A Billion Wicked Thoughts

last edited by Chris Yeh 7 years ago Page history

Subtitle: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships

 
By: Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam
 
Chapter 1: Intro
The source data consists of 400 million searches that were scraped from Dogpile between July 2009 and July 2010
(sadly, Dogpile no longer offers its Search Spy site which was the source of this information).
 
In cases where the search was ambiguous, the researchers used the AOL search histories released in 2006 to
disambiguate based on whether or not the terms typically appeared with other sexual searches.
 
A total of 55 million of the searches were classified as sexual.
 
The top 7 search categories by frequency are:
1. Youth
2. Gay
3. MILFs
4. Breasts
5. Cheating wives
6. Vaginas
7. Penises
 
The top 20 interests account for over 80% of searches; the top 35 over 90%.
 
Men's and women's tastes are radically different.  The top 5 men's adult sites are all video sites or "Tubes".  The top 5
women's sites are story-based (FanFiction.net, StephanieMeyers.com, eHarlequin.com, AdultFanFiction.net).  The first
video site does not appear until #5 (ForTheGirls.com) and gets less than 6% the traffic as FanFiction.net.
 
The writers theorize that men and women respond to different sexual cues.
 
Chapter 2: Male Visual Cues
Male monkeys are willing to trade juice for the opportunity to view photos of female monkey's butts.  They will trade
more juice to look at monkey porn than any other type of image.
 
Only 2% of porn subscriptions are billed to credit cards with female names.  The processors flag any female names as
potential fraud because they are so rare.
 
The most common ages searched for are 16 (Editor's note: Ugh) and 18.  But the most common after that are 40, 50,
and 60 (about as many men search for 40 and 50 year olds as search for 16 year olds).
 
The single most popular search term entered into Pornhub.com is "Mom" (as in "my friend's hot mom")
 
The two countries showing the highest interest in "granny porn" are Kenya (where young people are encouraged to
discuss sexual matters with their grandparents rather than their parents) and the UK (where many schoolboy's first
contact with a grown woman occurred when older schoolmarms spanked them).
 
For every search for a "skinny" girl, there are three searches for a "fat" girl.  On the Alexa Adult List, there are 504 sites
dedicated to heavy ladies, and only 182 to skinny ones.  The average American porn actress is in the healthy range of
BMI; most famous (non-porn) actresses like Angelina Jolie fall outside the healthy range.
 
Breasts are the most popular body part in sexual searches in every country, and the most popular category exclusive
to heterosexual men.
 
A study in France used a padded bra to test how often men would approach the same researcher with an A cup, B
cup, and C cup when she was at a bar:
A: 18
B: 28
C: 60
 
Men from a broad array of cultures prefer small feet on women.  There are 276 foot sites on the Alexa list, and only
one hand-focused one (Glove Mansion).
 
Men are more interested in penises than women, and far more interested in large penises.
15% of women are dissatisfied with their partner's penis size. 45% of men are dissatisfied with their own penis
size.
9% of women wish they had smaller breasts; just 0.2% of men wish they had smaller penises
Gaze tracking shows that men consistently direct their gaze to the male crotch; women rarely do so
1/4 Chatroulette sessions feature a penis
35% of pictures that men post to the GoneWild subreddit are penis close-ups
 
Japanese anime porn ("hentai") is the most popular form of animated pornography across the globe. Hentai
characters are drawn with impossibly large breasts, round and firm butt, low waist-to-hip ratio, and small feet.  Hentai
frequently contains men with unrealistically gargantuan penises as well.
 
Chapter 3: Male Desire
About half of roosters will attempt to mate with an artificial chicken head mounted on a feather-covered board.  Male
turkeys will attempt to mate with a rubber ball, as long as it's the size and height of a female head.
 
While watching porn, the amygdala and hypothalamus are much more highly activated in men than women.
 
Out of the top 100 rated images on Fantasti.cc, 23 feature a close-up of female anatomy without a face.
 
