by Ogi Ogas
For men, the penis can never be too big, apparently. Just .2 percent of men wish they had a smaller penis, compared to 9 percent of women who wish they had smaller breasts. Indeed, there are more than six times the number of searches for “big dick” than “small dick.” There are 1,072 Web sites in the Alexa Adult List that feature heterosexual porn with large penises such as Monsters of Cock, Mr.Biggz, and Teens Like It Big. The number of Alexa sites devoted to small penises? Just three: PinkyDick, Little-Cock, and My Tiny Dick.
Here’s the AOL search history of one fan of oversized organs, Mr. Amish:big cocks
big dicks
monster cocks
tight pussy big dicks
long dong sex
big texas cocks
enormous cocks
gigantic cocks
big white dick sex
horny Amish women
So far, all of the visual cues we’ve encountered draw a man’s attention to the female body. But not the penis. So why might the male organ captivate men’s attention? One possible explanation may lie with our primate cousins. Among New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, and the apes, the penis is a prominent and versatile social tool. The erect primate penis is used as a sign of male-male aggression, to mark territory, and as a sexual invitation to females. If the invitation is witnessed by a competing male, the erect penis can provoke hostility and attacks. It may also be a visual cue that motivates males to copulate with a female shortly after she has mated with a competing male. Biologist Richard Dawkins even suggests that an erection may be a visible sign of a male’s general health. But some primates go further than simply inspecting each other’s phalli.
When male savanna baboons meet, they frequently perform an intense greeting that scientists have endowed with the technical term diddling—“the fondling of the penis and scrotum.” Similarly, among the Australian Walbiri and Aranda people, when grievances need to be settled, the men participate in what is known as the penis-offering rite, which is said to represent “paying with one’s life.” Each man presents his semierect penis to all the others, pressing it into each man’s palm and drawing it along the length of the upturned hand. Anyone who has seen a koteka, the colorful two-foot-long penis cap worn by men in Papua New Guinea, can easily believe that men have inherited our primate cousins’ attentiveness to the penis.
But men aren’t satisfied by checking out other men’s penises. They also like to flaunt their own. Historically, male exhibitionism has been considered a mental disorder. If that is the case, the Internet suggests we are a planet of mentally deranged men. Chat Roulette is a Web site that allows users with a webcam to randomly connect to other people around the world. Once you enter Chat Roulette, you see whatever the other person has chosen to place in front of their webcam. It might be a party, a cute kitten, an old man with a beard, or—very rarely—a bored teenage girl. One blogger recorded what he saw on 1,276 consecutive Chat Roulette sessions: 298 webcams (about one in four) were aimed at a penis. Another blogger created software to track the global locations of penis sightings on Chat Roulette: ChatRouletteCock Map.com reveals that Europe, Brazil, and the American east coast are dense with Internet exhibitionism.
On Fantasti.cc, 23 percent of the male users use an image of their penis as their avatar, while another 13 percent used a penis from a porn clip. In comparison, 5 percent of the female users use an image of a vagina. On reddit’s heterosexual Gone Wild forum, where users are free to post NC-17 pictures of themselves, 123 of the 345 self-posted male images (about 35 percent) consist of close-ups of penises.
Though encountering a male exhibitionist on the subway or in the city park can be frightening and unsettling, clinical psychiatrists do not consider them dangerous. Exhibitionists rarely follow up their lewd displays with any attempt at contacting the women they’ve exposed themselves to. Often, the urge to exhibit oneself manifests as an inexplicable compulsion, rather than a conscious intention to dominate or scare a woman. “The act was more magical than sexual, a ritual to restore that all-important sense of power that the defeats of life had temporarily destroyed,” explained Lance Rentzel, former wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, recounting the incident that got him arrested. “On this day, for some reason, I needed someone to play with me in a childish game I was making up. Look at me, look at me. Look at what I’ve got. I sat in the car and they came over and I exposed myself. It took maybe 10 seconds, then I drove off, strangely relieved.”
