So how many American men are gay? This measure of pornography searches by men—roughly 5 percent are same-sex—seems a reasonable estimate of the true size of the gay population in the United States. And there is another, less straightforward way to get at this number. It requires some data science. We could utilize the relationship between tolerance and the openly gay population. Bear with me a bit here.
My preliminary research indicates that in a given state every 20 percentage points of support for gay marriage means about one and a half times as many men from that state will identify openly as gay on Facebook. Based on this, we can estimate how many men born in a hypothetically fully tolerant place—where, say, 100 percent of people supported gay marriage—would be openly gay. My estimate is about 5 percent would be, which fits the data from porn searches nicely. The closest we might have to growing up in a fully tolerant environment is high school boys in California’s Bay Area. About 4 percent of them are openly gay on Facebook. That seems in line with my calculation.
I should note that I have not yet been able to come up with an estimate of same-sex attraction for women. The pornography numbers are less useful here, since far fewer women watch pornography, making the sample less representative. And of those who do, even women who are primarily attracted to men in real life seem to enjoy viewing lesbian porn. Fully 20 percent of videos watched by women on PornHub are lesbian.
Five percent of American men being gay is an estimate, of course. Some men are bisexual; some—especially when young—are not sure what they are. Obviously, you can’t count this as precisely as you might the number of people who vote or attend a movie.
But one consequence of my estimate is clear: an awful lot of men in the United States, particularly in intolerant states, are still in the closet. They don’t reveal their sexual preferences on Facebook. They don’t admit it on surveys. And in many cases, they may even be married to women.
It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently. They demonstrate that suspicion in the surprisingly common search: “Is my husband gay?” “Gay” is 10 percent more likely to complete searches that begin “Is my husband . . .” than the second-place word, “cheating.” It is eight times more common than “an alcoholic” and ten times more common than “depressed.”
Most tellingly perhaps, searches questioning a husband’s sexuality are far more prevalent in the least tolerant regions. The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in twenty-one of the twenty-five states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average.
Google and porn sites aren’t the only useful data resources when it comes to men’s sexuality. There is more evidence available in Big Data on what it means to live in the closet. I analyzed ads on Craigslist for males looking for “casual encounters.” The percentage of these ads that are seeking casual encounters with men tends to be larger in less tolerant states. Among the states with the highest percentages are Kentucky, Louisiana, and Alabama.
And for even more of a glimpse into the closet, let’s return to Google search data and get a little more granular. One of the most common searches made immediately before or after “gay porn” is “gay test.” (These tests presume to tell men whether or not they are homosexual.) And searches for “gay test” are about twice as prevalent in the least tolerant states.
What does it mean to go back and forth between searching for “gay porn” and searching for “gay test”? Presumably, it suggests a fairly confused if not tortured mind. It’s reasonable to suspect that some of these men are hoping to confirm that their interest in gay porn does not actually mean they’re gay.
The Google search data does not allow us to see a particular user’s search history over time. However, in 2006, AOL released a sample of their users’ searches to academic researchers. Here are some of one anonymous user’s searches over a six-day period.
Friday 03:49:55
free gay picks [sic]
Friday 03:59:37
locker room gay picks
Friday 04:00:14
gay picks
Friday 04:00:35
gay sex picks
Friday 05:08:23
a long gay quiz
Friday 05:10:00
a good gay test
Friday 05:25:07
gay tests for a confused man
Friday 05:26:38
gay tests
Friday 05:27:22
am i gay tests
Friday 05:29:18
gay picks
Friday 05:30:01
naked men picks
Friday 05:32:27
free nude men picks
Friday 05:38:19
hot gay sex picks
Friday 05:41:34
hot man butt sex
Wednesday 13:37:37
am i gay tests
Wednesday 13:41:20
gay tests
Wednesday 13:47:49
hot man butt sex
Wednesday 13:50:31
free gay sex vidio [sic]
This certainly reads like a man who is not comfortable with his sexuality. And the Google data tells us there are still many men like him. Most of them, in fact, live in states that are less tolerant of same-sex relationships.
For an even closer look at the people behind these numbers, I asked a psychiatrist in Mississippi, who specializes in helping closeted gay men, if any of his patients might want to talk to me. One man reached out. He told me he was a retired professor, in his sixties, and married to the same woman for more than forty years.
About ten years ago, overwhelmed with stress, he saw the psychiatrist and finally acknowledged his sexuality. He has always known he was attracted to men, he says, but thought that this was universal and something that all men just hid. Shortly after beginning therapy, he had his first, and only, gay sexual encounter, with a student of his who was in his late twenties, an experience he describes as “wonderful.”
He and his wife do not have sex. He says that he would feel guilty ever ending his marriage or openly dating a man. He regrets virtually every one of his major life decisions.
