A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (47 page)

BOOK: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire
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177
also controls another critical bodily process: orgasm
Marthol & Hills (2004).
177
to test this hypothesis with an ingenious experiment
Dutton & Aron (1974).
178
The experiment presented female subjects with two different conditions
Schacter & Singer (1962), Dutton & Aron (1974), Meston & Heiman (1998), Brotto & Gorzalka (2002), Palace & Gorzalka (1990), Meston (2000), Meston & Gorzalka (1995).
178
to Josef Mengele’s medical examination table
Kahr (2008).
180
“She wore her very best lingerie”
http://www.hotwifeblog.com/2010/06/11/her-first-time-alone/
.
180
men who search for “cheating wife”
Perry Stathopoulos, the CTO of PornHub, supplied us with a variety of data about users’ activities on their Web site. One data set was a collection of most frequent search terms entered into the PornHub search engine, and number of videos viewed per search term. The data was collected in February 2010.
181
the most common two-word phrases in cuckold stories
Stories were scraped from the
Loving Wives
category on Literotica in April 2010.
182
in videos containing a white man and a black man
43 out of 50 videos feature black and white men feature the black male as the top. Videos were retrieved and examined in August 2010.
182
Sperm competition refers to a variety of physiological and behavioral adaptations
Birkhead & Maller (1998).
183
giant testicles of the chimpanzee
Dixson & Brancroft (1999).
183
the bulbous head and extended length of the human penis
Gallup et al. (2006). Also see
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=secrets-of-the-phallus
.
183
the inevitable flaccidity men experience after ejaculation
Gallup et al. (2006).
183
Dogs, deer, and kangaroos
Birkhead & Hosken (2008).
183
Male stickleback fish
Zbinden et al. (2004).
184
frequently perceived as more dominant
A female Duke undergraduate gained notoriety in October 2010 for her parody of a thesis presentation that detailed her actual sexual liaisons with student athletes at Duke. The PowerPoint presentation listed the sexual perks and quirks of the thirteen men she allegedly slept with. She makes note of how one of her partners–a Caucasian man—implores her to profess love for big black penises while in bed with her.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/07/karen-owen-duke-sex-rati_n_754186.html
.
184
British psychologist Nicholas Pound
Pound (2002).
184
videos portraying “polyandrous sexual activity”
Pound (2002).
185
the three hundred most-viewed group sex videos
The three hundred most-viewed group sex videos were collected from PornHub on January 9, 2010, and “compilation” videos were removed.
mean # of males per video: 2
mean # of females per video: 2.6
Then, we removed “threesome” videos, which left a set of videos with four or more sexual partners:
mean # of males per video: 3.75 mean # of females per video: 3.31
In the set of threesome videos, there were more males in 63 videos and more females in 91 videos.
185
Men fantasize about group sex more often than women do
Ellis & Symons (1990).
186
shrieking, shivering female orgasms
When asked whether female orgasms in porn were fake or real, one porn director replied, “More fake than real. I have some girls who always fake it, they find the pressure of the cameras and lights, the added self-awareness stop them from getting to orgasm. Other girls find that as soon as the cameras are on they come from the smallest of things. One girl in particular will come multiple times in every scene she does. Everyone is wired different, I don’t think you can say everyone does this or everyone does that.” He added, “I really dislike guys using Viagra or similar drugs. Anything that raises the blood pressure makes their faces go bright red as soon as they start fucking, which really shows up on camera. I think it looks terrible.” Personal e-mail communication from Stephen Yagielowicz, August, 2010. In the same communication, Yagielowicz observed, “While some actresses are better at acting than others, it appears that acting is all it is—and that even when the guy is ‘acting’ it does not go unnoticed, or undesired. While I suspect that most fans believe that the girls are actually having orgasms (just as most guys believe they always give their lover an orgasm), I also suspect that many performers are thinking about the new shoes they will buy or whatever, rather than being immersed in the scene. It’s like big time wrestling: some believe it’s all real, from the hits to the back story. Same with porn. Having said that, girls like Lezley Zen and Aria (not Giovanni, just Aria), Tory Lane and others have been thought of as ‘giving it their all,’ while the ‘squirters’ tend to carry more of a ‘she’s really cumming!’ audience, with girls such as Tianna Lynn and Annie Cruz coming to mind with no pun intended. I also think you used the right word: ‘actresses’—this is after all about fantasy, not reality. Audiences are not there to see their bored wives wearing hair curlers and saying ‘hurry up.’
186
one of the most potent psychological cues
Bogaert (2001). “The results indicated that, when given a choice to view different media materials, the men chose a broad range of media materials, although the ‘female insatiability’ films were more popular than the other sexual films (e.g., ‘erotic’ or ‘violent’).” Also, Brewer & Hendrie (2010).
187
On Fantasti.cc, we analyzed ten thousand comments
We scraped 10,000 comments posted in response to the hundred highest rated videos on Fantasti.cc in March 2010. These comments were then categorized by workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The comments were binned into seven categories. A particular comment was categorized and counted if at least two of three workers applied the same category tag.
subject is attractive, 6033
praise of anatomy, 5157
subject is expressing pleasure, 4806
comment on sex, 4047
None of the above, 3443
subject is “dirty,” 2739
subject is expressing surprise or fear, 1148
188
are wired to pay attention to whether his partner is engaged
See
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/buss-passion.html
.
188
“if Ann rejected Andy for being a bad lover”
Personal e-mail communication with Donald Symons, 2010.
188
more than 65 percent of women say they’ve faked orgasms
Muehlenhard & Shippee (2009), Brewer & Hendrie (2010).
189
the men and women who produce the adult content on the Internet live from paycheck to paycheck
Personal e-mail communication with Stephen Yagielowicz, August 2010. Profitability has been further eroded by tube sites, including illegitimate tubes based in eastern Europe.
191
“I pretty much can’t watch professional porn anymore.”
http://www.consolecity.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-63740.html
.
192
especially genuine amateurs
Symons & Ellis (1990). From
http://wwwscientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=one-reason-why-humans-are-special-a-2010-06-22
: “In a 1990 study published in the
Journal of Sex Research
, evolutionary psychologists Bruce Ellis and Donald Symons found that 32 percent of men said that they’d had sexual encounters in their imagination with more than 1,000 different people, compared to only 8 percent of women. Men also reported rotating in from their imaginary rosters one imagined partner for another during the course of a single fantasy more often than women did.”
Toates (2009). “Novelty and increased appetitive behavior is associated with increased activation of dopamine in the N.acc.” Also see Fiorino et al. (1997), Woodson (2002).
192
a process first studied systematically in rats in the 1950s
Wilson et al. (1963).
192
one study of novelty conducted at the State University of New York, Stony Brook
Odonohue & Geer (1985).
CHAPTER 10
 
