A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (19 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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The author’s description is still rather literary and emotional, especially compared to the graphic detail and physical violence of male-targeted coercion erotica. Scientists point out that the men in many of these female coercion fantasies are handsome, appealing alphas—the kind of partner that appeals to Miss Marple. “What is ‘wished for’ in real life is surrender to a powerful and attractive selected male and a sense of danger, excitement, and passion in real-life relationships,” observed two psychologists in a 2008 review of rape fantasy research.
But Meredith Chivers also points out that there is something primordial about female fantasies of submission. “It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought. To be all in the midbrain.” Though academic research focuses on the notion that coercion involves desirable male partners, many amateur stories written by women depict rapes by unattractive and brutal men in shuddering detail.
Literotica is the single most popular English-language erotic story site on the Web, with 5 million visitors per month. Run by the husband-and-wife team of Laurel and John since the late ’90s the site contains more than 200,000 erotic stories, including more than 10,000 “non-consent/reluctant” stories. There are female-authored fantasies of truckers raping women at rest stops, depraved criminals raping innocent housewives, and soldiers brutalizing captive women.
But fan fiction features the widest variety of female-authored nonconsensual sex—in some cases downright violent and degrading sex. Stories with such themes are common enough to merit their own identifying tags:
Abuse
,
Violence
,
BDSM
,
Tort
[ure] and
Humil
[iation]. Each of these tags is among the ten most popular sexual act descriptors for Harry Potter stories on AdultFanFiction .net. Here is an excerpt from a fan fiction story by Miss Stephanie, featuring the abduction of a muggle by Draco Malfoy:
She fought with renewed strength then, but he smiled in a wicked grimace as he forced her hands over her head and straddled her. . . . Draco felt the heat flare as he ripped her shirt away and caught sight of her rather large breasts. They jounced and wiggled as she struggled again, and another slap stilled her. . . . Her head turned and he saw a trickle of blood alongside her mouth, but this only spiked his arousal, causing his penis to jump with eagerness as he pulled it out. She pushed against him, ineffectually, but he slapped her regardless, and forced her hands down, gripping them with his own hands on either side of her head. . . . He knew that he was wrong, but he wanted to make this last. He had never in his life felt such heat conjoin in his loins, and he was sure the explosion that was building within him was going to be momentous.
In such fantasies, it often seems like something is going on other than the mere desire to be irresistible. “I get off on stories with the rough stuff,” explains Miranda Helmsley, a forty-two-year-old baker. “I don’t know why. I definitely would never want to experience any of the things that turn me on. But I need the girl to be exploited, put in her place with real force from the man. I don’t like to think too much about it, and I definitely would never tell my husband.”
These violent and degrading coercive fantasies may be female counterparts to men’s submission fantasies, such as “forced feminization,” “cock and ball torture,” and “golden showers”—squicky genres we will consider later. It may be that at the bottom of our subcortex, in our hypothalamus and midbrain, we all share the same ancient circuitry associated with dominance and submission. In Czech author Milan Kundera’s “The Hitchiking Game,” he describes a sexually inexperienced woman who pretends to be a prostitute as part of a sex game with her boyfriend. She ends up losing herself in the role.
This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure at this moment—beyond that boundary.
WEB0.0
 
