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... kinda?
You have to go pretty far before any woman is going to use 'beanflicker novel' or even 'it's erotica', but Reddit's /r/romancebook has a first page with Kink and Sex Acts Megathread - Knotting, FMC and MMC has something erotic happen in front of them and it makes them both “snap”, and Mmc fucks fmc thinking she is his girlfriend. I'm not an absolute expert in the field, but even the M/M stuff is written for and often by women's consumption, and about the point where the protagonist secretly begins taking contraceptives so the fuckening can continue, there's not a lot of fig leaf.
(To be clear, I'm not judging, here! ... well, except in the giving some of the books individual ratings, and considering if I want to drop some furry names in the megathread.)
Yes, there's still some stigma about this stuff: a woman reading Morning Glory Milking Farm (cw: not-great romance art, incredibly heavy-handed innuendo in picture, the book is bizarrely vanilla) on the train is going to get similar looks as a guy leafing through the original edition Savant and Sorcerer (cw: woman in swimsuit-level-nudity). But you're not going to see a Fifty Shades of Gray For Men make the front pages, nor will some random male-focused shipper fanfic smutty fanfic get a full film. Even the for-gay-guys equivalents are a lot more heavily policed: there's no Magic Mike-but-actually-gay.
Most people talk about it through euphemism in wildly public spaces; spice, heat, the citrus scale, so on. But they're still pretty overt about it, with over half of this book list having explicit smutty sex scenes (3 'pepper' or higher). Maybe that's less of a deal because it's a mostly written environment. But it's not something that's hard to spot.
I'm more skeptical that this is bad. I've made and will continue to make the argument that even pretty kinky or genre-focused smutty or smut-adjacent works can have broader meaning or allow deeper insight, and that even works that are just read for gratification are fine whether they're smut or milsci-fi (even if gustibus non disputandum meets some discomfort with WH40k books). But it's a thing, and the difference in expectations by gender is a thing.
Funny you should say it like that, since Fifty Shades of Grey is LITERALLY a Twilight fanfic called Master of the Universe with the names changed.
Master of the Universe:
Fifty Shades of Grey:
By contrast, looking at both Head over Feet and The Love Hypothesis, it seems clear that the latter was more heavily edited.
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I was in the waiting room of a doctor's office yesterday and my wife noticed a number of....spicy? (I think was the term) books on the bookshelf. None of the current monster/dark fantasy stuff thats all the rage right now, but absolutely text based pornograrphy for women. About a dozen of them. The exact same shelf, immediately adjacent to the smut books, were three different editions of the Bible. This was an office in a Catholic hospital.
Its impolite because its only men that seem to take issue, and its inappropriate for men to criticize women. Full stop.
I've left out the absolute best part imo. The overwelming majority of these books are written in a non-omniscient* first-person, producing an entire generation of women "readers" who struggle with, or fail completely, to parse the meaning of third-person prose. They can't keep track of who is doing what; literally can't tell who the subject/object of the sentence is and get so confused they give up on the book. The meme is "3rd person is immediate DNF" (did not finish).
*non-omniscient in that the main PoV character often lacks the knowledge of what the main PoV character is thinking or planning.
https://tiktok.com/discover/i-cant-read-third-person
https://old.reddit.com/r/Barnesandnoble/comments/1lhiwrs/third_person_difficulties/
https://old.reddit.com/r/romanceunfiltered/comments/1nys2bs/illiteracy_driving_first_person_pov_trend_in/
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4854296-struggle-reading-books-in-third-person
To be fair, some of that reflects people who 'can't' read third-person in the performative 'just can't even' sense; they're capable of it, they just don't like to do so, or don't find it as entertaining. There's a pretty sizable BookTok force that has a similar reaction to first-person perspective books or fanfic, as well, generally seeing it as schlocky and prone to confusing action-state errors. The third-person diehards aren't necessarily any freer of messy fanfic behavior (eg, y/n fics are pretty common in both first-person, second-person, and third-person), but it's a lot less of a clear dividing line than you'd expect.
((Though, yes, the people who literally-literally can't read third person works exist, too.))
I tend err toward third-person than not, but I do have some sympathies, here. From a writing perspective, first-person lets you get away with a lot of scenes that would devolve into endless pronoun problems or feel bizarrely clinical, and there's a lot of mystery or action gimmicks that either don't work or come across as author fiat in a third-person work (even one where the pov is highly restricted to one person).
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Damn. As a commenter on one of those reddit threads mentioned, I always thought first-person was the "weird" way of writing a story. Haven't these women read anything in school? Or even Harry Potter? Or... oh, shit! Hunger Games is first-person!
This is a bit of a blackpill.
It should be, relates nicely to the way Men and Women engage with video games, (huge generalization here) women like to insert themselves into the character and "roleplay" as themselves, while men typically embody the the true abstract character's motivation, roleplaying as some one who isn't going to necessarily act like themselves.
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I wonder which book they were most often opened to....
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