A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (14 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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In addition to communicating with others, Miss Marple also pays attention to the rules, expectations, and attitudes of the society she finds herself in.
THE CULTURAL DETECTIVE
 
One of the more noticeable differences between male-targeted and female-targeted porn on the Web is the presence of political messages. On men’s porn sites—including gay porn sites—there is a complete absence of any kind of explicit politics. The only exception is the rare imploration to support free speech. Though there are far, far fewer numbers of female-targeted porn sites, those that do exist contain a relative abundance of political messages. “We do what we can to support the activists who fight for awareness of cultural appropriation,” proclaims graphic porn site NoFauxxx, adding, “We follow an all-inclusive casting attitude: we do not take gender, size, race, or any other consideration into consideration when choosing our models.” The Web site Crash Pad Series says the actress and director Shawn “can be found in front of the computer designing digital landscapes of desire as well as in front of the camera sharing her passion for the ‘personal as political’ lifestyle.” The East Van Porn Collective calls itself an “anarchofeminist porn collective.” Especially common are female-targeted adult sites promoting “empowerment” and “positivity,” concepts men do not associate with erotica.
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister suggests that women’s greater sensitivity to cultural influences is rooted in brain mechanisms. “Women’s sexuality appears to be more plastic than men’s, relying on social framing and cultural conditions when making decisions regarding relationships. Men’s sexuality seems far more driven by simple physiological mechanisms.” Keenly attuned to cultural values and social rules, the Detective Agency asks: Which behaviors and relationships are celebrated—and which are frowned upon? What values should I endorse when it comes to sex and relationships? Women are sensitive to messages on magazines and television shows, even indirect messages, such as a model’s body weight, the car a politician is driving, or a celebrity’s views on mental health—subjects that elicit more online comments from women than men. Many more women than men report feeling social pressure on how to behave, dress, and look. Women are also much more likely to attribute sexual anxiety to social pressures.
Women’s cultural evaluation mechanisms appear to be especially concentrated in the middle prefrontal and inferior prefrontal cortex and the middle temporal cortex. These parts of the brain are social evaluation centers, considering what behaviors are appropriate and inappropriate in a given situation. They handle moral cognition (is this right or wrong?) and social judgment (what will other people think of me?).
Cultural information helps Miss Marple play it safe: Who does society value more, doctors or software programmers? Can I get away with wearing a tattoo on my back or will people think it’s a “tramp stamp”? Can I post photos on Facebook of me in my bathing suit or will guys think I look fat? Since women must always consider the long-term consequences of their sexual decisions, a woman’s brain is designed to evaluate the particular cultural conditions in which she finds herself.
Why is the female brain designed to play it safe? Because historically, the odds of a woman reproducing are very good. In fact, today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. According to recent DNA analysis, through the history of the human race about 80 percent of the women reproduced. Only 40 percent of men reproduced. This means that plenty of men were able to have children with multiple women—but the majority of men never had
any
kids. Roy Baumeister observes the psychological consequences for a man:
If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances . . . Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed, but if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).
For women throughout history, the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Taking chances like [sailing off into the unknown] would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. Women might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.
A woman’s social environment is also crucial. Does a woman have a network of family and friends who can help provide emotional support and assist with child care? Does this social network approve of her partner? Is a woman in a position in her career where she can take time out for a relationship and to possibly raise children? Are there any other decent men available?
For a woman, context is everything.
MISS MARPLE’S FEMININE INTUITION
 
