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

  Finally—and most important—we can’t emphasize enough that when it comes to understanding human desire, scientists focus on statistics rather than individuals. We might say that men are taller than women because the average height of the human male is taller than the average height of the human female. But perhaps you yourself are a tall woman or a short man, defying the averages and exposing the limitations of such generalizations. Nevertheless, by identifying a real difference in the average heights of men and women, scientists can then look for reasons why—such as the discovery that the pituitary gland releases more growth hormones in men than in women.

  We can understand how the sexual brain works using statistics and large sample sizes. But you—you are a wholly unique combination of desires and experiences that almost certainly exists nowhere else. No matter how unique your own tastes, we hope this book might help you understand why you like the things you do—and why your partner’s tastes can seem so different.

  To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.

  —Donald Symons

  CHAPTER 1

  What Do We Really Like?

  Sexual Cues

  The study of desire has never been for the faint of heart.

  —Mata Meana, professor of clinical psychology

  The year 1886 witnessed the birth of two remarkable scientific disciplines, each founded by a German. One scientist gazed outward at the hidden patterns of the physical universe. The other peered inward at the secret workings of the mind. One discipline has achieved stunning progress. The other, perhaps surprisingly, lags far behind.

  Heinrich Hertz built the very first radio antenna in 1886. He wanted to test for the existence of electromagnetic waves as predicted by Scottish theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Hertz became the first person to successfully transmit and receive a radio signal, simultaneously proving Maxwell correct and inaugurating the field of radiophysics. The subject of this new field was a strange, invisible “wave” that no philosopher or priest had ever dreamed of in their most extravagant fantasies. Yet over the ensuing century, radiophysicists developed the lasers used in DVD players and eye surgery. They figured out how to scan the brain for tumors. They even listened to the lingering sounds of the big bang, the event marking the origin of the known universe.

  We all have a more intimate and personal relationship with the subject studied by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a subject scrutinized by humankind since we yawped our first words in the valleys of Africa. In 1886, Krafft-Ebing published a landmark book. He deliberately wrote sections in Latin and chose a Latin title in order to discourage laypeople from reading it. The book was Psychopathia Sexualis. It addresses such arcane topics as clitoral stimulation, reduced libido, and homosexuality. The discipline Krafft-Ebing founded is known as sexology.

  So in the 125 years since Psychopathia Sexualis initiated the scientific study of a very familiar activity, how do the field’s achievements match up to those of radiophysics? It’s rather like comparing the Olympics gold medal tallies of the United States and Fiji. Unlike the origins of electromagnetic energy, the origins of desire remain mysterious and controversial. There’s no consensus on which sexual interests are normal, abnormal, or pathological. Scientists can’t even agree on the purpose of female orgasm, whether there is such a thing as having too much sex, or whether sexual fantasies are innocent or dangerous.

  Today, a wide variety of scientists study desire, including neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, and pharmacologists. One of their most basic questions is: why do we like the things we like? This question has never been adequately answered, because we must first determine what people like. To steal an expression from American writer William S. Burroughs, we need to “see what’s on the end of everyone’s fork.” But stealing a look at men and women’s true interests has been far from easy.

  While modern radiophysicists have discovered black holes and developed the means for communicating with extraterrestrials, scientists studying desire still struggle to identify basic differences between the sexual interests of men and women. Why is there such a gap between the achievements of the fields founded by Heinrich Hertz and Richard von Krafft-Ebing? One big reason is data acquisition.

  The best method for acquiring scientific data is direct observation. Nothing beats watching a subject in action. But scientists have an easier time gazing at intergalactic quasars than peeking into someone’s bedroom. Quasars don’t close the curtains out of modesty or suspicion. In contrast, most of us are unwilling to let curious scientists photograph us as we tumble between the sheets. Radio waves may be invisible, but they don’t try to deceive curious physicists and they’re incapable of self-deception. Humans are guilty of both.

  Since direct observation of sexual behavior is so challenging, most scientists acquire sexual data using self-report surveys. But are you willing to jot down answers to questions like “Have you ever felt attracted to your pet schnauzer?”—even if the unshaven young grad student surveying you insists, “Trust me—your answers are completely anonymous.”

  The difficulties associated with acquiring sexual data are not limited to skittish subjects who don’t want to be studied. Many social institutions don’t want sex to be studied, either. Federal funding agencies, advocacy groups, ethics review boards, even fellow scientists all bring powerful social politics to bear on those researchers brave enough to investigate human desire. For example, in 2003, congressmen led by Pennyslvania representative Pat Toomey sought to block federal funding of four sexual research projects, including a study of the sexual habits of older men in New England and a study of homosexual and bisexual Native Americans. “To obtain grant money, my colleagues in mainstream psychology are free to invoke ‘basic research’ or say they want to ‘expand our understanding of human behavior,” laments Marta Meana, a clinical psychologist and sex researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and one of the world’s leading authorities on female sexuality. “But if you’re studying sex and want to get significant funding, you have to link your work to ‘health’ or ‘human rights.’ ”

  Institutional sex taboos have stymied efforts to uncover the true patterns of human desire. In fact, since the publication of Krafft-Ebing’s book, only one scientist has managed to survey a large number of people on a broad range of sexual interests: Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey was an entomologist who spent his career studying the gall wasp. He collected more than 1 million of the tiny, reddish insects, pinning and labeling each one by hand. Mrs. Kinsey surely expected a life of placid stability, where the most exciting event might be an occasional wasp sting. But in 1940, Kinsey abruptly exchanged his wasps for the birds and the bees. He had become fed up with the moralizing and superstitions that abounded in sex education in the 1930s. But what really motivated him was his frustration with the complete absence of scientific data on what people were actually doing.

