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

by Ogi Ogas

  Masculine professions dominate gay porn. There are military-oriented gay sites, such as AWOL Marines, Military Shorties, and Hooyah Fags. The slogan of MilitaryJerkoff.com is “Don’t ask, don’t tell . . . just suck my dick, bro” and features straight American soldiers masturbating for the camera. Firemen and policemen are popular roles in gay porn, as are thugs, construction workers, and jocks.

  On Thor and Rocco, the blog of a fortysomething married gay couple, Thor narrates his fantasy about the plumber who replaced the tiles in his shower. “This kid that is here now is so fucking hot. Yeah, he is definitely straight, but what I would give to blow him while his boss is out.”

  In order to dispel any possible ambiguities about the true sexual orientation of an actor, many gay men prefer to watch straight porn—a man having sex with a woman—since this offers indisputable proof of heterosexuality. “I only watch straight videos,” explains one thirty-six-year-old gay man who has sex with multiple men every week. “I prefer gangbang porn, especially European porn, where there’s a greater comfort with men being near other men’s bodies. Just guys helping a buddy out. Of course, I never really look at the woman at the center of it . . .”

  Recently, some Web sites have adapted to the gay interest in straight porn by offering heterosexual content specifically tailored to gay cues. Straight Guys for Gay Eyes and Next Door Hookups present heterosexual couples having sex. There’s no doubting the actors are straight: there they are, making love to the ladies and loving it. For a straight man, watching the attentively crafted videos on Straight Guys for Gay Eyes is educational: these videos reveal the central importance of point of view in pornography, something that often goes unnoticed.

  In porn targeted at heterosexual men, the woman is always the focus of the camera. We see her expressions, her emotions, the graphic details of her anatomy. We hear her moaning and watch her reaction when the disembodied man ejaculates on her. Other than the penis, the man’s body and especially his face are rarely highlighted in contemporary porn. This “man’s eye” point of view is a big reason why many women do not like pornography: it’s usually shot in a manner designed to maximize activation of male visual cues and completely ignores the visual and psychological cues that appeal to women. In effect, a female viewer is compelled to “have sex” with the woman in the porn—and have sex with her as a man would.

  On Straight Guys for Gay Eyes, the situation is completely reversed. Now the camera favors the man. The woman is an afterthought. Sometimes she doesn’t even take off her shirt, while the man’s shirt gets removed in the first few seconds. The woman herself is often silent, while the man moans or simply tells the girl how much he’s enjoying himself. The emphasis is on male pleasure. The camera lovingly attends to the man’s reactions and feelings, lingering on his brawny chest and arms, moving to a close-up of his butt and thighs as he pumps in and out of the woman. The male body is the center of attention. Perhaps as a result, many straight women report finding Straight Guys for Gay Eyes more arousing than other kinds of porn.

  If you think about it, it’s a little odd that a man’s heterosexuality should be a cue that activates gay desire. If a guy has a hot body, shouldn’t that be enough? “Sometimes you’re watching a porn and the guy looks straight, like a real macho bad-ass, smoking hot,” explains Rocco. “But then suddenly he lisps, ‘Oooh, give me a good thucking!’ and just ruins the whole thing.”

  This suggests that gay desire does not solely target anatomical cues. If gay men are merely attracted to male bodies, they shouldn’t care whether those bodies are inhabited by a straight mind or a gay mind or an androgynous mind. If anything, one would intuitively expect that gay men would be more aroused by a gay mind, since that would suggest that any attraction could be reciprocated. Instead, the gay sexual brain also hunts for the psychological cues associated with masculinity.

