A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (36 page)
Authors: Ogi Ogas,Sai Gaddam
BOOK: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire
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Many believe that by reducing our desires into a set of narrow biological cues, we eliminate all the magic of sex. Instead, by identifying those cues, we can liberate ourselves and appreciate the magic more clearly. A penis and a female body can be combined within the sorcery of the male sexual imagination to produce an entirely new creation. Dominant men and irresistible women can be magnified by the erotic artistry of the female sexual imagination to produce thrilling tales of vampires and demons.
By investigating the software of our sexual brain, we can finally appreciate the true nature of human desire. There is no such thing as an absolute, unitary “male sexuality” or “female sexuality,” but instead a number of gender-specific software components, subject to the vagaries of biology and experience. We each respond to our own unique pattern of sexual cues—some male, some female, some fixed, some flexible. Cues can flip, change, or transform, resulting in endless variations of sexual identity that defy easy labeling. But it is our sexual cues, our finite, identifiable, biological cues, that grant us all the pleasures of sex.
Our cues release us, even as they bind us.
CONCLUSION
Happy Ending or Happily-Ever-After?
Different but equal.
—Roy Baumeister, social psychologist
N
ow that we’ve finally seen what’s on the end of a billion forks, we can draw some conclusions. One of the most encouraging is this: if you are a woman, then no matter what your attributes—big or skinny, A-cup or double-E, mother or grandmother—you are the sexual ideal and greatest erotic fantasy for an abundance of men. Similarly, if you are a man, no matter what your character—aggressive or pacifist, witty or stoic, rich or penniless, scarred or delicate—there are plenty of women who can fall in love with you, and if their love is reciprocated, feel intense desire for you.
ow that we’ve finally seen what’s on the end of a billion forks, we can draw some conclusions. One of the most encouraging is this: if you are a woman, then no matter what your attributes—big or skinny, A-cup or double-E, mother or grandmother—you are the sexual ideal and greatest erotic fantasy for an abundance of men. Similarly, if you are a man, no matter what your character—aggressive or pacifist, witty or stoic, rich or penniless, scarred or delicate—there are plenty of women who can fall in love with you, and if their love is reciprocated, feel intense desire for you.
Some of us may have a harder time finding a sexual match than others, and perhaps the one we find the most attractive may not reciprocate our sentiments. Sexual attraction may not always lead to long-term compatibility. Fortunately, the Internet—in addition to being the genie of a million squicks—offers myriad new ways of finding someone whose desires complement our own.
Why is human sexuality so diverse, with homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality appearing so often alongside heterosexuality? Over the past few hundred thousand years, the design of women’s brains have diverged more and more from men’s brains in order to manage the different challenges confronted by each sex: the primary challenge of long-term investment planning for women, the primary challenge of attaining status for men. But as the software of the male brain has become ever more different from the software of the female brain, this has increased the number of opportunities for disruptions during neural development. Sometimes female software ends up with male components, sometimes male software gets female components. The very gulf that separates a woman’s brain from a man’s brain is responsible for all the wondrous diversity of human sexuality.
As our world becomes more technologically sophisticated and socially complex, this has introduced even more variations in the way our sexual cues get set and triggered. Our sexual software, originally designed to play the odds, now allows us to play the field, searching for partners who match our unique sexual tastes with unprecedented precision.
The greatest hurdle to sexual harmony is ignorance of the fact that members of the other sex (and other sexual orientations) are fundamentally different from ourselves. We all instinctively feel that other people must be
just like us
. “It just seems so natural to like men,” insisted one thirty-year-old gay man when asked why he liked gay porn that featured straight men. “To be completely honest, I guess I believe that all guys must feel the same attraction to men that I do, but straight guys just repress these feelings. So when I see a straight guy having sex with other men, it feels like validation. It’s like—
see, he’s just like me after all
.”
just like us
. “It just seems so natural to like men,” insisted one thirty-year-old gay man when asked why he liked gay porn that featured straight men. “To be completely honest, I guess I believe that all guys must feel the same attraction to men that I do, but straight guys just repress these feelings. So when I see a straight guy having sex with other men, it feels like validation. It’s like—
see, he’s just like me after all
.”
Similarly, many straight men believe that, deep down, all women secretly yearn for casual, no-strings-attached sex with strangers. Many straight women believe men have been socialized to be aggressive and promiscuous—but hide a secret emotional life that, with the proper attention, will blossom into tenderness and monogamy. It’s hard for us to accept that other people’s most intimate desires are different from our own—and when confronted with this fact, we often dismiss their desires as deviant or dangerous or just plain hurtful. When literary scholar Janice Radway asked the women in a romance discussion group about male sexuality, the women reported that they did not want to adopt male standards; they wished that men would learn to adhere to theirs. Doubtless, most men feel the same way. By identifying and understanding one another’s sexual cues, we can develop greater comfort, confidence, and compassion; only then will we have an authentic opportunity to truly connect.
