A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (5 page)

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

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It’s certainly possible that people are more likely to use a search engine to locate rare interests that are not well represented on popular adult sites. Perhaps most people have no need to use a search engine to locate the “vanilla” porn they can easily find on mainstream, high-traffic sites. Consequently, we might hypothesize that the popularity of squicky interests is overstated on the Dogpile list. But this seems unlikely for a number of reasons. For one thing, many of these seemingly unusual interests
are
well represented in mainstream porn sites—including transsexual pornography, which is often featured on the front page of PornHub, the world’s most popular adult video site.

Moreover, the most popular sexual search category by far is
youth
, which is exceedingly well represented in mainstream porn sites. It appears people are using search engines like Dogpile even when they want to locate sexual interests that are very easy to find. Finally, the relative popularity of the interests expressed in sexual searches—including both squicky and familiar interests—is confirmed using a variety of other online data, such as Web site traffic, porn site subscriptions, and porn video downloads.

So now that we’ve categorized all 55 million Dogpile sexual searches, just how diverse is the full list of
Homo sapiens’
sexual interests as expressed on the Internet? Not very diverse, it turns out. Just twenty different interests account for 80 percent of all searches. That’s rather remarkable. With less than two dozen interests, you can satisfy the desires of almost everyone who uses a search engine to find erotic content. In fact, the thirty-five top interests account for 90 percent of all searches. This doesn’t even include
cheerleaders
(#79),
massage
(#51), or
virgins
(#61). This means that most people’s desires are clustered together into a relatively small set of common interests. When it comes to our kinks, we all have a lot more in common than you might think.

Strictly speaking, Rule 34 may be true. If you can imagine it, there is almost certainly porn of it on the Internet. If you Google “skeleton porn” or “sexy funeral director” or “erotic stories about lumpy potatoes” you will find results. But most of us aren’t spending our time looking for this stuff. Instead, the vast majority of our desires are shared by crowds of other people.

But some of you are probably thinking, hang on. There’s something pretty glaring about this list of sexual searches. It sure seems to reflect the tastes of
men
. Certainly
breasts
,
cheerleaders
, and
gay
are predominantly male interests. Does this mean that women don’t use the Internet to satisfy their own desires?

The following tables list the most popular “erotic” Web sites, though it would be more accurate to say these Web sites reflect the interests of men and women’s sexual brains. The first table shows the five most popular Web sites among men. The second table shows five Web sites popular among women, including the most popular fan fiction Web site, the most popular romance author Web site, the most popular romance novel Web site, and the most popular porn site for women.

On the Web, men prefer images. Women prefer stories. Men prefer graphic sex. Women prefer relationships and romance. This is also reflected in the divergent responses of men and women when asked what sexual activities they perform on the Internet.

When men and women are free to search for anything they want behind the anonymity of their computer screen, they don’t just seek out different interests. They seek out different modes of stimulation. Men prefer to watch, women prefer to read and discuss. This fundamental dichotomy in sexual interests confirms the predictions of one of the most influential sex scientists, Donald Symons.

“In the male fantasy realm of pornotopia, sex is sheer lust and physical gratification, devoid of courtship, commitment, durable relationships, or mating effort. Porn videos contain minimal plot development, focusing instead on the sex acts themselves and emphasizing the display of female bodies, especially close-ups of faces, breasts, and genitals,” explains Symons and psychologist Catherine Salmon in their book,
Warrior Lovers
. “The female fantasy realm of romantopia is quite different. The goal of a romance novel’s heroine is never sex for its own sake, much less impersonal sex with strangers. The core of a romance novel’s plot is a love story in the course of which the heroine overcomes obstacles to identify, win the heart of, and ultimately marry the one man who is right for her.”

Biological anthropologist Donald Symons is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Symons is retired from research, living with his wife in a canyon looking up at the chaparral-covered Santa Ynez Mountains. He’s a vegetarian and an ardent fan of comedian Richard Pryor. He is also the most cited living researcher in the contemporary science of sex. His pioneering work is referenced by scientists investigating an astonishingly diverse range of phenomena, including gay relationships, female fantasies of coercion, incest avoidance, anal sex, and porn star hip size.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing established the science of human desire with
Psychopathia Sexualis
in 1886. But the establishment of the “hard science” of human desire waited nearly another century for the publication of Symons’s 1979 book
The Evolution of Human Sexuality
. Many prominent scientists have been influenced by this book, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker: “
The Evolution of Human Sexuality
was a landmark in its synthesis of evolutionary biology, anthropology, physiology, psychology, fiction, and cultural analysis, written with a combination of rigor and wit. It was a model for all subsequent books that apply evolution to human affairs, particularly mine.” For the first time, human desire was integrated within the theoretical framework of evolutionary biology. This theory-based approach to desire was something quite different from Alfred Kinsey’s observational approach.

