>>1714I guess I'm using that word to cover a little too much ground. One sense is for a fascination that can connect with sexuality, but does not require it, and which is
almost as present when the sexual urge is absent. IIRC there was a male comedian who once said he thought he could define pornography as "anything you lose interest in when you're finished masturbating." A lot of not-male smut doesn't work like that, but if you think you can discuss those works with men you find that there's just nothing going on inside their heads, because their interest is purely as an access way to arousal and release. It's not just that they're lame smut writers, they are also lame smut readers. Maybe this is just a sexual function thing related to men becoming touch-avoidant at some point during or after sex, but there might be some social conditioning there, I read a long article once about male sexual complexes that came to the conclusion that hetero porn teaches hetero men that it's not okay to be flaccid and naked at the same time.
The second is a sense of a divide between, for lack of better terms, 2d and 3d. There are lesbians with an interest in yaoi, but I don't think I've heard about any homosexual men with any parallel interest in yuri. I only realized I'd been using the words that way when I read your question and tried to answer it, so the words don't fit properly. John Stuart Mill defined the term "self-regarding action" to refer to any action or behavior that does not affect others, and only affects the agent; the agent does not act upon anyone, and so the self-regarding action is immune to any question of morality. That seems like a slightly better fit. It seems like there's a difference between the self-regarding and the outwardly manifested sexual behaviors. A woman's ravishment fantasies and a male's rape fantasies seem completely different, even if the male is imagining himself as victim rather than perpetrator, and it doesn't just seem like a difference in genitals. I don't think men have the right kind of compartmentalization. There does seem to be a relationship between this and the fascination mentioned earlier; fantasies are often baroque in detail, so long as there is only a distant relationship with reality.
