People love to read and watch game of thrones. But, in real life, they make torture illegal and demand democracy instead of loyalty to lord. So confusing.
There are plenty of people who long for a life of riding around on a horse swinging a sword at things or exploring the outer reaches of space on a futuristic craft. On the contrary; I'd say that the fiction that people select is highly correlated with their escapist desires.
Keep in mind, im not saying that people who enjoy Fifty Shades want to be raped. But there are enough people with rape/domination fantasies that it makes sense to unearth its sales as a proxy for repressed desires. And these desires are antithetical to a culture that calls for more fairness/equality between the sexes, or at least the claim that deeply seated biological urges don't influence a person's thoughts and behaviors directly.
Those things are people. And contemporary equivalent of those are soldiers who joined one of guerrillas or some such. People who read those books dont go after those experiences.
I think the answer here is that the expectations being thrown into the ring from all parties are unrealistic and self-serving, and the only true bastion of sanity is the one provided by raw biological drives. We as humans can continue attempting to put ourselves above our animal nature, but it does seem that we might be destined to fall on our face.