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Authors: Ogi Ogas,Sai Gaddam

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BOOK: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire
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The adaptationist perspective has been incredibly fruitful, particularly in the area of female sexuality. Historically, there have been a number of challenges to studying female desire and sexual behavior. There have been times when it wasn’t considered appropriate for a doctor to even look at his female patients’ genitals. For male researchers to ask women about their sexual desires and behavior was simply not acceptable. Even today, a female sex researcher will have a much easier time in terms of how both participants and others view her and her work. So the study of female sexuality has languished behind that of males, especially back in the day when most scientists and researchers were male. It was often only considered legitimate to study female sexuality if you were trying to help women become pregnant. But the rise of the adaptationist perspective (led by both male and female researchers) has focused attention on questions surrounding the female choice of partners and how such choices would have resulted in greater reproductive success in the past. This research has led to discoveries about female mate preferences, the role of hormones and the ovulatory cycle in female sexuality, and the function of female orgasm.
Without an adaptationist perspective, it’s unlikely anyone would have designed a study to look at how well exotic dancers are tipped according to their ovulatory cycle. The fact that tips are higher when dancers are more fertile tells us something about both female desirability and behavior during ovulation and how attractive this is to males.
The adaptationist approach was also the critical tool Ogi and Sai used to unlock their exhaustive Internet data.
And they did so elegantly and eloquently. This book provides a refreshing look at the big picture of human sexuality, informed by the ultimate unobtrusive source of data, the Internet. And regardless of your background, you’re in for a treat. You will learn about the endless variety of kinks and squicks (kinks that you find gross as opposed to a turn on) that people have. You will also learn about the essential male and female sexual psychologies, as illustrated by Elmer Fudd (the trigger-happy hunter who sees what he wants, aims and fires, and then does it all over again) and the Miss Marple Detective Agency (the female software for figuring out if this guy is the right one). If that hasn’t convinced you that you need the insights these authors have to offer, there is also the importance of the Magic Hoo Hoo, critical to all romance novels . . . part of the female desire to be sexually irresistible, and all that we can learn from watching gay porn (which is amazingly different from slash, considering both are about guy on guy action).
If you want answers to pretty much anything you need to know about sexual desire, this is the book for you.
Catherine Salmon
Coauthor of
Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fantasies, Evolution and
Female Sexuality
and
The Secret Power of Middle Children
PREFACE
 
The World’s Largest Behavioral Experiment
 
While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.
—Sherlock Holmes,
Sign of the Four
 
 
 
 
T
here’s one special challenge that every behavioral scientist must eventually confront. A challenge that sets all behavioral scientists apart from physicists, biologists, and engineers. It’s the reason most students of behavioral science are drawn to the field, and one reason most behavioral scientists are women. It’s also the reason it’s the only discipline requiring all its practitioners to have their ethics evaluated by committee. What is this unique challenge? The subjects of behavioral science: people.
And people are a problem.
Most people aren’t particularly interested in contributing to scientific progress. Who wants to keep a daily journal recording every time she yawns? Who wants to get injected with radioactive cobalt before sticking his head into a hole the size of a water bucket? There are groceries to shop for, customers to sell to, kids to pick up. What kind of person wants to do boring tasks with no personal benefit and for trivial money? Fortunately for science, there is such a person.
The undergraduate.
Many sciences have a standard test subject, used over and over by its practitioners. Geneticists use fruit flies, endocrinologists use guinea pigs, molecular biologists use mice. For behavioral scientists, it’s the college freshman. It’s easy to understand why: they’re cheap, in plentiful supply, easy to motivate through course requirements, and willing to endure even the most unusual experimental methods. Much of our contemporary understanding of ethics, aggression, and sexuality is based upon the behavior of adolescent psych majors. But recently, researchers have begun to wonder just how valid this understanding really is. After all, don’t undergrads—jobless, childless, and marinating in sex hormones—represent a unique specimen of
Homo sapiens
?
Surely there are behavioral experiments that don’t use college students? There are indeed studies that use adults, children, and retirees. But almost all of these people are still “WEIRD”: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. A stunning 96 percent of subjects in psychology experiments from 2003 to 2007 have been WEIRD, according to Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, and his coauthors. But the real trouble, says Henrich, is that WEIRD people are different from the other 88 percent of the world’s population. He compared the result of studies on cooperation, learning, decision-making, and even basic perception that used both WEIRD and non-WEIRD subjects. Henrich found striking differences. “The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the behavioral sciences renders them—perhaps—one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about
Homo sapiens
.”
But if people are such a problem, how can we possibly observe the behavior of the full spectrum of humankind? Fortunately—amazingly—there is an unprecendented new source of behavioral data, one that reveals the unfiltered activities of a stunning diversity of people. This is the world’s largest experiment on human behavior: the Internet.
The Internet records the activities of more than a billion people from every country on the planet. This online data offers the opportunity to view even the most fundamental human behaviors in a brand-new light. In this book, we use data from the world’s largest behavioral experiment to reexamine one of the most important and intimate of all behaviors: sexual desire. In the pages that follow, you’ll learn the truth about what men and women secretly desire—and why.
Everyone has strong feelings about sexual behavior, and that’s a problem for the researchers who study it. We all have our favorite theories that fit our experiences and prejudices. We all tend to think our own desires are pretty natural and normal. But other people’s desires? They’re gross, immoral, or downright dangerous. Sometimes, though, we hide desires we don’t want to talk about, don’t understand, and maybe don’t want to understand. As a result of all these intense feelings and prejudices, many twenty-first-century convictions about desire are still imbued with superstition. By analyzing the intimate desires of tens of millions of men and women and explaining the mechanisms that produce them, we hope this book might shine some light into the darkness.
We need to warn you up front. In the pages that follow, you’re going to peer into other people’s minds without filters or cushions. The sexual brain is guaranteed to upset the politically correct, the socially conservative, and just about everyone in between. This book is not an expanded issue of
Cosmopolitan
or
Maxim
, and it’s definitely not for children. You’re certain to be challenged and occasionally dumbfounded.
We also want to emphasize that this book is not intended as a complete catalog of the diversity of human desire; far from it. We’ve omitted many important sexual interests because of space limitations, and sometimes because we felt we simply didn’t have enough data to do justice to a particular topic. Instead, we’ve strived to convey the most defining and illuminating features of our sexual desires.
Our lawyers instructed us to add another cautionary warning. Throughout this book, we describe many adult Web sites that depict various sexual situations. Often, these situations are depicted as genuine, even though they involve actors in scripted scenarios. Sometimes these situations involve nonprofessional performers and unscripted acts. However, much of the time it is not possible to determine whether a sexual situation depicted as genuine on a Web site is, in fact, fictional or authentic.
Finally—and most important—we can’t emphasize enough that when it comes to understanding human desire, scientists focus on statistics rather than individuals. We might say that men are taller than women because the average height of the human male is taller than the average height of the human female. But perhaps you yourself are a tall woman or a short man, defying the averages and exposing the limitations of such generalizations. Nevertheless, by identifying a real difference in the average heights of men and women, scientists can then look for reasons why—such as the discovery that the pituitary gland releases more growth hormones in men than in women.
We can understand how the sexual brain works using statistics and large sample sizes. But you—you are a wholly unique combination of desires and experiences that almost certainly exists nowhere else. No matter how unique your own tastes, we hope this book might help you understand why you like the things you do—and why your partner’s tastes can seem so different.
To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.
 