Some might argue that not all of our sexual cues should be indulged—that some should be ignored or repressed. Science can’t offer any moral prescription about which cues should be judged acceptable and which unacceptable; but science does tell us that it’s difficult or impossible to modify men’s rigid cues, and even though women’s tastes are more plastic, it’s simply not possible to shut off the sleuthing of Miss Marple or her detectives. It’s also worth remembering that at various points in the twentieth century, the medical profession and mainstream society were in perfect agreement that certain sexual activities were
unacceptable
, including masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, adolescent make-out sessions, homosexuality, and interracial sex.
unacceptable
, including masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, adolescent make-out sessions, homosexuality, and interracial sex.
Our brain has a conscious, thinking cortex that is fully capable of pondering human sexuality and forming its own judgment. That’s part of the joy of being human—figuring out what to do about the unique pattern of cues that nature and experience have endowed us with. We can accept our fantasies without becoming slaves to them. Maybe you’ll explore your own cues in solitude; perhaps you’ll seek those places where your cues intersect someone else’s.
But a lucid consideration of our unique suite of cues holds tremendous potential for deep personal fulfillment—a fulfillment we may not be able to experience from anything else. As American author Edward Abbey writes, “Modern men and women are obsessed with the sexual; it is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. Like apes in a zoo, we spend our energies on the one field of play remaining; human lives otherwise are pretty well caged in by the walls, bars, chains, and locked gates of our industrial culture.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A
ccumulating and interpreting a billion wicked thoughts required the support, guidance, and kindness of a great many folks.
ccumulating and interpreting a billion wicked thoughts required the support, guidance, and kindness of a great many folks.
We’re grateful for the excellent research assistance provided by Jess Kamen, Jessie Sementelli, Kyra Smith, Lyndsey LaRiviere, Matt Feltz, Lingqiang Kong, Thao Nguyen, and Brian Wilder. Lauren Clark and Dan Schneider deserve special notice for their talent and effort.
We’d like to thank anonymous individuals who shared ideas with us: Axay, Irlemochrie, countryadameve, xannate, pbjane, contractor72. We’d also like to thank the anonymous workers of Amazon Turk.
We’d like to thank the following individuals for advice and ideas: Erik Larsen, Jeannie Larsen, Denise Leclair of the International Foundation for Gender Education, Anna Schwind, Gennady Livitz, Tom Standage, Alex Davis, Joe Rogan, Andrea Cendrowski, Chris Betke, and Eddie Ramsey.
We’d also like to thank the scientists and professionals who answered our questions or sent us material: Debra Lieberman, David Buss, Roy Baumeister, Richard Wrangham, Leda Cosmides, Elaine Hatfield, Meredith Chivers, Nicholas Pound, Albert-László Barabási, Robert Boyd, Joseph Plaud, Anne Lawrence, Peter Brugger, Serge Stoleru, William Reiner, Joshua Greene, Elizabeth Hines of Project HAL, Peter Gray, Matthew McIntyre, Larry Cahill, Dominique de Quervain, Ernst Fehr, Daniel Kruger, J. Michael Bailey, Simon Lajeunesse, Sherif Karama, Irv Binik, James Roney, Margaret McCarthy, Diane Halpern, Gilbert Herdt, Ed Hagen, Carla Harenski, Jonathan Haidt, Tom Standage, Jim Jansen, Eujern Lim, Alan Said, Sam Gosling, Leonard Koziol, Dan Ariely, Melita Giummarra, Isabelle Henault, Benjamin Edelman, Yonie Harris, Alice Dreger, Elise Seip, Julie Albright, Peter Skomoroch, Lisa Ruble, George M. Realmuto, Daniel Kruger, William Tooke, Lindsay Weekes, Tyler Cowen, Andrey Anokhin, Joe Henrich, Henry Jenkins, Adam Wilson of Mira Books, and Raelene Gorlinsky of Ellora’s Cave.
