A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (22 page)

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Authors: Ogi Ogas,Sai Gaddam

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

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