochemistry. Recent studies have shown that different people have very different levels of excitement in response to stimuli -- for instance, some people don't feel any sense of excitement unless they're bungee jumping, whereas others have heart palpitations just seeing pictures of it. If you're very sensitive and more verbally oriented, explicitness or immediacy may be way too much, like having music turned up so loud you can't make out the lyrics. If you have a high excitement threshold and are primarily visual, the detachment of low-key text may be boring. For most anybody, it varies with mood, too; loud music or other intensive stimulus may be great sometimes, but too jarring if you're feeling tired or fragile.

These are not intrinsically gendered differences. There may be gender correlations, insofar as hormone balance affects neurochemistry, mood, and arousal levels, but I suspect they're really overstated a lot of the time. There are plenty of women who have high thresholds for excitement, and/or are visually oriented, and plenty of men who are not.

The part that is very gendered is acceptability. Girls are discouraged from a very early age from types of activity and behavior that are supposed to be masculine, as boys are discouraged from 'feminine' pursuits. Porn and war (simulated or otherwise) are the most staunchly defended masculine domains at this point, and there's a lot of no-girls-allowed vibe. Stuff like racy romance novels are a safer outlet, because an interest in romance is an acceptable feminine pursuit, and nobody necessarily asks if you're reading it because you like the romance or because you're into the heaving bosoms. Reading romance novels, or reading fan fiction, does not necessarily brand you as a transgressive perv, whereas the stash of boy-on-boy hardcore hidden under the bed likely would.

The off-limits, no-girls-allowed thing applies to the content, as well as the general principle, of course. Even for women who respond to visually explicit porn, a lot of the available material may be offensive for other reasons (violence, iffy consent, etc.) By the same token, for female video game consumers, the violence and immediacy of first-person shooters or fighting games may be cathartic, but the sleazy Lara Croft jiggle may be too obnoxious to deal with. Even the venues in which one finds both porn and games are filled with misogyny and poor male behavior, which does not make an inviting atmosphere for female consumers.

That part is definitely gendered...

[dpolicar]

Yup, there's a lot of conditioning involved.

Though within the context of my own upbringing, the stash of boy-on-boy hardcore hidden under the bed would brand you as a transgressive perv regardless of your gender.

[argentla.livejournal.com]

Though within the context of my own upbringing, the stash of boy-on-boy hardcore hidden under the bed would brand you as a transgressive perv regardless of your gender.

Hence the popularity of yaoi manga...

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I think I'm less interested at the moment in the root causes of the gender differences and more in why those differences play out in opposite directions in porn and video games.

There have been a lot of efforts to market more elaborate games to women that have largely failed--I don't think there's an acceptability barrier there, although I think it's possibly the case that no one has yet managed to get it right in what is, after all, a relatively new medium--Hollywood is still shocked every time a largely female audience pushes a film over $100 million. On the other hand, I think that porn is a sufficiently private activity that if more men wanted more narrative, they'd get it, even if it's not cool.

To restate--I hope it's clear that I'm talking about large market-based generalizations here, not making any claims about the tastes and preferences of any individual.

[minkrose]

Well, I'll say that this is overwhelmingly true in my household.
*I* love narrative erotica - I remember the first time I found Penthouse and I was absolutely entranced by the Forum even though I thought the pictures were nice, too. I think I was about 14 at the time.
I can't speak to Andy's porn preferences since, well, that's his business. But my guess would be that it's not narrative erotica.


As for games, Andy loves role playing and complex storylines. He has a lifetime membership for LotR Online, which says something. I don't like games at all, unless it's Solitaire (and I've been known to play with real cards for hours!) or Minesweeper. I barely play games at all, and I don't like ongoing story arcs when I do play them.

I have absolutely no idea what that means! To be fair, I dislike all games and always have, so that might be why I'm not willing to commit my time and resources to something I don't really enjoy - I hate winning, and losing, and playing games. But I love books in any form, and I get a strong emotional connection to books that don't have erotic elements, so I always assumed that's why literary porn worked better for me.

I have definitely heard of those stereotypes for gender preferences with porn, but I've never heard anyone talk about gender preferences for games. I guess that's the next step!

[argentla.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's an acceptability barrier there

I don't know that I agree with that. I think that the act of playing video games occupies a different social space for women than it does for men. More elaborate, time-consuming games imply a different level of commitment than casual games; there is a big difference in acceptability between playing the occasional video game and being a 'gamer,' and the gamer community is one that is neither welcoming nor friendly to women. (I say "imply" because I think it has more to do with perception than actual time spent; it's entirely possible to burn just as much time on Katamari Damacry or Tetris as on something more elaborate, but the simpler game implies that you can just get up and leave whenever you want.)

The same arguments are leveled in the comic book business when someone makes an occasional, usually inept stab at marketing comics for girls. A fine idea, except that -- oops -- the comics were only sold through comic book shops, which are not places most 16-year-old girls venture, usually for good reason.

I would also say that the existence and popularity of explicit, more-or-less plotless porn does not imply the absence of interest in textual erotica, etc. By the same token, I think there's a dangerous marketing fallacy that presumes that demand magically creates product. Product is created, and if it's consumed as is, more is created just like it; in that, the porn industry is just like any other business. Do male porn consumers shy away from consuming porn because it generally lacks narrative? Apparently not. Does that mean they prefer a lack of narrative or plot? Possibly, but it's not an assumption that the facts either support or refute.

