A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (33 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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“Transsexual Porn is classified as Straight Specialty,” blogs Wendy Williams, a bulky transsexual performer who has starred in eleven movies. “So obviously the adult industry had to market our porn to those who buy it, guess what that is STRAIGHT men. There is no market for a gay company to produce this content so most are all big straight companies like Evil Angel and Devils Film.” Housekeeper, who runs several transsexual porn sites, including Transsexual Brazil and Stroking Queens, agrees. “My main audience, and the audience for most shemale porn, are straight dudes. That’s how it’s always been. I will say that all of the visitors to transsexual sites are straight. Many of them are married men, men in relationships with real women, and single men.”
T-girl porn has exploded in popularity over the past decade, with a dazzling variety of sites on the Alexa Adult List: She Gods, Shemale Fly, Evil Shemales, TranSex Domination, and Submissive SheMale. In fact, if you categorize the sites on the Alexa Adult List by the names of the sites, then T-girl sites are the fourth most popular category of adult Web site. “Transsexual porn is one of the largest-selling niches in all of straight porn. It’s a huge moneymaker,” asserts Wendy Williams. T-girl porn is popular in every country on the Internet, but especially in Brazil and Southeast Asia. “Shemales” is the sixteenth most popular sexual search on Dogpile, more popular than “butts,” “threesomes,” and “interracial sex.”
Here is the search history for one T-girl fan, Mr. Miami Latino.
transexuales calientes
chat de transexuales latinos
transexual cum
transexuals fucking women
lesbian transexuals
miami hot latin girls
semen transexual
Most men who search for T-girl porn either search exclusively for T-girl content or a mix of T-girl porn and straight porn. But there is a minority of men who search for both gay and T-girl content. For example, Mr. Squirt.
absolute shemale
squirt
gay male porn galleries
squirt
absolute shemale
squirt
gaybeef
squirt
Does this suggest that perhaps some gay men really do like T-girls? Not necessarily. Two sociologists visited a Chicago bar frequented by transsexual women and their male admirers. Scientists refer to these T-girl fans by the rather intimidating term
gynandromorphophiliacs
. The sociologists approached various men at the bar and interviewed them about their sexual orientation and tastes. So how many T-girl fans were straight? About 60 percent. And the others? The remaining 40 percent were bisexual men. There were no gay men at the bar.
So what drives straight men’s interest in T-girls? The fact that as represented in online porn, the T-girl is an erotical illusion.
The T-girl consists of the novel juxtaposition of two kinds of male visual cues. First is a set of cues for
femininity
: breasts, butts, curvy figures, and feminine facial features and mannerisms. All of these cues trigger the male brain’s usual arousal from an attractive female body. But there is another vivid cue: the penis. As we’ve learned, the penis has a special power to activate the male sexual brain. When you superimpose these two cues, the result is an erotic version of the
Mona Lisa
smile.
“I like her soft looks, sexy body. Very nice long legs,” muses one T-girl fan on Fantasti.cc. “And then there’s that added bonus . . . I can’t really explain why it affects me.”
A sense of inexplicable enigma often colors men’s response to shemale porn, similar to most people’s reactions to optical illusions. “I’m enchanted by her figure. It’s svelte, and the long hair is really nice and feminine. Plus a sex toy that just kind of pops out in my brain,” explains another shemale fan. Wendy Williams is used to it. “They like the feminine qualities that make us a transsexual and the dick is sort of a fetish.” The femininity cues are the reason gay men aren’t interested.