Perhaps men are tapping into an ancient display mechanism we share with other primates, similar to the way girls’ enjoyment of brushing other girls’ hair may reflect our primate grooming mechanisms. It’s true that some women are enchanted by a substantial phallus. But for men, a large penis is always welcome.
AN ANIMATED LADY
One way to get a better sense of the visual cues that trigger male desire is to consider erotic art designed for men. An artist is not constrained by gravity or biology but is free to fashion impossible bodies limited only by his imagination. If a particular style of erotic art becomes popular across diverse cultures, this may be a good indication that it is activating men’s innate desire software. With the growth of the Internet, one type of erotic art has risen to unchallenged dominance across all wired nations: Japanese anime.
A more relaxed judicial reinterpretation of obscenity laws in the 1990s released the floodgates on Japanese animated erotica, an art form that traces its roots back to nineteenth-century woodblock printings. With the advent of the Internet, Japanese anime quickly spread throughout the world. Japanese anime (sometimes known as hentai) is the most searched for type of erotic animation or erotic art on search engines in the United States, Russia, France, Thailand, Brazil, and Australia, suggesting that it is highly effective in exploiting men’s visual cues. (Animation, including non-Japanese cartoons, is the ninth most popular category of sexual searches on Dogpile.) So what do the women in Japanese anime look like? The typical anime female is a high school teenager. She has large, baby-like eyes, emulated by Lady Gaga in her “Bad Romance” video. Her voice is extremely high-pitched. She frequently wears school uniforms, complete with pleated skirts, vests, and saddle shoes. She is often sexually inexperienced and reacts with embarassment at the mention of sex (indicated by reddening cheeks). Yet, despite all these vivid cues of youth, she is drawn with impossibly large breasts, a perfectly round and firm butt, a low waist-to-hip ratio, and small feet. It’s also worth noting that Japanese animation frequently contains men with gargantuan penises, sometimes longer than a girl’s arm.
In other words, the Internet’s most popular visual erotic art contains supercharged versions of all the male visual cues. This probably explains why many men are schediaphiliacs—sexually attracted to animated characters.
Now that we have a better understanding of what men like to look at, we can ask—why?
CHAPTER 3
Elmer Fudd, Wabbit Hunter
Male Desire
If you put little, warm holes in the wall of my house—given enough time, I’m going to have sex with it.
—Comedian Joe Rogan
What does a hen need to turn a rooster on? A sultry clucking, a tail-swinging sashay, a thickly feathered breast? When it comes to sex appeal, the white leghorn rooster has simple tastes. All a hen needs to get a rooster crowing is a red comb. Head and body optional.
When biologists tried to figure out which visual cues evoked sexual behavior in male fowl, they found that roosters would exhibit mating behaviors even when exposed to an artificial hen’s comb. About half of all roosters attempted copulation with an artificial chicken head mounted on a feather-covered board. Turkeys are even less discriminating: male gobblers will try to mate with a rubber ball, as long as it’s the size and height of a female head.
The objectification of female anatomy is not limited to farm birds. Male chacma baboons find the bright red rumps of ovulating females to be particularly arousing. Using an ingenious experiment, one scientist attempt
ed to determine whether a female’s scarlet derriere was the actual cue exciting males, rather than her odor or behavior. A nonovulating female baboon was fitted with a “thermoplastic perineum swelling”—a fake baboon butt. The artificially enhanced female was kept in a separate cage where she was visible to the males, but could not be touched by them. The experimenters then counted the number of times the males masturbated. The bigger and brighter the fake butt, the more the male baboons pleasured themselves.
The butt fixation of male baboons would probably come as no surprise to clinical psychologists, who encounter far more men than women obsessed with body parts. Men’s sexual fantasies are more visually explicit than women’s and men remember more visual details from sexual encounters than women do. Erotic stories written by men use more visual descriptions than stories written by women. In the AOL search data, almost no one who searched for “Martha Stewart” searched for “porn,” though “Martha Stewart” searchers were four times more likely than chance to search for erotic stories.