  There are certainly many gay men who have a strong sexual preference for gay men over straight men. Gay men also fall head-over-heels in love and pursue long-term monogamous relationships with their partners. Gay desire is as varied as straight desire. But numerous studies have demonstrated that the gay interest in masculinity appears to be as fixed and inflexible as David/Brenda Reimer’s unchangeable interest in women. Several decades of medical attempts at converting homosexual desire into heterosexual desire through conditioning, electroshock—or, in one case, directly stimulating a gay man’s brain while he had sex with a female prostitute—have been notorious failures. The American Psychiatric Association officially opposes such ill-advised and ultimately unethical attempts at reprogramming gays’ brain software because of their ineffectiveness and terrible side effects, which resemble the “psychological warfare” experienced by David Reimer.

  It might be that by the time males are born, a binary “gender cue” in their brain software gets set to target either masculinity or femininity. There is some evidence that a neural network consisting of core regions in the human reward system may contain receptors for the gender cue. This fundamental, relatively inflexible gender cue then influences and organizes the other male cues—including the visual cues.

  THE MALE GAZE

  Women often complain that male porn objectifies women, reducing them to a crude collection of anatomical parts. The movie Angel Eyes is a useful example to consider.

  Angel stands in front of two brutish guys. One ogles Angel’s body and purrs, “Nice ass, mind if I squeeze it?” Angel shyly nods, and soon the two guys are probing and poking Angel’s body as if it’s a slab of meat on a butcher’s block. “Great chest!” says the second guy, stroking his rough hands across Angel’s nipples. A few minutes later, the two guys have Angel bent over a sofa, one in front, one in back, both pounding away. It’s the kind of scene frequently used to demonstrate the misogyny of porn except for one thing.

  Angel is a man.

  If you’re a straight guy, gay porn might be too squicky for you to watch. But if you did take a look (in the interests of science), you’d stand a very good chance of experiencing what many women experience when they watch porn: a feeling that it’s too graphic with way too many close-ups. But if you managed to get past the squickiness, you might experience another feeling: déjà vu. Except for the fact that the male body is the star, gay porn looks and feels exactly like straight porn.

  Gay porn features similar numbers of explicit anatomical close-ups. We looked at the one hundred top-rated video clips on Gaytube and found:• 83 featured a graphic shot of a penis.

  • 48 featured graphic shots of male butts.

  • 46 featured graphic shots of a man’s chest.

  Like straight porn, gay porn typically jumps right into sex with little or no narrative preamble. Actors on gay tube sites are rarely identified by name; instead, sex is presented as a fast, anonymous, orgasm-focused tangle of bodies.

  So what else do gay men want to see online? Below is a list of the seven most popular categories of gay sexual searches on the Dogpile search engine:

  Except for straight (#2), every one of these gay interests is also a popular straight interest. In fact, virtually all of the genres of gay porn have a precise parallel in straight porn. Youth tops both lists by a large margin. Indeed, fully one-third of the hundred most popular gay sites on the Alexa Adult List feature young men. Within youth, gay porn has twinks, analogous to teens in straight porn. Twinks are young guys, typically college age, most often lean, athletic, with an all-American look and feel. Almost onehalf of the hundred most popular gay porn sites feature young men, including Twink’s Orgasms, King Twinks, and Cute Young Twinks. Every gay tube site features a twinks section.

  Donald Symons explained that men have a preference for younger women, an assertion confirmed by Internet porn. Young women offer the best long-term opportunity for healthy children. But this evolutionary reasoning does not apply to gay desire: a sexual interest in young men will not lead to increased numbers of children. Thus, it seems very likely that gay men inherit the same brain softwar
e targeting youth cues as straight men. This male desire for youth contrasts with the sexual desires of women, who generally prefer that their partners be older and more experienced.

  But gay men aren’t exclusively interested in youth. Like straight men, a large minority of gay men can also be aroused by age and experience. Some gays seek out older men called daddies, paralleling the MILFs of straight porn. Also analogous to the tastes of straight men, gays prefer daddies who are confident and authoritative, who unapologetically seduce younger men. Like MILFs, daddies must be fit and physically attractive. And of course, a large penis is always welcome.

