A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (13 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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But why? In women, why is there such a distinct separation of the physical from the psychological?
When contemplating sex with a man, a woman has to consider the long term. This consideration may not even be conscious, but rather is part of unconscious software that has evolved to protect women over hundreds of thousands of years. Sex could commit a woman to a substantial, life-altering investment: pregnancy, nursing, and more than a decade of child raising. These commitments require enormous time, resources, and energy. Sex with the wrong guy could lead to many unpleasant outcomes. If a man abandons her, she would face the challenges of single motherhood. If the man turns out to be cruel, he might injure her or her children. If the man turns out to be weak or incompetent, he might fail to protect her from threats.
A woman’s sexual desire must be filtered through a careful appraisal of these potential risks. During human prehistory, women who blindly gave in to every sexual urge likely faced a host of daunting challenges, including—in the most extreme cases—death. Most important, from an evolutionary point of view, her children would have a harder time surviving than the children of a woman who limited the expression of her sexual urges to a strong and decent man willing to invest in a stable, long-term, child-rearing relationship. All modern women are the fruit of feminine caution. The result of this whittling away of the impulsive branches of our ancestral maternal tree is a female brain equipped with the most sophisticated neural software on Earth. A system designed to uncover, scrutinize, and evaluate a dazzling range of informative clues. We’ve dubbed this female neural system the
Miss Marple Detective Agency
.
Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Miss Marple is an independent, neatly dressed elderly lady who appears to be sweet and frail. She lives alone and enjoys knitting and weeding her garden. Others dismiss her as scatterbrained or erratic. However, she is actually a shrewd judge of human character and harbors deep knowledge of the dark side of human nature. Though others underestimate her mental powers, she frequently solves mysteries that have stumped the police.
The unique detective skills of the female sexual brain were honed over hundreds of thousands of years of amateur sleuthing, investigating the character of sneaky and aggressive men in an extraordinary variety of contexts. Like the fictional Miss Marple, a woman’s Detective Agency mulls over a variety of evidence concerning a potential partner’s character, weighs clues from the physical and social environment, and examines her own experiences and feelings before permitting—or pursuing—sex.
The range of clues Miss Marple gathers is extensive, as captured in a scene from the movie
Up in the Air
, in which Natalie, an earnest businesswoman fresh out of college, describes “her type” of man: “You know, white collar. College grad. Loves dogs. Likes funny movies. Six foot one. Brown hair. Kind eyes. Works in finance but is outdoorsy, you know, on the weekends. I always imagined he’d have a single syllable name like Matt or John or . . . Dave. In a perfect world, he drives a Four Runner and the only thing he loves more than me is his golden lab. Oh . . . and a nice smile.”
The Detective Agency’s focus on intimate, detailed clues can be seen in consumer choices. Many women are willing to pay money for celebrity biographies in order to read about the private life of Leonardo DiCaprio or Johnny Depp, but they won’t pay money to see photos of them nude. Men whip out the credit card to see a naked Angelina Jolie or Scarlett Johannsen, though it would never occur to them to shell out cash for their biographies.
Craigslist, the largest online classifieds Web site, contains a section called Missed Connections. In this section, men and women leave messages for others they encountered and were attracted to, but for some reason lost contact with. Are there any patterns in the half million Missed Connections postings we scraped in the spring of 2010? For men, the single most common phrase is “looking for.” For women, it’s “miss you.” Elmer Fudd is hunting for wabbits, searching for his lost partner. In contrast, Miss Marple reviews the details of a shared moment. Women fondly recall the place, weather, food, wardrobes, and conversation of an intimate encounter.
The Miss Marple Detective Agency is responsible for the separation of a woman’s sexual mind from her sexual body. Miss Marple inhabits a woman’s conscious mind and intercepts signals coming from her body, preventing them from triggering conscious, psychological arousal.
Wait
, says Miss Marple,
let’s think this over
.
The Detective Agency consists of four different types of mind software—four detectives—that seek out and evaluate different types of clues:
An emotional detective
A social detective
A cultural detective
A physical detective
The physical detective evaluates things like nutrition, stress, shelter, and safety. A woman’s ovulation cycle and estrogen production are sensitive to changes in the physical environment. Women are much more likely than men to report a decrease in sexual desire due to physical illness, hunger, or anxiety about physical security. Indeed, the male sexual brain is just the opposite: heightened physical threats—such as impending warfare—tend to enhance male desire.
Overseeing these four software detectives is Miss Marple herself: a master sleuth who sifts through all the accumulated clues in order to make one all-important decision:
should I or shouldn’t I
?
THE EMOTIONAL DETECTIVE
 