Body part sites include Boobpedia, Mighty Fine Ass, and Foot Fap.
 
Japanese men are obsessed with the strip of skin between mini-skirt and stockings.  Indian men are obsessed with the
belly.  But internationally, the most popular parts are breasts, butts, and feet.
 
"Few men are aroused by the sight of a flat-screen monitor or a box of Kleenex, though both are frequently
associated with arousing stimuli."
 
Studies on sexual imprinting in animals show that there is a critical period, and that male sexual imprinting is
irreversible. (Male sheep who imprint on goats will not find other sheep desirable; female sheep who imprint on goats
can become willing to mate with other sheep."  The imprinting software has to be flexible to account for uncertainty;
thus men can imprint on small breasts, so long as they match the cue for "breastness."
 
Male sexuality appears based on cued interest; a cued interest develops when the brain's natural responsiveness to a
particular kind of cue (breasts, butts, feet) causes the brain to imprint on a target that exhibits that cue.  This explains
shoe fetishes; the software that makes feet a cued interest gets redirected to the adjacent shoe.
 
It is possible for men to develop uncued interests based on experience (e.g. a man who develops an erotic fixation on
doctor's offices after having a nurse rub ultrasound gel on his testicles in adolescence).  These interests are most likely
to form in conjunction with ejaculation.
 
Breasts, hips, butts, and feet (estrogen appears to limit the growth of foot bones) are all sensitive to estrogen.
Unhealthy women produce less estrogen, and are thus less likely to produce healthy offspring.  Women's curves
consist of gynoid, or female-only fat, which supports the energy demands of pregnancy and lactation.  A woman's
body accumulates the maximum percentage of gynoid fat during adolescence.
 
Low female weight is associated with infertility, whereas higher weights are not.  The evolutionary pressure is to prefer
fat to skinny.
 
Levels of gynoid fat in breasts positively predict all aspects of female lifetime reproductive capacity, including
lactation quality.
 
"The male brain's desire software is like Elmer Fudd.  Fudd is a solitary hunter who likes to work alone.  Fudd is
trigger-happy.   The moment he sees a wabbit--or thinks he sees a wabbit--he squeezes the trigger and fires.  Fudd is
easily fooled by ducks dressed up as rabbits and other tricks played on him by Bugs Bunny. But even when Fudd
shoots his gun at a phony rabbit, he never gets discouraged.  He reloads and gets back out there."
 
Chapter 4: Female Desire
Professor Elaine Hatfield conducted the following experiment at Florida State.  She had attractive male and female
undergrads approach students of the opposite sex and ask one of three questions:
 
1. Would you go out with me tonight?
2. Would you come over to my apartment tonight?
3. Would you go to bed with me tonight?
 
Here were the percentage of "Yes" answers for men and women:
  Men  Women 
Date?  50%  56% 
Go home with me?  69%  6% 
Have sex?  75%  0% 
 
Meredith Chivers of Queen's University in Canada showed women erotic pictures, then asked them how they felt to
measure psychological arousal. She also used a plethysmograph to measure physical arousal.  The photographs
included men and women exercising, straight sex, lesbian sex, gay sex, and monkeys having sex.
 
All of the images elicited physical arousal (increased vaginal blood flow), even the monkey sex.  In terms of
psychological arousal, straight sex and lesbian sex generated the most psychological arousal. Exercise and monkey
sex had no psychological effect.
 
When the same experiment was conducted on men, physical and psychological arousal were perfectly correlated (and
none of the male subjects were turned on by the monkey sex).
 
This explains why "female Viagra" never worked--increasing blood flow didn't increase psychological arousal. 
Ironically, the most promising drug for improving women's arousal is Flibanserin, a fast-acting antidepressant.
 
Women masturbate less, fantasize about sex less frequently, and initiate sex less often than me.  Women are much
more likely than men to pursue sex for reasons other than sexual pleasure.  Women are more likely to report low
desire as resulting from relationship difficulties and high desire as resulting from relationship harmony.
 
