A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (8 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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There are more than 1,672 large breast Web sites in the Alexa Adult List, making them one of the most popular categories of sexual sites. Dozens of synonyms for “large” appear in sexual searches for breasts—busty, big, gigantic, monster, huge, massive, ginormous—while there are only three common synonyms for small breasts—small, tiny, petite. As Alice Fisher observed, there does seem to be an intriguing coincidence between men’s preference for large breasts and the increase in women’s actual breast sizes. Of course, not all men are fans of busty.
“I like small breasts. They’re like,
Hi! How can I help you!
” muses comedian Mitch Fatel. “Large breasts are like,
I’m sorry, we’re closing in 5 minutes
.”
Flat-chested women have enthusiastic fans. The Web sites Flat Chested Coeds, Sexy Small Boobs, and I Love Small Tits all celebrate women who are less endowed. In Japan, a woman with small breasts is called “Delicious Flat Chest” or DFC, and there are many popular animated DFC characters, such as Sailor Moon, Lina Inverse, Konata from
Lucky Star
, and Nagi from
Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens
. Keira Knightley and Kate Hudson are both A-list and A-cup movie stars with devoted male followings.
But it’s the big ones that dominate Internet porn. Just like “Teen,” “Busty” is a common prefix used in a variety of porn site names: Busty Island, Busty and Dusty, Busty Elders, Busty at Work, Busty Party. “It’s just nice to have something big right there . . . and you can do way more with them. When they’re bigger, right?” asserts Lee Malden, a twenty-two-year-old music producer. “Grab ’em, hold on to ’em, fuck ’em if you’d like! Bigger tits are better tits, man.”
The significant historical and cross-cultural popularity of breasts supports the notion that they are an innate visual cue triggering male desire. However, one possible challenge to this notion is the fact that breasts are rarely fetishized in primitive hunter-gatherer cultures—the type of cultures that may be most similar to our Stone Age ancestors. But it’s worth observing that in these cultures, such as the Amazonian Yanomamo, a twenty-two-year-old’s breasts often resemble a Western forty-year-old woman’s breasts. In modern societies, dramatically improved nutrition, health, and fitness mean that women can maintain firm, youthful breasts well into adulthood—or MILFhood.
Though there seems to be a cross-cultural preference for larger breasts, the preferred size of a woman’s areola seems to be highly variable. There are no nipple-size-specific Web sites on the Alexa Adult List, but there are many large-nipple sites, and many small-nipple sites. One cross-cultural study found that men in Papua New Guinea preferred large areolae, Samoan men preferred slightly smaller areolae, and New Zealand men preferred medium-sized areolae. The color of a woman’s nipples is an even less influential visual cue. There are no adult sites dedicated to dark-colored nipples or light-colored nipples, and out of the 55 million Dogpile sexual searches, fewer than two thousand specified the coloration of the nipple.
Butts are almost as popular as breasts in sexual searches, and there are almost as many porn sites dedicated to butts as breasts, hinting that men may also have an innate sensitivity to buttocks cues. Regarding butts and breasts, bigger is usually better. Not so for another male visual cue.
AN EXQUISITE PAIR OF JIMMY CHOOS
 
“I do have a bit of a foot fetish, yes,” affirms comic actor Jack Black. “I find myself staring at feet. I like a heel. If she’s wearing clogs, that does something for me. Flip-flops. Sandals. Bare feet are the best.”
Scientific attempts at explaining the widespread male interest in feet have been quite varied. Richard von Krafft-Ebing believed such an interest could develop when “emotional and visual impressions are brought into associative connection.” Freud thought a foot fetish reflected a submissive, immature personality. Social scientists have speculated that they form because of the strong odor of feet or because fancy women’s shoes draw heightened attention to ladies’ feet. But another possibility is that men’s brains are
designed
to respond to women’s feet. The biggest piece of evidence supporting this possibility is men’s preferred foot size.
The anthropologist Daniel Fessler found that men from a broad variety of societies (including Iran, Brazil, Tanzania, and Papua New Guinea) rate small female feet as more attractive than large feet. In contrast, women rated an average male foot size as most attractive. Moreover, on sexual foot Web sites, small feet are represented almost exclusively. If an interest in feet was purely cultural, we might expect to see at least one society or Web site celebrating large female feet.
