The Internet and Human Sexuality

“A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire” A book by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

In the world of behavioral science, there is a problem that every researcher must confront. According to Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, the authors of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire,” that problem is people. There aren’t many adult humans who are willing to advance the cause of science by documenting their sneezes or their changing moods, who will consent to being injected with chemical dyes or doused with cold water. Those who have the time and the interest are college students, and college students tend to be WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.

It may surprise you to discover that much of what we know about ethics, aggression and sexuality is based on research conducted on adolescent psychology majors. It will probably not surprise you to discover that the young, privileged and educated are not a representative sample of the species Homo sapiens.

The research challenges are even greater when it comes to studying sexual behavior. People simply aren’t that eager to disclose their most private habits and desires, and when they are, there’s no way to tell whether they’re being completely honest with the researchers, much less with themselves. The Kinsey Reports of the 1940s and ’50s, for example, are considered the most comprehensive study of the true sexual interests of ordinary people. Eighteen thousand men and women answered a total of 521 questions about a wide variety of sexual activities, including bondage, bestiality and homosexuality.

But even Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking research had its limitations. The subjects were educated, middle-class Caucasians. The data they provided consisted of secrets and memories they chose to share, rather than verifiable facts or direct observation. And perhaps the most compromising detail is that the information was collected through face-to-face interviews between scientist and subject — hardly the ideal setting in which to reveal one’s most private sexual fantasies.

“A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire” is an ambitious attempt to get to the bottom of what truly makes men and women tick. In it, Ogas and Gaddam seek to eliminate the problems of selection bias and less-than-candid research subjects. They ask the question: Where can we gather the most truthful, intimate information from the widest variety of people? It would have to be a place that would assure absolute anonymity, for even the subjects knowing that they were being studied would contaminate the results. For Ogas, a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience, and Gaddam, who conducted his doctoral research on biologically inspired models of machine learning, that answer was obvious: the Internet.

“The Internet search engine is a marvelous digital genie,” explain Ogas and Gaddam. “It grants us not just one, but an infinite number of erotic wishes. Ordinary folks can sit at their keyboards, liberated from any need for modesty, and express precisely what they would like to pop up on their computer screen. I wish for … Zac Efron in his bathing suit. If we want to make sense of the diversity of the sexual interests expressed on the Internet — and the mind software responsible for these interests — we should start by looking for patterns in these wishes.

“We collected about 400 million different searches that were entered into the Dogpile search engine from July 2009 to July 2010. We collected these searches through a process called scrapping: We wrote a program to capture the searches listed on SearchSpy, a Dogpile-run website that displays in real time the actual searches people entered into the Dogpile search engine. If you visit SearchSpy, it’s like looking through a window into a planetary stream of human consciousness — and you won’t have to wait more than a few seconds to see its sexual side. Of the 400 million searches we collected, about 55 million (roughly 13 percent) were searches for some kind of erotic content. These sexual searches represent the desires of roughly 2 million people. Two-thirds are from the United States, though some users are from India, Nigeria, Canada and the United Kingdom.”

Besides the Web searches, the authors also analyzed hundreds of thousands of online erotic stories and romance e-novels, adult websites, and sexually oriented websites and message boards.

Ogas and Gaddam went on to break down these searches by interest, coming up with categories such as “butts,” “cheerleaders,” “cheating wives,” “breasts” and “penises,” then rating them in order of popularity. After categorizing these 55 million searches, their first significant finding was that our interests — as expressed on the Internet — are not terribly diverse. In fact, only 20 different categories account for 80 percent of all searches. “With less than two dozen interests,” write the authors, “you can satisfy the desires of everyone who uses a search engine to find erotic content. In fact, the 35 top interests account for 90 percent of all searches. This doesn’t even include cheerleaders (No. 79), massage (No. 51) or virgins (No. 61). This means that most people’s desires are clustered together into a relatively small set of common interests. When it comes to our kinks, we all have a lot more in common than you might think.”

We are more alike, claim the authors, and also more unalike. When it comes to the arousal mechanisms of men and women, the differences are the most profound. No big revelation there. But the real eye-opener is how different we actually are — to the point where straight men have more in common with gay men than either group have in common with women.

Science has long understood that men are aroused by visual stimulus. The male brain is programmed to objectify women — a fact that can be distressing or reassuring, depending on your point of view. And this has been demonstrated in other animal species. A male rooster sees a hen’s red comb — head and body optional — and he begins to exhibit mating behaviors. Male baboons will masturbate at the sight of a swollen, red, female baboon butt, even an artificial one. The bigger and brighter the derriere, the swifter and more impassioned the response. To a human male searching the Internet, this translates into pornography, where exaggerated and tumescent sex organs can be ordered up at whim, often devoid of any distracting context. And these disembodied images are just as popular with gay men as with their straight brothers. In fact, the researchers discovered, for every female body part that heterosexual men fancied (breasts, vaginas), there was an analogous male body part (chests, penises) sought after by homosexuals.