Women who limit their sexual urges to a strong and decent man willing to invest in a stable, long-term, child-rearing
relationship are much more likely to have surviving offspring.  All modern women are the fruit of feminine caution.
 
A woman's sexuality is like Miss Marple's Detective Agency; it mulls over a variety of evidence, weighs clues from the
physical and social environment, and examines her own experiences and feelings before permitting or pursuing sex.
 
Many women pay for celebrity biographies to read about the private life of Leonardo DiCaprio or Johnny Depp, but
won't pay money to see them nude.  Men don't hesitate to pay to see nude photos of Angelina Jolie or Scarlet
Johansson, but it would never occur to them to buy their biographies.
 
The agency includes four detectives:
Emotional
Social
Cultural
Physical
 
Emotional:
Women's brains are different. The anterior cingulate cortex and insular cortex are larger, and are active during social
processing. When women process sexual stimuli, the anterior cingulate cortex tends to inhibit emotion, perhaps to
prevent reactions until the stimulus has been properly investigated.  The insular cortex and hippocampus are both
involved in the storage and retrieval of emotional memories, and are both larger and more active in women than in
men.
 
Women encode emotions through the left amygdala, while men process emotions through the right amygdala.  The
right amygdala enhances memory for the "big picture" of an experience, while the left amygdala enhances memory
for peripheral details.  The right amygdala is active in men (but not women) when viewing pornography; the left
amygdala is active in women while processing erotic narratives.
 
Social:
Women are more verbal than men, a superiority that appears as early as age five. Teen girls send and receive 80 texts
per day; teen boys 30. 59% of teen girls call a friend every day; only 42% of boys do.  There are more connections
between the language centers and subcortical reward systems in the female brain, suggesting that talking is more
rewarding for women than for men.
 
Cultural:
Men's porn sites have no explicit politics; female-targeted porn sites contain an abundance of political messages. 
"Women's sexuality appears to be more plastic than men's, relying on social framing and cultural conditions when
making decisions regarding relationships. Men's sexuality seems far more driven by simply physiological
mechanisms."
 
Women report feeling more social pressure on how to behave, dress, and look. Women are also more likely to
attribute sexual anxiety to social pressures.
 
The female brain is designed to play it safe because the odds of a woman reproducing are very good.  Today's human
population is descended from twice as many women as men.  Historically, 80% of women reproduce, versus only 40%
of men.
 
In other words, men who don't take chances, are likely to end up childless.  Men ought to be willing to risk their lives
to boost their reproductive odds, because if they don't, they won't reproduce anyway.
 
Women face a different problem--the odds are good that men will offer sex.  All that matters is choosing the best
offer.
 
Most of the software of the Detective Agency is located in the conscious parts of the brain--that's also the part of the
brain that gets inhibited by alcohol and recreational drugs.
 
Chapter 5: Ladies Prefer Alphas
The romantic hero (a virile, dangerous, lusty adventurer) is constructed from female psychological cues, in the same
way that young, busty porn stars are built from male visual cues.
 
Romance is the single largest share of the fiction market. 74.8 million Americans read a romance novel in 2008, and
over 90% of them were women.  In contrast, about 100 million men in the US and Canada accessed online porn in
2008.  Yet online pornography almost certain generates less revenue than the romance industry.
 
5 of the 10 most popular Kindle ebooks are romances.  FanFiction.net has more than 2 million stories (about half of
which are tagged "romance"), and is visited by mostly 18-24 year old women.
 
Most of the sex in fan fiction (and romances) emphasizes the emotional and psychological over the physical.
 
Here are the 10 most common professions of the hero, based on an analysis of 15,000 Harlequin romances
Doctor
Cowboy
Boss
Prince
Rancher
Knight
Surgeon
King
Bodyguard
Sherriff
 
These professions are associated with status (no welders), confidence (no claims adjusters), and competence.  Women
are attracted to alpha males.
 
