A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (4 page)
Authors: Ogi Ogas,Sai Gaddam
BOOK: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire
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Where does this diversity come from? Why does one person seek out “spanking stories” and someone else seek out “shemales in prom dresses”? Why are your own erotic preferences different from your partner’s? These questions are at the very heart of our investigation.
We’re going to combine Internet data with the latest findings from neuroscience and sex research to make sense of the diversity of human desire. We’re going to explain why you or your partner might like things in private that you would never share in public—or with each other. This explanation will come in the form of surprising new ideas about the mind software governing our desires. We’ll start with a seemingly simple question. What is the original source of our sexual interests? How does the initial impulse to seek out “best romance novels” or “free gay video” get into our brain in the first place?
One possibility is that our desire software is influenced by social stimuli. Maybe our brains are designed to sample our cultural environment—including messages communicated by our parents, our peers, and the media—then set our desires according to the examples dictated by these social inputs. How could we test this “social inputs” hypothesis? Here’s one possible experiment: we could try to use social inputs to intentionally engineer a person’s most fundamental sexual desires.
If we could take a newborn infant and control everything in his social environment—including the way everyone interacted with him—could we dictate the kind of person that infant will find sexually desirable when he grows up?
THE UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES OF BRAINWASHINGWhile circumcising two-week-old David Reimer with an electro-cautery needle in Manitoba in 1965, the attending urologist accidentally burned off David’s entire penis. Confronting this horrific tragedy, the Reimers consulted the most famous sexologist of the time, Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Money believed that sexuality was entirely the product of social inputs. He assured the Reimer family they had nothing to worry about. Just dust off the name Mrs. Reimer had intended to use if she had given birth to a girl, have David undergo surgery to give him a vagina, and raise their emasculated son as a daughter.
Brenda Reimer’s parents never told her she was born male, initiating one of the most delicate family secrets imaginable. They gave her dolls and dresses and hormone treatments, and regularly schlepped her to Dr. Money’s Baltimore office for therapy. What kind of therapy does one provide to a young girl if one believes that sexual desire is dictated by social inputs? Dr. Money showed little Brenda pictures of nude adult men and said, “This is what grown-up girls like.” Money was pleased with Brenda’s development. For more than a decade, he reported to the scientific community that the first-ever experiment in neonatal gender bending was an “unqualified success.”
But if you spoke with Brenda, she would have described the experiment quite differently. As early as age three, she angrily tore off her dresses. She refused to play with dolls, preferring cars and guns. Instead of using her jump rope for skipping, she used it to whip her brother and tie people up. Brenda’s earliest memory was asking her father if she could shave like him. At school, she became an outcast, teased and rejected for her strange, boyish behavior. The Reimers enrolled Brenda in the Girl Scouts. “I remember making daisy chains and thinking, ‘If this is the most exciting thing in Girl Scouts, forget it!’ I kept thinking of the fun stuff my brother was doing in Cub Scouts.”
And what abouther sexual desire, the main focus of Dr. Money’s vigorous therapy? When Brenda hit puberty, she felt no attraction to boys at all. Money asked her distraught parents, “How do you feel about your daughter being a lesbian?” Overwhelmed by Brenda’s conspicuous psychological agony, her parents finally revealed the truth when she was fourteen. “Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did,” explained Brenda, who quickly changed his name back to David. “I wasn’t some sort of weirdo.”
He had a mastectomy to remove his hormone-induced breasts and a phalloplasty to provide him with a nonfunctional penis. He started dating girls, to whom he felt a strong attraction. Eventually he got married. But he certainly never visited Dr. Money again. “It was like brainwashing,” David reminisced a decade later. “What they did to you in the body is sometimes not near as bad as what they did to you in the
mind
—with the psychological warfare in your head.”
mind
—with the psychological warfare in your head.”
David’s failed experiment was the first of its kind, but unfortunately not the last. In the wake of Dr. Money’s buoyant reports of the successful experiment on Brenda, thousands of genetically male infants with various anatomical disruptions were raised as girls. In 2004, one urologist compiled a report on fourteen genetic males who underwent neonatal sex reassignment. Seven had switched back to living as males, six were still living as females, and one refused to declare a sexual identity. Only those living as men had dated and were able to live independently. Today, the medical profession discourages surgical sex reassignment in newborns, and one reason is because of the tragic experiment on David Reimer. In 2004, at age thirty-eight, David permanently ended his psychological warfare by firing a shotgun into his brain.
David Reimer’s story suggests that the social environment has very little influence on the male brain’s attraction to women. But Reimer was a single person. Let’s try another experiment testing the effects of social inputs on desire, using many more subjects. What happens if mainstream society exposes
all
of its boys to the same sexual stimuli? How many of these boys will feel an attraction to these stimuli as adults?
all
of its boys to the same sexual stimuli? How many of these boys will feel an attraction to these stimuli as adults?
For example, imagine a culture in which every prepubescent boy is encouraged to perform fellatio on an older teenager several times a week for three or four years, as part of a ritualistic initiation into adulthood. If social inputs determine whether the male brain finds men or women to be sexually attractive, then we might expect this would result in a society dominated by adult homosexuality, or at least bisexuality.
In fact, a society with such practices actually exists: the Sambia. These Papua New Guinea people are jungle horticulturalists who live in mountain hamlets. The Sambia believe that semen is the essence of manhood (sort of like Austin Powers’s mojo) and all Sambian boys must ingest quite a bit of it to become strong, masculine men. When the boys hit puberty and start to develop a manly physique, their elders say, “See? It’s working!” Now the adolescent boys get fellated by a new crop of prepubescent boys.
