A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships is a book by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam looking at sexuality.
This has been a subject that has traditionally been difficult to study. Sex, especially kinky sex, is a taboo to some extent in most cultures, and so people do not discuss it openly. You cannot see what porn people are purchasing by looking at the supermarket. Even on questionnaires, people might not believe it is really as anonymous as it claims to be, and will lie.
Luckily though, the past few decade have seen the triumphant rise of the internet. Now people can search for whatever they like in the privacy of their own home. They are no longer constrained by social taboos because they can turn their browser to porn mode and happily search for Vietnamese midgets shitting in a bucket without it leaving an traceable history.
So what do billions of internet logs tell us about sexuality?
Mostly that people conform to gender stereotypes.
At this point, let me say that I am going to lay out what the books says in broad terms. The caveat is that any stereotype has some outliers, possibly many. Women can like porn. Men can like romance. We are dealing with statistics only and to tar one individual with any one giant brush would be silly. Please insert this thought into the start of every sentence. Onwards…
Men like porn. For them the goal is the organum as once they have shot their seed, their job is done. They are willing to pay for it. 98% of online porn purchasers are men. In fact women buy porn so rarely that if some payment processors automatically flag any card with a woman’s name as fraud.
Women on the other hand like romance. Their brain functions as a detective agency as the book describes it. Carefully considering men because they have to deal with the consequences of getting pregnant. They want to imagine a tough alpha male who falls for them, and only for them, so they can live happily ever after.
Men experience high corrolation between mental and physical arousal. If our junk is excite, we feel excited. But women don’t have this. You can stimulate a woman’s body, but unless you stimulate her mind as well, she isn’t into it. A deeply serious example of this is rape. Women’s bodies can become aroused during being raped and some wrongly assume this implies a level of consent. It does not.
Another example is viagra. This works for men because if you can get the blood flowing through your member, you get aroused. But for women, with the decoupled physical and emotional states, it does not have the same effect.
Gay men on the whole have a male brain. It likes the same thing straight men like – watching porn, aiming for the ejaculation. It is no more interested in romance than the straight’s man brain. The only difference is that gay men are attracted to masculinity rather than femininity. Ironically this leads many gay men to be attracted to straight men, gay for pay porn stars, because shagging women is associated with being masculine.
Whether you are gay or straight could be influenced by testosterone. Interestingly, it is gay men who seem to have more of it. The average length of a straight guy’s penis is 5.99 inches, for a gay man it is 6.32 – a third of an inch longer.
Men’s sexual cues are probably imprinted during their teenage years and cannot be changed easily. So if you get off on being tied up, you’re going to feel that way your whole life. Men get aroused by unconditioned responses such as looking at breasts, but it is difficult to condition a response into them. Pavlov might be able to make a man salivate, but he can’t trigger a full erection.
This brings up interesting points for equality. For example, it has long been believed that society conditions the idea that promiscuous men are “players” whereas promiscuous women are “sluts”. But the evidence suggests this is wrong. We are naturally wired to feel this way because the most successful males (in terms of reproduction, the only scoresheet nature uses) are the ones that sleep with the most women whereas the most successfully women are those that only sleep with, and therefore get pregnant by, the most successfully socially-dominant males.
Nowadays we do not have to worry about this, of course, thanks to the wide availability of contraception. But we are hard wired to feel this way. If anything, society reduces the objectification and shaming of women by socially conditioning us away from our baser instincts. Much like how society actually reduces rape and violence, as Steven Pinker points out.
As Noreena Hertz points out in Eyes Wide Open we’re all wired to be a bit racist, and it is up to us as intelligent people to battle our biases. Similarly, we’re all a bit sexist, so we shouldn’t feel guilty for how we are made. We should still strive for a fair and equal society though, knowing we have biases to overcome.
In summary, human sexuality is incredibly complex on an individual level. Statistically, though, a lot of us are wired to like similar things, and so long may the internet be filled with porn, and romance stories. Browse whichever makes you happy.