Women prefer the voices, scent, movement, gait, and facial features of dominant men.
 
Virtually every serial killer received love letters from large numbers of female fans.  Among the Yanomamo people of
the Amazon, men who have killed the most other men have the most wives and offspring.
 
Women don't want a nice guy, they want an alpha who learns to be nice to her.  They want to tame, heal, or soften
the alpha hero's wild heart.
 
"In the same way that women often find the breathless gasping and moaning of female porn stars to be absurdly
inauthentic, male readers of romances might find the emotional confessions of romance heroes to be strangely
unfamiliar."  Just as men are convinced that porn stars are having real orgasms, women are convinced that bad boys
are hiding a secret tenderness.
 
The romance titles on Amazon include 415 millionaires, 286 billionaires, and 263 sheiks (e.g. "The Sheik's Secret
Harem Girl").
 
"Material resources are arousing to females across all the animal kingdom. Female chimpanzees prefer males with the
largest quantity of meat. Female pelicans prefer males who give them the most fish.
 
In modern romance novels, successful independent women need a hero who is even richer, or is a total macho
badass.
 
The hero is always competent.  There is no such cue in men.  "In pornography and life, men are quite happy pursuing
attractive women who are drifting and aimless."  Most men on OkCupid would date a woman who couldn't drive;
most women would not.
 
Intelligence is also essential.  This may be due to women's selectivity.  Both brain and testicles require a lot of energy;
in species where females of promiscuous, the males tend to develop large testicles and small brains.
 
Women are far more interested in older partners than men are.
 
"Despite the fact that they are a five-star general or lord of Southern England, they hide a troubled and tempestuous
soul that can only be healed by the magical balm of a woman's love."
 
"Little attention is paid to the details of male genitalia.  Instead, and quite curiously, there is far greater emphasis on
the activity of the blood within a hero's penis than what his manhood actually looks like."
 
Chapter 6: The Heroine
"One of the most fundamental and influential psychological cues for women is irresistibility: the feeling that you are
sexually desirable."
 
"Donald Symons and Bruce Ellis found that more than half of women's fantasies reflect the desire to be sexually
irresistible.  Women frequently fantasize about being a stripper, harem girl, or Las Vegas showgirl and 'delighting
many men.'"
 
There are dark sides to this trigger--body images issues and fantasies of coercion and submission.
 
The popularity cue is also powerful, which is one reason many women find married men attractive.
 
"When it comes to desiring a man, women have a love/hate relationship with other women.  This is quite different
from men's attitude towards other men where women are involved, which is more of an ignore/kill relationship."
 
"The psychological cue of adorability--a woman's desire to feel loved for her unique and special qualities--is as
fundamental as irresistability.  "Twu Wuv" is about a woman's specialness as a human being.  The hero must
demonstrate that his love is steady, irrational, and everlasting.  The main narrative arc of any romance consists of the
hero gradually coming to terms with the powerful and inexplicable love he feels toward the heroine."
 
"The climax of every romance novel occurs when the hero finally confesses his heartfelt Twu Wuv to the heroine in a
sudden gush, often accompanied by a marriage proposal."
 
"The male brain is designed for sexual jealousy. Men are suspicious about whom a woman has slept with and
frequently press their partner on how many time's she's previously had sex; most women are savvy enough to round
this number down. Likewise, the female brain is designed for emotional jealousy.  Women usually push their partner
to reveal how many times he's previously been in love; men are often foolish enough to provide a figure other than
zero."
 
Men's desire is like an OR gate; meet one criteria, pull the trigger.  Women's desire is like an AND gate; meet all
criteria, or reject the suitor.
 
"A single 60-second clip can compel a man to masturbate to ejaculation. But the single most popular artifact used by
women to generate arousal takes the form of a 250-page book that requires hours to digest."
 
The male brain splits Sex and Romance; the female brain unites and intertwines them.