A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire
by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam
Dutton. 394 pages, $26.95
GAY MEN have larger penises on average than do straight men, and, according to the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts, “you could even say that gay guys act more like men than straight guys do.” This is because gay and straight men are sexually identical (except in one crucial respect): both respond to visual stimuli, want sex with multiple partners, and like to download pornographic images—only gay men do these things even more robustly than straight men do.
This is just one of numerous findings brought to light by co-authors Ogi Ogas, a computational neuroscientist, and Sai Gaddam, an expert on biologically inspired models of machine learning. The “billion wicked thoughts” in the title refers to the vast data set that they compiled and analyzed from users of sex-oriented websites on the Internet, all with the goal of answering one central question: what does human desire look like? While deploying a number of methodologies to approach this question, their core research is based on some 400 million searches that were entered into Dogpile from July 2009 to July 2010, of which thirteen percent were sexual in nature—totaling some 55 million searches conducted by two million individuals.
These are numbers that would have been the envy of Alfred Kinsey, who had to interview his subjects in person for the two books collectively known as The Kinsey Reports (1948 and 1953). The 18,000 subjects that Kinsey ultimately interviewed represent an impressive sample, and Ogas and Gaddam are quick to credit Kinsey with having conducted the only truly comprehensive study of human sexual behavior to date. Indeed the focus on behavior—what people actually do sexually—was a hallmark of Kinsey’s study, which expressly excluded things like fantasies and desires as unscientific.
Ogas and Gaddam argue that people’s desires are precisely what the Internet allows us to investigate. The anonymity of the Web lets people live out their deepest sexual desires in a safe, private milieu, and thus it can shine a reliable light on what people truly want when it comes to sex. The data from which they derived their findings consisted mainly of porn websites, interactive websites (such as ChatRoulette.com), and sex ads on Craigslist. They also tapped search companies that retain and sell data about individuals’ search histories (who knew?).
The authors compare their study to the famous Gergen Experiment of 1978, in which five men and five women were left in a pitch-black room and instructed to “freely express their desires.” Within a short time—unlike a control group left in a lighted room—the ten were touching and hugging, and eighty percent reported getting sexually aroused. Likewise the anonymity of the Internet frees people to express sexual desires that they wouldn’t otherwise acknowledge. For example, a surprising number of married straight men get off on the idea of another man having sex with their wives, especially if it’s an African-American man (Old Spice, anyone?).
Much that Ogas and Gaddam report confirms what we already knew or suspected about male and female sexuality. Women tend to respond to psychological and emotional cues, which is why they’re more receptive to romance novels. Men respond to visual cues and are easily aroused by pornographic images. Male sexual desire is essentially settled by late adolescence, while women’s sexuality is more fluid over a lifetime. Women also tend to be more flexible at any given moment, and it usually takes a variety of stimuli—verbal, tactile, visual, and even olfactory—to get a woman going. Men, in contrast, tend to respond to “the perfect single cue,” whether a beautiful breast or a large penis.
One chapter of the book is devoted to same-sex desire and focuses exclusively on gay men. Ogas and Gaddam’s bottom line is that gay and straight men are remarkably similar in their sexual interests: “Internet porn suggests that gay men share the same visual cues as straight men: youth, aggressive and seductive maturity, graphic details of the body, large penises, ejaculation shots, and anonymous, emotionless, non-monogamous sex.” The fact that heterosexual men are attracted to large penises and ejaculation shots is among the more surprising findings. The authors argue that men in general respond to “cues of domination,” which includes the male phallus, while women respond to “cues of submission” or even coercion.
Here is where gay and straight men part company, for while the penis is always an instrument of domination for straight men, it is also experienced as an instrument of submission for most gay men. Based on some 1.9 million men-seeking-men ads on Craigslist, Ogas and Gaddam found that “tops” outnumber “bottoms” by a ratio of about two to one (65 to 35 percent). They also make much of gay men’s obsession with straight men as sex objects, as witness the most popular websites and search items, and they point out that virtually all gay porn stars are masculine tops. This suggests, they contend, that something is “flipped” in the gay male brain that renders it “feminized” with respect to sexual attraction. But what about those larger penises and other hypermasculine qualities that gay men display? Here Ogas and Gaddam introduce a complex model involving the prenatal release of the hormones testosterone, estrogen, and androgens that results in an ambiguously gendered brain.
The attempt to explain their statistical findings with reference to neuroscience and fetal development is interesting, if often highly speculative. But given the glut of data that Ogas and Gaddam had at their disposal, one might have expected a bit more hard analysis—perhaps a bar graph or two and maybe even some advanced statistics to make sense of all this data. Instead, the book frequently devolves into anecdotes and quotations from the searches, along with random theorizing about what it all means. The data sets from the Internet are indeed immense and the potential for an in-depth examination of desire enormous, but that’s a book that has yet to be written.
