Love, sex, and language:Gender differences in sexual fantasizing and evolutionary evidence from storytelling

Charles Darwin first argued that natural selection affects not only biological structures, but also cognitive functions. Evolutionary psychology has now shown how this influence encompasses every facet of the mind, from categorization to language. In particular, the impact of selection pressure is evident in the human ability to form narratives. But, not all narratives are the same; they serve different functions from both an individual and societal perspective. There is also an interesting gender difference in them. It is precisely at the intersection of gender differences, different kinds of narratives, and different ways in which selection pressures affect men's and women's behavior that we see a somewhat sexually oriented natural preference for different kinds of stories. While men have a clear preference for pornographic fiction, women seem to prefer the romance novel. The reason for this lies in the different parental investment that evolutionarily characterizes males and females of the human species. While male interest is about increasing the chances of offspring, female interest is about building relationships stable enough for parental care to succeed during the difficult period of human neoteny. This is the reason why males and females prefer to fantasize sexually about different things. This thesis is tested by strong contemporary cultural drives that seem to free the sexes, at least in part, from such constraints. The social organization of Western countries, women's emancipation movements, and, more generally, the contemporary tendency to transform every natural drive into a cultural convention transform the evolutionary constraints just mentioned into socially contested social constructs. It is impossible to determine the outcome of this struggle. But interestingly, this tension shapes the cultural conjuncture in which we live, making our time a pivotal point in the evolutionary and cultural history of our species.