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

by Ogi Ogas

  Question #2 (OkCupid Question# 13103): How big is your porn collection? A. Small B. Medium C. Large D. Don’t have one. (Respondents: 8,147 straight men, 762 bisexual women, 3,394 straight women.)

  Question #3 (OkCupid Question# 35624): You discover a huge porn collection on your significant other’s computer. You are: A. Unaffected . . . “So what?” B. Embarassed or disgusted . . . “This is filthy!” C. Angry or hurt . . . “This is cheating!” D. Masturbating . . . “This is so hot!” (Respondents: 253,460 straight men, 27,639 bisexual women, 163,804 straight women.)

  Question #4 (OkCupid Question# 18966): Do you prefer hardcore or softcore when it comes to your porn? A: Hard! B: Soft! C: I’m not sure. D: I don’t like porn. (Respondents: 57,876 straight men, 8,245 bisexual women, 36,799 straight women.)

  169 38 percent of the women self-identify as bisexual Fantasti.cc users self-identification, based on user information scraped in July 2010:

  WOMEN: 958 bisexual, 368 (38%)

  open-minded, 286 (30%)

  straight, 184 (19%)

  single, 133

  relationship, 115

  MEN: 5626 straight, 3912 (70%)

  open-minded, 980 (17%)

  single, 818

  relationship, 364

  bisexual, 279 (5%)

  169 In Richard Lippa’s BBC survey Lippa (2007).

  170 bisexual women have greater circulating levels of testosterone Van Wyk (1995). “Several studies seem to indicate that some bisexuals have a predominantly heterosexual or homosexual orientation, but high erotic responsiveness and more ‘masculine’ characteristics, leading to versatility in sexual behavior. Early exposure to masculinizing hormones seems to predispose human females toward bisexuality rather than exclusive homosexuality.” Also Vinegas & Conley (2000).

  170 can trigger a variety of negative reactions Spinella (2007). “The analysis indicated that several brain structures are commonly involved in the processing of disgust-inducing and erotic pictures (occipital cortex, hippocampus, thalamus, and the amygdala). The ventral striatum was specifically activated when subjects saw highly sexually arousing pictures. This indicates the involvement of the human reward system during the processing of visual erotica.”

  http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/08/15/ ewwwwwwwww: “The disgust response gets pulled into these higher moral domains having to do with social rules,” says Daniel Kelly, a philosopher at Purdue University and author of a forthcoming book on morality and disgust. Paul Rozin. In all those instances, most people refused, even though they knew the cockroach and sweater were clean and that the fudge was in fact fudge. They just felt disgusted. According to Rozin, the power of our disgust reaction leads us to a sort of magical thinking. “The sense of contamination is what’s so interesting,” Rozin says. “When the cockroach touches something, we feel like something of the cockroach actually enters it.”

  171 Reading the Romance Radway (1984).

  172 “centerfold syndrome” Albright (2008).

  172 prone to condemning squicky content as immoral See http://www.obscenit ycrimes.org/Senate-Reisman-Layden-Etc.pdf

  172 as not just physically unhealthy but morally wrong http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=one-reason-why-humans-are-special-a-2010-06-22: “Between 1969–1989, for example, a single institution in the United States performed 656 castrations with the aim to stop the men from masturbating. One clinical study reported some success in eliminating this problem behavior by squirting lemon juice into the mouth of a young patient every time he pulled out his penis in public.”

  173 powerful male sex drive focused There is a neurological condition known as Kluver-Bucy syndrome that results from the destruction of temporal lobe tissue. This condition removes all sexual inhibitions. Men who suffer from Kluver-Bucy will try to have sex with trees, animals, and rocks. They can no longer control their sexual urges. “Male hang-ups” may actually be nature’s way of narrowing the focus of the powerful drive of male sexuality.

  CHAPTER 9

  174 Mr. Closet Abridged excerpt is from Levine et al. (2003).

  175 I first discovered porn-stories when I was 15 http://www.asstr.org/~Forbidden_Fantasies/stuff/what.htm.

  177 also controls another critical bodily process: orgasm Marthol & Hills (2004).

  177 to test this hypothesis with an ingenious experiment Dutton & Aron (1974).