195
Geladas are a peculiar and little-known species of monkey
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Ethiopias-Exotic-Monkeys.html
.
197
increase a male’s social status
Blakemore et al. (2010). “Rather, there is emerging evidence from both human and nonhuman primate studies that testosterone increases motivation to attain higher status, but the specific effects on behavior are dependent on the social and developmental context.”
197
the monkey will rise swiftly up the dominance hierarchy
Panksepp (1998).
197
The Blind Side
Lewis (2007). See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oher
.
197
the naked mole rat
Holmes et al. (2007), Holmes et al. (2008).
198
more dominant a human male becomes
Holmes et al. (2008), Bernhardt et al. (1998). Boston men may have experienced the most sex in America during the 2007 sports season, when the Red Sox, Celtics, and Patriots all made it to the championships in their respective sports.
199
social dominance is a complex cognitive process
Marsh et al. (2009), Allison et al (2000), Chiao et al. (2008).
199
sexual dominance and sexual submission appear to be entirely managed by subcortical processes
There’s precious little research on the neural underpinnings of sexual dominance and submission in humans, but sexual behavior in rats has proved to be a good model for basic sexual behavior and endocrine action in humans. Becker (2008), Agmo and Ellingsen (2003), Pfaus (2009), Paredes (2003).
Herbert (2008): “The medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus (MPOA) is known to be involved in masculine patterns of sexual behaviour in rodents and monkeys, and to be sexually dimorphic, though, it should be pointed out, there are suggestions that it promotes sexual performance (the ability to copulate) more than motivation for masculine-type sex. Garcia-Garcia-Falgueras and Swaab find that part of this area, INAH3 in humans, is larger and has a greater number and density of neurons in males than females, and that male-to-female transsexuals (MtF) resemble females.”
Evidence from rat studies: Becker et al. (2001), Hoshina et al. (1994), Paredes & Baum (1997).
200
Mr. Panties
User #13263062.
201
Mr. Diapers
User# 23251711.
201
Mr. Gardens
User # 3214991.
203
women are not motivated by a testosterone-fueled drive
Mazur & Booth (1998). A normal man has about ten nanograms of testosterone per milliliter of blood; women have roughly one-seventh this amount. Female testosterone levels are not responsive to anticipated or successful status competition.
203
This changes if you give women testosterone
van Honk et al. (2004), Dabbs & Hargrove (1997).
203
Female Viagra already exists and it’s called testosterone
Because people who are deprived of food tend to have more frequent daydreams about food, it might be expected that sexual deprivation would have the same effect on sexual thoughts. The little evidence that exists, however, suggests otherwise. Those with the most active sex lives have the most sexual fantasies. Studies have shown that frequency of fantasy is positively correlated with masturbation frequency, intercourse frequency, number of lifetime sexual partners, and self-rated sex drive.

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