My Permission to Be Horny

What do the female fantasies of bad boys, danger, violence, and taboo all have in common? Permission to be horny.

Viewer discretion is advised, especially for: my parents, my in-laws, my siblings, or my kids in 10 years.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Every time I write about “straight female sexuality” I’m a little afraid that I’m actually just writing about myself. Thank goodness I trashed my draft essay, All Women Like Chest Hair. But throughout my adult life, I’ve noticed a particular theme in sexual media for women. I’m not talking about porn, and I’m especially not talking about “porn for women,” which is basically the Venus Divine razor of porn—tailored “to women” but is essentially softer, higher-budget porn without the aggression and dirty words (ummm…maybe some women…many in fact…are into that? Never mind.)

No. I’m talking about sexually-driven media that is driven almost entirely by female media consumption (unlike the porn industry, which is largely driven by men even if women also watch it.) I’m talking about Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. I’m talking about Booktop “goon slop,” I’m talking about Bridgerton, I’m talking about the type of unspoken sexual fantasies that would be common among suburban moms who buy snack attachments for their Stanley cups.

At first, I thought I could boil most of this stuff down into a very light submission/dominance fantasy, even for women who aren’t part of the BDSM “community.” (You need at least 500 Reddit karma to qualify, buttercup!) After all, as I wrote about before, straight women are much more likely to desire a dominant partner than straight men were to desire a submissive one, and the BDSM subreddit is full of women asking how to get their male partners onboard with the kink (almost no posts like this exist with the gender reversed!) This would also explain the common thread of female fantasies wherein the male love/sex interest is “dangerous” to everyone but her. This makes sense from a basic evo psych standpoint, in that women might be programmed to desire men who are dangerous enough to hunt and ward off invaders, but not so indiscriminately violent that they also harm their families. Enter: the sparkly, superhuman vampire who wants to drink your blood, but loves you too much to kill you. Some men might complain that women’s desire for “bad boys” is wrong and degenerate, but it kind of makes sense—at least as much as sense as “innocent virgin who is a slut only for me.”

I actually had the idea to write a whole article on the female fantasy of dangerous men, but I quickly discovered that the fantasy isn’t really about the danger, nor is it about violence. There was no vampire or Viking warlord in Bridgerton. The common thread is something else entirely: the permission to be horny.