The retired professor and his wife will go another night without romantic love, without sex. Despite enormous progress, the persistence of intolerance will cause millions of other Americans to do the same.
You may not be shocked to learn that 5 percent of men are gay and that many remain in the closet. There have been times when most people would have been shocked. And there are still places where many people would be shocked as well.
“In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, insisted in 2007. “In Iran we do not have this phenomenon.” Likewise, Anatoly Pakhomov, mayor of Sochi, Russia, shortly before his city hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics, said of gay people, “We do not have them in our city.” Yet internet behavior reveals significant interest in gay porn in Sochi and Iran.
This raises an obvious question: are there any common sexual interests in the United States today that are still considered shocking? It depends what you consider common and how easily shocked you are.
Most of the top searches on PornHub are not surprising—they include terms like “teen,” “threesome,” and “blowjob” for men, phrases like “passionate love making,” “nipple sucking,” and “man eating pussy” for women.
Leaving the mainstream, PornHub data does tell us about some fetishes that you might not have ever guessed existed. There are women who search for “anal apples” and “humping stuffed animals.” There are men who search for “snot fetish” and “nude crucifixion.” But these searches are rare—only about ten every month even on this huge porn site.
Another related point that becomes quite clear when reviewing PornHub data: there’s someone out there for everyone. Women, not surprisingly, often search for “tall” guys, “dark” guys, and “handsome” g
uys. But they also sometimes search for “short” guys, “pale” guys, and “ugly” guys. There are women who search for “disabled” guys, “chubby guy with small dick,” and “fat ugly old man.” Men frequently search for “thin” women, women with “big tits,” and women with “blonde” hair. But they also sometimes search for “fat” women, women with “tiny tits,” and women with “green hair.” There are men who search for “bald” women, “midget” women, and women with “no nipples.” This data can be cheering for those who are not tall, dark, and handsome or thin, big-breasted, and blonde.*
What about other searches that are both common and surprising? Among the 150 most common searches by men, the most surprising for me are the incestuous ones I discussed in the chapter on Freud. Other little-discussed objects of men’s desire are “shemales” (77th most common search) and “granny” (110th most common search). Overall, about 1.4 percent of men’s PornHub searches are for women with penises. About 0.6 percent (0.4 percent for men under the age of thirty-four) are for the elderly. Only 1 in 24,000 PornHub searches by men are explicitly for preteens; that may have something to do with the fact that PornHub, for obvious reasons, bans all forms of child pornography and possessing it is illegal.
Among the top PornHub searches by women is a genre of pornography that, I warn you, will disturb many readers: sex featuring violence against women. Fully 25 percent of female searches for straight porn emphasize the pain and/or humiliation of the woman—“painful anal crying,” “public disgrace,” and “extreme brutal gangbang,” for example. Five percent look for nonconsensual sex—“rape” or “forced” sex—even though these videos are banned on PornHub. And search rates for all these terms are at least twice as common among women as among men. If there is a genre of porn in which violence is perpetrated against a woman, my analysis of the data shows that it almost always appeals disproportionately to women.
Of course, when trying to come to terms with this, it is really important to remember that there is a difference between fantasy and real life. Yes, of the minority of women who visit PornHub, there is a subset who search—unsuccessfully—for rape imagery. To state the obvious, this does not mean women want to be raped in real life and it certainly doesn’t make rape any less horrific a crime. What the porn data does tell us is that sometimes people have fantasies they wish they didn’t have and which they may never mention to others.
Closets are not just repositories of fantasies. When it comes to sex, people keep many secrets—about how much they are having, for example.
In the introduction, I noted that Americans report using far more condoms than are sold every year. You might therefore think this means they are just saying they use condoms more often during sex than they actually do. The evidence suggests they also exaggerate how frequently they are having sex to begin with. About 11 percent of women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four say they are sexually active, not currently pregnant, and not using contraception. Even with relatively conservative assumptions about how many times they are having sex, scientists would expect 10 percent of them to become pregnant every month. But this would already be more than the total number of pregnancies in the United States (which is 1 in 113 women of childbearing age). In our sex-obsessed culture it can be hard to admit that you are just not having that much.
But if you’re looking for understanding or advice, you have, once again, an incentive to tell Google. On Google, there are sixteen times more complaints about a spouse not wanting sex than about a married partner not being willing to talk. There are five and a half times more complaints about an unmarried partner not wanting sex than an unmarried partner refusing to text back.
And Google searches suggest a surprising culprit for many of these sexless relationships. There are twice as many complaints that a boyfriend won’t have sex than that a girlfriend won’t have sex. By far, the number one search complaint about a boyfriend is “My boyfriend won’t have sex with me.” (Google searches are not broken down by gender, but, since the previous analysis said that 95 percent of men are straight, we can guess that not too many “boyfriend” searches are coming from men.)