So what is the rate of homosexuality among adult Sambian men? Roughly 5 percent, about the same level of homosexuality found in Western societies. By the time a Sambian man reaches his twenties, he usually marries a Sambian woman. “They have pleasant memories of their youth,” reports the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, who lived among the Sambia. “But their real lust is for women.”
What do these two “natural experiments” teach us? They point to the same conclusion: some things we
instinctively
find arousing. Even if society urges us to participate in a specific sexual practice during our formative years, this does not necessarily determine our adult desires. Of course, we haven’t learned anything yet about female desire, which may operate quite differently from male desire. There may also be important social inputs that influence a man’s other desires. But his fundamental attraction to men or women does not appear to be one of them. To fully understand human desire, we must consider the specific design of our brain’s software.
THE GENIE OF A MILLION SQUICKSinstinctively
find arousing. Even if society urges us to participate in a specific sexual practice during our formative years, this does not necessarily determine our adult desires. Of course, we haven’t learned anything yet about female desire, which may operate quite differently from male desire. There may also be important social inputs that influence a man’s other desires. But his fundamental attraction to men or women does not appear to be one of them. To fully understand human desire, we must consider the specific design of our brain’s software.
The Internet search engine is a marvelous digital genie. 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.
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
scraping
: we wrote a program to capture the searches listed on SearchSpy, a Dogpile-run Web site 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.
scraping
: we wrote a program to capture the searches listed on SearchSpy, a Dogpile-run Web site 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.
Next, we categorized all of these sexual searches by interest. For example, we categorized “hot Latino ass,” “bootylicious babes,” and “sexy guys with bubble butts” as examples of the interest
butts
. (These categories do not distinguish between male and female searchers, or between gay and straight searchers.) Some searches we categorized into multiple interests. For example, “Asian sailor orgy” was counted as
Asians
,
sailors
, and
group sex
. It’s important to note that these searches reflect what people
desired
to find at a given point in time, not what they actually found. It’s the wishes, not what the genie actually produced.
butts
. (These categories do not distinguish between male and female searchers, or between gay and straight searchers.) Some searches we categorized into multiple interests. For example, “Asian sailor orgy” was counted as
Asians
,
sailors
, and
group sex
. It’s important to note that these searches reflect what people
desired
to find at a given point in time, not what they actually found. It’s the wishes, not what the genie actually produced.
Sometimes it was difficult to immediately know whether a particular search expressed an erotic urge, such as “college cheerleaders.” Perhaps this search reflects the innocent interest of someone on the varsity squad scoping out the competition for the National Cheerleading Championship. In such uncertain cases, we turned to other data sets for guidance, including the AOL (America Online) data set.
In 2006, AOL released a data set containing the search histories for 657,426 different people. Each search history contains all the searches made by a particular AOL user over three months, from March 1, 2006, to May 31, 2006. For example, here’s the abbreviated search history for “Mr. Bikinis,” our name for user #2027268:
college cheerleaders
cheerleaders in Hawaii
pics of bikinis and girls
the sin of masturbation
pretty girls in bikinis
girls suntanning in bikinis
college cheerleader pics in bikinis
noooooooo
christian advice on lust
The release of this data set was a public relations disaster for AOL and was named one of the “101 Dumbest Moments in Business.” Even though users’ names were not included, the data was widely viewed as an egregious violation of user privacy. The person responsible for the release of the data, the head of AOL Research, was fired. But the data has proven to be an unparalleled gold mine for researchers investigating online behavior—though, surprisingly, not by researchers studying desire.
Using the AOL data (and other data sets), we determined whether an ambiguous Dogpile search phrase was likely a sexual search, by analyzing what other searches occurred most frequently with the ambiguous search phrase in the AOL data. This allowed us to see, for example, that the search phrase “college cheerleaders” occurs most frequently with “naked cheerleaders,” “busty cheerleaders,” and “free cheerleader porn.” If an ambiguous search phrase was highly correlated with sexual searches, then we counted the search in the appropriate category—in this case,
cheerleaders
.
cheerleaders
.
Take a look at the following list, which shows the most popular sexual interests on Dogpile. But before you do, take a guess. What do you think is searched for the most:
cheerleaders
,
cheating wives
, or
butts
?
cheerleaders
,
cheating wives
, or
butts
?
What are we to make of the fact that
cheating wives
(#5) are more popular than
butts
(#21) or
cheerleaders
(#79)? Why is
youth
(#1) so much more popular than anything else? We saw that culture did not influence whether male brains prefer men or women. But could social inputs influence some of the other interests people search for on the Internet?
cheating wives
(#5) are more popular than
butts
(#21) or
cheerleaders
(#79)? Why is
youth
(#1) so much more popular than anything else? We saw that culture did not influence whether male brains prefer men or women. But could social inputs influence some of the other interests people search for on the Internet?
One fact argues against a cultural influence on certain sexual interests: some of the most popular sexual interests are commonly held to be squicks. For example,
transsexuals
(#17) are more popular than
celebrities
(#23) or
Asians
(#29). “Shemale porn,” as it is known in the adult industry, is internationally popular and profitable, despite the fact that mainstream society finds it pretty strange. You certainly won’t see any Hollywood blockbusters or CNN reports touting the pleasures of transsexual erotica. Yet behind the veil of anonymity, millions of people actively seek it out.
transsexuals
(#17) are more popular than
celebrities
(#23) or
Asians
(#29). “Shemale porn,” as it is known in the adult industry, is internationally popular and profitable, despite the fact that mainstream society finds it pretty strange. You certainly won’t see any Hollywood blockbusters or CNN reports touting the pleasures of transsexual erotica. Yet behind the veil of anonymity, millions of people actively seek it out.
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