A Billion Wicked Thoughts

The world's largest experiment on human desire.

by Ogi Ogas, Ph.D., and Sai Gaddam, Ph.D.

Comparing the Sexuality of Women and Gay Men

An analysis of the texts of gay- and female-authored erotica.

Published on May 4, 2011 by Ogi Ogas, Ph.D. in A Billion Wicked Thoughts

This post is a response to Studying sexuality, one mouse-click at a time by Stephen Snyder, M.D.

WARNING: This article contains language which many might consider offensive or obscene.

For many years, psychologists presumed that gay male sexuality was similar to female sexuality. Both gay men and heterosexual women like men, of course. But are there other similarities? One way we might approach this question is by comparing erotic stories written by women and gay men.

Below are three lists. Each column contains a list of two-word phrases that appear most frequently in a different set of erotic stories. Each phrase includes a male pronoun in order to offer a more accurate comparison of the way each genre handles men, but also to eliminate proper names which appear frequently in stories, such as Harry.

The left column is taken from 105,938 stories on the Web's most popular collection of gay-authored erotica, the Nifty Erotic Stories Archive. The middle column is taken from 147,567 stories on the Web's most popular collection of NC-17 fan fiction stories, Adult Fan Fiction, written almost exclusively by women. The right column is taken from a set of 10,344 romance novels written between 1983 and 2008.

See All Stories In

Taboos: Tweets to Fantasies

Deviant desires are more common than you think.

Find a Therapist

Search for a mental health professional near you.

Find Local:

There's no overlap in the lists—except both genres of female erotica appreciate his heart. In gay erotica, there's a graphic emphasis on anatomy, especially penises and butts. In erotic fan fiction, there's a softer emphasis on feelings—his heart, he sighed, he shook, his mind—and less graphic anatomy: his teeth, his skin, his neck. Women also appreciate the sounds of a man: he murmured, he sighed, his words, his voice.

Gay erotic stories feature little foreplay before jumping into sex: on average, sex appears about a quarter of the way into a gay story; sex appears about halfway into erotic Harry Potter fan fiction. It's also worth observing that gay men are no more interested in romance novels than straight men are. The biggest audience for Brokeback Mountain was heterosexual women—and the movie was based upon a story written by a woman.

When it comes to sexual interests, boys will be boys.