A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (11 page)

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Authors: Ogi Ogas,Sai Gaddam

BOOK: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire
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Supersized signals of estrogen may be one source of BBW porn’s popularity. These heavy women have large amounts of android fat, but they have very large amounts of sexy gynoid fat, too. The Venus of Willendorf is likely the creation of a prehistoric fan of BBW—and a lover of gynoid fat.
Donald Symons believes the preference for heavier-than-average women over skinnier-than-average women may be due to a concept known as
asymmetrical fitness
. Evolutionary theory predicts that men will prefer women who weigh a pound more than the optimum weight for reproduction over women who weigh a pound less, if there is a penalty associated with mating with a skinnier woman. In fact, low female weight is associated with infertility and poor health. If a woman’s weight drops below a certain level, she will even stop ovulating. Women with weights somewhat higher than optimum do not suffer much of a drop in fertility or health, leading to evolutionary pressure for a man to prefer heavier-than-average women over lighter-than-average women.
This also applies to breasts: breasts that are slightly larger than average are more likely to reflect health and fertility than ones slightly smaller than average. Levels of gynoid fat in breasts positively predict all aspects of female lifetime reproductive capacity, including conception probability, probability of successful pregnancy, and offspring quality. Breast size is not correlated with milk production, though gynoid fat is correlated with lactation quality.
But even though men generally prefer large breasts over small breasts, the Internet demonstrates quite clearly that there’s significant interest in a wide range of cup sizes. If the male brain responds instinctively to a visual breast cue, why do some men prefer double-D’s while others prefer Delicious Flat Chests?
TAKING A CUE FROM MOTHER NATURE
 
Polish breasts are different from Vietnamese breasts, which are different from Zulu breasts. And breasts are always changing. The average Japanese bra size went from 34A in the 1980s to 34C in the 1990s. The average British bra size went from 36B in 1997 to 34D today. The male brain is designed to be sensitive to this variation. A visual cue guides a man’s attention to a suitable erotic target, then the imprinting process establishes a cued interest using the specific details of the actual visual stimulus. This stimulus-sensitive imprinting process is not limited to sexual interests—or humans.
Famously, goslings (baby geese) imprint upon the first large, moving object they see. Most of the time when a gosling hatches, that large, moving object is the mother goose. But if a sneaky scientist intervenes, removing the mother goose and placing her own human body in view of newly hatched goslings, the baby geese will imprint upon the scientist instead. After that, the goslings will follow the scientist wherever she goes. For the baby geese, the scientist has become a cued interest.
The “mother cue” for the gosling brain (large, moving objects) is rather simple and nonspecific. There are two reasons for this. First, this simple design is pretty effective, since the first big, moving object a gosling sees is usually its mother. But just as important, the cue is simple and general because the gosling brain doesn’t know ahead of time exactly what its mother will look like. Perhaps mom will be an unusual color, or smaller than average, or sport an injured wing. The geese “mother imprinting” brain software is designed to adapt to variable mother stimuli—though it can also be tricked by unusual interventions, such as sneaky scientists.
Men’s desire software is also designed to adapt to variable visual cues. The same way that our taste for sugar may cause us to develop a taste for Snickers or Ben and Jerry’s Karamel Sutra, men appear to imprint upon the specific female body parts that are available in a young man’s environment. In other words, men aren’t born with a “visual template” for the ideal breast, any more than they are born with a notion of the ideal candy bar. Instead, the male brain flexibly responds to a wide range of stimuli that contain a visual cue of “breastness,” just as many candies contain a taste cue of sweetness. Thus, early exposure to anatomical stimuli that match a man’s innate visual cues can result in a wide variety of anatomical preferences.
“I have been crazy for small breasted women since my first girlfriend when we were both 13. She was a very small A cup, and her nipples were very sensitive,” relates one man online. “Just sucking them would make her come. When I later dated other larger breasted women, it seemed like the larger the breast, the less sensitive they were. Plus, a downblouse [looking down a woman’s shirt] of a small breasted woman makes it easy to see her nipples, whereas a large breast makes it much more difficult. Smaller breasted women just look better to me!!!”
This cue-driven imprinting process in men may help explain some of the interest in mature women and GILFs, while also accounting for the fact that the fellatio-performing Sambia boys end up still liking women. Older women still present feminine visual and psychological cues that may (or may not) trigger sexual imprinting in the male brain. The odds of imprinting may go up if these cues are paired with physical contact or a sexual context—such as Kenyan boys learning about sex from grandma, or British boys getting paddled by a matron. The Sambia boys, on the other hand, don’t experience any feminine cues during their rituals, so sexual imprinting may be less likely to be triggered, or imprinting may be weaker.
It appears that for a man, youthful sexual experiences are crucial for forming lifelong sexual interests—both common cued interests like big butts, and accidental uncued interests like ants in your pants. The enduring potency of interests forged in adolescence may explain the popularity of “vintage porn” on the Internet;
vintage
is the 57th most popular category of sexual search on Dogpile and numerous well-trafficked Web sites—such as the Classic Porn and My Retro Tube—that feature movie clips from the ’70s and ’80s.
Men are wired for blasts from the past.
ELMER FUDD, WABBIT HUNTER
 
