Have you seen my post Neuroscience of human sexual attraction triggers (3 hypotheses)? I think it’s related but not identical. In particular, the way I would put it is that “feeling safe” (i.e. like an interaction is low-stakes, or more specifically feeling low physiological arousal) tends to be a turnoff [at least for typical straight cis women, not sure about other cases]. And this explains many other things too, not mentioned by your post, e.g. rich / famous / powerful men do well in the dating market because interactions with them is high-stakes by default, simply because they have the power to make another person’s life much better or worse depending on how the interaction goes, and the other person knows that.
HOWEVER, if “feeling safe” is a turn-off, feeling genuinely terrified is a turnoff too. So I think your title “nonconsent preference” is an importantly misleading description. I think it’s an inverted-U thing, not monotonic. Laughter has an analogous inverted-U relation to physiological arousal—e.g. in physical play, a kid will laugh more as the apparent threat goes up, but past some point they’ll stop laughing and switch to screaming.
Have you seen my post Neuroscience of human sexual attraction triggers (3 hypotheses)? I think it’s related but not identical. In particular, the way I would put it is that “feeling safe” (i.e. like an interaction is low-stakes, or more specifically feeling low physiological arousal) tends to be a turnoff [at least for typical straight cis women, not sure about other cases]. And this explains many other things too, not mentioned by your post, e.g. rich / famous / powerful men do well in the dating market because interactions with them is high-stakes by default, simply because they have the power to make another person’s life much better or worse depending on how the interaction goes, and the other person knows that.
HOWEVER, if “feeling safe” is a turn-off, feeling genuinely terrified is a turnoff too. So I think your title “nonconsent preference” is an importantly misleading description. I think it’s an inverted-U thing, not monotonic. Laughter has an analogous inverted-U relation to physiological arousal—e.g. in physical play, a kid will laugh more as the apparent threat goes up, but past some point they’ll stop laughing and switch to screaming.
That was a great post.