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

by Ogi Ogas

  Never in his life had he wanted anything as much as he wanted her. “But you owe me something.”

  There was no mistaking his meaning. “When we r-reach New Orleans,” Celia stammered, “Monsieur Valle-rand will give you a reward for saving my life.”

  “I want it now.” The bristle of his beard scratched the back of her neck, the velvet heat of his mouth rubbed over the top of her spine. “Please,” she said wildly, “don’t do this—”

  She whimpered in fear, but nothing would stop the ravenous mouth that wandered over her. It didn’t matter if his desire was reciprocated or not—he had to bury himself inside her and satisfy his hunger.

  “I am not yours and you have no right—”

  “You are mine. Until I give you to the Vallerands.” He bent over her unwilling mouth once more, thinking that he’d never had to seduce a woman before, not when every corner of the world was filled with willing ones. For him, the act of mating had always been quick and intense. But now he wanted something different, wanted it enough to wait with unnatural patience.

  “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.” Dimly she sensed the terrible guilt that awaited her if she allowed him to take her. If she put up enough of a struggle, there was a slim chance he might let her go. But to her everlasting shame, she found she had no more will to fight . . . her body was welcoming the drugging caresses that eased away all pain, all awareness of everything but rapture.

  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.” Sometimes a woman just imagines a stranger being so smitten with her looks that he abandons his friends—or wife—and crosses the room to meet her. In Elizabeth Boyle’s His Mistress by Morning, Charlotte Wilmont is in love with Sebastien, Viscount Trent, from afar. A magic ring grants her wish to capture his heart. But when she wakes, she finds she has become his mistress—the most notorious and popular mistress in all of London.

  The psychological cue of irresistibility explains young women’s willingness to enter wet T-shirt contests and flash themselves at Mardi Gras. Whereas male exhibitionism is usually considered a psychiatric disorder and a crime, female exhibitionism is rarely considered a social problem. Indeed, it’s frequently exploited commercially. A journalist asked a girl at Spring Break in Miami why she had just stripped naked for the cameras of soft-core pornographers in exchange for a hat. “If a woman’s got a pretty body and she likes her body, let her show it off!” was her enthusiastic response. “The only way I could see someone not doing this is if they were planning a career in politics.”

  The desire to be desired may also explain why many adolescent women participate in sexting—exchanging naked photos of themselves taken on a smart phone or webcam. Numerous Web sites, such as JayBee (short for Jailbait), My Ex Girlfriend, and See My Girlfriend, consist of galleries of nude photos that young women have taken of themselves in the mirror or by holding the camera at arm’s length.

  Sexual irresistibility is often expressed in women’s magazines and self-help books as “empowerment.” In Real Sex for Real Women, Laura Berman suggests that her book will help women “feel empowered” by making their “partners cherish our bodies, crave our touch, and desire passionate, no-holds-barred sex.” In other words, to empower women to be the subject of unapologetic male lust.

  In women, the urge to feel irresistible may not be part of the conscious, cognitive software of the Detective Agency. It appears to be a primal component of female sexuality, as basic as a man’s urge to chase and seduce. Marta Meana believes that there may even be a parallel between female irresistibility and a sexual cue in the female rat. When female rats are in the “proceptive phase”—a period of fertility when they’re seeking males for sex—they are in control of the sexual interactions, darting and hopping around the interested male in a process called pacing. The female rat wants the male to pursue her. If the male shows sufficient interest and chases her at the pace she sets, then she permits him to mount her and copulate. It’s clear that female rats find pacing to be rewarding. Both pacing and the reward for pacing are controlled by software in the rat subcortex.

  But the powerful subcortical cue of irresistibility can also cause trouble for the female brain. Women of all ages report dissatisfaction with their body far more often than men do. Anorexia and bulimia are about seven times more likely to occur in women than in men. Women express much greater body image self-consciousness during physical intimacy than men and frequently cite body dissatisfaction as one of the primary impediments to satisfying sex. On the other hand, when a woman does feel empowered by her appearance, she is much more likely to report sexual satisfaction.

  The irresistibility cue is so potent and fundamental that it fuels a female fantasy that is very common—and very controversial.

  THE CONCUPISCENCE OF COERCION

  I blame my recurring rape fantasy on the fact that I’m a feminist. I’ve never made any bones about getting boned in exactly the fashion that I want. But as a girl, my equipment can be trickier to manage, therefore I need to be a boss in the bedroom to ensure I get worked the right way. It gets really tiresome always being the one in charge, and don’t shrinks say that people usually fantasize about the opposite of their reality? I guess that’s why I find myself wishing that my typically sugary-sweet sexual encounters were sometimes peppered with assault.

  So opens the essay entitled “One Rape, Please (to go)” authored by Ms. Tracie Egan Morrissey in the online magazine Vice. Egan describes her botched attempt at indulging her coercion fantasy. She hires a male escort: a young, handsome gigolo in New York City. She wants him to wear a ski mask because “it would also be extra scary and thrilling and hot.” Unfortunately for Egan, the fantasy peters out prematurely as the hired ruffian ends up falling for her. Instead of violating her resisting body, he begs to see her again.