  Kinsey and a small group of research assistants interviewed thousands of subjects in person, asking 521 questions about a tremendous variety of sexual interests, including bondage, bestiality, and silk stockings. Even by today’s standards, the results were shocking. Before Kinsey, homosexuality was believed to be exceedingly rare, yet more than one-third of the men reported having a homosexual experience. Women were believed to possess a very low sex drive, yet more than half of the women reported masturbating. Premarital sex, extramarital affairs, and oral sex all occurred far more frequently than anyone had guessed.

  “Too darn hot” croons Paul in Cole Porter’s Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate, after singing about the findings in the Kinsey Reports. He wasn’t the only one feeling that way. After the publication of Kinsey’s landmark book on female desire, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, the Rockefeller Center dropped his funding. Kinsey was denounced as a Communist and savaged by conservative and religious organizations. He became addicted to sleeping pills and developed heart trouble, dying at age si
xty-two from pneumonia and heart complications.

  The eighteen thousand men and women interviewed by Kinsey represent the most comprehensive scientific attempt at determining ordinary people’s true sexual interests. But the Kinsey surveys are now more than a half century old. Subsequent researchers, constrained by politics and social pressures, never followed up with large-scale replications of Kinsey’s inquiry into the variety of desire. Even Kinsey’s own data was limited in several respects. The subjects were primarily educated, middle-class Caucasians. The subjects were chosen opportunistically according to who was available, rather than being selected randomly or systematically. The survey data consisted of recollections the subjects chose to share, rather than verifiable information or direct observation.

  The intellectual heirs of Heinrich Hertz have quietly studied radar and X-rays without encountering push-back from society. In contrast, many intellectual heirs of Richard von Krafft-Ebing have been pilloried in the media, faced criminal prosecution, or been fired from their jobs. Physicists can observe subatomic particles and galactic superclusters. But human desire? What does desire truly look like? Science hasn’t been able to answer this question, because there just hasn’t been a way to observe the natural sexual behavior of large numbers of women and men.

  Until now.

  A BILLION WICKED THOUGHTS

  The 1960s and ’70s were the heyday of bold and slightly reckless social psychology experiments, which often resembled episodes of MTV’s prank show Jackass. The 1971 Stanford prison experiment divided subjects into prisoners and guards and forced them to live in a makeshift prison, resulting in degrading abuse by the guards and a riot by the prisoners. The 1960s Milgram obedience experiments required subjects to shock a man with increasing levels of electricity until the man appeared to die. In 1973, psychologist Kenneth Gergen of Swarthmore College conducted another social psychology experiment that would probably fail to get approved by today’s ethics boards. His research asked, “What do people do under conditions of extreme anonymity?”

  In Gergen’s experiment, five young men and five young women entered a small room one at a time. They did not know one another before the experiment, and they were kept isolated before they entered the room. Once they entered, they were free to do whatever they liked. At the end of the experiment, the subjects left the room one at a time. But what made this experiment so interesting was the room itself. It was pitch-dark.

  The subjects couldn’t see one another, they didn’t know one another, and they knew they would not learn one another’s identities after the experiment. In other words, they experienced complete and total anonymity. So what did these anonymous strangers do? At first they talked, but conversation soon slacked off. Then the touching began. Almost 90 percent of subjects touched someone else on purpose. More than half of the subjects hugged someone. A third of the subjects ended up kissing. One young man kissed five different girls. “As I was sitting Beth came up and we started to play touchy face and touchy body and started to neck. We expressed it as showing love to each other. We decided to pass our love on and share it with other people. So we split up and Laurie took her place.” Hidden by anonymity, the participants freely expressed their desires. One man even offered to pay Gergen to be let back into the room. Almost 80 percent of the men and women reported feeling sexual excitement.

  The Internet is like a much, much, much larger version of the Gergen experiment. Put a billion anonymous people in a virtually darkened room. See what they do when their desires are unleashed.

  When he was younger, Peter Morley-Souter enjoyed writing comics. He was influenced by Calvin and Hobbes, the family-friendly syndicated strip following the adventures of the mischievous six-year-old Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes. Peter would come up with a humorous idea for a comic drawn from his everyday experience. His younger sister, Rose, would draw it. The audience consisted mainly of Peter’s friends, though sometimes he would post his work on the Web. Today, Peter is training to be a secondary schoolteacher in Britain. He considers his comic writing a discarded hobby from his youth. He has trouble recalling much of his work—with one notable exception.