The male brain is designed to be more visually responsive to sexual stimuli than the female brain. Male arousal itself relies on two structures located in the subcortex: the amygdala and the hypothalamus. These are tiny structures that operate without conscious awareness. The amygdala is responsible for emotional responses. The hypothalamus is the engine of sexual arousal. In studies where both men and women viewed pornography, the amygdala and the hypothalamus were activated more strongly in men. This is the case even when women report stronger arousal than men (which happens infrequently). Together, the amygdala and the hypothalamus urge a man to pay attention: wow, look at those curves!
Visual cues trigger desire in men. If a man’s brain decides a picture is arousing, he swiftly experiences physical and psychological arousal. Immediately following exposure to erotic visual stimuli, the brain areas responsible for the generation of an erection are activated. Men’s greater sex drive may be partially due to the fact that their sexual motivation pathways have more connections to the subcortical reward system than in women.
In other words, what you may have long suspected is true: men’s brains are designed to objectify females. This objectification of women extends deep into the mists of prehistory. The famous 26,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf statuette, hand-carved by a Cro-Magnon in Paleolithic Germany, features GG-cup breasts and a hippopotamal butt, but no face. The 40,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels boasts even more prodigious hips and mammaries—and titanic labia.
Out of the one hundred highest-rated images on Fantasti.cc, twenty-three feature close-ups of female anatomy without a face. One close-up of a woman’s bare bottom generated hundreds of enthusiastic comments, including, “Delicious!”, “This is what I call a MASTER PIECE,” and “Great hindquarters. Now saddle up!” One imagines that if male baboons could speak, they’d shout similar cat calls over baboon booty.
Many adult sites targeting men focus on body parts. Daily Basis features a gallery of glossy bits of female anatomy—lips, toes, butts, eyelashes, bellies, breasts. The site looks like a Victoria’s Secret catalog passed through a paper shredder. Boobpedia is an online “Encyclopedia of Big Boobs,” containing detailed information on almost ten thousand pairs of breasts—and a few notes on the models, celebrities, and porn stars who own them. Mighty Fine Ass rates “amateur submitted nice asses and sexy round butts,” while Foot Fap displays hundreds of images of women’s feet.
Most women find such clinical portrayals of anatomy to be unappealing. But men’s brains scrutinize the details of arousing visuals with the kind of concentration jewelers apply to the cut of a diamond. Consider one of the most popular sexual visual interests in Japan, zettai ryouiki, translated as “the absolute territory.”
The absolute territory is the band of skin visible between a woman’s skirt and the top of her socks—or, even more tantalizing, between a miniskirt and thigh-high stockings. “The socks and skirt are usually darker shades than the skin,” explains one fan on the blog Anime Desho Desho. “Therefore the skin is the light at the end of a dark tunnel, gleaming in an aura of brilliance. Always seek the light!”
The anatomical fixations of men are often subject to intense analytical and mathematical scrutiny. Women are “Perfect 10s.” Baby Boomers described girls as 36-24-36. Fans of zettai ryouiki categorize the bewitching strip of skin into six different types, ranging from Grade E (too much skin and too much skirt) to A (very thin strip of skin and very short skirt). Fans spend hours measuring the ratio of skirt to skin to sock length on a wide variety of zettai ryouiki images in order to derive a “golden mean.” According to one blogger’s laborious calculations, the most sublime ratio for [skirt length]:[skin length]:[length of socks above knees] is 4:1:2.5. Another fan adds, “memorizing this formula is as important as knowing the first 30 digits of pi.”
