A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (26 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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However, there is one part of a man’s body that does appear to interest many women’s brains: the butt. The gluteus maximus is a “universal cue”: it’s the one piece of anatomy that straight men, gay men, and straight women all find exciting. “[John F. Kennedy Jr.] tried to hold the ATM door for me and I wouldn’t let him,” confesses one woman on Jezebel, “because I wanted to stand behind him and check out his ass.” Women generally prefer tight, athletic butts. Interestingly, NFL scouts believe that a football player’s butt is the single best indicator of his physical strength and athletic ability. Sportswriter Michael Silver reported on what he saw at the 2010 NFL Scouting Combine: “You’ll hear scouts and coaches throwing out compliments like, ‘That guy’s ass is pretty, now.’ You’ll see write-ups lauding a prospect’s ‘big, bubble ass’ or ‘great explosion in his hips.’ ”
Nevertheless, the appeal of butts is still modulated by the Detective Agency. Whereas plenty of men will state that breasts or butts are the most important thing, women generally take a more moderate view. On Yahoo! Answers, when someone posed the question “Do women like guys’ butts?” more than half the women responded with a variation of one woman’s response: “It’s not a major priority for a guy to have a nice butt, it’s just a nice advantage!”
Even though most women are not as focused on sexual visuals as men, there are still plenty of women who do enjoy hard-core pornography, even if they are much less likely to pay for it than men are. What kind of women watch a lot of visual porn? Consider the AOL search history of Ms. Intuition:
skin massage for stretch marks
look ten years younger fit tv show
fake nude jane seymour
tap your intuition
chakras
pampered chef recipes
sexy vanna white
family nude beach
older men younger women
french country decor
i am in love with him
italian framed art
jealousy between friends
friends jealous after weight loss
anna nicole smith nude
linens & things
labioplasty
celebs pics
free rape movies
what does sex mean to a man
how do men feel about sex
elizabeth montgomery naked
why are single women attracted to married men
when will i see results of pilates
sexy erica hill
anal sex benefits
june carter and johnny cash honeymoon pics
johnny carter cash pics
honeymoon sex
playgirl pics
george clooney nude
brad pitt nude
men in shower pics
porn for women
nude construction workers
making love
erotic nude couples
There has been no research exploring the question of what makes a minority of women become interested in porn, but Ms. Intuition’s search history suggests one very intriguing possibility, especially when combined with female responses to OkCupid questions. One particular group of women reported higher amounts of porn viewing, larger porn stashes, greater comfort with their partner watching porn, greater enjoyment of bondage, and more interest in using the Internet for porn. Who were these women? Self-identified bisexuals.
Ms. Intuition seeks out Brad Pitt, George Clooney, nude construction workers, and naked men in the shower. But she also seeks out naked pictures of Vanna White, Jane Seymour, and Elizabeth Montgomery. She also searches for more pornographic material overall than most searchers who search for female-targeted pornography. On OkCupid, the pattern of bisexual women’s responses to questions was distinct from straight women and lesbians—but quite similar to the responses of heterosexual men, as shown in the figure below.
Each column represents a single question from the survey. Note how the bisexual women’s response patterns are more similar to straight men’s than straight women’s.
 
In addition, the responses of bisexual women were similar to heterosexual men on a variety of nonsexual topics, such as aggression, domination, and work habits. Among registered users on the visual porn site Fantasti.cc, 38 percent of the women self-identify as bisexual. In Richard Lippa’s BBC survey, he found that bisexual women have a higher sex drive than either heterosexual women or lesbians. A smaller study at the University of Georgia found that bisexual women showed different patterns of arousal from watching pornography from lesbians and heterosexual women. In particular, bisexual women were more aroused than lesbians and heterosexual women by lesbian porn and male-female oral sex.
Though bisexuality in women is poorly understood, one possibility advanced by scientists is that bisexual women have greater circulating levels of testosterone. This could contribute to bisexual women’s higher sex drive and perhaps influences their interest in visual porn. “I can jill off to just about anything,” explains a self-proclaimed bisexual woman on
reddit.com
. “Sometimes I think I watch more porn than my boyfriend. I don’t understand why so many girls hate porn—I kinda think they probably are just too embarrassed to try it.”
MISOGYNISTIC, IMMORAL, AND SQUICKY AS HELL
 