We’d also like to thank Jasun Mark of Straight Guys for Gay Eyes, Laurel of Literotica, Paul Morrisson, Randy McAnus, Collin Ireland, Xvideos, Mack Mack, Max the Cat, Twilight Wars Author, Sam Lawrence of Blackbox Republic, Doug of Rabbit Reviews, Kellie Barker and Chris Baker of Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network (AEBN), Wetlook model and producer TracieZ, Erik Elsas of eewetlook.com, Joan Irvine of ASACP, Bob Smart of Booble, Lewis at Viv Thomas, Steve Lightspeed, Mark Greenspan of CCBill, Monica of Monica’s Reviews, and Scott Rabinowitz.
We’d also like to thank Dan Bullock and Barbara Shinn-Cunningham for their support at Boston University. We’d especially like to thank Ron Tanner for his literary guidance.
We’d like to thank those who helped us with women’s literature, including Erastes, Bo Balder, Susanna Carr, Alla Kalinina, Brita Hansen, Sylvia Volk, and Caroline Seawright.
We’d like to thank the publishing professionals who made this book possible, including attorney Gary Mailman, copy editors Rachael Hicks and Richard Willett, Jennifer Manguera, the magnificent Anna Sproul, editorial assistant Lily Kosner, Brian Tart, Christine Ball, and Gail Ross. Ogi would also like to thank Chris Castellani and Chip Cheek of Grub Street.
We’d like to thank the following individuals for reviewing drafts of our manuscript: Heather Ames, Greg Amis, Arash Fazl, Meredith Wright, Nico Foley, Arup Sen, Sara Trowbridge, Chris Yeomans, Karen Ferreira, Rena Xu, David Mou, Nicole Sarofeen, Peter Crossley, Antje Ihlefeld, Arash Fazl, Arun Ravindran, Darja Djordjevic, Elizabeth Ricker, Max Versace, Rohit Nambisan, Sameer Vaidya, Bo Balder, Sylvia Volk, Jess Kamen, Peter Kouroubacalis, John LaVerde, Kevin Jiggetts, Jessie Sementelli, Diwakar Chada, Aishwarya Mantha, Paulo Figueiredo, John Ogas, Ajish Potty, Shubhakoti Srikanth, Sameer Vaidya, Seema Rao, Jayaram Iyer, Murthy Bhavaraju, Santiago Olivera, Robert Kozma, Harsha Vellanki, Thomas Heiman, Sara Al-Tukhaim, Robin Sherk, Diksha Kuhar, Mrinmoyee Das, and Polina Ogas.
Special thanks to Eric X and Tiiu for sharing so much about their relationship and a mysterious world previously unknown to us.
Special thanks to Chris Coyne of OkCupid, who generously supplied us with terrific data.
Special thanks to C. Curtis Sassaman, who gave us invaluable information about running a porn site affiliate. His new Web site is poundedink.com.
We’d like to thank the extraordinarily generous and supportive Alec Helmy, who shared so many contacts and granted us the opportunity to attend the Xbiz conference.
Extra special thanks to Angie Rowntree and Colin Rowntree, who invited us into their home and shared so much precious data with us.
Thanks to Paul Vasey, whose help was so meaningful. We’d also like to thank the brilliant and always-diligent Stephanie Ortigue. Very special thanks to Frank Guenther.
We feel deep gratitude toward Steven Pinker, whose books, ideas, and research influenced us so profoundly.
Titmowse is one-of-a-kind and we hope we get to meet her in person one day. We’d also like to give very special thanks to Perry Stathopoulos of PornHub, who provided us with so much useful data and gave us an illuminating tour of the Manwin Canada offices.
We’d like to give outrageous thanks to Peter Kouroubacalis and John LaVerde, who showed us movies we never knew existed.
The remarkable Stephen Yaglieowicz was unfailingly helpful and interesting. He’s a bright light in a murky industry.
We’d like to give great thanks to Snake and Naif of Fantasti.cc, who invited us in and gave us the run of the place.
We’d really like to single out Marta Meana, whose feedback was unparalleled. She is a role model for all female scientists.
Of course, this book wouldn’t exist without the creative energy of Peter Morley-Souter and Rosa Morley-Souter—two Internet legends who may not be quite so anonymous after this book.
We’d like to offer our heartfelt thanks to Stephen Morrow, who believed in this book from the start, and gave us the freedom and support to pursue it the way we wanted.
We’d also like to thank the very best literary agent in America, Howard Yoon. You’re the grandmaster. Your support and talent mean everything to us.
But one man deserves our greatest praise. His intelligence, erudition, and unstinting generosity affected every atom of this book: Donald Symons. We walk in his shadow and follow his light. He opened up a universe to us, larger than our imagination, that never stops growing. Though we believe he has found the true path, any flaws, errors, isinterpretations, or outright howlers are our full responsibility. If we’ve strayed from the path, it’s on us and us alone.
NOTES
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