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




  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Preface

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1 - What Do We Really Like?

  CHAPTER 2 - Monkey Pay-Per-View

  CHAPTER 3 - Elmer Fudd, Wabbit Hunter

  CHAPTER 4 - The Miss Marple Detective Agency

  CHAPTER 5 - Ladies Prefer Alphas

  CHAPTER 6 - The Sisterhood of the Magic Hoo Hoo

  CHAPTER 7 - Boys Will Be Boys

  CHAPTER 8 - A Tall Man with a Nice Tush

  CHAPTER 9 - Cheating Wives and Girls Gone Wild

  CHAPTER 10 - Lords and Lordosis

  CHAPTER 11 - Erotical Illusions

  CONCLUSION

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  “Every invention in communication technology—the printing press, photography, motion pictures, videotape, the Internet—was quickly co-opted to produce and disseminate erotica. Just as the microscope and the telescope illuminated for the first time the very small and the very large, A Billion Wicked Thoughts uses the power of the Internet to illuminate, with unprecedented wattage, human male and female desires. Ogas and Gaddam analyzed a mountain of Internet data to produce a breakthrough in the study of human sexuality.”

  —Donald Symons, professor emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara; author of The Evolution of Human Sexuality

  “A Billion Wicked Thoughts provides a brilliant, thoroughly researched, and totally engaging analysis of human sexuality using vast and original analyses of the Internet. It furnishes an X-ray of male and female sexual minds and explains why they differ so profoundly. The insights it yields are often surprising, sometimes shocking, and never boring. I couldn’t put the book down.”

  —David M. Buss, author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind and The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

  “On the Internet, the evolutionary past meets futuristic technology, enabling the blossoming of all manner of sexual tastes, fantasies, and desires. Ogas and Gaddam have mined these new sources of information—arguably the world’s largest experiment on human behavior—to produce a fascinating and terrific book on human sexuality, in all its timeless mysteries and ultramodern manifestations. This well-written, entertaining book is packed with information, ideas, and insights. There is no better way to understanding your desires, your partner’s, or anyone else’s.”

  —Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology, Florida State University

  “A brilliant romp through the darkest recesses of our sexual minds, based on the unwitting confessions of millions of anonymous Internet users.”

  —Simon LeVay, author of The Sexual Brain and Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why

  “Ogas and Gaddam mine the power of the Internet for expressions of male and female mating psychology that are unfiltered by social expectations. In the process, they unearth A Billion Wicked Thoughts, many of which depart radically from our standard script for human mating psychology. These counterintuitive insights into the sexual psyche of our species should provide much fodder for discussion among sex researchers.”

  —Paul Vasey, professor of behavioral science, University of Lethbridge

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.);

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  Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee

  Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, May 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas

  Illustration on page 48 based on original artwork by Anime Art, used under a Creative

  Commons license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-51498-6

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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  FOREWORD

  My first encounter with one of the authors of this book, Ogi Ogas, was about a year ago. True to the online nature of the research he was doing for this book, I heard from him via e-mail.

  Ogi had read a book on sexuality called Warrior Lovers that I wrote a few years ago, along with Don Symons. In it we used “slash”—stories about heterosexual male fictional characters who fall in love, such as Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock or Clark Kent and Lex Luthor—revealing an unexpected yet telling aspect of female desire.

  Slash is, in a sense, the ultimate romance for its female readers: one in which there is no doubt at the end of the tale that these heroes have found their soul mates. Ogi wanted to know if I had any new work to tell him about. To be honest, I was a bit surprised by the initial e-mail—most conversations I have about slash are with other women—but it soon became clear that Ogi was interested not only in slash but in the bigger picture of human sexuality that can be found in the vast world of the Internet. There is a lot of truth to the belief that if you can imagine it, you can find it as Internet porn. That initial e-mail was the beginning of a long and lively conversation about the nature of sexual desire.