“In the Cinderella folktales the prince is never canvassing his kingdom in search of a girl whose feet will fill out a gravy boat of a shoe,” observes Donald Symons, who also points out some additional clues supporting an innate male interest in foot cues. Women’s feet typically grow during pregnancy, sometimes a half or even a full shoe size, and pregnant women should be less attractive from an evolutionary perspective since further reproduction is not possible during pregnancy. Several cultures, such as the Chinese and Persians, historically practiced foot binding in an effort to make the feet physically smaller. Many American women habitually wear shoes that are too small for their feet. Women themselves often seem to eroticize their feet, as epitomized by Carrie Bradshaw on
Sex and the City
, indicating an awareness (even if unconscious) that men are paying attention.
Another challenge for cultural theories of the male sexual interest in feet: why feet and not hands? Hands are more visible in all cultures, and the general shape and detail of the hand is quite similar to the foot. Women’s hands are often decorated with bright, manicured fingernails, drawing attention to them. In online porn, women’s hands are frequently portrayed as actively participating in sexual acts: there are far more handjobs than footjobs. So hands are highly visible, attractively adorned, and presented as sexual instruments. Yet in the Dogpile data there were 93,885 sexual searches for feet and only 5,831 sexual searches for hands. There are 276 different foot sites in the Alexa Adult List, but we could only find one Web site that could be construed as hand-focused: Glove Mansion.
So if men are attracted to feet because of an innate receptivity to foot cues, was Freud mistaken in his belief that a foot obsession is related to submissiveness? Perhaps not. According to the AOL search data, searches for foot erotica are highly correlated with searches for bondage and submission porn. Many webmasters cross-link their foot sites to submission sites to capture cross traffic from each. One popular type of foot porn consists of a man being stepped on by a domineering woman or being forced to lick a woman’s feet. It’s not clear whether these submissive interests arise as a way of simply engaging the foot in a more intimate way, whether an interest in feet may drive an interest in submission, or whether feet and submission are both related to some other unknown factor.
Searches for women’s shoes, pantyhose, and stockings are also highly correlated with sexual searches for feet. There are many Web sites and online forums that cater to an erotic interest in women’s footwear, such as Pretty High Heels, Cute Pantyhose, and Teens’ Pantyhose. “I definitely love girls with beautiful feet,” admits rap star Ludacris. “Sometimes she can trick me and just wear boots and not even show her feet. But when I see the feet, it’s a wrap.”
Men’s interest in breasts, butts, and feet are well known and well documented. The next anatomical cue, however, may come as something of a surprise.
HOSTING A SPECIAL EXHIBITION
 
Comedian Ron White describes a conversation with his cousin Ray.
“I told him we’re all gay, buddy. And Ray goes,
That’s bullshit, man.
Do you like porn?
Yeah, I love porn
. Oh, and do you only watch scenes with two women?
No, I’ll watch a man and a woman makin’ love
. Do you like the guy to have a half-flaccid penis?
No, I like big, hard, throbbing cock.
. . . See? You like looking at a big cock.”
The fact of the matter is that men are more interested in penises than women are—and men are
much
more interested in
large
penises than women are. In a recent academic survey of more than fifty thousand respondents between the ages of eighteen and fifty, just 15 percent of women reported dissatisfaction with their partner’s penis size, while 45 percent of men wanted a larger penis. But it’s not just their own penis that men are concerned with.
An eye-tracking study recorded what men and women looked at as they viewed different (nonerotic) images. They found that men consistently direct their gaze to the male crotch, though women rarely do so. In romance novels, even ones that include explicit descriptions of sex, visual details about a man’s penis, including size, are seldom offered. But in porn, the penis is always under the spotlight. The Web site
Fantasti.cc
is a community-based adult content aggregator, a social networking site where the predominantly male users rate and comment on more than 1 million images and videos. Out of the hundred top-rated images on
Fantasti.cc
, twenty-one feature close-up shots of a penis. The number of Dogpile searches for “pussy” just barely beats out searches for “dick,” 1,096,614 to 938,134.
