A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (20 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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There’s a fascinating parallel between what may be the greatest sexual self-delusion in men, and the greatest sexual self-delusion in women. Men are quite prone to believing they are inducing feelings of erotic ecstasy in their partner through their own sexual prowess. Women, on the other hand, are more easily manipulated by expressions of love.
This distinction reflects the different jealousies in men and women. The male brain is designed for sexual jealousy. Men are suspicious about whom a woman has slept with and frequently press their partner on how many times she’s previously had sex; most women are savvy enough to round this number down. Likewise, the female brain is designed for emotional jealousy. Women usually push their partner to reveal how many times he’s previously been in love; men are often foolish enough to provide a figure other than zero.
Ultimately, a woman wants to feel that a man loves her, and her alone, unconditionally and forever—and that none of a man’s previous women ever rose to anywhere near the same level. This is reflected in romances. As Candy Tan writes, “For the vast majority of heroes, falling in love with the heroine represents an emotional deflowering akin to a heroine’s loss of virginity. We therefore recommend that heroes protect this tender bud of emotional vulnerability with a series of emotionally unfulfilling—even psychically damaging—relationships. Just remember: physical whoring is not a problem; it is, in fact, recommended for certain hero archetypes. Emotional whoring, on the other hand, is deeply frowned upon; just as the heroine is a whore if she has enjoyed sexual relations with anybody other than you, you, as a hero, are an emotional whore if you fall in love with anybody else other than the heroine.”
THE POWER OF AND VS. THE POWER OF OR
 
Let’s review what we’ve learned so far about the differences between Elmer Fudd and the Detective Agency. We’ve seen how Elmer Fudd is a trigger-happy hunter who readies, aims, and fires at the slightest hint of any wabbit. Any sexual cue will do. We call this single-cue arousability the
Power of Or
. Nice breasts
or
a round butt
or
a hot MILF
or
a shapely pair of pumps—just one of these is all it takes to goad Elmer into squeezing the trigger. The brain software controlling male desire functions like what computer engineers call an “OR gate”—any sexual cue is sufficient to activate arousal.
But Miss Marple is more demanding. Before the Detective Agency authorizes psychological arousal, it requires a much longer list of cues to be satisfied. A prospective lover must be financially secure
and
nice to children
and
self-confident. The woman herself must feel safe
and
irresistible
and
physically healthy. We call this multi-cue threshold the
Power of And
. The brain software controlling female desire functions like an “AND gate”—no single cue is sufficient to activate arousal. Instead, a number of cues must be satisfied simultaneously. The exact threshold of the female AND gate depends on many variable factors: the cues themselves, a woman’s age, her alternate prospects, her culture, her health, and many other factors.
“It could be that sex is judged not to be worth the risk, effort, or other investment,” explains Marta Meana. “That is, there may not be sufficiently high incentive to act out the desire.”
For many men, one particular cue can be absolutely essential for arousal, which is one reason why fetishes are so much more common in men than in women. But for most women, no single cue is essential to activate arousal. If a guy is not great-looking, but he’s a wealthy, sweet heart surgeon, she can still become aroused. If he’s a hot, brilliant alpha who exhibits overwhelming lust for a particular woman, despite his reputation as an impoverished gigolo, perhaps that may be enough to cross the threshold.
Though the Power of Or means that men have little trouble getting aroused, it also means that men are not very flexible in their sexuality. In contrast, the Power of And means that female sexuality is far more plastic. Psychologist Roy Baumeister was one of the first scientists to focus attention on female sexual plasticity, emphasizing “the female sex drive is more malleable than the male in response to sociocultural and situational factors.” But the Power of And also means that women have a harder time getting aroused. They simply have more cues to satisfy. This is likely one of the main reasons that clinical psychologists see far more women with desire and orgasm disorders than men. On the other hand, since women are not tied to any particular cue, they have much greater flexibility in getting aroused—including greater flexibility in the gender of their partners.
This is one reason why many more women than men experiment with dating same-sex partners, such as Anne Heche, who was married to a man, then dated Ellen Degeneres, then married another man. Studies have found that high sex drive in women is associated with increased sexual attraction to both women and men, while high sex drive in men only enhances attraction to one or the other, depending on the man’s sexual orientation. Many female-targeted porn sites, such as NoFauxxx, East Van Porn Collective, and Crash Pad Series proudly claim to offer a wide variety of models, situations, and sexual orientations. Male-targeted paysites, on the other hand, almost always focus on a single, specific cue.
The Power of Or is designed to help men exploit any sudden opportunity for sex. Since a man pays no physical cost for impregnating a woman, evolution made it easy for him to get aroused. After all, any opportunity is precious. For a woman, however, a man is bound to show up eventually, but pregnancy entails a substantial investment. She doesn’t need to chase—she needs to choose.
The Power of And is designed to prevent impulsive sex that could have disastrous consequences. But the Power of And is also designed to help a woman flexibly adapt to the particular cultural and physical environment in which she finds herself. Though round, firm breasts and shapely curves are strong indicators of a woman’s health and fertility in any human society, the cues that indicate the most desirable man shift from culture to culture, and generation to generation.
Because of the Power of Or, a sixty-second PornHub clip of a woman unbuttoning her shirt can compel a man to masturbate to ejaculation. But the single most popular artifact used by women to generate arousal takes the form of a 250-page book that requires hours to digest. Even the shorter fan fiction stories invite many hours of analysis and discussion. For the past decade, FanFiction .net has consistently maintained one of the highest stickiness ratings of
any
Web site on the Internet, meaning its users spend more time on the site than users on almost any other site in the world. The only sites that have been stickier were America Online (in the early 2000s) and, more recently, poker sites.
The female brain splits conscious psychological arousal apart from unconscious physical arousal, while the male brain unites them. But the male brain splits apart two neural systems that are united in the female brain: sex and romance. In women, sex and romance are intimately intertwined within the Detective Agency. Sex scenes are integrated into the romance novel as stepping stones leading toward a Happily-Ever-After where sex and love are united in matrimonial bliss. Anonymous, casual sex is anathema in the romance novel.
Men, however, are eminently capable of mentally partitioning sex and romance. This is one reason why men can so easily view porn at work or on a transatlantic flight. Sex is the end of the journey, rather than the journey itself. PornHub is a collection of sexual moments, devoid of romance. On the other hand, men can fall head-over-heels in swooning, romantic love, like Tom Cruise’s frenetic display of passion on Oprah’s couch. The rock music subgenre called emo (for “emotional hard-core”) consists of all-male bands singing about broken hearts and unrequited love. It’s just that men are able to separate the tender feelings they feel toward a girlfriend from the more carnal urges they feel toward a hot babe at a nightclub or the MILF next door.
 
