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

by Ogi Ogas

  But there is another important psychological cue offered by amateur porn, especially genuine amateurs: novelty. Males of most species are wired to become aroused by novelty, a process first studied systematically in rats in the 1950s. Researchers observed that after a male rat had copulated with the same female a few times, he would become exhausted. He’d do the rodent equivalent of collapsing on the sofa and reaching for the remote to watch SportsCenter. Often, the female rat would be eager for more. She would nudge and lick him, doing her seductive best to arouse him, but he would simply lie in the nest, flaccid and unresponsive.

  Then the researchers would place a new, unfamiliar female in the cage. Immediately, the male would jump to his feet and strut around, flexing his masculine haunches and showing off his versatile tail. Gone was the exhausted, drooping rodent of a moment before. Within minutes, he would be feverishly copulating with the new female. The researchers repeated this process with another female, then another. Each time, like a ragged marionette, the male would respond to the brain’s command to perform. In one study, a male copulated with a dozen females before finally collapsing in a bleary heap.

  In one study of novelty conducted at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, forty male volunteers were exposed to images of heterosexual couples engaged in sexual activity. Arousal was quantified by a penile plethysmograph. One group of young men was shown the same image five times, while another group was shown five different erotic images. In the first group, the plethysmograph slowly deflated. In the second group, the plethysmograph maintained steady arousal.

  After orgasming, why do men have such a difficult time getting aroused again by the same woman, but get erect so easily at the sight of a new woman? We think it’s to prevent a man from dislodging his own sperm—the same reason we believe men become flaccid after orgasming. Since the penis appears to be physically designed to shovel out competitors’ sperm, it can just as easily shovel out a man’s own sperm. By becoming flaccid and losing all sexual interest in a woman once he ejaculates inside her, a man increases the chances of impregnating her. But if a new woman appears, it’s in his biological interest to get erect and jump back into action. There might even be another man’s sperm to shovel out of the way. Of course, once he ejaculates inside the new woman, he will again become flaccid and uninterested for the very same reason: sperm preservation.

  As Lord Byron lamented, “How the devil is it that fresh features /Have such a charm for us poor human creatures?” Fresh features certainly charmed Giacomo Casanova, history’s most famous rake, who narrated his eighteenth-century erotic adventures with 122 women in his detailed memoirs, Story of My Life. Though Casanova’s seductive prowess is dwarfed by the notorious conquests of Wilt Chamberlain (who claimed to have had sex with more than twenty thousand women), Casanova’s description of the usual course of his love affairs is revealing: “After the most pleasant highs derived from the physical enjoyment of a woman’s charms have been absorbed, there is always a notable reduction of ardor upon the repetition. Excitement diminishes, attraction wanes. Soon, and inexorably, boredom sets in. Then I must plead my unworthiness and arrange to pair the woman with some other, more suitable man, as a means to extract myself from the frustrations of apathy.”

  Porn stars, by virtue of their very prevalence in porn, quickly lose their novelty value. Amateur porn offers new bodies with fresh faces. Women who strip naked and perform on webcams for paying men lament the “New Girl Effect,” whereby webcam performers make the most money they’ll ever make in their very first week. One reason that Girls Gone Wild is so very popular is that it offers an endless stream of authentic young women, each appearing just long enough to maximally activate the novelty cue before being replaced by another fresh face, igniting the male brain yet again.

  But in one of the many ironies of the adult industry, the women who stand to make the most money from selling nude photos of themselves—namely, young amateurs who have never appeared in porn before—are also the ones most willing to give it away for free. In fact, many young women enjoy snapping self-portraits of themselves in their underwear or completely naked and posting them online. JayBee, Sexbook, and My Ex Girlfriend contain thousands of provocative photos of young women taken by their own hands.

  These true amateur sites manage to cross the abyss separating the divergent desires of men and women. Women are satisfying their own psychological cue of irresistibility, the exhibitionist desire to be desired. Men, on the other hand, are very willing to pay to see such authentic, novel expressions of female sexual pleasure. Everybody’s happy.

  Especially Joe Francis.

  CHAPTER 10

  Lords and Lordosis

  Human Psychological Cues

  You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.

  —John Calvin

  Geladas are a peculiar and little-known species of monkey that science has largely overlooked. They live in large troops in the towering Simien Mountains of northern Ethiopia. They have golden manes that are the stuff of shampoo commercials, and burning red eyes. They graze on grass, but have vampiric canines. But what’s particularly interesting is a very special patch of skin on their chest shaped like an hourglass.

  On males, this hourglass indicates its owner’s social status. The color ranges from a meek eraser pink to a fiery red for alphas. Gelada society is broken into harems. Each harem is composed of an alpha male, between two and twelve females, and their young. Even though the male is in charge, the females expect to be well taken care of. Otherwise, they may turn on their leader.

  There are always bachelors with bright hourglasses—though not as bright as alphas’—who skulk around the edges of harems, testing for weakness. Often the alpha will scream and kick up dust, demonstrating his dominance. But sometimes his display is unconvincing. Then a bachelor may attack.

