A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (7 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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Almost no academic research has been done investigating the appeal of MILFs. But it’s reasonable to presume that at least some of the interest in MILFs depends on psychological cues. The terms “aggressive” and “seduction” appear on the vast majority of MILF sites, including My Friend’s Mom and Mommy Got Boobs. The “MILF-lovers” Facebook group asserts in its mission statement, “We love the experience and confidence of the older woman. How she is comfortable seducing a young guy, then fucking him with abandon and no romantic complications.” MILF sites typically feature innocent young men who are seduced by aggressive older women. The self-assured Mrs. Robinson, who seduces a very young Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate
, is perhaps the most famous MILF in cinema.
Though the self-confidence of the MILF appears to be essential to her appeal to the male brain, she also seems to present a number of visual cues that activate male desire. Most MILFs in online porn are busty, curvy, with large, round butts. This is often reflected in the titles of Web sites: My Busty MILF, MILF Ass, Busty Moms Videos, Sexy Ass MILF, Busty MILF Pics.
Many men find both young and adult women to be appealing. On AOL, one out of four people who searched for MILFS also searched for teens. Intriguingly, there is a similar level of overlap between searches for teens and searches for another age-related sexual interest known as GILFs. About one out of four GILF searchers also searched for teens. So what does GILF stand for? Granny I’d Like to Fuck.
Here is the abbreviated AOL search history of one granny fan, Mr. Playstation:
mature deepthroat movies
old lady oral movies
granny cum swallowing movies
what is the optimum humidity for a home
grandma anal movies
star wars lego game cheats for playstation 2
teen deepthroat movies
mature oral movies
Many people find GILFs to be squicky. After all, if men are free to search for any porn they desire, surely they’ll avoid postmenopausal women? Such thinking, apparently, is uninformed ageism. Though it’s true that the total number of
granny
searches amounts to less than 8 percent of the total
youth
searches, there are more sexual searches for
grannies
(#19) than for
spanking
(#25)
.
But are GILFs truly that popular? Perhaps it’s simply some particular eccentricity of Dogpile users?
Alexa is a company that measures traffic to different Web sites through the use of its Alexa toolbar. Alexa publishes a list of the million most popular Web sites in the world. According to our analysis, 42,337 of these Web sites were adult sites in March 2010, or about 4 percent of all sites. We’ll call this set of the most popular adult sites in the world the
Alexa Adult List
.
Out of the 42,337 sites on the Alexa Adult List, 313 are
granny
sites. In fact, there’s an active and well-defined community of granny porn enthusiasts, with sites such as GILF Porn, Tube Granny, and Granny Rides Again. The popularity of GILFs presents a serious challenge for evolutionary science. A broad body of research has demonstrated that men prefer smooth skin to wrinkles and long, lustrous hair to short, gray frizz. What might be going on with all these searches for sexy women of a certain age?
Two countries boasting the highest interest in granny porn are Kenya and England. In Kenya, the “rules of sexual shame” encourage young people to discuss sexual matters with grandparents. Among the Kisii, the grandmother is often the confidante of her grandchildren regarding sexual experiences and sexual technique. In fact, for many Kisii boys, their first acquisition of sexual knowledge from a woman comes from an older woman.
Following a somewhat different pattern, the United Kingdom features a widespread boarding school culture involving strict rules, corporal punishment, and severe, elderly matrons. “There’s a lot of interest in older ladies from the Brits because when a lot of them were schoolboys they were spanked or slapped or pinched by a schoolmarm,” explains a longtime adult industry veteran. “It might have been their first intimate contact with a woman.” We’ll explore these cultural possibilities further in the next chapter.
Some of the interest in older women may simply be due to their greater availability. On the Web site Granny Sex Forum, a user named LoveSelsie describes where he goes to pick up GILFs: “WalMart is very close to my home so it is common for me to visit the store almost daily. Some time ago, I noticed a new greeter at the door. She was about 5 foot 5 inches tall and just a little fluffy. Her hair was gray, short and straight. She was a very appealing lady and I wanted to get to meet her.” It’s worth observing that LoveSelsie focuses on the
visual
attractiveness of GILFs, as do many other granny fans.
Even though there are sizable male audiences for both moms and grannies, youth remains the empress of the Internet.
Youth
is the number one sexual interest by a wide margin on search engines in Russia, Japan, Europe, and India. On the Alexa Adult List, there are 2,462 adult sites that feature youth, compared to 1,237 sites that feature MILFs or mature women. In Web site names, “Teen” is a prefix or suffix applied to just about every interest imaginable: CandyCoatedTeens.com, TeenSnow.com,
FineArtTeens.com
,
DrunkTeenParty.com
,
DoctorTeen.com
.
“Legal teen content has been a consistent earner in the adult industry,” observes Stephen Yagielowicz. “It’s the most competitive niche, with the lowest conversion [to paid subscription] rates. But it’s also got the highest traffic. If you throw up a site with young women, you’re guaranteed plenty of eyeballs. But with so much competition, you certainly aren’t guaranteed profit.”
THE MYTHIC APPEAL OF SKINNY
 