There’s a scene in
Legally Blonde
where Elle Woods returns home to campus and notices her awkward friend David trying to pick up a pretty girl. “You’re a dork,” replies the girl. “Girls like me don’t go out with guys like you.” Elle hurries over to David and slaps him. “Why didn’t you call me? We spent a beautiful night together and I haven’t heard from you since.” David plays along as the pretty girl watches attentively. After Elle stalks off, the pretty girl returns to David. “So, when did you wanna go out?”
The maxim “All the best men are taken” is doubly true. If a man is already taken by a woman, then by definition, he’s the best man—or certainly a more
desirable
man. If the exact same man is not taken, then his value is questionable—he’s certainly not as desirable as a man who has already received the stamp of approval from another woman’s Detective Agency.
The
popularity cue
is prominent in romance novels, though it may find its most classic expression in the Cinderella fairy tale. The Prince is sought after by all the ladies of the kingdom—including the bitchy stepsisters—but the glass slipper only fits one girl, the oppressed maid Cinderella. In the romance novel
Heaven, Texas
by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, the hero is a famous professional football player. The heroine is a rather mousy spinster and virgin who’s spent most of her life working in nursing homes. Nobody thought she stood a chance with the popular hometown hero. The hero himself said she wasn’t his type and didn’t expect to stay with her even after they started sleeping together. But even though he can have any woman in town, the virgin’s Magic Hoo Hoo captures his full attention and he ends up falling for her.
Popularity cues are one reason many women find married men so attractive. The fact that another woman’s Detective Agency has already completed her assiduous detective work and endorsed a man is valuable information. If the man had something to hide, surely the wife’s Miss Marple would have ferreted it out. But for the men who are the subject of the popularity cue, it’s a case of the rich getting richer. Former Playboy playmate Kendra Wilkinson chronicles her first sexual encounter with Hugh Hefner in the Playboy Mansion:
One of the girls asked me if I wanted to go upstairs to Hef’s room. . . . It seemed like every other girl was going, and if I didn’t it would be weird. One by one, each girl hopped on Hef and had sex with him . . . for about a minute. I studied their every move. Then it was my turn . . . it was very weird. I wasn’t thinking about how much older Hef was—all the body parts worked the same. I wanted to be there.
Men who are awkward loners or social rejects have a major strike against them in the view of the Detective Agency, unless they offer compensating cues. “Omega” heroes—comedians, art thieves, and nerdy geniuses—rarely show up in romances though, as with Beta heroes, they have their own devoted following. Xander from
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
is an omega, as is the thief Gawain Lammergeier in Claire Delacroix’s
The Scoundrel
. Alpha heroes who are dominant in the society of men and desired by the society of women are far more common, and far more appreciated by Miss Marple.
The solitary hunter Elmer Fudd is not receptive to the popularity cue. Other men’s opinion about the attractiveness of a woman plays no role in the level of man’s desire; indeed, men often prefer that other men had less interest in a potential partner in order to leave her more accessible. The fewer competing wabbit-hunters, the better.
When women are not competing for mates, they frequently solicit one another’s opinions on men, relationships, sexuality, health, dieting, fashion, and especially one another’s feelings—what we might call
informational cues
. The Detective Agency always craves information to make good long-term investment decisions—and the more information, the better. We saw how women dominate social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Bebo. But informational cues are most prominent within the highly networked fan fiction community.
One reason that fanfic has exploded online is because the Internet makes it very easy for female fans to communicate with one another. Most fan fiction stories are posted in forums and blogs that allow readers to comment on the stories. Readers pay particular attention to the emotional qualities of the story and the authenticity of the characters. Remarking on a Harry Potter story, one fan observes, “Oh, and, on a side note, would Ron really use the expression, ‘hooking up’? It sounded very Muggle, very American, and very post-early 90s to me.” Another fan commends the author, saying, “I liked his surges of anger every now and again, made for a more compelling and realistic Harry. I also thought his spat with Ginny was done very appropriately.”
Many fan fiction stories elicit hundreds of comments. A story’s author usually responds to comments on her story. Fanfic authors frequently share what they were feeling when they wrote their story, eliciting further discussion. Many women enjoy talking about the process of talking about fan fiction, a type of discussion known as “meta.”
One 55,000-word story set in the
Stargate : Atlantis
universe and titled “Written by the Victors” was posted on LiveJournal in 2007 by the author Speranza. It has received more than one thousand enthusiastic comments and still receives comments today. “I will point out that the thing that unequivocally sucked me in was that after seven chapters of theorizing about John’s character and motivations we finally get to the emotional truth of the matter,” writes one commenter. Miss Marple’s joy in analyzing and evaluating informational cues is quite apparent in most comments. “I particularly loved the different truths of the competing historical narratives, their different weightiness in publication type ranging from what I thought were excerpts from more popular and lightweight memoirs/biographies to the more supposedly stringent peer-reviewed articles—how they in literary style cycled through the spectrum of factual history-legend-myth-poetic fantasy and finally degenerated (for us readers—into Latin/Greek and finally glyphs/ideograms)—lost forever perhaps.”
In fan fiction, the discussion is as important as the story.
When it comes to desiring a man, women have a love/hate relationship with other women. This is quite different from men’s attitude toward other men where women are involved, which is more of an ignore/kill relationship. Why this difference? Miss Marple simply cannot gather enough evidence about a potential partner by working on her own. She always benefits from making a few calls—or a few dozen—to the Detectives at other Agencies.
But at the end of the day, what matters most is the opinion of one man.
SO DAMN EASY TO LOVE
 
The pop singer Beyoncé croons, “Why don’t you love me? Tell me, baby, why don’t you love me? When I make me so damn easy to love?” The psychological cue of
adorability
—a woman’s desire to feel loved for her unique and special qualities—is as fundamental as irresistibility, and a quality that the Detective Agency is keen to detect.
“For women, being lovable was the key to attracting the best mate. For men, however, it was more a matter of beating out lots of other men even to have a chance for a mate,” suggests Roy Baumeister. “Perhaps nature designed women to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.”
While a woman’s desire to be sexually irresistible may be rooted in the unconscious subcortex, the desire to be loved may involve the conscious cortex, along with conscious emotional mechanisms designed to evaluate a man’s love. In romance novels, the hero must show signs of loving the heroine for her unique personal qualities. Some romance fans refer to this as “Twu Wuv.” Whereas the Magic Hoo Hoo is about a woman’s sexual desirability, Twu Wuv is about a woman’s specialness as a human being. The hero must demonstrate that his love is steady, irrational, and everlasting.
The main narrative arc of any romance consists of the hero gradually coming to terms with the powerful and inexplicable love he feels toward the heroine. It is the authenticity and depth of a man’s Twu Wuv that the Detective Agency is ultimately designed to plumb. Though a hero may feel the whirling vertigo of love early on, it’s not enough for him to simply profess it to the heroine. He must demonstrate its reality through sacrifice and commitment. Often, the hero fights the feeling, sometimes even treating the heroine badly in the hope that by getting rid of her, he will get rid of the throbbing passion in his heart. But love eventually burns through.
The climax of every romance novel occurs when the hero finally confesses his heartfelt Twu Wuv to the heroine in a sudden gush, often accompanied by a marriage proposal, as in this scene from Theresa Michaels’s
Once an Outlaw
:
Logan had eyes for no one but Jessie. Her tears soaked his chin, but her whispers were less frantic now. Wiping the tears with his finger tips, he brought them to his lips.
“I never want to see you cry again,” he whispered. She tried to stem the flow, truly tried, but the tears kept coming as she gazed at his battered face. “Ah, Jess, what am I gonna do with a woman who won’t obey me?”
“I don’t know.”
He angled his throbbing head and brushed his swollen mouth against hers.
“Guess that’s all you’re getting in the way of a kiss for now. But I’ve the rest of the answer to your question, Jessie. Remember last night? You asked who I am. Logan Kincaid of the Rocking K ranch and the man who wants to marry you. Come home with me, Jess.”

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