The Detective Agency’s decision-making process is often experienced as “female intuition”—a gut sense that a particular guy is Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong. This is the subjective outcome of Miss Marple’s evaluation of the complex array of clues gathered by the emotional, social, and cultural detectives—combined with an evaluation of a potential mate’s physical attractiveness—to produce a simple answer to the profoundly complex question: should I or shouldn’t I?
Should I marry Tom, or wait until he gets a better job? Should I sleep with this hot guy I just met at the club, or will my friends think I’m a slut? Should I use one of my last contraceptive sponges on Enrique, or is he not really sponge-worthy? A woman’s mind is filled with difficult choices, the result of Miss Marple’s endless sleuthing. In India, women even outsource this sleuthing to a booming business of “wedding detectives” who track down hidden information about prospective husbands.
Miss Marple’s cautious detective work is responsible for the dramatic results in Hatfield and Clark’s study. Women don’t want to go to bed with a complete stranger, even if he’s attractive, because there are not enough clues to determine what he’s
really
like. The Detective Agency is responsible for Meredith Chivers’s findings that physical arousal is separate from psychological arousal, since Miss Marple won’t permit psychological arousal unless enough of her criteria are met, regardless of what a woman feels down below. This is also why there can be no female Viagra. Simply increasing heat and blood flow between a woman’s legs won’t sway the discerning Miss Marple.
Most of the software of the Detective Agency software is located in the conscious parts of the brain, in the cortex. This is also the part of the brain that gets inhibited by alcohol and many recreational drugs. Perhaps drinking is a fast-acting substitute for what author Lori Gottlieb calls “The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” in her book
Marry Him
. Gottlieb argues that women set the bar too high and urges them to settle, to not try and check off every requirement on Miss Marple’s exacting list. And this list often seems endless, as captured in a cottage industry of books for women. Leslie Parrott talks about
Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts
. Helen Norman Wright identifies
101 Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged
. Monica Leahy makes sure the Detective Agency leaves no stone unturned by presenting
1,001 Questions to Ask Before You Get Married
.
The constant, conscious swirl of thoughts in the offices of the Detective Agency is the result of wisdom inherited from millions of sexual transactions conducted by women over a period of a few hundred thousand years. The result is the most sophisticated neural structure on Earth. How can we make such a grand claim? Because the Detective Agency is nature’s most successful long-term investment planner.
As any portfolio manager can tell you, long-term investment planning is tough. The most important requirement for long-term investment success is information, especially inside information. Mutual fund managers are absolute data hounds, voraciously gathering and analyzing oceans of economic and financial data. They’re also among the most highly paid people in America.
The second most important requirement for long-term investment planning is an effective analysis of the probability of various outcomes. Mutual fund managers employ teams of mathematical PhDs, macroeconomic wizards, and number-crunching supercomputers to predict the financial future. Long-term investing is expensive, difficult stuff. But this is precisely what Miss Marple excels at.
What is the payoff for spending my precious time with this guy? Will investing in a sexual relationship with this man give me the greatest chance of success to raise healthy, happy children in the future? The Detective Agency is ultimately a highly adaptive, highly intelligent system for successful long-term investment planning in a dynamic environment, which is why it represents the pinnacle of brain evolution. The male brain solves a man’s investment planning problem using simple, quick shortcuts: go after youth and gynoid fat. The female brain is more like Warren Buffett, always taking the long-term view and adjusting to changing circumstances. The male brain is like a stockbroker who gives all his clients the same advice whether the market is up or down: invest in Google, you can’t go wrong.
This fundamental difference in desire software is reflected in the type of erotic obsessions that men and women develop. As we saw in the previous chapter, men are quite prone to developing sexual obsessions with objects, which they frequently use for masturbation. Some male fetishists require the object to be present in order to ejaculate. Women, however, rarely develop sexual fetishes for objects. They do, however, develop
emotional
fetishes, a condition known as
objectum sexualis
.
Women who suffer from objectum sexualis usually claim that they are in love with an inanimate object, such as fences, a roller coaster, or a Ferris wheel. Though they sometimes have sex with the objects, their interest usually expresses itself as a powerful emotional connection and a desire for intimacy. Sometimes these feelings culminate in a romantic ceremony. One objectum sufferer named Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer married the Berlin Wall. Another objectum sufferer, Erika Naisho, married the Eiffel Tower. After the ceremony, she changed her name to Erika Eiffel. “There is a huge problem with being in love with a public object,” she reported sadly, “the issue of intimacy—or rather lack of it—is forever present.”
It was relatively easy to summarize the main sexual cues used by Elmer Fudd. The male brain relies on a few effective visual shortcuts. But we need two chapters for the most basic sampling of the psychological cues used by the female brain.
CHAPTER 5
 
Ladies Prefer Alphas
 
Female Psychological Cues I: The Hero
 
 
A porn video has almost as many climaxes as it does scenes, but a romance novel has only one climax: the moment when the hero and heroine declare their mutual love for each other.
—Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons,
Warrior Lovers
 
 
 
 
W
hen looking for clues, Miss Marple prefers stories over visuals. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Detective Agency brain software is designed to process psychological, social, and contextual information. This kind of information is transmitted more effectively through narratives and verbal exchanges than imagery. Consequently, whereas men are more aroused by visual cues, women are more aroused by psychological cues. Visual cues convey information about a woman’s health, fertility, and youth—data important to Elmer Fudd. Psychological cues convey information about a man’s stability, commitment, social status, competence, and kindness—data important to the Detective Agency. One particular kind of story packs the densest compilation of psychological cues into a single Miss Marple–thrilling fantasy: the
romance
.
The romance novel has long been described as “pornography for women.” This is a somewhat unfair and misleading comparison. After all, would we characterize gang bang porn as “romance for men”? However, the comparison is apt in one respect. As we’ve seen in previous chapters, porn reveals the sexual cues that activate male desire. Similarly, romance reveals the sexual cues that activate female desire. “The romance novel is a chronicle of female mate choice,” assert Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons in their book,
Warrior Lovers,
“in which the heroine overcomes obstacles to identify, win, and marry the hero, who embodies the physical, psychological, and social characteristics that constituted high male mate value during the course of human evolutionary history.”
The basic elements of the romance novel can be traced back to the 1740 book
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.
The story is told through a series of letters.
Pamela
follows the courtship of a fifteen-year-old servant-maid by her master, Mr. B, a nobleman. Mr. B repeatedly tries to seduce and ravish Pamela, but she refuses his advances. Eventually, she realizes she loves him. When he realizes he feels the same way, he marries her.
Pamela
was one of the earliest best-sellers in the English language, though it was criticized for its perceived lewdness. For the second edition, the author relied on women’s reading groups for editorial advice.

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