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

by Ogi Ogas

  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

  Monkey Pay-Per-View

  Male Visual Cues

  A large penis is always welcome.

  —Atia of the Julii, Rome, season 1

  Wolfgang likes to look at images of female derrieres. He prefers certain poses: bent over, legs splayed, leaning on her knuckles. He likes these images so much that he is willing to pay for the privilege of looking at them. Sometimes he pays several times a day. This might seem excessive, though not exactly remarkable, except for one fact: Wolfgang is a monkey.

  Rhesus macaques at Duke University Medical Center’s monkey colony are able to trade fruit juice for peeks at photos of female perinea (the scientific term for “bright pink monkey butts”). Researchers led by neurobiologist Michael Platt have consistently found that males are willing to trade juice to view these images and will trade more juice to look at monkey erotica than any other image, including powerful males or friendly female faces.

  Men aren’t the only primates willing to spend money just to look at females, but they’re the only ones to develop it into an industry. The most popular paysites featuring adult videos, including Brazzers, Bang Bros, and Reality Kings, typically attract an audience that is around 75 percent men. Of course, that does mean that one out of four visitors is a woman—a minority, though a significant minority. But when it comes to actually paying for porn, the gender gap widens into an abyss. According to CCBill, the billing service most commonly used by the online adult industry, only 2 percent of all subscriptions to pornography sites are made on credit cards with women’s names. In fact, CCBill even flags female names as potential fraud, since so many of these charges result in an angry wife or mother demanding a refund for the misuse of her card.

  A willingness to drop cold hard cash on porn is certainly the best indication that men’s motivation to ogle images is stronger than women’s. But there are plenty of other indicators. Consider one surprising investigation sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

  The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a federal government agency that funds approximately 20 percent of all basic research in American universities in every field of science and engineering, including the mapping of the genome and the construction of radio telescopes. Its board of directors is appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. No other institution has a greater influence on American science. But in 2009, a certain activity was stealing so many hours from employees at the NSF headquarters in Washington, D.C., that the agency’s inspector general launched a formal inquiry. The activity? Surfing Internet porn.

  More than two dozen employees at all levels of management were spending thousands of work hours watching pornography on taxpayer-purchased computers. These were smart, educated peop
le used to interacting with America’s intellectual elite. But these white-collar executives couldn’t resist the temptations of online erotica. One senior executive spent 331 days viewing naked girls on his office computer, though he insisted his activities were a charitable contribution: “These young women are from poor countries and need to make money to help their parents.” The NSF porn-viewing employees had one thing in common: they were all men.

  Over the past three years, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Defense at the Pentagon, and the Minerals Management Service (responsible for monitoring the BP oil spill) all held internal investigations to deal with numerous male employees watching porn on government computers. Men are so highly motivated to look at graphic sex that they’re willing to risk public shame and even their jobs just to visit porn sites.

  So what exactly are all these men so driven to look at?

  GIRL METROPOLIS AND COUGAR TOWN

  In this chapter, we’re going to review some of the main visual cues that activate male desire. Of course, men are also aroused by psychological cues. But the Internet demonstrates quite convincingly that most men prefer visuals to stories or discussion. Some of men’s visual cues will probably come as no surprise. Others are quite unexpected. Strictly speaking though, the most influential male cue of all is not visual, but chronological.

  Age dominates sexual searches, adult Web site content, and pornographic videos. On Dogpile, terms describing age are the most frequent type of adjective in sexual searches, appearing in one out of every six sexual searches. When the male desire software evaluates a woman’s visual appearance, one of the most prominent criteria is age—and not just youth, either.

  Take a look at the graph on the next page. It shows the frequency of sexual searches on Dogpile that contain specific ages, such as “naked 25-year-olds” or “sexy 40-year–olds.” The higher the bar, the more popular the age. Notice there are two separate peaks, marked in dark gray.

  The first peak is on the left, in a narrow cluster of searches for teens. But there’s a broader cluster of searches on the right, with a peak at age fifty. Though the popularity of adult women doesn’t quite reach the stratospheric heights of teens, it’s worth observing that more men search for fifty-year-olds than search for nineteen-year-olds. There is a rather shocking number of searches for underage women, but you may be equally surprised to discover there is significant erotic interest in sixty- and seventy-year-olds.

  Frequency of age-related sexual searches on the Dogpile search engine

  The adult industry recognizes there are distinct audiences for women of different ages. “A MILF falls into the 35-50-year-old category (50+ is ‘mature’). ‘Teens’ can be 18–20. The 21–35s are just plain porn,” explains Stephen Yagielowicz, senior editor for Xbiz, the leading source of news and business information for the adult industry. “Anecdotally, much of the mature content that I’m seeing on [nontube sites] today is vintage content from Eastern Europe, showing the widespread and perennial appeal of this material. You gotta love dirty old ladies!”

  In the late 2000s, the online adult industry went through a dramatic change. This change was made possible by new technological developments, but was ultimately driven by male desire—namely, the desire to look at things. The Web site that epitomizes this change is known as PornHub.

  Following the explosive success of YouTube—a Web site that allows users to upload and share their videos—a number of Web sites began to emulate YouTube, but with adult content. These sites are known as tubes. Dozens of tubes sprung up in 2007, including RedTube, XTube, YouPorn, and XNXX. Each offered thousands of video clips. The tubes quickly incited the wrath of the rest of the online adult industry. The reason for this animosity is perfectly understandable: many tube sites gave away content for free that they acquired for free. Instead of earning money from subscriptions—the previous business model for adult Web sites—the tubes earn money from advertisements.