  178 The experiment presented female subjects with two different conditions Schacter & Singer (1962), Dutton & Aron (1974), Meston & Heiman (1998), Brotto & Gorzalka (2002), Palace & Gorzalka (1990), Meston (2000), Meston & Gorzalka (1995).

  178 to Josef Mengele’s medical examination table Kahr (2008).

  179 an analysis of about twenty-four thousand children http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/06/the-paternity-myth-the-rarity-of-cuckoldry/

  179 3,500 paternity claims http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2483751/Mothers-wrongly-identifying-fathers-in-Child-Support-Agency-claims.html.

  180 “She wore her very best lingerie” http://www.hotwifeblog.com/2010/06/11/her-first-time-alone/.

  180 men who search for “cheating wife” Perry Stathopoulos, the CTO of PornHub, supplied us with a variety of data about users’ activities on their Web site. One data set was a collection of most frequent search terms entered into the PornHub search engine, and number of videos viewed per search term. The data was collected in February 2010.

  181 the most common two-word phrases in cuckold stories Stories were scraped from the Loving Wives category on Literotica in April 2010.

  182 in videos containing a white man and a black man 43 out of 50 videos feature black and white men feature the black male as the top. Videos were retrieved and examined in August 2010.

  182 Sperm competition refers to a variety of physiological and behavioral adaptations Birkhead & Maller (1998).

  183 giant testicles of the chimpanzee Dixson & Brancroft (1999).

  183 the bulbous head and extended length of the human penis Gallup et al. (2006). Also see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=secrets-of-the-phallus.

  183 the inevitable flaccidity men experience after ejaculation Gallup et al. (2006).

  183 Dogs, deer, and kangaroos Birkhead & Hosken (2008).

  183 Male stickleback fish Zbinden et al. (2004).

  183 “My steady boyfriend, nicknamed IFuckAmy” http://cuckoldinglifestyle.blogspot.com/2006/02/cuckolding-today.html?zx=a5f050a3291bc87e.

  184 frequently perceived as more dominant A female Duke undergraduate gained notoriety in October 2010 for her parody of a thesis presentation that detailed her actual sexual liaisons with student athletes at Duke. The PowerPoint presentation listed the sexual perks and quirks of the thirteen men she allegedly slept with. She makes note of how one of her partners–a Caucasian man—implores her to profess love for big black penises while in bed with her. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/07/karen-owen-duke-sex-rati_n_754186.html.

  184 British psychologist Nicholas Pound Pound (2002).

  184 videos portraying “polyandrous sexual activity” Pound (2002).

  185 the three hundred most-viewed group sex videos The three hundred most-viewed group sex videos were collected from PornHub on January 9, 2010, and “compilation” videos were removed.

  mean # of males per video: 2

  mean # of females per video: 2.6

  Then, we removed “threesome” videos, which left a set of videos with four or more sexual partners:

  mean # of males per video: 3.75 mean # of females per video: 3.31

  In the set of threesome videos, there were more males in 63 videos and more females in 91 videos.

  185 Men fantasize about group sex more often than women do Ellis & Symons (1990).

  186 shrieking, shivering female orgasms When asked whether female orgasms in porn were fake or real, one porn director replied, “More fake than real. I have some girls who always fake it, they find the pressure of the cameras and lights, the added self-aware
ness stop them from getting to orgasm. Other girls find that as soon as the cameras are on they come from the smallest of things. One girl in particular will come multiple times in every scene she does. Everyone is wired different, I don’t think you can say everyone does this or everyone does that.” He added, “I really dislike guys using Viagra or similar drugs. Anything that raises the blood pressure makes their faces go bright red as soon as they start fucking, which really shows up on camera. I think it looks terrible.” Personal e-mail communication from Stephen Yagielowicz, August, 2010. In the same communication, Yagielowicz observed, “While some actresses are better at acting than others, it appears that acting is all it is—and that even when the guy is ‘acting’ it does not go unnoticed, or undesired. While I suspect that most fans believe that the girls are actually having orgasms (just as most guys believe they always give their lover an orgasm), I also suspect that many performers are thinking about the new shoes they will buy or whatever, rather than being immersed in the scene. It’s like big time wrestling: some believe it’s all real, from the hits to the back story. Same with porn. Having said that, girls like Lezley Zen and Aria (not Giovanni, just Aria), Tory Lane and others have been thought of as ‘giving it their all,’ while the ‘squirters’ tend to carry more of a ‘she’s really cumming!’ audience, with girls such as Tianna Lynn and Annie Cruz coming to mind with no pun intended. I also think you used the right word: ‘actresses’—this is after all about fantasy, not reality. Audiences are not there to see their bored wives wearing hair curlers and saying ‘hurry up.’

