A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (21 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 terms of stimulating gay arousal, it really
matters
if a guy is gay or straight. On gay forums, there are frequent and lengthy discussions of whether a purportedly straight actor who appears on a gay site like Broke Straight Boys is truly gay-for-pay or just plain gay. These discussions often manifest the same heated analysis as straight men’s discussion of whether a particular porn actress has authentic orgasms. “Peter North isn’t really straight, dude, he did gay porn in the 90s.” “Hey, does anybody know if the yummy redhead on the latest Dirty Tony is really gay-for-pay?”
So why are straight guys so appealing to gay men? Because gay men are attracted to
masculinity
. Though this may seem somewhat obvious—doesn’t being gay mean you like men?—there is a common misconception that gay men are attracted to partners who are feminine and flamboyant. The briefest glance at gay porn sites would quickly dispel this notion. The vast majority of gay men prefer to masturbate while thinking about cowboys, firemen, or David Beckham instead of drag queens, ballet dancers, or Elton John. On the television show
Glee
, the football player Finn and mohawked bad boy Puck are bigger turn-ons for gay men than the effeminate gay character Kurt. On
Ugly Betty
, gay men would much prefer to invite Betty’s straight boss Daniel Meade into their bedroom than fashion reporter Suzuki St. Pierre.
Masculine professions dominate gay porn. There are military-oriented gay sites, such as AWOL Marines, Military Shorties, and Hooyah Fags. The slogan of
MilitaryJerkoff.com
is “Don’t ask, don’t tell . . . just suck my dick, bro” and features straight American soldiers masturbating for the camera. Firemen and policemen are popular roles in gay porn, as are thugs, construction workers, and jocks.
On Thor and Rocco, the blog of a fortysomething married gay couple, Thor narrates his fantasy about the plumber who replaced the tiles in his shower. “This kid that is here now is so fucking hot. Yeah, he is definitely straight, but what I would give to blow him while his boss is out.”
In order to dispel any possible ambiguities about the true sexual orientation of an actor, many gay men prefer to watch straight porn—a man having sex with a woman—since this offers indisputable proof of heterosexuality. “I only watch straight videos,” explains one thirty-six-year-old gay man who has sex with multiple men every week. “I prefer gangbang porn, especially European porn, where there’s a greater comfort with men being near other men’s bodies. Just guys helping a buddy out. Of course, I never really look at the woman at the center of it . . .”
Recently, some Web sites have adapted to the gay interest in straight porn by offering heterosexual content specifically tailored to gay cues. Straight Guys for Gay Eyes and Next Door Hookups present heterosexual couples having sex. There’s no doubting the actors are straight: there they are, making love to the ladies and loving it. For a straight man, watching the attentively crafted videos on Straight Guys for Gay Eyes is educational: these videos reveal the central importance of point of view in pornography, something that often goes unnoticed.
In porn targeted at heterosexual men, the woman is always the focus of the camera. We see her expressions, her emotions, the graphic details of her anatomy. We hear her moaning and watch her reaction when the disembodied man ejaculates on her. Other than the penis, the man’s body and especially his face are rarely highlighted in contemporary porn. This “man’s eye” point of view is a big reason why many women do not like pornography: it’s usually shot in a manner designed to maximize activation of male visual cues and completely ignores the visual and psychological cues that appeal to women. In effect, a female viewer is compelled to “have sex” with the woman in the porn—and have sex with her as a man would.
On Straight Guys for Gay Eyes, the situation is completely reversed. Now the camera favors the man. The woman is an afterthought. Sometimes she doesn’t even take off her shirt, while the man’s shirt gets removed in the first few seconds. The woman herself is often silent, while the man moans or simply tells the girl how much he’s enjoying himself. The emphasis is on
male
pleasure. The camera lovingly attends to the man’s reactions and feelings, lingering on his brawny chest and arms, moving to a close-up of his butt and thighs as he pumps in and out of the woman. The male body is the center of attention. Perhaps as a result, many straight women report finding Straight Guys for Gay Eyes more arousing than other kinds of porn.
 
If you think about it, it’s a little odd that a man’s heterosexuality should be a cue that activates gay desire. If a guy has a hot body, shouldn’t that be enough? “Sometimes you’re watching a porn and the guy looks straight, like a real macho bad-ass, smoking hot,” explains Rocco. “But then suddenly he lisps, ‘Oooh, give me a good
th
ucking!’ and just ruins the whole thing.”
This suggests that gay desire does not solely target anatomical cues. If gay men are merely attracted to male bodies, they shouldn’t care whether those bodies are inhabited by a straight mind or a gay mind or an androgynous mind. If anything, one would intuitively expect that gay men would be more aroused by a gay mind, since that would suggest that any attraction could be reciprocated. Instead, the gay sexual brain also hunts for the
psychological
cues associated with masculinity.
There are certainly many gay men who have a strong sexual preference for gay men over straight men. Gay men also fall head-over-heels in love and pursue long-term monogamous relationships with their partners. Gay desire is as varied as straight desire. But numerous studies have demonstrated that the gay interest in masculinity appears to be as fixed and inflexible as David/Brenda Reimer’s unchangeable interest in women. Several decades of medical attempts at converting homosexual desire into heterosexual desire through conditioning, electroshock—or, in one case, directly stimulating a gay man’s brain while he had sex with a female prostitute—have been notorious failures. The American Psychiatric Association officially opposes such ill-advised and ultimately unethical attempts at reprogramming gays’ brain software because of their ineffectiveness and terrible side effects, which resemble the “psychological warfare” experienced by David Reimer.
It might be that by the time males are born, a binary “gender cue” in their brain software gets set to target either masculinity or femininity. There is some evidence that a neural network consisting of core regions in the human reward system may contain receptors for the gender cue. This fundamental, relatively inflexible gender cue then influences and organizes the other male cues—including the visual cues.
THE MALE GAZE
 
