What Are Women Actually Attracted To? - Catherine Salmon
Catherine Salmon (guest), Chris Williamson (host)
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Catherine Salmon and Chris Williamson, What Are Women Actually Attracted To? - Catherine Salmon explores what Women Secretly Want: Porn, Rough Sex, Romance, and Power Dynamics Chris Williamson and evolutionary psychologist Catherine Salmon explore what actually attracts women, contrasting public narratives with revealed sexual and romantic preferences. They discuss research on porn reactions (including facial ejaculation), motivations behind rough sex, why women consume written erotica and true crime, and how fantasies differ from day-to-day partner choices. Salmon emphasizes evolved sex differences, sociosexuality, and novelty-seeking as key drivers, arguing that culture often pushes ideals (soft, feminized men) that don’t match women’s fantasies or behavior. The conversation closes by examining how evolutionary psychology collides with feminist narratives and why you can’t easily “morally” override sexual desire or the mating market.
What Women Secretly Want: Porn, Rough Sex, Romance, and Power Dynamics
Chris Williamson and evolutionary psychologist Catherine Salmon explore what actually attracts women, contrasting public narratives with revealed sexual and romantic preferences. They discuss research on porn reactions (including facial ejaculation), motivations behind rough sex, why women consume written erotica and true crime, and how fantasies differ from day-to-day partner choices. Salmon emphasizes evolved sex differences, sociosexuality, and novelty-seeking as key drivers, arguing that culture often pushes ideals (soft, feminized men) that don’t match women’s fantasies or behavior. The conversation closes by examining how evolutionary psychology collides with feminist narratives and why you can’t easily “morally” override sexual desire or the mating market.
Key Takeaways
Facial ejaculation is judged less by the act itself than by context and expression.
Salmon’s study found that the biggest factors in how arousing or degrading a cum-shot-on-the-face image seemed were whether the recipient looked like they enjoyed it and whether the viewer’s sexual orientation matched the recipient’s sex; disgust sensitivity and sociosexuality also mattered.
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Rough sex is more about novelty-seeking and arousal than aggression.
Data show that people who enjoy rough sex also tend to seek sexual novelty (public sex, sex toys, new experiences) rather than harboring generalized aggressive tendencies, and women often report faster orgasms when sex is rougher, suggesting heightened stimulation rather than hostility.
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Women’s erotica centers on a powerful man’s intense commitment, not serial variety.
Dark romance and similar genres overwhelmingly feature strong, high-status, physically impressive male heroes who become devoted to one woman; if it were purely about explicit sex, the male lead would rotate, but the enduring appeal is a high-value man investing deeply in a single partner.
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Women often prefer written erotica because it delivers richer context and customization.
Unlike visual porn, novels and fan fiction can develop a character’s personality, backstory, and commitment arc, allowing female readers to project their own ideal looks and traits onto the hero; this fits long-term mating fantasies better than standardized visual casting.
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Female fascination with serial killers and true crime may mix threat-learning with attraction to ‘apex predators.’
Salmon suggests women may partly consume true crime to understand and avoid victimization but also to mentally pair with the most formidable male in a dangerous world—someone whose capacity for violence, if directed toward protection, is highly valuable.
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Cultural pushes for softer, feminized men often clash with women’s actual desires.
Experiments with gentle, compliant male heroes in romance fiction didn’t sell well, and real-world erotica and cover-model conventions show women gravitate to masculine, dominant, capable men, even if they publicly praise more androgynous or submissive archetypes like Harry Styles.
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Sexual preferences are resistant to moralizing and top-down ‘shoulds.’
Both speakers argue that media narratives telling people what they ought to find attractive (e. ...
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Notable Quotes
“What makes coming on somebody’s body degrading and coming inside them sacred?”
— Catherine Salmon (paraphrasing a line that inspired her research)
“The fantasies of women are not about generally men that they can push around. They’re about men that are useful if the world comes to an end.”
— Catherine Salmon
“Saying that, ‘Well, you should find this attractive,’ isn’t gonna make them find that attractive.”
— Catherine Salmon
“The market and sexual desire are two things that are very difficult to cheat.”
