A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (39 page)

BOOK: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire
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the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/04/23/sec.porn/index.html
.
evening-buzz-viewing-porn-on-the-job/.
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Men are so highly motivated to look at graphic sex
“Is There Anything Good About Men?” Roy Baumeister, American Psychological Association, Invited Address, 2007.
“men recorded approximately 7.2 sexual fantasies per day as compared with 4.5 for women” and “men estimated they had approximately one sexual fantasy per day, whereas the women estimated they had only one sexual fantasy per week.”
Leitenbergand Henning (1995).
“Male university students were found to masturbate to ejaculation about every 72 hours, and on the majority of occasions, their last masturbation is within 48 hours of their next in-pair copulation.” If they’re not having intercourse every day, that is to say, men tend to pleasure themselves to completion no more than two days prior to having actual sex.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=one-reason-why-humans-are-special-a-2010-06-22
, retrieved on August 20, 2010. Incidentally, male dolphins also have a very strong sex drive, and can mate dozens of times a day. They often try to have sex with inanimate objects and other animals, like sea turtles, using a penis as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk. When a pack of male dolphins happen upon a female, they frequently attempt to force her to mate.
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one out of every six
16.8 percent of all sexual searches.
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frequency of sexual searches on Dogpile that contain
specific
ages
We collected 398,944,925 searches. We classified 55,170,457 searches as “sexual” searches. We scraped from July 10, 2009, to July 28, 2010. We missed some days in September, for a total of 352 days of scraping. The figure shows age-specific sexual searches. The mode (not shown) is age thirteen.When including searches for ages 16 and under, the median age is 15 and the mean age is 20.
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cluster of searches
In the United States, all women in porn must be over eighteen. If you are looking at a porn site and don’t see “18 USC 2257 Compliant,” Chris Hansen of
To Catch a Predator
will be asking you to take a seat faster than you can say “statutory rape.”
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“MILF falls into the 35–50-year-old category”
Personal communication from Stephen Yagielowicz, August, 2010.
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single most popular search term users enter
Perry Stathopoulos, the CTO of PornHub, supplied us with a variety of data about users’ activities on their Web site. One data set was a list of search terms that were most frequently entered into the PornHub search engine in February 2010.
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frequency of specific age-related
adjectives
We generated the age-related adjectives by reviewing the most common age-related terms in our sexual search age categories.
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became a profitable online niche in the early 2000s
Personal e-mail communication with Stephen Yagielowicz, senior editor for Xbiz, August 10, 2010; personal e-mail communication with Colin Rowntree, owner of
Wasteland.com
, August 2010.
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An erotic online comic titled
Savita Bhabhi
The comic continues to be published on a different Web site and now requires a paid subscription. In homage to
Savita Bhabhi
, an online talk show, Jay Hind features an advice segment titled “Savita Bhabhi ke Sexy Lessons.” It contains racy innuendo-filled suggestions from an attractive female host who copies the cartoon avatar’s titillating look.
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searches for content they don’t immediately see
Perry Stathopoulos, CTO of PornHub, supplied us with a variety of data about users’ activities on their Web site. One data set was a collection of all search terms entered into the PornHub search engine in February 2010.
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More than a quarter of all men
Leitenberg & Henning (1995).
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a greater willingness to have casual sex
Easton et al. (2010).
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know exactly what they want
Personal communication, August 2010. The names of all individuals who shared personal information about their sexual interests have been changed to pseudonyms. Ages and professions are accurate.
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The “MILF-lovers” Facebook group
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2254123384
, retrieved March, 2010.
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one out of four people who searched for MILFs
Number of
MILF
searchers: 3,405. Number of
teen
searchers: 22,103. Expected overlap for
MILF
and
teen
searchers, assuming independence: 114. Obtained: 812. Percent of
MILF
searchers who also searched for
teen
: 23.9. Percent of
teen
searchers who also searched for
MILF
: 3.67.
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one out of four GILF searchers
Number of
granny
searchers: 942. Number of
teen
searchers: 22,103.
Expected overlap for
granny
and
teen
searchers, assuming independence: 31.7. Obtained: 202. Percent of
granny
searchers who also searched for
teen
: 21.44. Percent of
teen
searchers who also searched for
granny
: 0.91.
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one granny fan, Mr. Playstation
User #1183669.
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the Alexa Adult List
We used the Alexa list of the million most popular Web sites from March 27, 2010. Of the sites in the top million, 953,702 were successfully crawled. We classified 42,337 as porn sites based on textual pattern matches. We classified Alexa Web sites by analyzing titles and keywords from the textual content of the Web sites. In ambiguous cases, we used independent raters’ evaluations. Here is a list of the top categories of Web sites on the Alexa Adult List:
 
