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

by Ogi Ogas

  There is very strong evidence that these body maps are innate. One dramatic example is a strange condition in people who are born without arms or legs, yet can still “feel” the missing arm or leg. This experience of an absent body part is known as a phantom limb. Various psychological tests demonstrate that these congenital phantom limbs are anatomically accurate (for example, the owners cannot imagine them doing impossible movements) and are not just the result of “wishful thinking” from watching other people. It appears our mind has its own body map that forms independently of our physical body.

  If the male desire software wanted to know what parts of a potential mate’s body to target, it could use the brain’s body map as a reference point. Perhaps the chest, buttocks, and foot regions of the body map are prewired to subcortical sexual reward centers. Though this is speculative, there are some intriguing clues that support this possibility. First, there is another body map disorder known as body integrity image disorder (BIID) that causes some people to want to amputate their limbs. BIID is the opposite of a phantom limb—these people have a real limb, but it doesn’t seem to match their mental representation of the limb, so they want to get rid of it. The first recorded case involved an Englishman who forced a French surgeon at gunpoint to cut off the Englishman’s healthy leg. What’s so intriguing is that many men who suffer from BIID feel a strong sexual component to their desire for amputation. (Though women also suffer from BIID, they experience sexual feelings must less frequently than men.)

  Another piece of evidence is that blind men are aroused by female anatomy, and even seem to prefer the same low waist-to-hip ratio that sighted people do. They also report being aroused by touching breasts and buttocks.

  But one of the most intriguing sources of support for the notion that male visual cues activate regions of interest in the brain’s body map comes from Syracuse psychologist Stephanie Ortigue. In 2007, Ortigue examined the brain of a thirty-four-year-old man with a very unusual sexual interest. Ortigue dubbed it the “Sleeping Beauty” fetish.

  “He was aroused by sleeping women. For a while, his wife voluntarily took sleeping pills to satisfy his desire, but eventually she refused,” explains Ortigue. “So he began secretly giving her benzodiazepines, Bromazepam. When she found out, she was furious. But since the man’s compulsion was so strong, he put on a latex mask and waited for her to leave work, then sprayed her with pepper spray, apparently intending to put her to sleep. She fought him off, called the police, and that’s how he ended up in the emergency psychiatric unit.”

  But as fascinating as the man’s sleeping fetish was, there was more. The man was fixated on hands and feet. The reason he wanted his wife to sleep was so that he could paint and manicure her toenails and fingernails, then masturbate.

  Ortigue’s team scanned the man’s brain using MRI. They discovered lesions in a part of the brain associated with body image. The man also suffered from “personal representational hemineglect”: he had an incomplete mental image of his hands. When asked to draw a picture of himself, his arms trailed off into nothingness. The fact that he preferred the hands and feet of sleeping women suggests that he was sexually attracted to disembodied (but living) limbs—an almost exact complement to the sexual desire to amputate one’s own limb.

  If men’s visual cues originate as erotic regions of interest linked to a neural body map, this could explain why gay men are interested in brawny chests and straight men are interested in busty chests. All men instinctively know they should pay attention to chests. But what kind of chest should they pay attention to? Perhaps the gender cue plays an important role in this process. If a man is born with the gender cue set to femininity, this cue instructs the regions of interest cues to look for the relevant anatomy on women. If a man’s gender cue is set to masculinity, this cue instructs the brain to look at the relevant anatomy on men.

  This flexibility in setting the visual cues would also explain why men are interested in such a variety of breasts and chests. Men aren’t born liking double-Ds. Instead, the region of interest cue guides a man to examine the chests in the particular environment in which a man finds himself. A feminine gender cue targets female chests. But other fundamental cues might also influence the region of interest cues. For example, the youth cue may guide the chest cue to target young female chests. The brain then surveys the available young female chests in the environment to generate its template for an ideal chest.

  In this view, culture does play an essential role in determining the exact form of a man’s visual cues. This may be one reason that the butt preferences of Latinos and Africans are notably different from the butt preferences of the Japanese and Irish. All men have an innate interest in butts, but the precise kind of butt varies from culture to culture, depending on women’s (and men’s) bodies in the particular culture, as well as the culture-specific way they are presented.

  So far we’ve only focused on the visual cues that arouse gay men and straight men. But what about psychological cues? Might gay men prefer the same psychological cues favored by women?

  TOPS AND BOTTOMS

  For the past fifteen years, the psychologist Paul Vasey has been studying Japanese macaques, two-and-a-half-foot-tall, pink-faced monkeys. Vasey has been trying to solve a rather intriguing puzzle. Why do some female macaques mount other females during the mating season, the same way males do? At first, Vasey believed that perhaps parts of these females’ brains had somehow been masculinized. He thought that their “female software” had somehow been converted into “male software.” But when he took a look at their brains, he found that they looked completely female. So he came to a different conclusion about females mounting females.

