Women Like Men Who Lord It over Them
The majority of women have submission fantasies. Twilight BDSM fan fiction is one example of contemporary culture dressing up the fantasies.
Submission themes are immensely popular in cross-cultural female erotica. Most heterosexual women are wired to find sexual submission sexually exciting. So are most female mammals.
Consider Rattus norvegicus, the Norwegian rat. The female performs stereotypical physical actions associated with sexual interest. First is pacing: running and stopping, inducing a male to chase her.
This culminates in lordosis: assuming a submissive stationary posture with arched back and raised hips. Lordosis is controlled by a specific region of the hypothalamus, a subcortical brain structure. An analogous part of the brain controls submission postures in female primates.
In male rats, another part of the hypothalamus controls stereotyped dominance activity, such as mounting a female and performing intromission.
Though a woman’s preference for physical sexual submission appears to be controlled by the unconscious, inaccessible subcortical part of her brain, this unconscious physical preference is complemented by an independent psychological preference for dominant men.
Almost every quality of dominant males triggers arousal in the female brain: dominant scents, dominant gaits, deep voices, height, displays of wealth. Romance heroes are almost always high status alpha males—billionaires, barons, surgeons, sheriffs.
Pulp romantic fiction for women features no heroes who are kindergarten teachers, accountants, or plumbers. Even though there’s been a trend away from the conspicuously rapey bodice-rippers of the seventies and eighties, women still want strong, dominant men.
This is one of the problems we’re having in romance in general right now. Our heroes have become too politically correct.
We’re portraying men the way feminist ideals say they should be – respectful and consensus-building. Yet women like bad boys.
That’s because the inner cave woman knows Doormat Man would become Sabertooth Tiger Lunch in short order. In fact, this may be one reason why EroRom [erotic, romantic fiction] is gaining popularity so fast. Writers feel free to write dominant heroes with more of an edge.
Most men are aroused by being dominant, as evidenced by the massive cross-cultural popularity of dominance-themed adult Web sites for men.
These include some of the most inventive and varied genres of male erotica, such as hypnotism porn (where Svengalis hypnotize woman into having sex), drunk porn (where men trick inebriated women into having sex).
Then there’s sleep porn (where men take advantage of sleeping women), and a wide diversity of exploitation porn (where women exchange sexual favors for school books, a ride, or a rent-free apartment).
Our mammalian brains come wired with very ancient sexual preferences, quite prominent in the most popular forms of male and female erotica preferred by Homo sapiens.
Men are aroused by being dominant and by submissive women, women are aroused by being submissive and by dominant men. In the bedroom, inequality beats equality.
If you suspect this is some kind of stealth agenda for justifying belligerent or misogynistic male behavior, read on, for there is a fascinating neural caveat.
One of the most startling findings is that men and women’s brains each come wired with the neural circuitry for both sexual dominance and sexual submission.
When Nature builds our brains, it installs both the “male” and “female” subcortical circuits, but apparently only links one of these circuits to the arousal system.
Scientists can trigger lordosis in male rats by activating their dormant submission circuitry, and can trigger masculine mounting in female rats by activating their dormant dominance circuitry.