  186 one of the most potent psychological cues Bogaert (2001). “The results indicated that, when given a choice to view different media materials, the men chose a broad range of media materials, although the ‘female insatiability’ films were more popular than the other sexual films (e.g., ‘erotic’ or ‘violent’).” Also, Brewer & Hendrie (2010).

  186 “Seeing and hearing a woman who is truly turned on” http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/9pzlt/is_there_a_reason_that_so_much_hetero_porn_is/.

  186 Sasha Grey http://www.freeones.com/html/s_links/Sasha_Grey/.

  187 Sasha Grey, Nina Hartley, Chloe, Cytherea, and Jenna Jameson http://www.nina.com/vboard/showthread.php?p=315, http://forum.adultdvdtalk.com/forum/topic.dlt/topic_id=150466/forum_id=1/cat_id=1/150466.htm, http://www.adultdvdtalk.com/chat/chloe.asp.

  187 On Fantasti.cc, we analyzed ten thousand comments We scraped 10,000 comments posted in response to the hundred highest rated videos on Fantasti.cc in March 2010. These comments were then categorized by workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The comments were binned into seven categories. A particular comment was categorized and counted if at least two of three workers applied the same category tag.

  subject is attractive, 6033

  praise of anatomy, 5157

  subject is expressing pleasure, 4806

  comment on sex, 4047

  None of the above, 3443

  subject is “dirty,” 2739

  subject is expressing surprise or fear, 1148

  188 are wired to pay attention to whether his partner is engaged See http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/buss-passion.html.

  188 “if Ann rejected Andy for being a bad lover” Personal e-mail communication with Donald Symons, 2010.

  188 more than 65 percent of women say they’ve faked orgasms Muehlenhard & Shippee (2009), Brewer & Hendrie (2010).

  189 the men and women who produce the adult content on the Internet live from paycheck to paycheck Personal e-mail communication with Stephen Yagielowicz, August 2010. Profitability has been further eroded by tube sites, including illegitimate tubes based in eastern Europe.

  189 Joe Francis http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-gonewild32aug06,0,2664370.story?coll=la-home-headlines.

  191 “I pretty much can’t watch professional porn anymore.” http://www.consolecity.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-63740.html.

  192 especially genuine amateurs Symons & Ellis (1990). From http://wwwscientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=one-reason-why-humans-are-special-a-2010-06-22: “In a 1990 study published in the Journal of Sex Research, evolutionary psychologists Bruce Ellis and Donald Symons found that 32 percent of men said that they’d had sexual encounters in their imagination with more than 1,000 different people, compared to only 8 percent of women. Men also reported rotating in from their imaginary rosters one imagined partner for another during the course of a single fantasy more often than women did.”

  Toates (2009). “Novelty and increased appetitive behavior is associated with increased activation of dopamine in the N.acc.” Also see Fiorino et al. (1997), Woodson (2002).

  192 a process first studied systematically in rats in the 1950s Wilson et al. (1963).

  192 one study of novelty conducted at the State University of New York, Stony Brook Odonohue & Geer (1985).

  CHAPTER 10

  195 Geladas are a peculiar and little-known species of monkey http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Ethiopias-Exotic-Monkeys.html .

  197 increase a male’s social status Blakemore et al. (2010). “Rather, there is emerging evidence from both human and nonhuman primate studies that testosterone increases motivation to attain higher status, but the specific effects on behavior are dependent on the social and developmental context.”

  197 the monkey will rise swiftly up the dominance hierarchy Panksepp (1998).

  197 The Blind Side Lewis (2007). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oher.

  197 the naked mole rat Holmes et al. (2007), Holmes et al. (2008).