Women often complain that male porn objectifies women, reducing them to a crude collection of anatomical parts. The movie
Angel Eyes
is a useful example to consider.
Angel stands in front of two brutish guys. One ogles Angel’s body and purrs, “Nice ass, mind if I squeeze it?” Angel shyly nods, and soon the two guys are probing and poking Angel’s body as if it’s a slab of meat on a butcher’s block. “Great chest!” says the second guy, stroking his rough hands across Angel’s nipples. A few minutes later, the two guys have Angel bent over a sofa, one in front, one in back, both pounding away. It’s the kind of scene frequently used to demonstrate the misogyny of porn except for one thing.
Angel is a man.
If you’re a straight guy, gay porn might be too squicky for you to watch. But if you did take a look (in the interests of science), you’d stand a very good chance of experiencing what many women experience when they watch porn: a feeling that it’s
too graphic
with
way too many close-ups
. But if you managed to get past the squickiness, you might experience another feeling: déjà vu. Except for the fact that the male body is the star, gay porn looks and feels
exactly
like straight porn.
Gay porn features similar numbers of explicit anatomical close-ups. We looked at the one hundred top-rated video clips on Gaytube and found:
• 83 featured a graphic shot of a penis.
• 48 featured graphic shots of male butts.
• 46 featured graphic shots of a man’s chest.
Like straight porn, gay porn typically jumps right into sex with little or no narrative preamble. Actors on gay tube sites are rarely identified by name; instead, sex is presented as a fast, anonymous, orgasm-focused tangle of bodies.
So what else do gay men want to see online? Below is a list of the seven most popular categories of gay sexual searches on the Dogpile search engine:
 
Except for
straight
(#2), every one of these gay interests is also a popular straight interest. In fact, virtually all of the genres of gay porn have a precise parallel in straight porn.
Youth
tops both lists by a large margin. Indeed, fully one-third of the hundred most popular gay sites on the Alexa Adult List feature young men. Within
youth
, gay porn has
twinks
, analogous to
teens
in straight porn. Twinks are young guys, typically college age, most often lean, athletic, with an all-American look and feel. Almost onehalf of the hundred most popular gay porn sites feature young men, including Twink’s Orgasms, King Twinks, and Cute Young Twinks. Every gay tube site features a twinks section.
Donald Symons explained that men have a preference for younger women, an assertion confirmed by Internet porn. Young women offer the best long-term opportunity for healthy children. But this evolutionary reasoning does not apply to gay desire: a sexual interest in young men will not lead to increased numbers of children. Thus, it seems very likely that gay men inherit the same brain software targeting youth cues as straight men. This male desire for youth contrasts with the sexual desires of women, who generally prefer that their partners be older and more experienced.
But gay men aren’t exclusively interested in youth. Like straight men, a large minority of gay men can also be aroused by age and experience. Some gays seek out older men called
daddies
, paralleling the MILFs of straight porn. Also analogous to the tastes of straight men, gays prefer daddies who are confident and authoritative, who unapologetically seduce younger men. Like MILFs, daddies must be fit and physically attractive. And of course, a large penis is always welcome.
While straight men have a deep-rooted fascination with large penises, gay men are positively obsessed with them. There are hundreds of gay sites celebrating the penis, such as We Love Cock, Addicted to Cock, and Cock-n-Dick. The men in gay anime porn always have jumbo-sized members, drawn in a rainbow of bright colors. The famous gay erotic artist Tom of Finland drew men with thick, oversized organs. Many amateur gay sites simply feature collections of close-ups of penises, with no face or body visible, such as Cocks n’ Balls (“No bull, just cocks”). There’s even a common term for gay men obsessed with large members: “size queens.”
Like straight men, gay men also search for heavy actors and models far more than skinny ones. Large gay men are typically referred to as
bears
, paralleling the BBW of straight porn. Bears are usually big, hairy, and older, with a warm and friendly personality. Sites like Lusty Bears, Gay Bear World, and Bear Forest feature explicit imagery of oversized men just like BBW sites feature oversized women. Scrawny boys are relatively more popular among gays than scrawny girls are among straight men, but still remain far less popular than bears.
Gay sites like Asian Boy Feet, Jock Foot Fantasy, and Barefoot Frat celebrate men’s feet. Gay men, like straight men, can also become sexually aroused by other body parts or by cued interests in clothing, such as armpits (
Armpits.com
), saggy jeans (Saggers
GoneWild.com
), and socks (
GaySocks.com
). And, unlike women, gay men are also willing to pay money just to
look
at body parts.
Feet, butts, and chests are highly popular in both gay and straight porn, as are domination, submission, group sex, amateurs, and numerous types of squickier interests. With so many parallel interests, Internet porn suggests that gay men share the same visual cues as straight men. This fact overturns many common misconceptions about gay desire. Gay men are not looking for flamboyant, effeminate actors who are preening and emoting. Gay porn is not full of chatty conversation, Cher impersonators, or the elaborate analysis of feelings. Political messages are entirely absent. Instead, gay guys like the same things as straight guys: youth, aggressive and seductive maturity, graphic details of the body, large penises, ejaculation shots, and anonymous, emotionless, nonmonogamous sex.

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