Customer Reviews

Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

A wonderful new coinage appeared a few years ago, and it is so appropriate to this book that I have added it as a tag; "mansplain." I invite the reader to google for its meaning.

This small book, ostensibly about a form of erotic romance known as "slash" spends 85 of its 100 pages of content explaining the writer's theories about "female mating strategies" as this field likes to call it, and barely 15 pages talking about its ostensible subject.

After a very cursory and confused description of the earliest forms of slash, which the authors dismiss as identical to standard hetero romance, they offer this insightful notion; "Some women don't want to become mrs. Hero, they want to be a hero too," and then note that "these women were tomboys when they were younger." This does not tell us anything illuminating. I would expect an evolutionary psychologist to be intrigued by this seeming contradiction in strategies. But that's where the book ends just where it should begin.

I will say that Symons is an unusually flexible evolutionary psychologist. He does say that biological heredity is only one of the forces that influence human choices, and, in fact, he speaks scornfully about populist theories such as "selfish genes" that "constantly whisper in the ear" about "maximizing reproduction" and suchlike. This is the reason I give the book any stars at all.

But when the authors begin explaining slash they do so in a voice that many women will recognise, I am sorry to say, that of the dismissive bemused male. I am inclined to write a scenario in my head, about the way this book got written. How much of it is actually Ms Salmon's contribution, I wonder?

And what would she change now? Given that the book is nine years old, and so very much has changed in the genre as more women add their influences and more women become more self-aware as a result of the never-ending conversations within the genre's followers, this book is absolutely, one hundred percent, a waste of time for anyone looking for actual insight into the slash phenomenon.

I found this book, as the title would suggest, infuriating and insulting. I have been a fan of slash for many years, to the point that I am writing my Masters thesis on the subject. This book completely dismisses the fact that desire can be culturally inscribed. There is more to sexual psychology than just evolution. A case is made for what is essentially the nuclear family in ancient times. It is a logical argument, but there is absolutely no proof. Slash cannot simply be dismissed as the result of female sexual psychology, or a male/male romance novel. It is infinitely more complex, as anyone who has been part of a slash community would know. Check out NASA/Trek by Constance Penley instead.

I'd never heard of slash fiction before this and initially expected it to be violent. No, it simply refers to the punctuation mark between the two initials eg K/S for Kirk/Spock. It does sound bizarre at first to have heterosexual women reading and writing erotic fiction revolving around a TV heterosexual male duo who eventually become sexual. This short book from the 'Darwinism Today' series attempts to explore what slash fiction can add to our understanding of female sexual psychology.

Most of the book is actually an explanation of sexual selection and adaptation in humans. Of course this is necessary when the book is an attempt to place 'slash' within the Darwinian framework but it reduces 'slash' itself to a bit-part role. It ends up more like a Symons' rehashing of his views on human sexuality which are not actually without critics even within the Darwinist world itself.

I do not believe Symons is wrong in a general sense about the broad differences between male and female sexual psychology but there are points which are not given due consideration. The idea that simply copulating with new females is the MAIN focus of the male cannot be correct as this could lead to no offspring considering how rare female ovulation actually is. It can only be a 'losers' strategy to mate mostly with strangers.

The main problem is the idea that the human female's sexual nature is monogamous. No other female animal is monogamous unless the male is also monogamous. Though the authors touch on the fact that human females are not selected to have only one mate in their life this is downplayed to the point of oblivion.

They therefore miss considering what female nature might be underneath the one that has been constructed in human societies which included male ownership and exchange of females and their breeding potential. How women have adapted to survive under such male control, including the 'story' they present to males, is not the same as being naturally what men want them to be.

Also downplayed is how different the environment was in which selection took place from how it is today and how maladaptive human sexuality is in today's environment. Numbers of males in our ancestral past would never have had a single mating with a female. The fact that sexual rejection is a major experience and fear for males of all species but rarely if ever experienced by females should point us to explore more the connection between this rejection reality for men and the desperate unreal fantasies of never, ever being rejected ie porn and prostitutes.

Evolution does, though, show us how and why the sexes are usually different to some degree. Female mammals, especially human females, are a long way from the original females that simply expelled eggs into the waters. Males have not traveled so far in the sense that their role can still be over after the sperm have left the body as it was over for those primitive ancestors.

The authors' argument that because there are gay prostitutes and gay porn actors this means that female prostitutes and porn actors are not targets of contempt is ridiculous. The two different situations cannot be compared. Female sexuality is treated differently from male sexuality no matter what its context. Men have no madonna/whore split and male sluts are never treated like female sluts whatever the context.

And finally reaching the slash fiction itself......all the authors do is use it to support the rest of their argument as it has already been played ie females are extremely monogamous and want only one perfect and totally committed mate - forgetting that women can get through romance novels - and therefore heroes - at a rate of knots!!!

I think the most interesting points to come from 'slash' are about how women can identify with men in a way men tend not to with women - as if the only way women can get beyond restricted female roles is to take on a male personna and move with the freedom and mobility of the male in a world that is his own and he can feel at home in.