So far, we’ve reviewed the sexual cues in porn that trigger arousal in the vast majority of men and a sizable minority of women. But there’s no escaping another obvious fact about porn: it can trigger a variety of negative reactions as well, including anger, jealousy, or moral condemnation. It’s almost as if porn has “anti-cues” mixed in with the cues. Just as the sexual cues in the male brain are different from the cues in the female brain, anti-cues manifest differently in men and women. In general, male anti-cues trigger aggressive hostility, while female anti-cues trigger a greater variety of emotions.
“I caught my husband watching porn one night when I came home early,” reports one distraught woman on reddit. “I felt completely betrayed, like he was cheating on me.” Many women, upon catching their male partner indulging in online erotica, instinctively feel a sense of betrayal. Such emotions likely reflect innate “mate guarding” software in the female brain. Whereas the male brain is designed to become jealous over physical infidelity, the female brain is designed to become jealous over emotional infidelity. Women are instinctively concerned with a man’s investment of resources in other women, and instinctively look for signs that a man is losing emotional interest. Even though porn does not represent an actual threat to a woman’s relationship, the sense that a man’s emotions are getting diverted somewhere else can trigger instinctive feelings of disloyalty.
Perhaps the hardest situation for a woman is discovering that her partner is looking at a qualitatively different kind of female from herself. “I found these links on Jake’s browser—they were all to Asian porn sites,” writes one twenty-two-year-old woman. “I clicked on one, and it was all these slender, flat-chested Asian girls. I’m blond, somewhat big-boned, with size D cups. I was like—why in the world are you with me???”
This is quite different from the reaction of men. “One night I caught my wife secretly looking at Web Virgins,” confesses one twenty-seven-year-old programmer. “It really turned me on. She turned beet red, which just turned me on even more.” Most men, including gay men, are aroused by the idea of discovering their partner watching porn. It doesn’t appear to activate the male mate guarding software, since there’s no cue of physical cheating.
Though many women feel betrayed when their partners watch porn, they rarely feel that they are betraying their husbands by reading romance. In fact, in Janice Radway’s
Reading the Romance
, the women in a romance book discussion group insisted that reading romance improved their sex lives with their husbands. Even though the male brain can understand that a woman may be lost in an intimate fantasy world where she is emotionally and erotically connecting with a fictional male, as long as there are no real penises involved, men don’t tend to get jealous of a woman’s reading habits. However, men can get annoyed. “I think every girlfriend I’ve had has turned to me after watching a romantic movie and asked ‘Why can’t you be more like him?’ ” laments one young man. “I’ve never put on a Jenna Jameson movie and asked ‘Why can’t you be more like her?’ ”
Many women feel threatened by some of the sexual acts depicted in porn, fearing that men will expect them to perform those acts. As one twenty-two-year old woman lamented, “Some of these things, it just makes you ask—do guys
really
want girls that do that?” Women also feel concerned that men will only be satisfied by women who have bodies like porn stars—what some term the “centerfold syndrome.” Other women fear that exposure to pornography will induce men to perform violence against women.
Women’s brains simply process porn differently than men’s brains. Many of women’s concerns are the result of the Detective Agency’s focus on the psychological and the cultural messages it perceives in porn. In Chapter 1, we compared men and women’s divergent sexual cues to a female brain that could only taste sweet and bitter and a male brain that could only taste salty and sour. Porn and romance novels are specifically tailored to appeal to the cues of each sex—porn consists of visual cues appealing to men, romance consists of psychological cues appealing to women. When we each encounter the other’s erotica, we can only understand it in terms of our own cues.
Women react to the perceived social messages in porn—that women are sex objects, that women should be promiscuous, that violence against women is acceptable (violence is actually extremely rare in online porn, though it doesn’t feel that way to female viewers). Men, however, don’t perceive any of these messages. Their brains are focused on the close-ups of the breasts, the seductive manner of the MILF, or the very large penis.
Though women have a broad range of reactions to porn, men are generally more tolerant—up to a point. Then things can get violent. Some straight men have an explosive reaction to gay porn or other porn they find very squicky. Men are also prone to condemning squicky content as immoral. Over the past century, the male-dominated medical profession at various points considered masturbation, fellatio, cunnilingus, anal sex, homosexuality, bisexuality, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and adolescent necking as not just physically unhealthy but morally wrong. Even today, various sexual behaviors can elicit a furious reaction from men.
Why does sex cause some men to react with a righteous rage? One indirect cause may be the very strength of the male sex drive. We’ve seen that men desire sexual release so intensely that they’re willing to risk their jobs by masturbating at work. Any desire that powerful presents grave risks. If a man ends up developing a sexual interest in something nonreproductive—crawling ants, for example, or a doctor’s office—then he may be doomed to go childless. Elmer Fudd is designed to easily aim, shoot, and repeat, but he must first be taught what a rabbit looks like, and then be prohibited from shooting at anything else. After a man finishes his sexual imprinting during adolescence, it appears that the male brain labels everything else as deviant, dangerous, or disgusting. This is probably intended to keep the powerful male sex drive focused exclusively on a man’s cued interests.
For a woman, the flexible and cautious Power of And prevents women from making sexual mistakes, harnessing feelings of guilt, anger, shame, and insecurity. For a man, disgust and outrage serve a similar purpose—to keep his sexual interests focused on the prize: sexual reproduction.
CHAPTER 9
 
Cheating Wives and Girls Gone Wild
 
Male Psychological Cues
 
 
There’s a reason they call it Girls Gone Wild and not Women Gone Wild. When girls go wild, they show their breasts. When women go wild, they kill men.
—Comedian Louis C.K.
 
 
 
 
A
man who we will call Mr. Closet is financially successful and married with three children. He also hides a secret. A couple times a week while driving home from work, he takes a wrong exit. And then it starts.
I go into “autopilot.” I start driving aimlessly until I am lost in a neighborhood I have never been to and to which I would never go. I drive until I see a house with a light on or some sign that someone is home, smoke coming from the chimney, the sight of someone through the blinds, but never with a car in the driveway. I am sweating by this time because I know what is coming. I always park right in front of the house and sit there for a minute. I get out of the car and walk to the front door. I try the door knob. I go in without knocking or making any noise. I get into the front coat closet.

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