—Donald Symons
CHAPTER 1
 
What Do We
Really
Like?
 
Sexual Cues
 
 
The study of desire has never been for the faint of heart.
—Mata Meana, professor of clinical psychology
 
 
 
 
T
he year 1886 witnessed the birth of two remarkable scientific disciplines, each founded by a German. One scientist gazed outward at the hidden patterns of the physical universe. The other peered inward at the secret workings of the mind. One discipline has achieved stunning progress. The other, perhaps surprisingly, lags far behind.
Heinrich Hertz built the very first radio antenna in 1886. He wanted to test for the existence of electromagnetic waves as predicted by Scottish theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Hertz became the first person to successfully transmit and receive a radio signal, simultaneously proving Maxwell correct and inaugurating the field of
radiophysics
. The subject of this new field was a strange, invisible “wave” that no philosopher or priest had ever dreamed of in their most extravagant fantasies. Yet over the ensuing century, radiophysicists developed the lasers used in DVD players and eye surgery. They figured out how to scan the brain for tumors. They even listened to the lingering sounds of the big bang, the event marking the origin of the known universe.
We all have a more intimate and personal relationship with the subject studied by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a subject scrutinized by humankind since we yawped our first words in the valleys of Africa. In 1886, Krafft-Ebing published a landmark book. He deliberately wrote sections in Latin and chose a Latin title in order to discourage laypeople from reading it. The book was
Psychopathia Sexualis.
It addresses such arcane topics as clitoral stimulation, reduced libido, and homosexuality. The discipline Krafft-Ebing founded is known as
sexology
.
So in the 125 years since
Psychopathia Sexualis
initiated the scientific study of a very familiar activity, how do the field’s achievements match up to those of radiophysics? It’s rather like comparing the Olympics gold medal tallies of the United States and Fiji. Unlike the origins of electromagnetic energy, the origins of desire remain mysterious and controversial. There’s no consensus on which sexual interests are normal, abnormal, or pathological. Scientists can’t even agree on the purpose of female orgasm, whether there is such a thing as having too much sex, or whether sexual fantasies are innocent or dangerous.
Today, a wide variety of scientists study desire, including neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, and pharmacologists. One of their most basic questions is: why do we like the things we like? This question has never been adequately answered, because we must first determine
what
people like. To steal an expression from American writer William S. Burroughs, we need to “see what’s on the end of everyone’s fork.” But stealing a look at men and women’s true interests has been far from easy.
While modern radiophysicists have discovered black holes and developed the means for communicating with extraterrestrials, scientists studying desire still struggle to identify basic differences between the sexual interests of men and women. Why is there such a gap between the achievements of the fields founded by Heinrich Hertz and Richard von Krafft-Ebing? One big reason is
data acquisition
.
BOOK: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire
12.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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