  “It isn’t functional. The behavior has no discernible purpose, adaptationally speaking,” explains Vasey. “Instead, it’s a by-product of other behavioral mechanisms.” The “other behavioral mechanisms” include the brain software for mounting, a typically male behavior. But if the female macaques’ brains were typically female, then where did the male behavior come from? In other words, how was “male software” running in a female brain? One possible answer can be found in the brains of another mammal, the rat.

  Male and female rats express very different behaviors during sex. The males are dominant, the females are submissive. The male rat is an aggressive stalker, a rodent Elmer Fudd hunting wats instead of wabbits. He looks around for a suitable female, and once he spots one, he takes control. He grabs her around her hips and vigorously thrusts away—a mechanical process of mounting called intromission.

  The female is more coy. She paces: she runs away from the pursuing male in a series of short dashes. If the male can match her pacing, she will eventually halt and assume a submissive position, thrusting her hips into the air and waiting. This mechanical process is called lordosis. Software in the subcortex of the male brain controls intromission. Different software in the subcortex of the female brain controls lordosis. But researchers have discovered something very interesting about this complementary software.

  It’s possible to make a dominant male behave like a submissive female. How? By stimulating the same part of the subcortex that controls lordosis in females. Using drugs or an electrode, you can elicit lordosis in male rats by activating the ventromedial hypothalamus. In other words, male rat brains naturally contain female sexual software.

  Similarly, if you stimulate a specific part of the female rat brain, you can elicit mounting and hip-thrusting behavior. The female rat brain naturally contains male sexual software. Perhaps this is also what’s going on with Vasey’s female-mounting female macaques: these females are simply accessing the naturally occurring male sexual software.

  This choice is very salient in gay men. When gay men have sex, there are two complementary roles: the “top” and the “bottom.” Usually the bottom is penetrated by the top, though often the bottom simply performs fellatio on the top. Most gay men eventually come to favor one role over the other. Since most heterosexual men pre
fer the dominant role in their sexual relations with women, we might speculate that most gay men would also prefer to be tops. After all, we’ve seen how gay men share the same visual cues as straight men; perhaps they share the same psychological cues, such as the desire to be dominant. At the very least, we might expect that gay men would balance their top and bottom roles, “pitching” and “catching” in relatively equal proportions over their lifetime. However, both of these assumptions are wrong. Most gay men prefer to be bottoms.

  “Tops have it so easy,” muses one thirty-seven-year-old bottom. “All you need to do is walk into a bar and flex your pecs and a dozen bottoms will throw themselves at you.” Online data supports the widespread belief in the gay community that there are more bottoms than tops.

  We analyzed 1.9 million men-seeking-men ads on Craigslist that were posted in every major city in the United States in the spring of 2010. These are classified ads that gay men typically use to seek casual sex. Sixty-five percent of the ads were from bottoms seeking tops, and 35 percent of the ads were from tops seeking bottoms. In other words, about two-thirds of American gay men who seek casual sex prefer the more submissive role.

  Gay porn is heavily dominated by bottoms. However, though tops are rare, they are the biggest stars with the biggest fan bases and the biggest paychecks. The most successful gay porn stars, such as Jeff Stryker, Wilson Vasquez, Rex Chandler (straight), and Michael Lucas, are all tops. One reason that tops are so valued in gay porn is because they are more straight-acting than bottoms, by virtue of the fact that they are playing the dominant role. In porn, tops are usually taller, more fit, and more dominant than bottoms. In the movie Thug Home Invasion, the thug played by Kamrun is a confident, masculine top who penetrates two uncertain, more effeminate men after he breaks into their house. If a straight guy appears in gay porn, he’s always the top unless it’s a genre that’s specifically devoted to forcing straight guys to have penetrative gay sex, such as Straight Hell.

  Tops rarely get aroused by being sexually submissive, and they identify with the dominant role when they watch domination/submission porn. One forty-five-year-old gay man, who frequently meets men through Craigslist, gives one perspective on what it’s like to be a top. “I’m not going to suck any dick, I’m nobody’s bitch,” he explains. “One of my favorite things is when married straight guys I work with say they want to see what it’s like to be with a guy, but don’t want anybody to find out. They figure I’m a safe way to try it out. They usually get drunk first, then I fuck them. Sometimes they start crying like a girl. They say, ‘oh this was a huge mistake.’ But it’s always been fun for me.”

  Most gay porn stories are written from the point of view of the bottom. This is apparent from looking at the possessive pronouns in the three most common five-word phrases in the gay stories on Literotica.a cock in my mouth

  his cock back into my

  out of my ass and

  So does being a bottom mean a person enjoys being sexually submissive? The answer is complicated. “The bottom is really in control,” explains one twenty-four-year-old middle school teacher. “He sets the pace, he’s the gatekeeper. Think of a woman—she’s the one that ultimately chooses what’s going to happen and what’s not going to happen.” Rocco adds, “The bottom willingly puts himself into the position to be dominated.” This desire for “submissive control” is reflected in Craigslist ads, such as this ad from a bottom: “Looking for top. Must enjoy and appreciate the cocksucking I will give.” Though most gay men agree that the bottom is actually the one who dictates the terms of sex, much as the female rat controls sex through pacing and lordosis, they also agree on something else: “Nobody likes a bossy bottom.”

