As the 2010s come to a close, people are looking back and reviewing what happened in all areas of life. In the field of literature, for example, the most popular books are being recounted, and according to a recent press release, the novel series “Fifty Shades of Grey”- all three books – occupied the first, second, and third spaces and thus was the number one selling book and series.
The best-selling book of the past decade in the United States was “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E.L. James, which sold 15.2 million copies from 2010 through 2019. In fact, the series holds the top three positions on the decade’s top-ten ranking list, with nearly 35 million print and e-book sales, according to global information company The NPD Group. Many of the recent decade’s top-selling books, including these leaders, were tied to movie adaptations, which is a testament to the marketing power Hollywood brings to book sales.
When comparing the top 10 adult books each year throughout the past decade, more non-fiction titles topped the NPD Bookscan charts in the second half of the decade than in the first half. In 2010, nearly 80 percent of the top-selling titles were fiction, and by 2019 that percentage dropped to 32 percent. “This consumer push for informational titles over fiction was reflected in larger non-fiction trends in the second half of the decade—such as the rise in cookbooks, self-help, and politics—which pushed more non-fiction titles into the top ten list,” said Kristen McLean, books industry analyst, NPD Bookscan. (source)
For a long time, one has heard a lot about how “men” have a problem with pornography. This is real and cannot be hidden- it is well documented and obvious for all to see. HOwever, there is also a similar problem but with women, and Fifty Shades of Grey is just that- it is pornography.
One must note that what constitutes “porn” for men is not the same as women. Men are visual creatures in this regard, whereas women are mental creatures. Men want to see beauty and youth, which are physical things. Women want money, power, and prestige, which are intangible qualities not necessarily connected to physical characteristics.
This is the reason why one may see fat, ugly, strange looking, or just well below-average looking men with very attractive women, for they both offer different things to each other that the other holds in mutual value. This is particularly visible in the US in many relationships between Black or Hispanic women and White men, where many times the woman is highly attractive and the man is average or somewhat ugly, as the value trade- beauty for women and power for men -is comparable in the dating market and leads to healthy and happy relationships.
This difference also holds true in how men perceive value in another person. Men want to look at beautiful women and find their sense of connection from seeing the physical beauty, the smells, and the corporeal attraction to the other person. Thus pornography is a direct attack on men because it subverts the natural desire for these things and seduces the senses into watching it because of the gratification it brings by way of the visual that it offers to its viewers.
However, women suffer exactly the same but from the written word because of the mental nature of how they experience attraction. It is no less insidious than visual pornography is for men or addictive, but what makes it different is that it is considered to be socially acceptable because it is less blatantly obvious. A picture of a woman with no clothes on an indulging in very explicit activity is more obviously sexual than is a book of text, but in terms of the effects it has on people, the former is for men what the latter is for women.
This is one of the unspoken crises and scandals of the anti-porn movements, for many want to criticize men for looking at pictures of naked women but refuse to address the fact that if one goes to most libraries, one of the largest sections that one will find is the “Romance” novel one, which is just another name for “Porn for Women”. There are may women who attack men for being “disgusting” and “unchristian” for looking at adult content (and this is not to justify doing such things), but at the same time many of the same women have no problems reading “romance novels” with highly provocative titles and just as graphic sexual scene but in written form as opposed to pictures or video.
If one considers that the number-one selling serial novel and the top three novels for the last decade were nothing more than female pornography, one must conclude that the emphasis on men and porn is not just imbalanced, but it is using the obvious nature of porn in photo and video form to avoid discussing the larger issue of perhaps a greater prevalence of porn addiction and perversion among women in terms of number and percentage of people in the exact same way that the racists of the time will point to the obvious sins of Ham that cannot be hidden while refusing to take into account the same and perhaps more committed but better hidden sins which Japheth and Shem partake of. Men might look at naked women and be accused of obvious perversion, but it is a far more serious issue when the same equivalent form of pornography for the opposite gender is not just prevalent everywhere, but it is so prevalent it defines national literature in two forms for an entire decade.
There is a major crisis going on right now with porn, and men have much to be criticized for. But anybody who ignores the female side of porn addiction or refuses to address it and instead focuses most attention to men is either misguided or has evil intentions, because just as it is women which serve as a metric for the state of morals in a society and are the vehicle through which a society rises or falls, the fact that they are so obsessed with the same type of moral rot is a reflection of massive social decay that pictures of naked ladies followed by vitriolic tirades against men are used to distract from their own and more serious sins.
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