  In 2007, the Montreal-based PornHub came online. Their three floors of sedate offices, just across the street from a Walmart, resemble the sterile corporate cubicles of any high-tech startup. In just two years, PornHub became the most heavily trafficked adult video site in the world, attracting more than 10 million visitors each day. Though it had an “anything goes” attitude in its earliest days, the now caution-minded PornHub offloads squickier content (such as fisting and golden showers) onto its sister tube sites, and completely prohibits videos depicting rape, incest, or bestiality. Their success is partially predicated on an interface that makes it easy for users to locate appealing visual content. Videos are searchable by tags, categories, and a search engine. So what is the single most popular search term users enter into the PornHub search engine?

  “Mom.”

  We can get a clearer perspective on the popularity of age-related genres (such as “Mom”) by considering the frequency of specific age-related adjectives used in sexual searches.

  This table mirrors the previous figure: youth dominates male desire, but there is also significant interest in older women, including MILFs. What’s a MILF? A “Mother I’d Like to Fuck.” This term was popularized in the 1999 teen comedy American Pie. MILFs became a profitable online niche in the early 2000s with the rise of Internet video, led by Web sites like MILF Hunter. Today, MILFs is one of the most popular and profitable genres of male-targeted pornography. Even socially conservative India has its own homegrown version of the MILF genre.

  An erotic online comic titled Savita Bhabhi gained a massive following in India soon after its initial publication in 2009. The comic strip, published in English, Hindi, and several other Indian languages, details the adventures of lusty buxom housewife Savita, who seduces salesmen, milkmen, neighborhood youth, and other assorted characters while her husband is away at work. The bhabhi—a Hindi word that literally means “sister-in-law” but is used to address married women in general—is a staple of erotic Indian tales as an aggressively amorous woman. Savita Bhabhi’s adventures, tame as they were by Western standards, did not go unnoticed by Indian authorities and the comic strip was banned within a few months.

  The male desire for older women is also reflected in the popularity of “mom” searches on PornHub (since teen content is highly visible and easily accessible on PornHub, users may be more likely to manually type in searches for content they don’t immediately see).

  More than a quarter of all men report that their first sexual fantasy was triggered by a sexy older person. There is a popular notion that older women, colloquially referred to as cougars, are more aggressive at pursuing sex than younger women. The tagline for ABC’s television show Cougar Town asks, “Can a woman of a certain age be a mom, a successful career woman, and still be on the prowl?” The answer seems to be yes. A 2010 study found that women age twenty-seven to forty-five have more sexual fantasies, a greater willingness to have one-night stands, and a greater willingness to have casual sex than women in other age ranges.

  “The main reason I like MILFs is because they’re more experienced and mature. They know exactly what they want, so there’s none of the awkwardness,” explains Brad Fowler, a twenty-one-year-old college student from Boston. “You feel like you can learn something from them, and there’s also an aspect of desiring something that you seemingly can’t have. . . . It’s easier to hook up with a hot college freshman than a hot forty-year-old with a kid and a minivan, so there’s a sense of accomplishment involved. It’s not Moms I Can Fuck, it’s Moms I’d Like to Fuck—it makes all the difference.”

  Almost no academic research has been done investigating the appeal of MILFs. But it’s reasonable to presume that at least some of the interest in MILFs depends on psychological cues. The terms “aggressive” and “seduction” appear on the vast majority of MILF sites, including My Friend’s Mom and Mommy Got Boobs. The “MILF-lovers” Facebook group asserts in its mission statement, “We love the experience and confidence of the older woman. How she is comfortable seducing
a young guy, then fucking him with abandon and no romantic complications.” MILF sites typically feature innocent young men who are seduced by aggressive older women. The self-assured Mrs. Robinson, who seduces a very young Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, is perhaps the most famous MILF in cinema.

  Though the self-confidence of the MILF appears to be essential to her appeal to the male brain, she also seems to present a number of visual cues that activate male desire. Most MILFs in online porn are busty, curvy, with large, round butts. This is often reflected in the titles of Web sites: My Busty MILF, MILF Ass, Busty Moms Videos, Sexy Ass MILF, Busty MILF Pics.

  Many men find both young and adult women to be appealing. On AOL, one out of four people who searched for MILFS also searched for teens. Intriguingly, there is a similar level of overlap between searches for teens and searches for another age-related sexual interest known as GILFs. About one out of four GILF searchers also searched for teens. So what does GILF stand for? Granny I’d Like to Fuck.

  Here is the abbreviated AOL search history of one granny fan, Mr. Playstation:mature deepthroat movies

  old lady oral movies

  granny cum swallowing movies

  what is the optimum humidity for a home

  grandma anal movies

  star wars lego game cheats for playstation 2

  teen deepthroat movies

  mature oral movies

  Many people find GILFs to be squicky. After all, if men are free to search for any porn they desire, surely they’ll avoid postmenopausal women? Such thinking, apparently, is uninformed ageism. Though it’s true that the total number of granny searches amounts to less than 8 percent of the total youth searches, there are more sexual searches for grannies (#19) than for spanking (#25). But are GILFs truly that popular? Perhaps it’s simply some particular eccentricity of Dogpile users?