  Biological anthropologist Jacinta Beehner remembers one fight that lasted three days. It appeared to be a stalemate until a treacherous female edged away from the harem. As her champion looked on, she sidled up to the bachelor. The former alpha “didn’t even try to prevent it,” Beehner recalls. “He just quit.”

  A deposed leader may be allowed to stay with a harem, where he cares for the young. Of course, he loses mating rights and must take on a sort of avuncular role. Within a few months of being dethroned, the flaming redness of his chest patch subsides to an anemic pink.

  We conclude our survey of sexual cues with a Siamese twin pair of psychological cues that is found in both men and women: sexual domination and sexual submission. In the male brain, only the gender cue (whether you’re attracted to men or women) is more basic and influential. The sexual submission cue is also fundamental to the female brain.

  But first, we need to make a distinction between social dominance and sexual dominance. Though not much studied by science, social dominance and sexual dominance appear to involve different parts of the brain. Social dominance specifically involves social status and is almost exclusively a male trait. Social dominance in the geladas is indicated by the redness of the male hourglass. (Female geladas also have an hourglass, but its redness indicates the status of her ovulatory cycle.) Sexual dominance has to do with one’s physical role in sex. In rats, intromission is the sexually dominant role, and lordosis is the sexually submissive role. Similarly, tops and bottoms among gays correspond to the sexually dominant and sexually submissive roles. Social dominance and sexual dominance are related but distinguishable.

  We’re going to start with a discussion of social dominance. We saw in Chapter 5 how male dominance is a potent cue for the Detective Agency, with Miss Marple valuing alpha males, dominant voices, dominant scents, dominant gaits—if it suggests dominance, women like it. In fact, social dominance in most mammals is exclusively a male domain. As we saw in Chapter 7, male social dominance is mediated by testosterone. This “male competition hormone” provides the redness for the male gelada hourglass.

  Testost
erone levels are associated with aggression. Superior fighting ability and a will to fight typically increase a male’s social status. When the rage center of a monkey’s brain is artificially stimulated, the monkey will rise swiftly up the dominance hierarchy, by virtue of frequently fighting other monkeys. Testosterone levels are associated with many physical qualities in males, including greater musculature, deeper vocalizations, and various skin coloration.

  There’s a very important fact to understand about male social dominance. No man is born dominant. He must strive for it—and he may fail. The male brain is designed to go through life shifting between dominant and submissive states. Though a man might be born with physical and personality traits that facilitate an easy rise to dominance—height, vigorous upper-body strength, a deep voice, an aggressive temperament, an indomitable will—dominance must still be attained through social interactions with other males. In other words, social dominance is fluid and flexible, not hard-wired into the male brain.

  The Sandra Bullock movie The Blind Side (based on the book by Michael Lewis) tells the true story of Michael Oher, one of the best offensive tackles in the NFL. He is a mountain of a man at six feet four inches and 304 pounds. But despite his size, he started out as a “gentle giant”—timid and submissive. It took time and experience to build up his confidence until he became a dominant All-Star left tackle for the Baltimore Ravens.

  Social dominance influences a man’s financial success. It also influences his attractiveness to women. But male dominance also has another consequence: it directly influences his sexuality. The link between social dominance and male sexuality is most apparent in one of the oddest mammals on Earth, the naked mole rat.

  The naked mole rat is what biologists call a eusocial creature. Like the ant or the termite, naked mole rats have separate behavioral castes, including a sterile caste. There is a naked mole rat queen that has unlimited reproductive privileges. There are “worker” naked mole rats, called subordinates. What’s interesting is that the subordinates are asexual. The male and female workers are almost indistinguishable, in both body and brain. They do not breed, just like worker ants or worker termites. Their life mission is to serve the greater good of the colony, digging and finding food and caring for young. They obey and serve the queen without question. In contrast, a small set of naked mole rats are “breeders.” They get to have sex.

  But naked mole rats are not genetically predetermined to become a breeder or a subordinate. The naked mole rat brain is designed to become either one. There are specific hormones responsible for the change: androgens, a class of hormone that includes testosterone. If the androgen levels rise in a subordinate, some remarkable changes occur. Suddenly, the rat develops prominent sexual characteristics. But just as dramatic are the changes in the brain. New neurons form, the receptors on existing neurons change, and the brain’s wiring changes. No longer is the subordinate deferent and asexual. Now it claims its role as a dominant member of society—and its main reward is sex.

  Though the relationship between social dominance and sexuality in humans is not quite as dramatic as in naked mole rats, socially dominant humans do share one essential quality with socially dominant members of all mammal societies: an increased sex drive. The more dominant a human male becomes, the more testosterone he produces, which in turn increases his sex drive. Men with high levels of testosterone lose their virginity earliest, have the most sexual partners, and convince women to have sex the fastest. Alpha males have the greatest sex drive of all.