How should we interpret this? Does this really imply that boyfriends withhold sex more than girlfriends? Not necessarily. As mentioned earlier, Google searches can be biased in favor of stuff people are uptight talking about. Men may feel more comfortable telling their friends about their girlfriend’s lack of sexual interest than women are telling their friends about their boyfriend’s. Still, even if the Google data does not imply that boyfriends are really twice as likely to avoid sex as girlfriends, it does suggest that boyfriends avoiding sex is more common than people let on.
Google data also suggests a reason people may be avoiding sex so frequently: enormous anxiety, with much of it misplaced. Start with men’s anxieties. It isn’t news that men worry about how well-endowed they are, but the degree of this worry is rather profound.
Men Google more questions about their sexual organ than any other body part: more than about their lungs, liver, feet, ears, nose, throat, and brain combined. Men conduct more searches for how to make their penises bigger than how to tune a guitar, make an omelet, or change a tire. Men’s top Googled concern about steroids isn’t whether they may damage their health but whether taking them might diminish the size of their penis. Men’s top Googled question related to how their body or mind would change as they aged was whether their penis would get smaller.
Side note: One of the more common questions for Google regarding men’s genitalia is “How big is my penis?” That men turn to Google, rather than a ruler, with this question is, in my opinion, a quintessential expression of our digital era.*
Do women care about penis size? Rarely, according to Google searches. For every search women make about a partner’s phallus, men make roughly 170 searches about their own. True, on the rare occasions women do express concerns about a partner’s penis, it is frequently about its size, but not necessarily that it’s small. More than 40 percent of complaints about a partner’s penis size say that it’s too big. “Pain” is the most Googled word used in searches with the phrase “___ during sex.” (“Bleeding,” “peeing,” “crying,” and “farting” round out the top five.) Yet only 1 percent of men’s searches looking to change their penis size are seeking information on how to make it smaller.
Men’s second-most-common sex question is how to make their sexual encounters longer. Once again, the insecurities of men do not appear to match the concerns of women. There are roughly the same number of searches asking how to make a boyfriend climax more quickly as climax more slowly. In fact, the most common concern women have related to a boyfriend’s orgasm isn’t about when it happened but why it isn’t happening at all.
We don’t often talk about body image issues when it comes to men. And while it’s true that overall interest in personal appearance skews female, it’s not as lopsided as stereotypes would suggest. According to my analysis of Google AdWords, which measures the websites people visit, interest in beauty and fitness is 42 percent male, weight loss is 33 percent male, and cosmetic surgery is 39 percent male. Among all searches with “how to” related to breasts, about 20 percent ask how to get rid of man breasts.
But, even if the number of men who lack confidence in their bodies is higher than most people would think, women still outpace them when it comes to insecurity about how they look. So what can this digital truth serum reveal about women’s self-doubt? Every year in the United States, there are more than seven million searches looking into breast implants. Official statistics tell us that about 300,000 women go through with the procedure annually.
Women also show a great deal of insecurity about their behinds, although many women have recently flip-flopped on what it is they don’t like about them.
In 2004, in some parts of the United States, the most common search regarding changing one’s butt was how to make it smaller. The desire to make one’s bottom bigger was overwhelmingly concentra
ted in areas with large black populations. Beginning in 2010, however, the desire for bigger butts grew in the rest of the United States. This interest, if not the posterior distribution itself, has tripled in four years. In 2014, there were more searches asking how to make your butt bigger than smaller in every state. These days, for every five searches looking into breast implants in the United States, there is one looking into butt implants. (Thank you, Kim Kardashian!)
Does women’s growing preference for a larger bottom match men’s preferences? Interestingly, yes. “Big butt porn” searches, which also used to be concentrated in black communities, have recently shot up in popularity throughout the United States.
What else do men want in a woman’s body? As mentioned earlier, and as most will find blindingly obvious, men show a preference for large breasts. About 12 percent of nongeneric pornographic searches are looking for big breasts. This is nearly twenty times higher than the search volume for small-breast porn.
That said, it is not clear that this means men want women to get breast implants. About 3 percent of big-breast porn searches explicitly say they want to see natural breasts.
Google searches about one’s wife and breast implants are evenly split between asking how to persuade her to get implants and perplexity as to why she wants them.
Or consider the most common search about a girlfriend’s breasts: “I love my girlfriend’s boobs.” It is not clear what men are hoping to find from Google when making this search.
Women, like men, have questions about their genitals. In fact, they have nearly as many questions about their vaginas as men have about their penises. Women’s worries about their vaginas are often health related. But at least 30 percent of their questions take up other concerns. Women want to know how to shave it, tighten it, and make it taste better. A strikingly common concern, as touched upon earlier, is how to improve its odor.
Everybody Lies Page 10