Warrior Lovers : Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality

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.

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 p

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.

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.