Whereas Kinsey and most previous sexual research described
what
men and women liked, Symons attempted to explain
why
men and women liked such different things.

THE DELICIOUS ELEMENTS OF DESIRE

Humans find a tremendous variety of food to be delicious: bananas, oysters, milk, bacon, peanuts, anchovies, zucchini. And that’s just the natural goodies. The aisles of modern supermarkets are overflowing with a cornucopia of manufactured edibility, including Tater Tots and bagel pizzas. Confronted with such an astounding diversity of culinary desires, one might be tempted to argue that they can’t possibly be reduced to a tiny set of hardwired tastes.

But in fact, our mind’s taste software responds to just five perceptual inputs: sweet, salty, sour, savory, and bitter. (Some researchers also suggest fatty and metallic.) Each of these taste cues is processed by a cue-specific neural pathway, elicits a cue-specific subjective experience, and fulfills a cue-specific evolutionary function. For example, our taste for sweetness detects sugar, which we need for energy. Consequently, our taste software has evolved so that we find sweetness desirable and rewarding. Our bitterness taste detects alkaloid substances, which are often associated with toxic plants. Thus, our taste software has evolved to find bitterness unpleasant.

Of course, our taste software is also designed to be highly adaptive. Even though all foods can be reduced to a handful of taste cues, the taste combinations we prefer are influenced by both culture and experience. We like pork chops or curry because that’s what Mom made. Most Americans don’t like braised cow tongues because they were never exposed to them growing up, though they are a common Filipino dish. College students eat a lot of Hot Pockets because they’re cheap and easy to prepare. We can learn to appreciate food that is bitter, like coffee or olives. But no culture enjoys cinnamon-sprinkled feces.

Food is a wonderful example of how our brains appreciate an infinite variety of stimuli using a limited set of perceptual cues. This is possible because taste cues combine together to form different amalgams of taste. A chocolate-covered almond consists of sweet and bitter cues, while a dill pickle consists of sour and salty cues. People learn to love highly complex taste combinations, like wine or caviar.

We believe that our sexual desire software works in a similar fashion. Just as all food can be broken down into a finite set of taste cues that activate our taste software, our sexual interests can be broken down into a finite set of sexual cues that activate our desire software. The idea that our brains contain innate mechanisms designed to detect specific sexual cues originated with Donald Symons. “It is clear that human beings evolved psychological mechanisms for detecting and assessing cues of mate value that are independent of other people’s preferences and are highly resistant to cultural modification. These mechanisms account for a very large proportion of individual variability in attractiveness.”

But there is one crucial difference between taste cues and sexual cues—a gender difference. Though the brains of both men and women are wired to detect the same taste cues, when it comes to sexual cues, things are different. It’s as if men were born with detectors for salty and sour taste cues, and women were born with detectors for sweet and bitter taste cues. We could both eat the same peanut brittle but experience different flavors: a man would report a salty taste, a woman would describe its sweetness.

We opened this chapter by describing the historical difficulties in determining what people desire. Symons knew enough about people’s desires to craft a theory of male and female sexual cues that remains a cornerstone of the science of desire. But the Internet expands our knowledge of what people desire as never before. When we are first confronted with this awesome diversity—as expressed in the Dogpile sexual searches—we might believe it cannot be reduced to a simple set of elements. But our brain’s taste software shows how an apparent infinitude of appealing stimuli can be reduced to a finite set of cues.

We sifted through a billion different Web searches, including a half million personal search histories. We analyzed hundreds of thousands of online erotic stories and thousands of romance e-novels. We looked at the forty thousand most trafficked adult Web sites. We examined more than 5 million sexual solicitations posted on online classifieds. We listened to thousands of people discussing their desires on online message boards.

The goal? To understand the specific innate cues that trigger desire in women and men.

CHAPTER 2

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

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