Like Agastya’s hand-crafted Lopamudra, the T-girl porn is an erotical illusion comprised of a conjunction of different anatomical cues. Many men who search for T-girl porn also search for specific female body parts, such as Mr. Sexy:
shemale galleries
sexy butt babes
sexy boob babes
sexy bikini babes
sexy boobed babes
Searches for T-girl porn are also highly correlated with searches for strap-on dildos. The nature of the erotical illusion of T-girl porn is made even more vivid in artistic erotica freed from physical constraints. In Japanese anime, transsexual characters are known as
futanari
. Futanari porn reveals exactly what appeals to straight men about T-girls. Futanari characters are drawn with hyperfeminine bodies, typically very young, with large round breasts and hourglass figures, large eyes with long eyelashes, and beautiful faces. They also possess giant horse-sized penises. Typical futanari features schoolgirls with giant protrusions beneath their plaid skirts, teenage girls with pink hair and a bulge in their jeans, slender ballerinas in tutus sporting erections as long as their slender legs.
Recently, contemporary adult webmasters have begun to understand the precise appeal of T-girl porn. They’ve found ways to manufacture “artificial shemales” that do not involve the use of actual transsexual actresses. One site, Futanaria.com, uses real women. The women are voluptuous and curvy, with enormous strap-on dildos that look like authentic if colossally oversized penises. The site is full of scenes of attractive, busty women stroking their giant artificial manhood until geysers of fake semen spray across the room. The site makes the erotical illusion very clear: visual cues of femininity juxtaposed with the visual cue of a penis. What about the opposite? What about someone with strong muscular arms, tattooed biceps, a bald head, a beard—and a vagina? The most famous (and perhaps only) transsexual male porn star is the cigar-puffing Buck Angel. Buck Angel combines a number of visual cues of masculinity with the single feminine cue of a vagina. Straight men express no interest in Buck Angel, and some find him disquieting. Many gay men, however, find Buck Angel extremely intriguing. “I would definitely love to try out Buck,” explains one thirty-two-year-old gay man. “He’s hot, and there’s just something very dizzying about him that whirls around in my brain.”
Women have created their own parallel world of protagonists accessorized with unnatural add-ons. But in keeping with the kind of female cues preferred by Miss Marple, these extra appendages are of the emotional and psychological variety.
VAMPIRE ANGST
 
Beth’s neck jacked back up as she met the man’s steady, feral gaze. She couldn’t see the color of his eyes through the glasses, but his stare burned.
As he stopped in front of her, she felt a blast of pure, unadulterated lust. For the first time in her life her body got wickedly hot. Hot and wet.
Pure, raw, animal chemistry. Whatever he had, she wanted.
On impulse her hands went to the lapels of his jacket, and she tried to pull him down to her mouth. He captured both her wrists in one of his hands. “Easy.”
She struggled against his hold, and when she couldn’t get free she arched her back. Her breasts strained against her T-shirt, and she rubbed her thighs together, anticipating what it would feel like to have him between them. “Sweet Jesus,” he muttered. She smiled up at him, relishing the sudden hunger in his face.
Wrath was dumbfounded. And he wasn’t a vampire who got struck stupid very often.
This half-human was the hottest thing he’d ever gotten anywhere near. And he’d cozied up to a lightning strike once or twice before.
This abridged passage, from J. R. Ward’s
Dark Lover
, is representative of a female erotical illusion that has rocketed to the top of best-seller lists and the heights of box office sales:
paranormal romance
. Over the past decade, sexy vampires, lusty werewolves, and a wide variety of supernatural beasties have replaced mere mortals as the most popular romance heroes and heroines. Stephenie Meyer leads the pack of paranormal authors with her Twilight series of novels about a pretty high school senior named Bella Swan who must choose between angsty vampire hottie Edward Cullen and loyal werewolf hottie Jacob Black. Twilight is so popular that U.S. senator Amy Klobuchar asked Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan if she belonged to Team Edward or Team Jacob. At times Meyer’s Web site has received more than a million visitors a day. The vast majority of her fans are women.
The rapid rise of the paranormal in romance is largely due to an extraordinary variety of erotical illusions. The paranormal takes the psychological cues inherent to the genre and twists them into marvelous new variations that satisfy Miss Marple in deliciously fresh new ways. Paranormals are the cream cheese sushi of the female sexual brain.