  But this book does far more than just show how wild and wooly online porn can be. It opens your eyes to the sexual desires of millions of people and it does so in a unique and valuable way. So much research on sexuality relies on surveys and questionnaires that ask people to reveal secrets they aren’t comfortable sharing (least of all with a researcher
who will do who-knows-what with the information). There is a real advantage in finding other methods of insight into our desires—unobtrusive measures that don’t require people to actively participate in the process of data collection. Just as Don and I demonstrated with commercial erotica and slash in Warrior Lovers, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam study digital footprints on the Internet to illuminate our understanding of the stark differences between the desires of males and females.

  The most startling insights often come from the most unexpected sources. The authors’ academic background, for instance, is hardly typical for the authors of a book on sex. Ogi and Sai were classmates in graduate school and their PhDs are from the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University. Most cognitive neuroscience researchers, if you hadn’t already guessed, aren’t doing research on porn. But Ogi and Sai’s computational neuroscience background led them to ask novel questions such as “how does the brain software that generates sexual desire and arousal actually work?” No one else in their field was thinking that way. It led them to not only use the Internet as a source of data (their data-mining approach was one their mathematical background made them uniquely suited to) but also to an adaptationist approach to human sexual behavior. This approach views male and female sexuality through a functional lens, as the products of differing selection pressures (or problems) that males and females had to face (or solve) over evolutionary time.

  The adaptationist perspective has been incredibly fruitful, particularly in the area of female sexuality. Historically, there have been a number of challenges to studying female desire and sexual behavior. There have been times when it wasn’t considered appropriate for a doctor to even look at his female patients’ genitals. For male researchers to ask women about their sexual desires and behavior was simply not acceptable. Even today, a female sex researcher will have a much easier time in terms of how both participants and others view her and her work. So the study of female sexuality has languished behind that of males, especially back in the day when most scientists and researchers were male. It was often only considered legitimate to study female sexuality if you were trying to help women become pregnant. But the rise of the adaptationist perspective (led by both male and female researchers) has focused attention on questions surrounding the female choice of partners and how such choices would have resulted in greater reproductive success in the past. This research has led to discoveries about female mate preferences, the role of hormones and the ovulatory cycle in female sexuality, and the function of female orgasm.

  Without an adaptationist perspective, it’s unlikely anyone would have designed a study to look at how well exotic dancers are tipped according to their ovulatory cycle. The fact that tips are higher when dancers are more fertile tells us something about both female desirability and behavior during ovulation and how attractive this is to males.

  The adaptationist approach was also the critical tool Ogi and Sai used to unlock their exhaustive Internet data.

  And they did so elegantly and eloquently. This book provides a refreshing look at the big picture of human sexuality, informed by the ultimate unobtrusive source of data, the Internet. And regardless of your background, you’re in for a treat. You will learn about the endless variety of kinks and squicks (kinks that you find gross as opposed to a turn on) that people have. You will also learn about the essential male and female sexual psychologies, as illustrated by Elmer Fudd (the trigger-happy hunter who sees what he wants, aims and fires, and then does it all over again) and the Miss Marple Detective Agency (the female software for figuring out if this guy is the right one). If that hasn’t convinced you that you need the insights these authors have to offer, there is also the importance of the Magic Hoo Hoo, critical to all romance novels . . . part of the female desire to be sexually irresistible, and all that we can learn from watching gay porn (which is amazingly different from slash, considering both are about guy on guy action).

  If you want answers to pretty much anything you need to know about sexual desire, this is the book for you.

  Catherine Salmon

  Coauthor of Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fantasies, Evolution and

  Female Sexuality and The Secret Power of Middle Children

  PREFACE

  The World’s Largest Behavioral Experiment

  While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

  —Sherlock Holmes, Sign of the Four

  There’s one special challenge that every behavioral scientist must eventually confront. A challenge that sets all behavioral scientists apart from physicists, biologists, and engineers. It’s the reason most students of behavioral science are drawn to the field, and one reason most behavioral scientists are women. It’s also the reason it’s the only discipline requiring all its practitioners to have their ethics evaluated by committee. What is this unique challenge? The subjects of behavioral science: people.