  For both ordinary women and female scientists, the widespread prevalence of female coercive fantasies is an understandable source of discomfort and hand-wringing. The subject frequently leads to defensiveness: getting excited by a fantasy is not the same thing as wanting it in real life. “Arousal is not consent,” asserts psychologist Meredith Chivers. In fact, many women emphasize that rape fantasies involve a meaningful level of consent in that the woman consents to having the fantasy. “Perhaps this is why some women can still enjoy rape scenes in romance novels or e-rom,” ponders one woman, “they have consented to participate in the mental experience and thus have control over the situation.”

  In romance novels from the 1970s and ’80s, the heroine was frequently raped. And not a verbal seduction followed by gentle coercion, either. Heroines were sometimes violated by a gang of pirates, sold into sexual slavery, or smacked around until their mouths bled. The hero himself often forced himself on the heroine, such as the pirate Griffin raping Celia Vallerand or Wood-iwiss’s Flame raping the Flower.

  Rape romances reached their pinnacle in the classic 1980s “bodice rippers,” with feisty heroines and very-bad-boy heroes set on revenge. Here is a sample from Christine Monson’s 1984 Stormfire . Irish rebel Sean Culhane has abducted Catherine Enderley, an English countess and daughter to the English aristrocrat who arranged the massacre that killed Sean’s mother.

  He climbed atop her, caught her hands and pinned them above her head, then threw a leg over her lower body. When she felt the pressure of his sex against her bare thigh, she suddenly went berserk and fought him in dumb, choking terror. Clamping her wrists with one hand, he methodically ripped the camisole and petticoat from her straining body, then lay full length upon her, forcing her to submit to his nakedness until she lay exhausted, heart thudding against his ribs. Sensing the trigger to her fear, he deliberately smeared her breasts with his blood so that her body was slippery under him. Relentlessly, he pursued her into the void.

  The author’s description is still
rather literary and emotional, especially compared to the graphic detail and physical violence of male-targeted coercion erotica. Scientists point out that the men in many of these female coercion fantasies are handsome, appealing alphas—the kind of partner that appeals to Miss Marple. “What is ‘wished for’ in real life is surrender to a powerful and attractive selected male and a sense of danger, excitement, and passion in real-life relationships,” observed two psychologists in a 2008 review of rape fantasy research.

  But Meredith Chivers also points out that there is something primordial about female fantasies of submission. “It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought. To be all in the midbrain.” Though academic research focuses on the notion that coercion involves desirable male partners, many amateur stories written by women depict rapes by unattractive and brutal men in shuddering detail.

  Literotica is the single most popular English-language erotic story site on the Web, with 5 million visitors per month. Run by the husband-and-wife team of Laurel and John since the late ’90s the site contains more than 200,000 erotic stories, including more than 10,000 “non-consent/reluctant” stories. There are female-authored fantasies of truckers raping women at rest stops, depraved criminals raping innocent housewives, and soldiers brutalizing captive women.

  But fan fiction features the widest variety of female-authored nonconsensual sex—in some cases downright violent and degrading sex. Stories with such themes are common enough to merit their own identifying tags: Abuse, Violence, BDSM, Tort[ure] and Humil[iation]. Each of these tags is among the ten most popular sexual act descriptors for Harry Potter stories on AdultFanFiction .net. Here is an excerpt from a fan fiction story by Miss Stephanie, featuring the abduction of a muggle by Draco Malfoy:She fought with renewed strength then, but he smiled in a wicked grimace as he forced her hands over her head and straddled her. . . . Draco felt the heat flare as he ripped her shirt away and caught sight of her rather large breasts. They jounced and wiggled as she struggled again, and another slap stilled her. . . . Her head turned and he saw a trickle of blood alongside her mouth, but this only spiked his arousal, causing his penis to jump with eagerness as he pulled it out. She pushed against him, ineffectually, but he slapped her regardless, and forced her hands down, gripping them with his own hands on either side of her head. . . . He knew that he was wrong, but he wanted to make this last. He had never in his life felt such heat conjoin in his loins, and he was sure the explosion that was building within him was going to be momentous.

  In such fantasies, it often seems like something is going on other than the mere desire to be irresistible. “I get off on stories with the rough stuff,” explains Miranda Helmsley, a forty-two-year-old baker. “I don’t know why. I definitely would never want to experience any of the things that turn me on. But I need the girl to be exploited, put in her place with real force from the man. I don’t like to think too much about it, and I definitely would never tell my husband.”

  These violent and degrading coercive fantasies may be female counterparts to men’s submission fantasies, such as “forced feminization,” “cock and ball torture,” and “golden showers”—squicky genres we will consider later. It may be that at the bottom of our subcortex, in our hypothalamus and midbrain, we all share the same ancient circuitry associated with dominance and submission. In Czech author Milan Kundera’s “The Hitchiking Game,” he describes a sexually inexperienced woman who pretends to be a prostitute as part of a sex game with her boyfriend. She ends up losing herself in the role.

  This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure at this moment—beyond that boundary.