  In the television series Breaking Bad, the high school chemistry teacher Walter White learns that he has lung cancer. The doctor tells him he only has a few months to live. He decides to “break bad” and become a crystal meth dealer. He ends up killing another drug dealer. Later, he blows up the headquarters of a vicious gang leader, a true alpha male. After each of these incidents of unexpected male dominance, he returns home and has fervent sex with his wife, who is overwhelmed by his unprecedented levels of lust.

  In the beautiful documentary Man on Wire, tightrope walker Phillipe Petit accomplishes an extraordinary feat: he illegally strings a cable between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and performs 120 floors above the ground without any kind of safety equipment. He is arrested, but is quickly released because of the outcry of the public, who claims him a hero. He triumphantly walks out of the police station to an adoring crowd. A woman rushes up to him, clearly enamored of his newly attained alpha status. Though Petit’s team is waiting for him—as well as the media—Petit immediately ignores them to return to the unknown woman’s apartment and has hours of passionate sex with her.

  HEADS OR TAILS

  In primates, social dominance is a complex cognitive process that appears to be partially managed by regions in the frontal cortex. This conscious part of the brain is responsible for evaluating the social ranking of others and whether there is enough social support to make a move to increase one’s own status.

  In contrast, sexual dominance and sexual submission appear to be entirely managed by subcortical processes, mediated by several nuclei in the hypothalamus. These subcortical circuits control very physical processes, such as hip thrusting or passiveness. As we saw in Chapter 7, both males and females in several mammal species appear to possess both sexual dominance and sexual submission circuitry. Female dogs sometimes mount other males or even mount the legs of humans, an act controlled by sexual dominance circuitry. Both types of circuits are wired to the pleasure centers of the brain. It’s rewarding for a female rat to perform lordosis or for a male rat to perform intromission. Since heterosexual female macaques mount other females, and heterosexual male bonobos allow themselves to be mounted by other males, it’s reasonable to presume that they also feel pleasure from switching over to the other side.

  Domination and submission are usually cast together like the two sides of a coin, which can show heads or tails but never both. Though the vast majority of gay men have a clear preference, they can and do shift flexibly between the top and bottom roles. But this flexible switching isn’t the sole domain of gay men. Consider the AOL search history of Mr. Panties:any bondage

  daddy gets excited so much wearing daughter’s pink panties

  daddy was forced by his boss to start wearing daughter’s

  panties

  kidnap a very pretty girl for fucking her in every tight hole

  watching your teenage daughter being fucked

  you’re all tied up and forced to watch your daughter being

  fucked

  so slip your panties now little girl i’ve got something for

  you to suck

  Some of Mr. Panties’ searches take a dominant point of view, some take a submissive one, demonstrating that a single individual can derive satisfaction from either a sexually dominant or sexually submissive role. One thirty-three-year-old male performer who has appeared in many “fetish shows” and adult movies also switches between dominant and submissive roles. “Sometimes I like to dress up like a blond girl, with high heels, a wig, miniskirt, makeup, the works. It’s very empowering. But most of the time I just like to tie girls up and whip them. The feeling of power, that’s a real rush.”

  When combined together, domination and submission is the sixth most popular category of sexual search on Dogpile. Since any act of sexual dominance requires an act of sexual submission by the partner, sometimes it was difficult to determine whether a particular search was better categorized as domination or submission. For example, one forty-two-year-old gay top reports that he enjoys watching sexual submission Web sites like Straight Hell and Frat Hazing because he identifies with the dominant men in the videos. That’s why we did not separate domination and submission into separate search categories.

  Nevertheless, despite the ambiguity in determining whether specific searches were better categorized as domination or submission , when viewing individual search histories on AOL, it was clear that most people prefer one or the other. There were a min
ority of people like Mr. Panties who appeared to flexibly shift between the two. But most were focused on one or the other, as illustrated by the sexual submission content preferred by Mr. Diapers:diaper punishment stories

  sissy diaper stories

  forced to be a girl at school

  femdom at school

  sissy slut cartoons

  prison slut stories

  adult babies in wet diapers pictures

  On the other side of the coin is Mr. Gardens:rape stories

  forced seduction

  forced deepthroat

  female oral humiliation

  botanical gardens

  throatfucking

  Heterosexual domination porn involves the male coercion of a female partner. The man is always in the dominant role. One subcategory of domination porn is financial exploitation—where men persuade women to have sex for money. Exploited Teens, Black Girls That Need Cash, or College Teens Book Bang are popular examples—the last one featuring college women (actually actresses) who have sex in exchange for textbooks. (These parallel gay Web sites such as Twinks for Cash, Gay 4 Cash, and Paid to Play Gay.) Another subcategory is psychological exploitation, including sites featuring sex with drunk girls (Drunk Chix, Free Drunk Bitches, and Only Drunk Porn), hypnotized girls (Hypnogirls, Smart in Hypnosis, and HypnoKing), and tricked girls (Chick Tricks, The Nasty Cop, and Teens Porn Casting). There’s also physical domination sites: Smack My Bitch, Forced Witness, and Forced Sex Scenes.