“Essentially the fashion world sees toothpicks toppling under the weight of their false lashes as attractive,” blogs Claire L on the fbomb Web site. “Arms must be willowy, stomachs trim and God forbid your thighs touch . . . and all for the convenience and pleasure of the male population.”
A recent Girl Scouts survey found that almost nine out of ten girls between thirteen and seventeen say they feel pressured by the fashion and media industries to be skinny. It’s true that many magazines often feature women with a lower-than-average body mass index (BMI), but these magazines—such as
Cosmopolitan
,
Vogue
, and
InStyle
—target
women
, not men. The porn that men seek out in the privacy of their laptops tells a different story—one supported by male visual cues rather than women’s fashion.
Like youth, a woman’s body size is another cue that appears to be an innate trigger of male arousal. Adjectives describing body size (such as “chubby” and “thin”) are the third most frequent category of adjectives appearing in Dogpile searches. Are most of these searches seeking the slender bodies of cover models? For every search for a “skinny” girl, there are almost three searches for a “fat” girl.
On the Web, many men are fans of BBW, which stands for Big, Beautiful Women. On the Alexa Adult List, there are more than 504 adult sites explicitly dedicated to heavy ladies (such as Fat Tube, Sugar Fat Girls, and Hippo Girls), and only 182 explicitly dedicated to skinny ones (such as Skinny Teens Naked). There are also more than 150 nonerotic BBW dating networks, such as Large and Lovely, Large Passions, and Chubby Fishing.
The women on adult BBW sites have very large and round breasts, large and curvy hips, and large and round butts. Indeed, the overall impression is one of supersized visual cues of femininity. “It’s simply better when there’s more,” explains a thirty-one-year-old natural gas engineer and BBW fan from central Pennsylvania. “Tits are great, why wouldn’t I want more? An ass is great, why wouldn’t I want more? It’s just nice to be able to really feel a woman there with you instead of trying to search for even a bit of some skeletal girl’s arm or leg to hold on to when you’re having sex. Bigger girls will have more fun, and will work twice as hard to meet the standards of the skinny girls most people find attractive.”
Nevertheless, though the popularity of chubby sites is indisputable, it’s true that the majority of women in mainstream porn are skinnier than average. We analyzed the average BMI and weight of 202 popular American porn actresses under age thirty. In addition, psychologists Martin Voracek and Maryanne Fisher analyzed the bodies of mainstream European porn actresses. The following table compares the BMI and weights of these porn stars with other women.
 
American porn actresses have an average weight and BMI that is below the average for all American women ages 20–29, but still remain within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s healthy range. European porn actresses dip just below healthy.
Many sex scientists believe that women’s waist-to-hip ratios are a visual cue for men. Some research suggests that men around the world find a specific waist-to-hip ratio (.7) to be most arousing. This is the same average waist-to-hip ratio Voracek and Fisher found among European porn actresses. A particular part of the male brain associated with reward processing, the anterior cingulate gyrus, even appears to be activated when a man views an ideal waist-to-hip ratio. However, it’s worth observing that “hips” and “waists” themselves rarely appear in sexual searches. There are no Web sites on the Alexa Adult List devoted to hips or waists, nor could we find any online list of “Top 10 Hips” (though there are plenty of such amateur lists of “best” breasts and butts). None of the major adult tube sites have a hips or waist category, and there are no hip fetishes reported in the clinical literature.
If the male desire software does target a particular waist-to-hip ratio, this must operate using a different neural mechanism from the desire software used to process other visual cues, since men do not search for hips, use “hips” as a tag when labeling videos, or fetishize hips the way they do breasts, butts, vaginas, feet, and penises. However, if men do prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio, this may be one reason why some men prefer heavy women, since many of the models featured in BBW porn have a low ratio due to their excessive hip size.
But one thing is clear: willowy, toothpick-thin women are a rarity in male-targeted pornography.
GIANT, HUGE, AND JUMBO
 
There is an anatomical mystery taking place all around the world. Women’s breasts are getting larger. And not just because women are getting heavier.
“In a country [Britain] where one in three women is overweight, you’d think there was a simple, fat-related reason for this, but obesity alone doesn’t explain the jump in cup size, nor the biggest growth area in bra sales: smaller back size and bigger cup size,” ponders
Guardian
journalist Alice Fisher. “Judging by recent underwear figures, there are more slimmer women with larger boobs than ever before. Women are happy about this. Men are happy about this. But no one seems happy to explain why this is happening.”
Breasts, no matter what size, are the most popular body part in sexual searches in every country we looked at, including the United States, Russia, India, Germany, Japan, and Saudi Arabia.
Breasts
is the third most popular category of sexual search—and the
most
popular category exclusive to heterosexual men. Large breasts are extraordinarily popular in Internet porn, dominating images, stories, videos, and most international variations of animated erotica. Their popularity was confirmed in an experiment conducted by psychologist Nicolas Gueguen, who used padding to vary a female confederate’s breast size from A-cup to C-cup, then counted the number of times she was approached by men at a nightclub and bar in France.

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