  While straight men have a deep-rooted fascination with large penises, gay men are positively obsessed with them. There are hundreds of gay sites celebrating the penis, such as We Love Cock, Addicted to Cock, and Cock-n-Dick. The men in gay anime porn always have jumbo-sized members, drawn in a rainbow of bright colors. The famous gay erotic artist Tom of Finland drew men with thick, oversized organs. Many amateur gay sites simply feature collections of close-ups of penises, with no face or body visible, such as Cocks n’ Balls (“No bull, just cocks”). There’s even a common term for gay men obsessed with large members: “size queens.”

  Like straight men, gay men also search for heavy actors and models far more than skinny ones. Large gay men are typically referred to as bears, paralleling the BBW of straight porn. Bears are usually big, hairy, and older, with a warm and friendly personality. Sites like Lusty Bears, Gay Bear World, and Bear Forest feature explicit imagery of oversized men just like BBW sites feature oversized women. Scrawny boys are relatively more popular among gays than scrawny girls are among straight men, but still remain far less popular than bears.

  Gay sites like Asian Boy Feet, Jock Foot Fantasy, and Barefoot Frat celebrate men’s feet. Gay men, like straight men, can also become sexually aroused by other body parts or by cued interests in clothing, such as armpits (Armpits.com), saggy jeans (Saggers GoneWild.com), and socks (GaySocks.com). And, unlike women, gay men are also willing to pay money just to look at body parts.

  Feet, butts, and chests are highly popular in both gay and straight porn, as are domination, submission, group sex, amateurs, and numerous types of squickier interests. With so many parallel interests, Internet porn suggests that gay men share the same visual cues as straight men. This fact overturns many common misconceptions about gay desire. Gay men are not looking for flamboyant, effeminate actors who are preening and emoting. Gay porn is not full of chatty conversation, Cher impersonators, or the elaborate analysis of feelings. Political messages are entirely absent. Instead, gay guys like the same things as straight guys: youth, aggressive and seductive maturity, graphic details of the body, large penises, ejaculation shots, and anonymous, emotionless, nonmonogamous sex.

  But what about psychological cues? Do gay men share the same preferences expressed in the romance and fan fiction so appreciated by women? What can we learn about gay desire from erotic stories?

  Below are two lists. The left column is a list of two-word phrases that appear most frequently in the stories on the all-gay site Nifty Erotic Stories Archive. The right column contains phrases that appear most frequently in the stories on Adult Fan Fiction. Each phrase includes a male pronoun, in order to offer a more accurate comparison of the way each genre handles men.

  There’s no overlap in the lists. In gay erotica, there’s a graphic emphasis on anatomy, especially penises and butts. In women’s erotic fan fiction, there’s an emphasis on feelings and softer qualities—his gaze, his heart, he sighed, his lover. Gay erotic stories feature little foreplay before jumping into sex: on average, sex appears about a quarter of the way into a gay story; in Harry Potter fan fiction, on the other hand, sex appears about halfway in. It’s also worth observing that gay men are no more interested in romance novels than straight men are.

  Gay brains appear to possess a gay Elmer Fudd: hunt, aim, fire, repeat. Psychologist Richard Lippa and the BBC conducted a massive international survey with more than 250,000 participants in forty-one nations. Everywhere, they found that both gay and straight men prefer appearance and visual attractiveness over all other qualities when selecting a partner. Another study put gay and straight men in a brain scanner and showed them pornographic videos. Their brain activity was strikingly similar, with comparable activation in the frontal cortex, visual cortex, and subcortex. But, strikingly, both gay and straight brains exhibited different patterns of activation from women’s brains.

  But gay men don’t just like the same kind of porn as straight men. They use it the same way. In fact, you could even say that gays guys act more like men than straight guys do. Gay men watch more porn, have larger porn stashes, search for more porn online, subscribe to porn sites more often, maintain more subscriptions at the same time, and renew their subscriptions more often. They’re more comfortable talking about porn than straight men—and are more tolerant of their partners watching porn than women are. “When you’re in a gay relationship, you’re both guys, so you understand exactly what’s up with the porn,” explains a thirty-two-year-old gay man. “It’s no big deal. In fact, it’s really hot to find your partner watching something good.”