  WEB0.0

  There’s a scene in Legally Blonde where Elle Woods returns home to campus and notices her awkward friend David trying to pick up a pretty girl. “You’re a dork,” replies the girl. “Girls like me don’t go out with guys like you.” Elle hurries over to David and slaps him. “Why didn’t you call me? We spent a beautiful night together and I haven’t heard from you since.” David plays along as the pretty girl watches attentively. After Elle stalks off, the pretty girl returns to David. “So, when did you wanna go out?”

  The maxim “All the best men are taken” is doubly true. If a man is already taken by a woman, then by definition, he’s the best man—or certainly a more desirable man. If the exact same man is not taken, then his value is questionable—he’s certainly not as desirable as a man who has already received the stamp of approval from another woman’s Detective Agency.

  The popularity cue is prominent in romance novels, though it may find its most classic expression in the Cinderella fairy tale. The Prince is sought after by all the ladies of the kingdom—including the bitchy stepsisters—but the glass slipper only fits one girl, the oppressed maid Cinderella. In the romance novel Heaven, Texas by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, the hero is a famous professional football player. The heroine is a rather mousy spinster and virgin who’s spent most of her life working in nursing homes. Nobody thought she stood a chance with the popular hometown hero. The hero himself said she wasn’t his type and didn’t expect to stay with her even after they started sleeping together. But even though he can have any woman in town, the virgin’s Magic Hoo Hoo captures his full attention and he ends up falling for her.

  Popularity cues are one reason many women find married men so attractive. The fact that another woman’s Detective Agency has already completed her assiduous detective work and endorsed a man is valuable information. If the man had something to hide, surely the wife’s Miss Marple would have ferreted it out. But for the men who are the subject of the popularity cue, it’s a case of the rich getting richer. Former Playboy playmate Kendra Wilkinson chronicles her first sexual encounter with Hugh Hefner in the Playboy Mansion:One of the girls asked me if I wanted to go upstairs to Hef’s room. . . . It seemed like every other girl was going, and if I didn’t it would be weird. One by one, each girl hopped on Hef and had sex with him . . . for about a minute. I studied their every move. Then it was my turn . . . it was very weird. I wasn’t thinking about how much older Hef was—all the body parts worked the same. I wanted to be there.

  Men who are awkward loners or social rejects have a major strike against them in the view of the Detective Agency, unless they offer compensating cues. “Omega” heroes—comedians, art thieves, and nerdy geniuses—rarely show up in romances though, as with Beta heroes, they have their own devoted following. Xander from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an omega, as is the thief Gawain Lammergeier in Claire Delacroix’s The Scoundrel . Alpha heroes who are dominant in the society of men and desired by the society of women are far more common, and far more appreciated by Miss Marple.

  The solitary hunter Elmer Fudd is not receptive to the popularity cue. Other men’s opinion about the attractiveness of a woman plays no role in the level of man’s desire; indeed, men often prefer that other men had less interest in a potential partner in order to leave her more accessible. The fewer competing wabbit-hunters, the better.

  When women are not competing for mates, they frequently solicit one another’s opinions on men, relationships, sexuality, health, dieting, fashion, and especially one another’s feelings—what we might call informational cues. The Detective Agency always craves information to make good long-term investment decisions—and the more information, the better. We saw how women dominate social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Bebo. But informational cues are most prominent within the highly networked fan fiction community.

  One reason that fanfic has exploded online is because the Internet makes it very easy for female fans to communicate with one another. Most fan fiction stories are posted in forums and blo
gs that allow readers to comment on the stories. Readers pay particular attention to the emotional qualities of the story and the authenticity of the characters. Remarking on a Harry Potter story, one fan observes, “Oh, and, on a side note, would Ron really use the expression, ‘hooking up’? It sounded very Muggle, very American, and very post-early 90s to me.” Another fan commends the author, saying, “I liked his surges of anger every now and again, made for a more compelling and realistic Harry. I also thought his spat with Ginny was done very appropriately.”

  Many fan fiction stories elicit hundreds of comments. A story’s author usually responds to comments on her story. Fanfic authors frequently share what they were feeling when they wrote their story, eliciting further discussion. Many women enjoy talking about the process of talking about fan fiction, a type of discussion known as “meta.”

  One 55,000-word story set in the Stargate : Atlantis universe and titled “Written by the Victors” was posted on LiveJournal in 2007 by the author Speranza. It has received more than one thousand enthusiastic comments and still receives comments today. “I will point out that the thing that unequivocally sucked me in was that after seven chapters of theorizing about John’s character and motivations we finally get to the emotional truth of the matter,” writes one commenter. Miss Marple’s joy in analyzing and evaluating informational cues is quite apparent in most comments. “I particularly loved the different truths of the competing historical narratives, their different weightiness in publication type ranging from what I thought were excerpts from more popular and lightweight memoirs/biographies to the more supposedly stringent peer-reviewed articles—how they in literary style cycled through the spectrum of factual history-legend-myth-poetic fantasy and finally degenerated (for us readers—into Latin/Greek and finally glyphs/ideograms)—lost forever perhaps.”