A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (29 page)

BOOK: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire

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A woman’s sexual pleasure isn’t just important for long-term relationships, but also matters in a short-term partner. The more pleasure a man provides a woman, the more likely she’ll want to have sex with him again instead of someone else, even if she’s someone else’s wife and “fidelity” per se isn’t at issue. But another reason why it would behoove a man to pay close attention to satisfying a short-term lover: female gossip. “For most of human history, if Ann rejected Andy for being a bad lover, it’s a good bet that everybody in the community would find out about it. That would lower Andy’s mate value among other women. So Andy better make sure that Ann is feeling good!”

Another genre of porn that appears to be based upon the female pleasure cue is
squirting
. Through a process that is still poorly understood, when some women orgasm they squirt out a jet of clear liquid, similar to male ejaculation. Since this is taken as an unfakable sign of female pleasure, squirting is quite popular with male viewers, ranking as the thirty-sixth most popular category of sexual search on Dogpile and the third most popular search on PornHub.

It’s clear that the male psychological cue of female pleasure is so potent that men are easily convinced of a woman’s pleasure, even when objectively there’s reason to be skeptical—especially considering that more than 65 percent of women say they’ve faked orgasms. For a woman, it appears there’s no better way to elicit a man’s devotion than to make him believe he’s taken her to the heights of sexual ecstasy. Men want to believe in their own sexual prowess and that sex is a source of boundless pleasure for their partner. The male cue for female sexual pleasure is entirely analogous to the female cue for a man’s emotional commitment.

Consider how often you might expect to hear the heroine in a romance novel say: “Oh, you sure like cunnilingus, don’t you? I can see how much you love cunnilingus! You’re just a big, dominant cunnilingus lover, aren’t you!”

Or, conversely, how often might you expect to hear a naked guy in porn sob, “Oh, you had me at hello!”

GIRLS GONE WILD

Most of the men and women who produce the adult content on the Internet live from paycheck to paycheck. The rest are middle class, making somewhere between the salaries of a rookie policeman and a senior computer programmer. “Despite the new sports cars gracing the splash pages of affiliate marketing Web sites, many more folks drive Pontiac Sunfires than Porsche Carreras,” admits Stephen Yagielowicz. There’s precious few millionaires in the business, not since the glory days of the 1990s, when there was little competition and even less free porn, though even then there were very few people who struck it rich.

But there’s one man who’s earned at least $100 million from his adult movie empire and who continues to rake in the dollars today. Amazingly, he’s achieved this success without filming any intercourse or fellatio, without hiring any actresses, and without building any sets. His movies aren’t available in stores and until recently weren’t even available for sale over the Internet. The man’s name is Joe Francis. His company is called Girls Gone Wild.

Francis’s videos feature college-age women voluntarily disrobing for his ultra-low-budget camera crews at Spring Break spots and university parties. He built his empire hawking his soft-core porn on late-night cable infomercials. How does he get the girls to take off their clothes? He offers them a free Girls Gone Wild T-Shirt and a chance to be ogled by millions of men. Why are men willing to shell out $19.99 just to see a collection of five-second clips of intercourse-free nudity? Joe Francis’s Gulfstream jet and silver Ferrari owe their existence to the male psychological cue of
authenticity
.

Authenticity is important to both men and women, but in different ways. Women focus on
emotional
authenticity. This is one of the primary tasks of the Detective Agency: looking for clues indicating whether a man is being honest about his level of ambition and commitment. Is he really an alpha, or is did he just learn the strategies of the Pickup Artist community? Did he really mean it when he said he loves me, or is he just trying to get me into bed?

Men, in contrast, focus on
physical
authenticity. Are those breasts that big or is she wearing a Victoria’s Secret push-up? Is she really twenty-five or just dressing young? Is her face expressing genuine sexual pleasure or is she faking it? This desire for physical authenticity manifests itself in the extraordinary popularity of “amateur” or “candid” porn.
Amateurs
is the ninth most popular category of sexual searches on Dogpile and is very popular on search engines around the world. Why is authenticity a psychological cue rather than a visual cue? Because just as most gay men prefer a hot straight guy over a hot gay guy even if they look exactly the same, most straight men prefer a hot amateur to a hot professional even if they’re identical twins.

There are a flood of Web sites that feature personal photos or videos taken from ordinary women’s MySpace or Facebook accounts, donated by ex-boyfriends, or captured by an iPhone in public without the subject’s awareness. For example, Watch My Girlfriend, Busty Candids, JayBee, Girls Next Door, and Real Emo. On reddit, one of the largest social news sites on the Web, there is a very popular Gone Wild forum where users post their own photos. Dare Dorm features videos of actual college students having group sex, purportedly sent in by the students themselves. (There is a gay version of this site called Dick Dorm.) Though many of these sites contain nudity, a very sizable portion of amateur content is non-nude and simply features attractive women going about their lives.

“I pretty much can’t watch professional porn anymore. Too many fake tits, fake orgams, fake moaning, almost every single fuck session ends with the guy blowing cum on the girl’s face,” complains one fan of amateur porn. “It reminds me of that scene from Ace Ventura 2 when he blows a gigantic loogie inside the hut, and then he and three other people come out of the hut with snot all over their faces . . . everything’s fake and retarded, especially the story.”