According to Ogas and Gaddam, the male brain’s desire software can best be compared to Elmer Fudd. Bugs Bunny’s perennial antagonist, Fudd is a solitary, trigger-happy hunter with a single goal in mind: rabbit. Just as the human male can be aroused by artificial breasts, the cartoon Fudd will point his gun at anything remotely resembling his target — Daffy Duck dressed up as a rabbit, for instance, or a pair of bunny ears set up by Bugs to trick him. But even when he’s been fooled, he’s undeterred. He reloads and gets back out there. Every new day is a chance to bag a rabbit.

For female arousal, however, context is everything. It’s why Big Pharma and biotech companies have yet to develop a Viagra for women. It takes more than increased blood flow to the vagina to make a female want to have sex; she also needs to be mentally stimulated. This is a far more daunting and complicated process, one that can’t be kick-started by disembodied images of male genitalia, no matter how attractive.

So when women are looking for online stimulation, their aphrodisiac of choice is the written word. Literotica, for example, is the most popular erotic story site on the Web, with more than 200,000 sexy stories — the vast majority of them written by women — and 5 million visitors per month — the vast majority of them women. These stories pique female desire in a way that is all about context. By the time the heroine beds down with the man (or men, or woman, or whatever) the reader knows what she needs to know to engage her unique circuitry. She knows who’s having sex, why and — just as in real life — where this relationship is going.

According to Ogas and Gaddam, this need is an evolutionary imperative. “When contemplating sex with a man, a woman has to consider the long term,” they write. “This consideration may not even be conscious, but rather is part of unconscious software that has evolved to protect women over hundreds of thousands of years. Sex could commit a woman to a substantial, life-altering investment: pregnancy, nursing and more than a decade of child raising. These commitments require enormous time, resources and energy. Sex with the wrong guy could lead to many unpleasant outcomes. If a man abandons her, she would face the challenges of single motherhood. If the man turns out to be cruel, he might injure her or her children. If the man turns out to be weak or incompetent, he might fail to protect her from threats.”

Because of these risks, the female brain has developed a highly sophisticated kind of vetting software. A man must pass the test in order to be considered arousal-worthy. According to the authors, if a man is Elmer Fudd, a woman is Miss Marple. Agatha Christie’s fictional detective is a shrewd judge of character with a deep knowledge of the darker side of human nature. The detective skills of the female brain were developed over generations, as amateur female sleuths investigated the characters of potential mates in a wide variety of situations. “Like the fictional Miss Marple,” Ogas and Gaddam conclude, “a woman’s Detective Agency mulls over a variety of evidence concerning a potential partner’s character, weighs clues from the physical and social environment, and examines her own experiences and feelings before permitting — or pursuing — sex.”

When so much of modern life is lived online, Ogas and Gaddam’s data collection methods may make some people uncomfortable. Granted, there is a technical and ethical difference between analyzing Internet traffic patterns of personal proclivities and collecting personal information. But how difficult would it be for a motivated computer tech to connect the dots between a fetish for rubber dresses and the fetishist’s home address? His credit card numbers? His employer’s phone number? In 2006, AOL released the search histories of more than half a million users; this data set contained all the Internet searches of certain AOL users over the course of three months. Typically, many of the searches contained sexual terms. Although the users’ names were not included, this incident was considered a public relations disaster for AOL; CNN Money named it one of the “101 Dumbest Moments in Business.” It was also considered a treasure trove for researchers, with some of the data being used for Ogas’ and Gaddam’s research.

More recently, Facebook has come under fire for transmitting users’ identifying information to advertising and Internet tracking companies through many of its popular applications, and yet Facebook’s membership continues to grow. Have we become used to trading a little bit of personal privacy for social convenience? Is this a case where the ends justify the means?

For people looking for a long-term relationship where they are not only loved but desired, that answer may be yes. Ultimately, Ogas and Gaddam’s ambitious and thought-provoking book delivers a message of hope. If there’s one thing their exhaustive research reveals, it is this: No matter who you are, slender or obese, young or old, there is a group of people out there who will find you attractive. All you have to do is go online. And for a person who is looking for instant gratification — no matter how exotic or debased — the news is just as good. For this, the authors cite what has become known as Internet Rule No. 34: If you can imagine it, it exists as Internet porn.

Robin Shamburg is the author of “Mistress Ruby Ties It Together: A Dominatrix Takes on Sex, Power, and the Secret Lives of Upstanding Citizens.” She is finishing her second book, “Dungeon Confidential.”