The interest in the absolute territory is almost exclusive to Japanese men. In India, the belly is a common male obsession. In Victorian times, ankles were considered highly erotic. Salvador Dalí claimed to be aroused by a woman’s earlobe. Thus, culture does seem to play some role in determining what part of a body the male brain targets. Nevertheless, internationally, three of the most consistently popular sexual searches on the Web are parts of the female body: breasts, butts, and feet. So how does the male brain guide some men to ankles and others to bellies—and most men to breasts and butts?
A SULTRY JAR OF PENNIES
Gentlemen, if you decided to participate in an intriguing experiment run by psychologists Joseph Plaud and James Martini, here’s how it would go down. First, you look through a collection of slides of women. Some are nude, some partially nude, but you select five that you find arousing. Next, you sit down in a comfortable reclining chair, remove your pants, and slip a loop of wire around your penis. This device, known as a plethysmograph, measures blood flow to your private parts. After relaxing as best you can for five minutes, a slide show begins.
A rather boring picture appears on the screen for fifteen seconds: a jar of pennies. Then, one of your personally selected erotic slides appears, this one for thirty seconds. Then it vanishes and you wait two minutes. If you were especially aroused by the pictures, you’d wait even longer, since the researcher would wait for you to return to “baseline detumescence.” Then the slide show repeats itself fourteen more times: pennies, porn, wait. That’s it! You’d collect your $20 for your contribution to science, drop the plethysmograph in a bowl of sanitizing fluid, and head home.
Plaud and Martini’s experiment tested the hypothesis that specific male desires are formed through a process known as conditioning . Famously associated with Ivan Pavlov’s salivating dogs, conditioning exposes a subject to a neutral stimulus (such as a ringing bell), followed immediately by an arousing stimulus (such as tasty dog food). According to the science of conditioning, if the neutral and arousing stimuli are paired enough times, then eventually the neutral stimulus should acquire the same properties of the arousing stimulus; the dog salivates at the mere sound of the bell.
So what did Plaud and Martini find? By the end of the experiment, two out of three subjects became aroused by the jar of pennies. This demonstrated in a very limited fashion that visual conditioning can influence arousal in men. So could social conditioning be responsible for men’s interest in specific parts of the female anatomy? Most of the time, the answer is probably no.
First of all, the jar of pennies did not make any of the men become erect. There was only a slight increase in blood flow to some of their penises. But more important, after a few weeks the men in the Plaud and Martini experiment were no longer aroused at all by the jar of pennies. In contrast, for virtually all men, a sexual interest in breasts, butts, or feet is sustained for life, and may even get more intense with age. In conditioning, if the neutral stimulus (e.g., the jar of pennies) is repeatedly shown to a subject without the arousing stimulus (e.g., naked woman), the neutral stimulus will eventually lose its power—a process known as extinction. But men s
pend their lives looking at presumably neutral stimuli (such as breasts or butts) without ever experiencing extinction. Moreover, few men are sexually aroused by the sight of a flat-screen monitor or a box of Kleenex, though both are frequently associated with arousing stimuli. Something else must be happening in the male brain to maintain a lifelong interest in specific female anatomy.
There are several interesting clues regarding how male visual interests form. First, many male sexual obsessions appear to form after a single exposure, rather than after repeated pairings of a neutral stimulus and an arousing stimulus. Second, almost all lifelong sexual interests in men first form during adolescence. Clinicians report that it is very rare for an adult man to form a new sexual obsession with a visual object. If the male desire software was operating solely according to the principles of conditioning, then age should not be a significant factor. Instead, there appears to be a special window of time when visual sexual interests can form—what neuroscientists call a critical period.
In studies where male sheep were raised by goats, the young sheep sexually imprinted upon goats during the sheep’s critical period. Afterward, the male sheep would only try to mate with goats. Other sheep were not sexually desirable. In contrast, when female sheep were raised by goats, their imprinting was reversible. The female sheep could become willing to mate with other sheep. This same pattern of irreversible male sexual imprinting and weak female imprinting was observed when young goats were raised by sheep.