Since most fiction these days is written by women (or so I believe), and since most readers tend to be women (or so I believe), and since most fiction is written to a formula that certainly includes catering to the reader’s fantasies, I found this quite interesting. It’s a YouTube video in which Dr. Jordon Peterson talks about the biggest female sexual fantasies.
Cut to the chase: women’s fantasies involving taming bad boys, or so Peterson argues. Within the context of these fantasies, male protagonist fall into one of five archetypes:
- Vampire
- Werewolf
- Billionaire (he uses Elon Musk’s image here — I laughed because I doubt very many women fantasize about Musk)
- Pirate
- Surgeon
Okay, I was on board until Surgeon. I don’t understand how that’s a bad boy archetype. Maybe I’ll have to read the right romance novel to find out.
Anyway, all of this came about because a bunch of Google engineers became interested in the porn searches that people make, and they divided it out by sex, and it turns out men want images while women want literature. I’m not very surprised by this. I hope no one is surprised by this. I am a little surprised to see women’s fantasies reduced to the simplistic terms: “Girl meets bad boy, Girl fixes bad boy”. But this might explain why, back in my dating days a million years ago, it seemed like all the single women only wanted the jerks.
Well, yes, there’s more to it than that. But clearly aggression is something of an aphrodisiac for women when viewed across a broad statistical sampling.
Not sure how or why this is interesting to me. But it did make me think. And it’ll probably change a bit how I read fiction written by and/or for women.