Consider paranormal heroes: wizards, necromancers, werewolves, and—most common of all—vampires. These supernatural males are alphas among alphas. Vampires are exceptionally strong and powerful. They’re often immortal. They know how to fight and are willing to annihilate the competition. They are fully capable of protecting the ones they love from a range of mundane and otherworldly dangers. In most tellings, such as Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series and Anne Rice’s Lestat series, vampires are fabulously wealthy, having acquired land and treasure across centuries. They’re prone to owning mansions and castles, and inevitably have far-flung networks of “old money” and behind-the-scenes power. The Validus vampires in F. E. Heaton’s
Winter’s Kiss
, for example
,
are a one-thousand-year-old vampire bloodline that influences European politics.
“Edward Cullen has, for millions of passion-starved better halves worldwide, become the undead embodiment of everything the contemporary schlub seems to have shed: danger, poetry, strength, speed, eternal devotion, and an insatiable hunger for the jugular,” complains Jeff Gordinier, the editor at large at
Details
magazine. “Meanwhile, the defanged mortal males of Earth, their rumps firmly planted in front of the flat-screen and their breath faintly fragrant of Pirate’s Booty, have become, thanks to Edward, one big collective cuckold.”
Werewolves are also alphas—even when they’re not. In most paranormals, including the works of Stephenie Meyer, Charlaine Harris, and Keri Arthur, werewolves operate in packs. Every pack has a true designated alpha wolf. However, any werewolf has monstrous strength and ferocity and refuses to back down from a challenge. They are intensely loyal to protecting anyone who is part of the pack, including human girlfriends.
Most supernatural heroes, whether storm-calling wizards, fire-breathing demons, or mind-reading psychics, have the kind of strength, competence, confidence, and willingness to defend women that sends Miss Marple into happy fits of fast-track approval. Particularly considering that paranormal heroes offer especially sweet emotional centers inside their tough supernatural shells.
In J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series of erotic paranormals, the vampires are led by the blind vampire prince Wrath, a super-alpha who is introduced as follows:
Wrath was six feet, six inches of pure terror dressed in leather. His hair was long and black, falling straight from a widow’s peak. Wraparound sunglasses hid eyes that no one had ever seen revealed. Shoulders were twice the size
of most males’. With a face that was both aristocratic and brutal, he looked like the king he was by birthright and the soldier he’d become by destiny.
Wrath is an erotical illusion. The description of Wrath comes close to the exaggerated caricature of an impossibly broadshouldered, improbably thin-waisted hero on the Cartoon Network, but since Wrath is a mythic being it makes this impossible blend of cues possible—and highly exciting to his female audience. The Amazon Kindle allows readers to highlight passages in their e-books and displays the passages that are most frequently highlighted by
all
readers of the same book. The above description of Wrath is one of the five most popular passages in
Dark Lover
.
Wrath has other cues that enrapture the Detective Agency. He is a thousand years old, immortal, the leader of an elite, internationally influential brotherhood of vampires, controls a kingly amount of investments in banks across the globe, and has killed hundreds of human men who pissed him off for various reasons. He’s an erotic concoction that hyperstimulates female psychological cues of experience, wealth, competence, and Miss Marple–swooning dominance.
Though vampires turbocharge cues of masculinity, the erotical illusions are only complete when these invincible heroes are brought to their knees by the irresistibility of an ordinary woman and her ability to unlock his secret heart. In the
Dark Lover
excerpt that opens this section, the half-human Beth has a Magic Hoo Hoo that dumbfounds Wrath, even though his palate has been jaded by “cozying up to lightning.” Another J. R. Ward vampire, named Rhage, has been cursed so that he possesses an unchecked lust for blood and women. When roused, his beast within is only satisfied by merciless, mindless sex with women he can hardly remember. And yet this formidable vampire ends up being vanquished by his deep and instant love for an averagelooking cancer survivor named Mary who volunteers at a suicide hotline.

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