Elmer Fudd and Miss Marple present myriad differences—different cues, different ways of processing cues, and different behaviors in response to cues. But Marta Meana warns of oversimplifying the sexual psychology of men and women. “We could find ourselves caricaturizing both male and female sexual desire with the former portrayed as an unshakable, appetitive drive with a near exclusive penchant for novelty and anonymity, and the latter as a fragile intrapsychic and interpersonal phenomenon requiring a delicate calibration of love, intimacy, and multiple other prerequisites.”
Nature is sure to throw a monkey wrench into our tidy distinctions. After all, since our desire software involves so many dynamic components, there’s bound to be tremendous individual variation in the way we each experience sexual desire. Indeed, there is one fascinating group of people whose brains mix together desire software from both Marple and Fudd.
Gay men.
CHAPTER 7
 
Boys Will Be Boys
 
Gay Cues
 
 
I’m a survivor first, a capitalist second, and a whole bunch of other shit after that.
—Lafayette, gay character on
True Blood
 
 
 
 
H
ere’s a tricky question: how does the desire software in gay brains differ from the software in straight brains? If you believe that homosexuality is a choice, then you might assert that all men are born with the same brains. After all, men are all born with the same bodies, right? It turns out that’s not entirely true. Gay bodies are different. All men are
not
created equal. Mother Nature has conspired to help gay men exceed straight men in one important respect: penis length.
The average length of the gay penis is 6.32 inches. The average length of the straight penis is 5.99 inches. A common negative stereotype of gay men holds that they are overly effeminate. But when it comes to the prime organ of masculinity, they have been endowed with nearly an extra half inch. If there is such a noteworthy difference in their physical hardware, might there also be a difference in their mental software? Could the gay brain come preloaded with its own special version of desire? And if so, what is the relationship between gay desire and longer penis length?
To answer these questions, let’s take a look at a video from a popular Web site.
 
An attractive-looking guy is walking down the sidewalk. Suddenly, a black van pulls up. The door opens, and two hot girls smile out.
“Hey, you need a ride?” they chirp.
Seeing two luscious babes, the guy grins and nods and hops onto the backseat. The girls sit on either side of him and immediately comment on his manly physique.
“Ooh, you work out, don’t you?”
The driver, a bald-headed young man in sunglasses, asks where he’s going.
“Across town,” replies the guest, eyeing the girls. “But I’m in no hurry.”
In the passenger seat is another young man whom the girls introduce as “a friend” before starting to massage the lucky guy’s arms and thighs. After a couple minutes of giggling, they remove their shirts and urge him to follow suit. He does so eagerly. They kiss and stroke him, observing that he’s rising to the occasion. They get his pants off and lock eyes with him.
“Do you want us to use our mouth?”
The guy nods yes, yes, yes.
“Well, okayyy . . . but we’re going to blindfold you, because we don’t want you to watch!”
The guy nods yes, yes, yes. Giggling and teasing, the two girls tie a black silk blindfold over his eyes. He feels someone kneel between his legs. A moment later, the lucky guy is moaning with pleasure.
Suddenly, the blindfold is torn off. The guy looks down.
“What the hell!?”
Kneeling between his legs is “the friend” from the passenger seat.
“Welcome to Bait Bus!”
All the videos on the paysite Bait Bus follow the same structure.
Two gay men drive around looking for attractive straight guys to coax into the van, using pretty young women as “the bait.” Then, after the women trick the guy out of his clothes, the producer offers him hundreds of dollars if he’ll let a gay man continue to perform fellatio on him. Bait Bus is modeled after the heterosexual porn site Bang Bus, which features pornographers who drive around Southern California picking up girls and offering them money to have sex in the van. But what’s so interesting about Bait Bus isn’t that the target is a guy—it’s the fact that he’s
straight
.
Straight men
are the fifth most popular category of gay sites on the Alexa Adult List. On Broke Straight Boys, young men who are “very hot and very straight” show their naked bodies to the camera in return for a few hundred dollars. In First Auditions, straight guys are told they’re auditioning for a heterosexual porn movie, but instead end up spreading their legs for a gay audience. In a video series on Treasure Island Media, straight men sit on a sofa watching heterosexual porn while a gay man licks their nether regions. The Web site Gay Hazing depicts fictional fraternities that haze their straight freshmen pledges by duping them into receiving fellatio from a man or inserting sex toys in their backsides. Straight Hell goes even further, portraying the fictional blackmail of straight men into having abusive sex with other men; for example, one straight man who borrows money to pay for his wedding ends up having to repay his gay lenders by getting gagged, bound, whipped, and penetrated by several men. Many sites simply offer candid shots of straight men collected from Facebook, MySpace, and other social media sites, such as Guys with iPhones, Straight Boy Galleries, and College Dudes 24/7.

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