Also the male-male bond is one that has been stronger in humans than either the female-female bond or the female-male bond. This is because our ancestry is one in which males stayed with their male kin and young females left their family when they were married. This obviously reduced female-female bonding potential but enforced that of kin-group males. The strongest bond for a female would be that with her offspring - especially her son as her daughter would leave at puberty.

There is a strong element in the desire for life-long commitment and a willingness to die for the other which is what a mother feels for her infant. Seeking this in a mate ie women seeking this in 'romance' or 'slash' - is really seeking it for the child who has yet to be and not necessaily for the woman herself. In slash, with two males, it is as if this is the only adult canvas on which a male can be believed to truly feel and be so committed as a mother is (and wants the father to be) for her child.

For a little book I have obvously found much food for thought. This is why I gave the book four stars though in itself the book has many faults. Though the 'slash' was essential to the book it was very limited within it and probably there is much more to slash than presented in the book. The fact that Japan has sales in the millions of 'boy love' comics for girls is a big thing that was not expanded upon. I am certainly more curious not only about slash but about the traditional romance which I have never actaully read either - though I love Star Trek!!

I came away from this wondering if the authors had taken the time to actually talk to any writers or fans of slash fiction at all. Because it really doesn't sound much like they did. I've been ten years in the Harry Potter fandom, seven of them as a writer and reader of primarily slash fiction, but also occasional het and femslash, and in my experience, most of what Salmon and Symond claim to be almost universally true of the genre reeks of the worst kind of BS.

One partner in most slash pairings is not habitually feminised, slash fiction does not always take place between two males who are close friends in the canon source material, such stories need not be set within the context of a loving, monogamous relationship, and lesbians do not just read and write femslash -- plenty of them enjoy male/male pairings! Those are just a few examples of completely wrong-headed generalisations made by the authors.

This book simply reeks of misogyny and gender essentialism. If you're already a slash fan, you'll be able to see it, but if you're not, please do not use this as a guide to the psychology behind slash fiction.

This was gift from a friend, a fellow fan of my favourite manga, From Eroica With Love, which is mentioned in the book. While I don't recognize everything in it and feel that some parts is a bit limited, I still found it an interesting read.

This book offers a remarkably convincing explanation of why some women should want to read and write male/male erotic romances. The book starts with a forceful and provocative statement of the fundamental importance of our evolutionary history to human psychology. The authors then argue how this explains some fairly basic differences in what men and women find erotic, drawing on some interesting comparisons between the behaviour of heterosexuals, gay men, and lesbians. They finally address the question of "slash" fiction and argue that, contrary to what one might think, the appeal of this material is actually rather similar to that of the heterosexual romance novels which are read by many women. I found this book well argued, thought provoking, and enjoyable throughout.

Most men have never heard of slash fiction, and when they do meet it they are liable to wonder how anything so bizarre could attract a large following among women readers. Why would anyone want to read stories, often sexually explicit, dealing with romances between well known fictional pairs of men -- Captain Kirk and Mr Spock, for example, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson? The creators of these characters may have been silent about their romantic involvement with one another, but the void is being systematically filled.

Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons take this quite seriously as a window into women's minds. Just as typical pornographic books and films reveal a lot about what men fantasize about, slash fiction, together with the better known romantic fiction, reveal as much about what women fantasize about. They take a fully neo-darwinist view of this, rejecting the standard view of many social scientists that there is no inborn difference at all between men's and women's minds, any difference that we think we see being entirely the result of environment and conditioning. For Salmon and Symons this standard view is nonsense, and for them the differences between men's and women's minds are real and have their origins in the evolutionary history of humanity. As they point out, commercial producers of men-oriented pornography and women-oriented romantic fiction (which at the time of writing was generating an annual income of about 5 billion dollars in the USA) are well aware of what sells and what does not, and, whatever maybe people's motivation for reading high-grade literature, such as the novels of Jane Austen, it can hardly be supposed that people buy pornography or romantic fiction for any reason other than that that is what they like.

I had low expectations for this slender book, expecting it to be perhaps a doctoral dissertation spun out into a monograph. Instead, Warrior Lovers is an extraordinarily lucid argument in favor of applying evolutionary theory to the study of human behavior, making its case with persuasive economy.

If you're familiar with the works of Steven Pinker, David Buss, or Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, then much of the content of WL will be familiar, but I suspect you will never have read the arguments rendered with such cohesion and clarity. This is the work of a man (Donald Symons) who has spent the previous four decades of his life contemplating human mating behavior, teaching and writing about it, and brings it all together in this tightly-written summary.

The book also addresses the phenomenon of "slash fiction," a subgenre of fan fiction, both heavily dominated by women, in the same way that graphic pornography is heavily dominated by men. Symons and Catherine Salmon (now a professor of psychology at the University of Redlands) place slash fiction within the realm of human cognition shaped by evolution, showing that it is congruent with other forms of sexual behavior explored in Symons' classic The Evolution of Human Sexuality and in much of evolutionarily-framed cognitive research since then.

If you're interested in reading a thoughtful discussion of the nature and origins of cognitive differences between men and women, this concise book should prove illuminating. It's an easy read, and a good one.