  Not all gay men like porn and some disapprove of their partners watching it, of course. Generally, however, gay men are free to seek out visual content that satisfies their erotic interests without facing the obstacles sometimes imposed by the female partners of straight men. The adult industry recognizes the financial power of their gay audience. “Gay men are much clearer about what they want, and much more loyal to Web sites that give them what they want,” explains the vice president of one company that runs a dozen gay paysites. “You get a smaller audience with a gay site than with many of the vanilla straight sites, but you’ll also get more conversions and renewals. It’s also easier to generate word of mouth, since gay men are more likely to talk about their favorite sites than straight men.”

  What percentage of all AOL users search for gay content? About one and a half percent.

  After comparing gay porn to straight porn (and considering the tragedy of David/Brenda Reimer), it appears that a preference for masculinity or femininity is preloaded into the male brain as a gender cue. This preference is not limited to the physical aspects of a body, since many gay men are especially aroused by straight men. In addition, the gay brain seems to be loaded with the same visual desire software as the straight brain—except that the gay visual cues target male bodies instead of female bodies.

  Thus, it seems likely that the gender cue organizes and influences the visual cues during a critical period in puberty and adolescence. But how does the gender cue control the visual cues? What causes straight guys to become obsessed with large breasts and round butts, while gay men become obsessed with brawny chests and rock-hard butts?

  How does the male visual desire software actually work?

  THE BODY MAP

  The anatomical parts that are searched for the most by gay men, referenced most frequently in gay porn, and referenced most often in gay erotica are: chests, butts, feet, and penises. What’s so intriguing about this list is that it parallels the anatomical parts most favored by straight men: breasts, butts, feet, and penises. (The vagina is also exceedingly popular.)

  But how might the male brain tell its owner which body parts to look at? You might guess that the male brain is born with a visual template for what an ideal breast looks like, the way you might find an image attached to an e-mail. According to this view, a young man simply consults this mental image to determine what he should look for. But the fact that gay men seek out firm, fit chests instead of soft, round breasts poses a problem for this view. Though it’s theoretically possible for evolution to have endowed the male brain with an innate portrait of the ideal breast, it’s theoretically impossible for evolution to have designed a gay-brain-only template for a man’s ideal chest.

  Furthermore, though most men have an interest in breasts, the ideal breast varies dramatically a
cross cultures. Indeed, the physical color, size, areola, and shape of breasts varies with ethnicities, too. It’s difficult to imagine how the human brain would come wired with a standard template for breasts that applies across all ethnicities and cultures. We saw how the male brain appears to have a critical period during which the physical details of an ideal breast get set. But how does the male brain know to seek out breasts to begin with?

  Scientists have not yet come up with any good answer to this question. No neuroscientist has conducted research intended to identify the neural wiring responsible for men’s sexual fascination with particular body parts. But there’s enough interesting clues that we can speculate how it might work.

  One possibility is that men’s desire software comes loaded with a sensitivity to “regions of interest”—namely, breasts, feet, butts, and genitals. The brain knows where to look, rather than what to look for. But doesn’t this “regions of interest” proposal suffer from the same problem as the idea of a breast template? Namely, how does the brain know where to look? One possibility is that male receptivity to female anatomical the body cues are linked to the male brain’s body map.

  Our brain has several different neural networks that contain mental representations of the body. For example, our somatosensory cortex contains a map of our body based upon our sense of touch. Another part of our brain that processes visual images of bodies is known as the extrastriate body area or EBA. The EBA is activated when looking at the bodies of other people—including individual body parts—but not when looking at faces or objects. Intriguingly, when scientists activated this brain region using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (blasting a brain region with a magnetic field that causes its neurons to fire), subjects altered their aesthetic judgment of body parts.