In many ways, tube sites like PornHub are technological innovations that are perfectly designed to appeal to the male sexual brain. They offer unlimited visual stimuli that can be easily searched by body part, age, and weight. Video streaming technology allows viewers to instantly jump ahead to the good stuff—or pause to examine some especially enticing visual. Many men spend hours online each week hunting for images that perfectly match their own personal set of cued and uncued interests.
Male desire is instantly activated by visual cues and is directed toward immediate action—in particular, behavior leading toward orgasm. Once male desire is triggered, it does not easily subside. As comedian Louis C.K. put it, “If you showed me my mother’s decapitated head while I was fucking, I would tell you: ‘We’re going to have to talk about this just as soon as I’m done.’ ”
On the Internet, male desire is a solitary affair. Men sit alone clicking on videos and images, rarely seeking to share their tastes and experiences with other men. Other men’s opinions about what is sexy are irrelevant or distracting. Men don’t require any information about a woman other than what they can see with their own eyes. They’re also quite happy to masturbate in the airplane bathroom or at the back of a university classroom—or in their office at the Pentagon.
Solitary, quick to arouse, goal-targeted, driven to hunt . . . and a little foolish. In other words, the male brain’s desire software is like Elmer Fudd. Fudd, the comic foil of Bugs Bunny in the Loony Tunes cartoons, is always on the hunt for a specific target: rabbits. Or as Fudd says it,
wabbits
. Fudd is a solitary hunter who likes to work alone. Fudd is trigger-happy. The moment he sees a wabbit—or thinks he sees a wabbit—he squeezes the trigger and fires. Fudd is easily fooled by ducks dressed up as rabbits and other tricks played on him by Bugs Bunny. But even when Fudd shoots his gun at a phony rabbit, he never gets discouraged. He reloads and gets back out there. Tomorrow’s another day for the hunt. Another chance to bag a wabbit.
But if male desire software is like Elmer Fudd, what about female desire?
CHAPTER 4
 
The Miss Marple Detective Agency
 
Female Desire
 
 
The best way to a man’s heart is to saw through his ribs.
—Sai’s ex-girlfriend
 
 
 
 
T
hough social psychologist Elaine Hatfield is one of the nicest people you could ever meet, her life has been filled with controversy, mostly because of her independent streak. When she was a young professor at the University of Minnesota in 1963, there were two rules. Women were not allowed to hang their coats in the faculty cloak room. Women were not allowed to dine at the Faculty Club. One Monday evening, Hatfield decided to challenge the rules.
She and fellow psychologist Ellen Berscheid approached the table where their male colleagues were sitting.
When we walked into the Faculty Club and chorused: “May we sit down?” our six colleagues couldn’t have been more courtly. “Of course! Do sit down.” But, Colleague #1 glanced at his watch and declared, “Oh, do excuse me I have to run.” Colleague #2 shifted uneasily, then remembered that his wife was picking him up. Colleague #3 snatched up a dinner roll and said that he better walk out with his friend. The remaining men realized that they’d better be going, too. Within minutes Ellen and I were sitting alone at the elegant table, surrounded by six heaping plates.
Shamed but undeterred, they kept returning to the Faculty Club until they finally obtained their own table. Eventually, Hatfield became a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she pioneered research into the psychology of falling in love. The National Science Foundation awarded her a grant for her research; ironically, this grant led to a much bigger setback than she experienced that Monday evening at the Faculty Club.
In 1975, she was awarded the Golden Fleece Award, which was no award at all. This notorious “honor” was bestowed by Wisconsin senator William Proxmire on federally funded research projects that didn’t meet his notions of “good science.” He launched his well-publicized smear campaign against Elaine Hatfield’s research with a press release:
I object to this not only because no one—not even the National Science Foundation—can argue that falling in love is a science; not only because I’m sure that even if they spend $84 million or $84 billion they wouldn’t get an answer that anyone would believe. I’m also against it because I don’t want the answer.
After newspapers published accounts suggesting that her research was silly and perhaps immoral, she lost her research funding. But even worse was the public shame—even her neighbors believed she had fleeced the government for bogus research.
She didn’t give up. In 1978, she wrote a book called
A New Look at Love
, summarizing what was known about the psychology of passionate and companionate love. It won the American Psychological Association’s National Media Award. She went on to author more than one hundred academic papers on desire and romance. She’s published other well-received science books, like
Love, Sex, and Intimacy,
and applied her knowledge of human psychology in several detective novels, such as
Vengeance Is Mine
. But the publication that generated the most lasting controversy for Hatfield was also one of her shortest—a psychology research paper focused on the differences between the desires of women and men.
One sunny afternoon, Hatfield and fellow psychologist Russell Clark sent nine research assistants onto the college campus of Florida State University: four young men and five young women from an undergraduate psychology class, all neatly dressed in casual attire. The male confederates were instructed to approach female students. The female confederates were instructed to approach male students. Each confederate asked his or her target one of three questions:
1. Would you go out with me tonight?
2. Would you come over to my apartment tonight?
3. Would you go to bed with me tonight?
How do you think the
male
students responded? The results are on the next page, but before you look, try to guess. What percentage of men do you think would say
yes
to a sexual solicitation from an attractive but completely unknown stranger?

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