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In Opera aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields.

As for why a straight woman writes gay romance, Penley suggests, it has to do with body politics. Women’s bodies are a political and social battleground. Women are told how to behave, and whether or not they can abort fetuses. They are held to impossibly high standards of beauty. Maybe they write with men’s bodies, she theorizes, because those bodies aren’t as problematic as their own. Maybe men’s bodies are just easier. Linda Williams, a Berkeley professor who wrote the first serious book about porn film, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” suggests a similar freedom — specifically, one from worry. When women watch straight pornography, there’s always the problem of who’s on top, or who’s on the bottom. “On the other hand,” Williams says, “if you’re watching two men having sex, you don’t have to worry about a woman being mishandled, or abused or overpowered.”Or it could simply be a fantasy of abundance. “If you presume that these women are heterosexual,” Williams adds, “and their own desire is for men, then you’ve doubled the pleasure.”Another prevailing belief is that the pleasure these women derive from reading erotic romances about two men has less to do with the sex than with the romance. The main pleasure comes from the romantic story, i.e., the plot. And the plots are essentially female. The sex is just the cherry on top.

The results for men, Bailey says, were as expected. Their arousal was “category-specific.” Men were turned on, in other words, only by the categories of people they prefer to have sex with. The women, however, had a different, far more surprising pattern of arousal: It didn’t matter whether the women said they were gay or straight, they were turned on by all the films. Bailey concluded that men’s and women’s brains are likely organized differently.As you might guess, Bailey is a controversial figure. That study, published in the journal Psychological Science, as well as his other research concerning the etiology of sexual arousal, has been attacked by everyone from The Washington Times and conservative congressmen to gay activists. (Bailey was also one of the first researchers to suggest that homosexuality is substantially genetic.)But why should a woman be turned on by a variety of stimuli any more so than a man? It may not make sense politically, but one of Bailey’s co-researchers, Meredith Chivers, might have found an answer by pushing the reasoning even further. She speculates that women’s genitals tend to lubricate in the presence of sexual cues as a defense against rape. Ancestral women whose bodies didn’t automatically lubricate during unwanted vaginal penetration might have sustained more serious injuries and would not have survived to pass the trait along to offspring. Becoming physically (if not mentally) aroused by a whiff of sex in the air, in other words, is evolutionarily adaptive for women. Which is not of course the same thing as pleasure. On that score, Bailey’s findings are reinforced by Abramson’s scientific experiments on masturbation from the early ’70s. He showed his subjects films of people masturbating to orgasm. As in the other studies, straight women were aroused equally by both genders. Abramson concluded that women are equally adept at imagining themselves as either the pleasurer or the receiver.

This situation deserves scrutiny, especially because fan fiction is becoming [End Page 118] increasingly visible to non-initiates through major media outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom, indicating that the genre is moving away from the margins of American and British culture

The mainstreaming of an alternative form of cultural production is nearly always synonymous with commercialization;

Over the past decades of sharing their transformative works, fan fiction readers and writers have generally felt wary of commodifying a form of cultural production that is essentially derivative and perhaps subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.

Eco distinguishes between the concept within aesthetic theory that every text is more or less open, because every text can be read in an infinite number of ways depending on what the reader brings to the text, and his more specific concept of the open work.

As examples

He also cites texts which on the surface are more traditional.

Behavioral Economics and Behavioral Finance are closely related fields making up a separate branch of economic and financial analysis using social, cognitive and emotional factors in understanding the economic decisions of consumers, borrowers and investors, and their effects on market prices, returns and the allocation of resources.