Amateur sites often seem to offer “proof” of women’s authenticity by their very medium, such as low-resolution photos from digital cameras or blurry shots taken at a crowded beach. On Girls Gone Wild videos, the girls are frequently filmed at Mardi Gras or Spring Break, settings with too many people and too much activity to fake. Of course, objectively speaking, there is nothing authentic about a pixelated image of a stranger whom you will never meet and whose name you may never know. Indeed, there is at least the remote possibility that a professional porn star might be contacted and persuaded to engage in sex for money. An unidentified amateur, on the other hand, is far more likely to be unattainable. But this doesn’t stop men from preferring the girl next door to
Playboy
’s Girls Next Door.

“All the porn stars are just fake, fake boobs, fake hair, fake orgasms,” writes another reddit commentator. “But you get one of those college videos, just some girl fucking her boyfriend, the girl loving it, her natural body, it’s like night and day.”

There’s a related genre known as “reality porn,” which
emulates
the authenticity of amateur porn. The Web site Mike’s Apartment presents women who trade sexual favors for a free stay in an urban apartment. Another long-lasting and highly popular example is Bang Bus (the original source of the gay Bait Bus), where pornographers ride around California in a van, looking for girls who might need a ride. They find a remarkable number of solitary ladies willing to get into a vehicle with a bunch of strange guys—and have sex with them. Sites like these try to cash in on the male desire for authenticity.

But there is another important psychological cue offered by amateur porn, especially genuine amateurs:
novelty
. Males of most species are wired to become aroused by novelty, a process first studied systematically in rats in the 1950s. Researchers observed that after a male rat had copulated with the same female a few times, he would become exhausted. He’d do the rodent equivalent of collapsing on the sofa and reaching for the remote to watch
SportsCenter
. Often, the female rat would be eager for more. She would nudge and lick him, doing her seductive best to arouse him, but he would simply lie in the nest, flaccid and unresponsive.

Then the researchers would place a new, unfamiliar female in the cage. Immediately, the male would jump to his feet and strut around, flexing his masculine haunches and showing off his versatile tail. Gone was the exhausted, drooping rodent of a moment before. Within minutes, he would be feverishly copulating with the new female. The researchers repeated this process with another female, then another. Each time, like a ragged marionette, the male would respond to the brain’s command to perform. In one study, a male copulated with a dozen females before finally collapsing in a bleary heap.

In one study of novelty conducted at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, forty male volunteers were exposed to images of heterosexual couples engaged in sexual activity. Arousal was quantified by a penile plethysmograph. One group of young men was shown the same image five times, while another group was shown five different erotic images. In the first group, the plethysmograph slowly deflated. In the second group, the plethysmograph maintained steady arousal.

After orgasming, why do men have such a difficult time getting aroused again by the same woman, but get erect so easily at the sight of a new woman? We think it’s to prevent a man from dislodging his own sperm—the same reason we believe men become flaccid after orgasming. Since the penis appears to be physically designed to shovel out competitors’ sperm, it can just as easily shovel out a man’s own sperm. By becoming flaccid and losing all sexual interest in a woman once he ejaculates inside her, a man increases the chances of impregnating her. But if a new woman appears, it’s in his biological interest to get erect and jump back into action. There might even be another man’s sperm to shovel out of the way. Of course, once he ejaculates inside the new woman, he will again become flaccid and uninterested for the very same reason: sperm preservation.

As Lord Byron lamented, “How the devil is it that fresh features /Have such a charm for us poor human creatures?” Fresh features certainly charmed Giacomo Casanova, history’s most famous rake, who narrated his eighteenth-century erotic adventures with 122 women in his detailed memoirs,
Story of My Life
. Though Casanova’s seductive prowess is dwarfed by the notorious conquests of Wilt Chamberlain (who claimed to have had sex with more than twenty thousand women), Casanova’s description of the usual course of his love affairs is revealing: “After the most pleasant highs derived from the physical enjoyment of a woman’s charms have been absorbed, there is always a notable reduction of ardor upon the repetition. Excitement diminishes, attraction wanes. Soon, and inexorably, boredom sets in. Then I must plead my unworthiness and arrange to pair the woman with some other, more suitable man, as a means to extract myself from the frustrations of apathy.”

Porn stars, by virtue of their very prevalence in porn, quickly lose their novelty value. Amateur porn offers new bodies with fresh faces. Women who strip naked and perform on webcams for paying men lament the “New Girl Effect,” whereby webcam performers make the most money they’ll ever make in their very first week. One reason that Girls Gone Wild is so very popular is that it offers an endless stream of authentic young women, each appearing just long enough to maximally activate the novelty cue before being replaced by another fresh face, igniting the male brain yet again.

But in one of the many ironies of the adult industry, the women who stand to make the most money from selling nude photos of themselves—namely, young amateurs who have never appeared in porn before—are also the ones most willing to give it away for free. In fact, many young women enjoy snapping self-portraits of themselves in their underwear or completely naked and posting them online. JayBee, Sexbook, and My Ex Girlfriend contain thousands of provocative photos of young women taken by their own hands.

These true amateur sites manage to cross the abyss separating the divergent desires of men and women. Women are satisfying their own psychological cue of irresistibility, the exhibitionist desire to be desired. Men, on the other hand, are very willing to pay to see such authentic, novel expressions of female sexual pleasure. Everybody’s happy.

Especially Joe Francis.

CHAPTER 10

Lords and Lordosis

BOOK: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire

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