  198 more dominant a human male becomes Holmes et al. (2008), Bernhardt et al. (1998). Boston men may have experienced the most sex in America during the 2007 sports season, when the Red Sox, Celtics, and Patriots all made it to the championships in their respective sports.

  199 social dominance is a complex cognitive process Marsh et al. (2009), Allison et al (2000), Chiao et al. (2008).

  199 sexual dominance and sexual submission appear to be entirely managed by subcortical processes There’s precious little research on the neural underpinnings of sexual dominance and submission in humans, but sexual behavior in rats has proved to be a good model for basic sexual behavior and endocrine action in humans. Becker (2008), Agmo and Ellingsen (2003), Pfaus (2009), Paredes (2003).

  Herbert (2008): “The medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus (MPOA) is known to be involved in masculine patterns of sexual behaviour in rodents and monkeys, and to be sexually dimorphic, though, it should be pointed out, there are suggestions that it promotes sexual performance (the ability to copulate) more than motivation for masculine-type sex. Garcia-Garcia-Falgueras and Swaab find that part of this area, INAH3 in humans, is larger and has a greater number and density of neurons in males than females, and that male-to-female transsexuals (MtF) resemble females.”

  Evidence from rat studies: Becker et al. (2001), Hoshina et al. (1994), Paredes & Baum (1997).

  200 Mr. Panties User #13263062.

  201 Mr. Diapers User# 23251711.

  201 Mr. Gardens User # 3214991.

  203 women are not motivated by a testosterone-fueled drive Mazur & Booth (1998). A normal man has about ten nanograms of testosterone per milliliter of blood; women have roughly one-seventh this amount. Female testosterone levels are not responsive to anticipated or successful status competition.

  203 This changes if you give women testosterone van Honk et al. (2004), Dabbs & Hargrove (1997).

  203 Female Viagra already exists and it’s called testosterone Because people who are deprived of food tend to have more frequent daydreams about food, it might be expected that sexual deprivation would have the same effect on sexual thoughts. The little evidence that exists, however, suggests otherwise. Those with the most active sex lives have the most sexual fantasies. Studies have shown that frequency of fantasy is positively correlated with masturbation frequency, intercourse frequency, number of lifetime sexual partners, and self-rated sex drive.

 
203 “increased my compassion for men four-fold” http://evolutionarytimes.org/files/bd4988b205d403c244617c86dcf34e8c-21.php

  203 number of negative side effects Basaria & Dobs (2004).

  203 many women prefer to be the seducer Targosz (2008).

  204 250 female teachers in America http://www.zimbio.com/The+50+Most+Infamous+Female+Teacher+Sex+Scandals/articles/7hrWhfmeIcL/50+Most+Infamous+Female+Teacher+Sex+Scandals.

  204 Rebecca Bogard http://sabrinaerdely.com/docs/SexLiesPhysEd.pdf.

  204 allegedly having sex with eight members http://www.zimbio.com/The+50+Most+Infamous+Female+Teacher+Sex+Scandals/articles/7hrWhfmeIcL/50+Most+Infamous+Female+Teacher+Sex+Scandals .

  204 complex relationship with their desire to be dominant or submissive Here’s one woman’s comment on http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/why_dont_men_read_more_romance_novels: “Fanfiction fanfiction fanfiction. Thank you kindly. Though gay sex is still the major content of fanfiction, and while I think that some of that is just the plain old two-hot-dudes-for-the-price-of-one thing, I also think it’s because to many women two male bodies read as kind of neutral and equal—one doesn’t start off coded as passive/receptive or active/ aggressive. And then there’s the whole subset that I think is women acting out their issues with sex on ‘neutral’ male bodies. Pretty much every trope that Amanda has decried as being disturbing in male-oriented porn has a fairly popular fanfiction equivalent.”

  204 “I can read and am very fond of [dominant and submissive roles]” An interesting anecdote from a submissive: “i sleep with a collar on at night. i find it comforting and it gives me a sense that there is more than me, i am not the biggest thing in the world, and that i’m not meant to control everything. i submit to plenty of things in my life and the collar symbolizes that, even though a collar usually symbolizes submission to your Master.” http://hislittlepet.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html.