The Hollywood fascination with entertainment for men, incidentally, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Until the late 1960s, the core audience for Hollywood was women 18-34, in modern marketing terms. Adventure movies were either pitched for a dual-gender audience -- which is why you had so many with 'hearthrob' stars like Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power -- or they were B-movies and serials, made on the cheap. Women were where the money was. By the sixties, a lot of the traditional female audience had defected to television (which remains a much more female-driven market than features), and Hollywood was left scrabbling. Then Lucas and Spielberg demonstrated that you could make a bazillion dollars with big-budget versions of what would once have been serial fare, and that chased out almost everything else.

Incidentally, one of the strongest female-driven film markets is horror. Girls 16-24 typically comprise 55%-60% of the audience for modern horror films. They don't make the big box office numbers of a Transformers, but because they can be made for cheap, they're often more profitable.

[gatewaygirl.livejournal.com]

Hm. I guess I should comment, since I write porn fanfic (and non-porn fanfic, and porn original fic, and non-porn original fic), and my favorite computer games are Scrabble and Bubbleshooter.

So I match your thesis, however, I would never have thought of the sort of video game you mean as plotty, just as visually overloaded. I used to do quite a lot of D&D, and then LARPing -- those are all about plot -- but I don't like long sequences of set-up in video games, or of special effects in movies. They're boring.

So I've always explained that as being not visually oriented ... which is sort of a pity, because I keep making friends with artists.

[dampscribbler.livejournal.com]

Life is all about narrative to me, too. That's why I'm on LJ. :)

Porn, OTOH, is not about life. It's about short-term gratification. So, I guess I trend with the guys on that one. I don't tend to play computer games at all, and when I did, they were text-based and narrative driven: Zork, and that one with the dead brothers on the island, what was that called?

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Interesting stuff--thanks for bringing it to the discussion!

I did know about the marketing shifts in movies, but it's a very good point. I do think that if men were interested in more narrative, the market would have been driven in that direction more than it has been--there is and has been a range in terms of what's on offer.

I've been seeing the stats and articles about women and horror--and the recent discussions of why Jennifer's Body seems to have tanked through lack of female interest in Megan Fox. It (along with the popularity of horror books among middle-school girls) appalls me to some degree, but that's personal taste and I'm still trying to figure out what I think about it apart from that reaction.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

There's certainly wide variation among games. But, anecdotally, Jason will often buy a game and play it through for a few weeks until he's finished it. And then, as with books, he knows the story and never touches it again. So it's pretty clear that he's in it for the storyline, at least some of the time.

[jelazakazone.livejournal.com]

Jason doesn't reread books? DH rereads fiction. Or some anyway.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Almost never.

[dampscribbler.livejournal.com]

Myst!

I am extremely old.

[jicama]

It's not specifically a matter of knowing the story so much as preferring to try new experiences rather than repeat ones I've already had.

Interestingly, I've found my relationship to games shifting recently; the last three games I completed were replays, one of them I keep loading up periodically for a quick challenge, and I have less patience for the obsessive make-work involved in many RPGs.

[jelazakazone.livejournal.com]

DH doesn't play any video games, so I can't speak to that.

Don't you feel that when you re-read a book, you bring a different perspective and thus have a different experience?

I have to say that when I re-read a book, I'm specifically looking to recreate the way I felt when I first read the book. Sometimes a book will have things I missed the first time and that's fun too. DH thinks he probably reads about 5 books a year that are re-reads (out of 80 books roughly).

[jicama]

Certainly the experience is changed when I read a book again, but there are always lots of books I haven't read, and a new book is a newer experience than an old one.

[gatewaygirl.livejournal.com]

Hm. I suppose I don't even have enough exposure to that sort of game to have realized they could have plots. We have an Xbox at work, but the guys mostly play this thing that involves driving really fast until you smash into a cliff or something, and I don't think it has any storyline at all. I hear about new releases of things like Tomb Raider, but never having seen it, I always figured the 'story' was a minute of narrative at scene changes, explaining the context for the next puzzle. No? They are more than updated arcade games?

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. Many of them have elaborate plots and "cut scenes" which are snippets of film that develop the story. Others have a lot of online interaction--building teams to go on missions, etc. There is wide variety, of course.

[dpolicar]

Something else that occurs to me as a potentially relevant dimension of variation has to do with the nature of the narration in romance novels and fanfic vs. video games.

My impression is that the former are very much centered around how the narrator feels; even when narrated in the third person the "point of view" is somewhere inside the character's head. My impression of the latter is that even for first-person viewpoints the "point of view" is psychologically outside the character's head; the character's internal experience isn't really articulated or invoked.

Of course, I'm hardly an expert consumer in either category, so I might be full of shit here.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Hmmn. That may be true of the explicit narrative, but isn't one of the points of many video games the idea of immersion in the avatar?

[dpolicar]

What I experienced of the genre back in the day was much more like being immersed in the role of the hero of a straightforward action/adventure movie... one with little to no emotional aspect of life, beyond the standard plot-motivational tropes (e.g., discovering your village has been slaughtered by the Villain and vowing revenge).

This may be different in more modern immersive games, though; my experience is way out of date.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I wonder to what degree this perception has to do with our ideas about different kinds of physical intercourse.

In the romance novels I've read, it's true that a lot of attention is paid to the inner state of the heroine, but that's not necessarily true of fanfic--the variation is wide.

Just because my mind went there:

He rounded the corner to see three monsters approaching. His breath quickened as hot blood pounded through his body. His sinews tightened as he drew his sword. He looked past its long, hard length at the oncoming marauders. Were they as eager for this battle as he was? Was the ringing of his blade dimmed by the rushing in their ears? A sharp coil of fear and anticipation spiraled deep within his gut and his hips loosened as he opened himself to the moment and engaged the enemy.

[dpolicar]

(nods) Back when I was doing online text-based RPGs, a lot of my combat scenes were written in this sort of introspective style (though not quite as purple as that, admittedly).