The dating advice book for women
He’s Just Not That Into You
opens with a group of young, professional women sitting around a table. They’re all writers for the show
Sex and the City
. They are carefully analyzing the ambiguous behavior of a guy dating one of the women in order to determine how he
really
feels. They weigh one clue after another, offering elaborate and divergent interpretations of the guy’s recent silence. Finally, they solicit the advice of comedian Greg Behrendt, who succinctly tells the women, “He’s just not that into you.”
Though Behrendt cuts through the convoluted analysis of the table full of Detective Agencies, there are very good reasons for Miss Marple to spend so much effort evaluating a man’s heart. When it comes to sex, men are enterprising and devious. Google “men will say anything” to see a list of fifty thousand cautionary tales. Here are two: “He saw I had a cat and he told me he loved cats and then later after I slept with him I learned he is allergic to them and hates them. I should’ve known he was lying cuz he started sneezing when we were in bed.” “He told me he worked in the front office of the Yankees and was friends with Derek Jeter. Turns out he was just the friggin’ bat boy.”
A man’s true character cannot be evaluated as swiftly or as easily as a woman’s bust size. Since the inner life of a man is so elusive, the Detective Agency has developed sophisticated instruments for appraising his personality. Is he honest? Sincere? Considerate? Loyal? Generous? Does he love his mama? She must also evaluate her own feelings. Do I feel appreciated and adored? Do I feel attractive? Am I nervous? Embarrassed? Guilty?
Studies show that women ruminate over emotional situations more than men, and reflect more often on negative feelings and on memories of negative life experiences. Women recall emotional memories more quickly than men and report emotions as more vivid and intense. Women have superior autobiographical memory: compared to men, they remember more details and their narratives of recollection are longer. Women recall their first life event more quickly, recall more life events, date life events more accurately, and recall earlier events than men. Their superior memory for life experiences does not depend on socialization, since this advantage is evident in girls as young as three. Interestingly, though women are more emotionally expressive than men, they also possess greater ability to control their facial and body expressions of emotions. Similarly, even though women ruminate more than men, some studies show that they are better at suppressing unwanted thoughts. Most relevant for the study of desire, women’s sexual fantasies haves higher romantic and emotional content than men’s fantasies.
These mental differences are reflected in neural differences. There is a flood of evidence pointing to physical differences between the male brain and the female brain. Some scientists even suggest that “sex differences in the human brain may be the norm rather than the exception.” Though some of these differences are present at birth, many don’t form until puberty, when the release of sex hormones initiates changes in neural structures and connections. In fact, the peak age of onset for mental health disorders is age fourteen, the age when gender differences in biologically based mental disorders first manifest themselves. Women are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. Men are more likely to suffer from schizophrenia and autistic spectrum disorders. Later in life, women are more likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s, while men are more likely to suffer from Parkinson’s.
Before puberty, boys and girls suffer from anxiety, depression, and panic disorders equally. But after the adolescent brain starts to change, women are twice as likely to suffer from mood disorders as men. Scientists speculate this may be because of the greater changes occurring in the female emotional software. Perhaps greater susceptibility to mood disorders is one of the costs of the emotionally shrewd Detective Agency.
The emotional software of the Detective Agency runs mostly on three brain structures. Two of the structures are in the cortex, where conscious thinking occurs: the anterior cingulate cortex and the insular cortex. These are both involved in the appraisal of emotions of self and others. These structures are slightly larger in women and also more active in women during social processing. When women are processing sexual stimuli, the anterior cingulate cortex tends to react by inhibiting emotion, perhaps one way the Detective Agency prevents a woman from reacting to an arousing stimulus until it has been properly evaluated. The insular cortex and the hippocampus are both involved in the storage and retrieval of emotional memories, and are both larger and more active in women than in men.
The other emotional structure is the amygdala, located in the unconscious subcortex. Women code emotions through the left amygdala, while men process emotions through the right amygdala. In men, the activation of the right amygdala and right cortical hemisphere enhance memory for the “big picture” or the gist of an experience. In women, activation of the left amygdala and left cortical hemisphere enhance memory for peripheral details. Interestingly, though the right amygdala is active in men while viewing pornography, it isn’t in women. However, the left amygdala is active in women while processing erotic narratives.
It’s often difficult to acquire enough clues about a potential lover by relying on your own investigation. For one thing, even Miss Marple has trouble being objective sometimes. In addition, there are a number of important clues that can only be verified by others, such as a man’s reputation or social status. It’s also worth knowing if other women are eyeing the same guy.
Sometimes Miss Marple needs to outsource her sleuthing to other Detective Agencies.
THE SOCIAL DETECTIVE
 
Miss Marple knows that the best way to gather and analyze clues is often to ask for help. Women solicit the opinions of other women on almost every aspect of a potential partner. They also rely on others for ideas about topics indirectly related to love and sex, such as beauty tips, health, child rearing, fashion, dieting, and myriad other factors that generate additional information analyzed by the Detective Agency. In other words, Miss Marple relies on her social network.
The social software of the Detective Agency is one of the biggest reasons that women are more verbal than men. Women begin communicating earlier in life than men, and spend more time communicating as both adolescents and adults. This verbal superiority appears as early as age five and does not appear to be controlled by hormones, since women performed better than men on verbal tasks even when they were matched on their levels of the hormone estradiol. This suggests the verbal differences are due to differences in mind software.
On average, girls age twelve to seventeen send and receive eighty texts a day; boys send and receive thirty. More women than men use social networking sites like Facebook, Classmates, Twitter, and MySpace. Women also have more friends on these sites. (Digg, a Web site where users rate news stories, is the rare exception of a social network with more male users.) Fifty-nine percent of teenage girls call friends on their cell phone every day, while only 42 percent of boys do. The social detective appears to be located mainly within the frontal cortex, including the prefrontal cortex. The areas of the frontal cortex devoted to language are larger in women and develop more rapidly during puberty in girls than in boys. There are also more connections between the female language centers and the subcortical reward systems, suggesting that talking is more rewarding for women than for men. Female brains also have greater connectivity between the two cortical hemispheres, leading some neuroscientists to speculate that the female brain is designed for more effective processing and production of language.
Men are more likely to suffer from autism, which is frequently characterized as a social disorder based on an inability to take in the point of view of others. One prominent researcher characterizes autism as a consequence of the “hypermasculinization” of the brain, emphasizing the fact that social software is less developed in the male brain.

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