— Chris Williamson
“Every girl who goes to a romance novel convention would be happy to have one of the cover models go home with her and stay there.”
— Catherine Salmon
Questions Answered in This Episode
How should individuals navigate the gap between their socially endorsed ideals (e.g., preferring soft, non-threatening partners) and their private sexual fantasies and attractions?
Chris Williamson and evolutionary psychologist Catherine Salmon explore what actually attracts women, contrasting public narratives with revealed sexual and romantic preferences. ...
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If rough sex is largely driven by novelty-seeking and heightened arousal, how can couples explore it safely without sliding into genuinely harmful dynamics?
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What would a porn industry that was truly designed around average women’s deepest desires—rather than assumptions about them—actually look like in practice?
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To what extent does female interest in true crime and dangerous men reflect adaptive learning versus potentially maladaptive romanticization of violence?
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How can evolutionary psychology be communicated in a way that acknowledges sex differences without being misused to justify rigid gender roles or sexist policies?
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Transcript Preview
Years ago, they really tried to push the softer, gentler, kinder view of guys in romance novels, and they didn't sell well. And my guess is they didn't sell well because even if in your daily life, it might be easier to have a guy that would do whatever you wanted no matter what, that might not be what you fantasize about.
Did you recently do a study about reactions to jizz on the face porn stimuli?
I did. I did do a study on that. In fact, I actually have just completed a follow-up study as well. (laughs) So, it's all about cum shots these days. (laughs)
What is? What's all about cum shots? Is your life all about cum shots?
Uh, not that my life is all about cum shots, I mean, but certainly lately, it has seemed to be the topic of conversation. (laughs) If you tell somebody you're doing that, that's what they wanna hear about. (laughs)
Okay. I- I want to hear about it. Please tell me everything.
Sure. I mean, part of the reason for being interested in it is because for a long time there has been, um, I think a lot of claims about the nature of pornography, um, that it's about degrading women, um, that, uh, y- you know, it has all these negative connotations, right? And there are a bunch of different researchers who've assessed this in different kinds of ways, but one sort of theme that has run through things is the idea that an external ejaculation that is deposited on the face is seen (laughs) as being degrading or seen in a negative light. And there's a number of ways that you could actually think about that. And a number of years ago, I read, um, a chapter in a book that made me really think about this. (laughs) And the chapter had a line in it about how what makes coming on somebody's body degrading and coming inside them sacred? And that made me think, you know, like, okay, that's not necessarily a bad point. Why do we have such a focus on it as being a negative thing? And what does it really mean that it is so ubiquitous in pornography that it's really difficult to find pornography, in fact, where you won't see a scene like that somewhere in the film? And so, we decided to do a study where we would actually show people, um, faces that had had deposits made on them and ask them about how arousing or how degrading they found those images to be and how much they liked the pictures. And we actually had subjects, not our own students because (laughs) um, our own students can be fragile, but we recruited adults from the general population to do this. And so, we had people look at, um, faces that we varied, right? So, they, some of them looked, well, they all looked at the same faces, but they either looked at faces that were male faces or female faces, right? We looked at... And so, because we were also interested in the sexual orientation of people and how that might influence this, so we had them look at male faces and female faces, and we also varied them in terms of their reaction. So, whether the person looked happy about having a cum shot on their face or whether they looked neutral about it, or whether they looked very unhappy about it. Um, and so as you might expect, um, from... if you have sort of a view that, that, that, uh, men like it when their partners are enjoying what's going on, men watching these images generally preferred the faces where the females actually looked like they were enjoying the experience. (laughs) Um, whether they were male or female faces that they were looking at, there definitely is also an effect of the preferred sex. So for men, straight men don't really like looking at pictures of other men with ejaculate on their face. (laughs) They, um, were not so happy with those. They were, their least preferred photo for them was the one, uh, with guys that had cum on their face. But homosexual men, actually, that was their favorite, um, photo of them. Not surprising, right? Um, for women, it was actually interesting, the women who... So, women in general didn't like the images as much, but for the women, if you looked at them across their sexual orientation, bisexual women actually liked the images a little bit more than either heterosexual or lesbian women, which was also kind of interesting and might actually have more to say about what shapes bisexuality, um, than, than anything else. But-
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