  “This one guy kept throwing up demands: stand like this, move like this, do this. It was like I was his personal dildo,” explains one very tall thirty-eight-year-old top. “I just wanted him to take it like a man, that’s why I told him to come over. So I threw him out.” Though the top is typically more dominant, sometimes he simply sits back and passively lets the bottom service him. “Looking for bottom to suck my dick and eat my cum while I watch TV,” runs one top’s ad on Craigslist.

  In other words, getting aroused by being sexually submissive does not seem to be identical with being a bottom, though they’re clearly related. “I hook up with a lot of guys off Craigslist,” continues the tall top. “Once in a while you get a guy that says, ‘Beat me, hit me, piss on me, call me a little slut.’ Most bottoms aren’t like that, but there’s a few that really get off on being degraded.”

  Out of more than a million Craigslist men-seeking-men ads, only about 2 percent of them specifically requested men willing to dominate another man sexually, above and beyond the usual call of a top. Most bottoms simply want to perform fellatio or receive anal sex—and they want to control what happens. “I’m a bottom and I can tell you I would never want to feel like I’m being humiliated or sexually degraded,” explains a twenty-six-year-old Latino man. “I get off on the pleasure I’m giving to the top. I mean, if a top wanted to call me a little slut, I’d probably enjoy it just because it’s sexy talk, but if he tried to tie me up or pee on me or something, I’d throw his ass out.”

  Most of the time, straight men are aroused by cues of domination, while women are aroused by cues of submission—as seen by the irresistibility cue and the prevalence of female coercion fantasies. But the majority of gay men also seem to favor cues of submissiveness (though most don’t appear to respond to irresistibility cues).

  If human brains are like rat and macaque brains and contain both male sexual dominance software and female submission software, perhaps the same factors that cause a gay man’s gender cue to get set to masculinity also tends to activate a gay man’s female submission software.

  BORN WITH GAY SOFTWARE

  In many ways, gay men seem to live a sexual life that straight men can only fantasize about. If you’re heterosexual and male, imagine that at any moment, day or night, you could press a button on your iPhone to see an array of attractive women you’ve never met before. Then, you could pick the one that struck your fancy and, within five minutes, get together with her. Two out of three times, she will just want to perform fellatio on you, then leave. She’s delighted to do it, and it doesn’t cost you a penny. This may sound like an impossible fantasy, but this experience is actually available to gay men right now, through Grindr.

  Grindr is an iPhone application that displays photos and profile information of all other men using Grindr who are within about three thousand feet, making it easy to get in touch with potential sex partners. “I’ve met up with a guy in the backseat of his Lexus during my lunch hour,” says one thirty-one-year-old Grindr user who works in the Boston Financial District. Grindr is a technological innovation that facilitates the casual, anonymous sex that has long been the fantasy of straight men, but is commonplace among gay men.

  Of course, gay men—like straight men—also pursue a “mixed mating strategy.” Gay men look for romance and long-term monogamous relationships. Gay men get their hearts broken, get married, and raise children. Like straight men, gay men cheat on their partners and get enraged when their partners cheat on them. In Richard Lippa’s BBC survey, he found that the preferred traits in a partner clustered together based upon the gender of the subject—not by nationality, and not by sexual orientation. In almost every way, the brain software of gay men appears to be identical to that of straight men.

  But as we’ve seen, there are at least two crucial differences: gay men prefer masculinity, and many (but not all) gay men prefer the submissive role in sex. Both of these preferences are standard in the female brain. Something apparently causes two specific parts of the male desire software to “flip” to female settings, while keeping all of the other male settings. There’s also a physical difference between gay and straight men: gay men have longer penises. Is there anything that could possibly cause all three of these differences? It turns out there is: fetal hormones.

>   In the adult brain, androgens (“male hormones”) and estrogens (the “female hormones”) each control the activity of the brain software involved in several different tasks, including male competition, female ovulation, and sexual arousal in both men and women. But they also play a very important role in constructing the brain—and the body.

  In the second trimester, the presence or absence of the sex hormones instructs the cells of a fetus to build certain physical structures, such as a penis or ovaries. They influence the growth of fingers and can establish the physiological foundation for male pattern baldness. But they also trigger a cascade of complicated events in the growing brain, influencing the growth and connectivity of neurons.

  Though scientists initially suspected that a reduction of testosterone in the third trimester might be responsible for the “feminization” of the gay brain, scientists now understand that things aren’t so simple. In fact, an excess of testosterone may ultimately be responsible. Since testosterone can get converted into estrogren, and since there are some parts of the fetal brain that testosterone cannot enter, it seems more likely that some parts of the gay brain are “hypermasculinized” and some parts are “feminized.”

  It may be that excessive androgens cause gay men to have longer penises and become attracted to masculinity. It might also be the case that even higher amounts of androgens are correlated with changes in the desire software that cause gay men to prefer the bottom role. Intriguingly, in our limited survey of gay men, we noticed an interesting pattern that supports this notion.