  And people are a problem.

  Most people aren’t particularly interested in contributing to scientific progress. Who wants to keep a daily journal recording every time she yawns? Who wants to get injected with radioactive cobalt before sticking his head into a hole the size of a water bucket? There are groceries to shop for, customers to sell to, kids to pick up. What kind of person wants to do boring tasks with no personal benefit and for trivial money? Fortunately for science, there is such a person.

  The undergraduate.

  Many sciences have a standard test subject, used over and over by its practitioners. Geneticists use fruit flies, endocrinologists use guinea pigs, molecular biologists use mice. For behavioral scientists, it’s the college freshman. It’s easy to understand why: they’re cheap, in plentiful supply, easy to motivate through course requirements, and willing to endure even the most unusual experimental methods. Much of our contemporary understanding of ethics, aggression, and sexuality is based upon the behavior of adolescent psych majors. But recently, researchers have begun to wonder just how valid this understanding really is. After all, don’t undergrads—jobless, childless, and marinating in sex hormones—represent a unique specimen of Homo sapiens?

  Surely there are behavioral experiments that don’t use college students? There are indeed studies that use adults, children, and retirees. But almost all of these people are still “WEIRD”: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. A stunning 96 percent of subjects in psychology experiments from 2003 to 2007 have been WEIRD, according to Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, and his coauthors. But the real trouble, says Henrich, is that WEIRD people are different from the other 88 percent of the world’s population. He compared the result of studies on cooperation, learning, decision-making, and even basic perception that used both WEIRD and non-WEIRD subjects. Henrich found striking differences. “The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the behavioral sciences renders them—perhaps—one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens.”

  But if people are such a problem, how can we possibly observe the behavior of the full spectrum of humankind? Fortunately—amazingly—there is an unprecendented new source of behavioral data, one that reveals the unfiltered activities of a stunning diversity of people. This is the world’s largest experiment on human behavior: the Internet.

  The Internet records the activities of more than a billion people from every country on the planet. This online data offers the opportunity to view even the most fundamental human behaviors in a brand-new light. In this book, we use data from the world’s largest behavioral experiment to reexamine one of the most important and intimate of all behaviors: sexual desire. In the pages that follow, you’ll learn the truth about what men and women secretly desire—and why.

  Everyone has strong feelings about sexual behavior, and that’s a problem for the researchers who study it. We all have our favorite theories that fit our experiences and prejudices. We all
tend to think our own desires are pretty natural and normal. But other people’s desires? They’re gross, immoral, or downright dangerous. Sometimes, though, we hide desires we don’t want to talk about, don’t understand, and maybe don’t want to understand. As a result of all these intense feelings and prejudices, many twenty-first-century convictions about desire are still imbued with superstition. By analyzing the intimate desires of tens of millions of men and women and explaining the mechanisms that produce them, we hope this book might shine some light into the darkness.

  We need to warn you up front. In the pages that follow, you’re going to peer into other people’s minds without filters or cushions. The sexual brain is guaranteed to upset the politically correct, the socially conservative, and just about everyone in between. This book is not an expanded issue of Cosmopolitan or Maxim, and it’s definitely not for children. You’re certain to be challenged and occasionally dumbfounded.

  We also want to emphasize that this book is not intended as a complete catalog of the diversity of human desire; far from it. We’ve omitted many important sexual interests because of space limitations, and sometimes because we felt we simply didn’t have enough data to do justice to a particular topic. Instead, we’ve strived to convey the most defining and illuminating features of our sexual desires.

  Our lawyers instructed us to add another cautionary warning. Throughout this book, we describe many adult Web sites that depict various sexual situations. Often, these situations are depicted as genuine, even though they involve actors in scripted scenarios. Sometimes these situations involve nonprofessional performers and unscripted acts. However, much of the time it is not possible to determine whether a sexual situation depicted as genuine on a Web site is, in fact, fictional or authentic.