  In 2003, Peter was a shy sixteen-year-old when a friend e-mailed him a “reimagining” of a Calvin and Hobbes comic. In it, Calvin and Hobbes were having enthusiastic sex with Calvin’s mother. Peter felt “pretty traumatized.”

  “I knew there was a lot of sex on the Internet. But Calvin and Hobbes?” bemoans Peter, explaining why he decided to come up with his own single-panel comic in response. “If there was porn of Calvin and Hobbes, I figured there must be porn of anything and everything.”

  Peter’s anguished comic portrays himself, gaping at his computer screen in shock. The black-and-white drawing is amateurish and not very memorable. But Peter seemed to tap into something in the zeitgeist with the comic’s caption: Internet Rule #34: There is porn of it.

  Peter posted his comic on an image-sharing Web site. The comic itself quickly disappeared from view, but the caption went viral. Peter’s words ricocheted across online communities, where they were modified into their more common phrasing: Rule 34: If you can imagine it, it exists as Internet porn. Today, Rule 34 thrives as sacred lore on blogs, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and social networking sites. It’s frequently used as a verb, as in “I Rule 34’ed Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell on the judging table.” Tech blog Boing Boing even hosts the “Rule 34 Challenge,” in which contestants race to find outrageous erotic combinations on the Web, like Ludwig van Beethoven fornicating with Britney Spears.

  Why did Rule 34 resonate with so many people? Because for anybody who has spent time surfing the Web, Peter’s maxim certainly seems true. EroticFalconry.com features photos of predatory birds with nude women, Snarry.net contains erotic stories about Harry Potter and Professor Severus Snape, and LoonerVision.com consists of videos for people who get sexually aroused by popping balloons. “The Web brings people together,” offered comedian Richard Jeni, “because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you’ve got millions of pals out there. Type in ‘Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire’ and the computer will say, ‘Specify type of goat.’ ”

  In 1991, the year the World Wide Web went online, there were fewer than ninety different adult magazines published in America, and you’d have been hard-pressed to find a newsstand that carried more than a dozen. Just six years later, in 1997, there were about nine hundred pornography sites on the Web. Today, the filtering software CYBERsitter blocks 2.5 million adult Web sites. As the puppets in the Broadway musical Avenue Q sing, “The Internet is for porn.”

  It’s true that visual pornography is mostly a male interest. But surging numbers of women are also using the Internet to satisfy their own erotic tastes. For large segments of the world, both Western and Eastern, sex-related online activities have become routine, with large majorities of both men and women using the Internet for sexual purposes. It’s hard to imagine a more revolutionary development in the history of human sexuality. With a visit to an adult video site like PornHub, you can see more naked bodies in a single minute than the most promiscuous Victorian would have seen in an entire lifetime. But there’s an even more dramatic change. We no longer have to interact with anyone to obtain erotica.

  Women who previously felt too mortified to be seen in the back room of the local video rental store are finally empowered to explore their erotic interests in privacy and comfort. Gay men who were previously isolated in suburban neighborhoods can now surf an endless variety of exciting content without leaving their chair. Anyone can view porn on a smart phone while riding the subway or sneaking off to the office bathroom. Billions of people around the planet are free to satisfy their most secret erotic desires by thinking, clicking, and typing—all while remaining cloaked by the anonymity of the Internet.

  Kenneth Gergen was able to watch his subjects’ behavior in the darkened room using infrared cameras. But how do we observe people’s sexual activitie
s on the Web if they are indeed anonymous? For better or worse, our online behavior is rarely traceless. We leave behind a trail of digital footprints. For example, if you use a search engine like Google, Yahoo!, or Bing, the text of your search is recorded and stored in a variety of places. The search engine companies certainly retain data about your search, and a few companies have even released semi-anonymized collections of individuals’ search histories. There are also third-party software tools that monitor, record, and sell search data. By examining this raw search data, we can finally see what’s on the end of everyone’s fork.

  Take a look at this list. Each phrase represents an actual search someone entered on the Dogpile search engine in May 2010. Dogpile.com is a popular “meta-engine” that combines results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other major search engines. This list is an unfiltered snapshot of human desire.

  shemales in prom dresses

  Twilight slash Edward and Jacob

  black meat on white street

  wives caught cheating on cam

  best romance novels with alpha heroes

  kendra wilkinson sex tape

  spanking stories

  free gay video tube

  Jake Gyllenhaal without shirt

  girls gone wild orgies

  jersey shore sex cartoons

  There’s a popular term for unusual sexual interests: kinks. There’s also a popular term for those kinks that gross you out: squicks. Many people’s natural reaction is to feel squicked out by some of the things on this list. You may instinctively feel that whoever is searching for this stuff must be an absolute weirdo. But one thing that immediately jumps out from this list is the remarkable diversity of people’s sexual interests. It’s like staring at a restaurant menu that contains Big Macs, sea slugs, Rocky Road ice cream, fried grasshoppers, and organic tofu. Do human beings really eat all of this stuff?