 
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men prefer smooth skin to wrinkles
. Symons (1979), Buss (2005).
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the grandmother is often the confidante
Brockman (1997). Also see
http://kisii.com/profile-and-coverage
.
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might have been their first intimate contact
Personal communication, February 2010.
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where he goes to pick up GILFs
http://www.grannysexforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65655
, retrieved on August 29, 2010.
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Youth
is the number one sexual interest
Russian data scraped by us from the Russian search engine Yandex in spring 2010, from
http://www.yandex.ru/last20.html
. India, Japan, and Europe data were calculated using Google trends and refers to searches entered into Google USA from those territories.
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“Legal teen content has been a consistent earner”
Personal communication, February 2010.
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“fashion world sees toothpicks toppling”
http://thefbomb.org/2010/08/its-not-all-skinny-love/
, retrieved on August 29, 2010. “Essentially the fashion world sees toothpicks toppling under the weight of their false lashes as attractive. Arms must be willowy, stomachs trim and God forbid your thighs touch; but appropriate facial features must be amplified. We are trained as consumers, convinced we require powders to contour our features into submission. We as women are coached into painting ourselves like dolls—doe-eyed creatures with pillowy lips, meek in demeanour—and all for the convenience and pleasure of the male population.”
Though it’s sometimes suggested that medieval Europe preferred a large, “Reubenesque” female body size, others argue that a broader analysis of art from the time reveals an average body size similar to that preferred today. See
http://www.femininebeauty.info/medieval-body-size-preferences
.
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pressured by the fashion and media industries to be skinny
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/02/9-in-10-teen-girls-feel-p_n_445630.html
, retrieved on August 29, 2010.
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For every search for a “skinny” girl
Number of sexual searches containing the word “fat”: 137, 324. Number of sexual searches containing the word “skinny”: 47,669.
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There are also more than 150 nonerotic BBW dating networks
Counted and checked by hand from BBW links and Google results for “BBW dating.” We estimate there were between 150 and 200 English-language BBW Web sites on the Internet in the summer of 2010.
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BMI and weight of 202 popular American porn actresses
We scraped biographies of all porn actresses listed on
Wikipedia
(See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pornographic_actresses_by_decade
; retrieved July 2010). We further extracted biographies that listed weight and height information. A cutoff birth date for inclusion, January 1, 1980, was then used to create the final list of actresses.
The porn actresses with the highest BMI include: Chelsea Charms (30), Lisa Sparxxx (25), Sunny Lane (23), SaRenna Lee (23), Vanessa Lane (22). Porn actresses with the lowest BMI include: Jenna Haze (16), Lela Star (16), Nikky Blond (15), Dominica Leoni (15), Meggan Mallone (14).
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bodies of mainstream European porn actresses
Voracek & Fisher (2006).
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weights of these porn stars with other women
Celebrity BMIs taken from
http://diet.health.com/2009/01/08/surprising-celebrity-bmis/2/
, retrieved on August 1, 2010. The healthy and average numbers are taken from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad347.pdf
.
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waist-to-hip ratio (.7) to be most arousing
Singh (1993), Singh (2002), Furnham et al. (2006), Karremans et al. (2010). But also consider Donohoe et al. (2009). The average WHR of the top fifty high-fashion models as of March 30, 2007, was reported as 0.7.
http://www.femininebeauty.info/i/top.models.txt
. “It should be noted, however, that this finding is based in part on studies that included 0.70 as the lowest WHR in their stimulus materials, e.g., Singh, 1993; when participants are able to choose from lower WHRs, it is sometimes found that WHRs lower than 0.70 are considered more attractive, e.g., Gray et al., 2003.
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activated when a man views an ideal waist-to-hip ratio
Platek & Singh (2010).
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no hip fetishes reported in the clinical literature
A PubMed search for paraphilias and fetishes failed to turn up any hip-related obsessions. Major contemporary lists of paraphilias do not include hip paraphilias, including very extended lists, such as in Levine et al. (2010). Incidentally, many of the paraphilias presented in these oft-reproduced lists do not find expression in online porn. We wonder how accurately these lists reflect actual clinical paraphilias, considering how different they are from the actual sexual interests people seek out online.

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