Big Dick
is a popular category of porn on all of the major adult tube sites, including PornHub.
For men, the penis can never be too big, apparently. Just .2 percent of men wish they had a smaller penis, compared to 9 percent of women who wish they had smaller breasts. Indeed, there are more than six times the number of searches for “big dick” than “small dick.” There are 1,072 Web sites in the Alexa Adult List that feature heterosexual porn with large penises such as Monsters of Cock, Mr.Biggz, and Teens Like It Big. The number of Alexa sites devoted to small penises? Just three: PinkyDick, Little-Cock, and My Tiny Dick.
Here’s the AOL search history of one fan of oversized organs, Mr. Amish:
big cocks
big dicks
monster cocks
tight pussy big dicks
long dong sex
big texas cocks
enormous cocks
gigantic cocks
big white dick sex
horny Amish women
So far, all of the visual cues we’ve encountered draw a man’s attention to the female body. But not the penis. So why might the male organ captivate men’s attention? One possible explanation may lie with our primate cousins. Among New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, and the apes, the penis is a prominent and versatile social tool. The erect primate penis is used as a sign of male-male aggression, to mark territory, and as a sexual invitation to females. If the invitation is witnessed by a competing male, the erect penis can provoke hostility and attacks. It may also be a visual cue that motivates males to copulate with a female shortly after she has mated with a competing male. Biologist Richard Dawkins even suggests that an erection may be a visible sign of a male’s general health. But some primates go further than simply inspecting each other’s phalli.
When male savanna baboons meet, they frequently perform an intense greeting that scientists have endowed with the technical term
diddling
—“the fondling of the penis and scrotum.” Similarly, among the Australian Walbiri and Aranda people, when grievances need to be settled, the men participate in what is known as the penis-offering rite, which is said to represent “paying with one’s life.” Each man presents his semierect penis to all the others, pressing it into each man’s palm and drawing it along the length of the upturned hand. Anyone who has seen a
koteka
, the colorful two-foot-long penis cap worn by men in Papua New Guinea, can easily believe that men have inherited our primate cousins’ attentiveness to the penis.
But men aren’t satisfied by checking out other men’s penises. They also like to flaunt their own. Historically, male exhibitionism has been considered a mental disorder. If that is the case, the Internet suggests we are a planet of mentally deranged men. Chat Roulette is a Web site that allows users with a webcam to randomly connect to other people around the world. Once you enter Chat Roulette, you see whatever the other person has chosen to place in front of their webcam. It might be a party, a cute kitten, an old man with a beard, or—very rarely—a bored teenage girl. One blogger recorded what he saw on 1,276 consecutive Chat Roulette sessions: 298 webcams (about one in four) were aimed at a penis. Another blogger created software to track the global locations of penis sightings on Chat Roulette: ChatRouletteCock Map.com reveals that Europe, Brazil, and the American east coast are dense with Internet exhibitionism.
On Fantasti.cc, 23 percent of the male users use an image of their penis as their avatar, while another 13 percent used a penis from a porn clip. In comparison, 5 percent of the female users use an image of a vagina. On reddit’s heterosexual Gone Wild forum, where users are free to post NC-17 pictures of themselves, 123 of the 345 self-posted male images (about 35 percent) consist of close-ups of penises.
Though encountering a male exhibitionist on the subway or in the city park can be frightening and unsettling, clinical psychiatrists do not consider them dangerous. Exhibitionists rarely follow up their lewd displays with any attempt at contacting the women they’ve exposed themselves to. Often, the urge to exhibit oneself manifests as an inexplicable compulsion, rather than a conscious intention to dominate or scare a woman. “The act was more magical than sexual, a ritual to restore that all-important sense of power that the defeats of life had temporarily destroyed,” explained Lance Rentzel, former wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, recounting the incident that got him arrested. “On this day, for some reason, I needed someone to play with me in a childish game I was making up. Look at me, look at me. Look at what I’ve got. I sat in the car and they came over and I exposed myself. It took maybe 10 seconds, then I drove off, strangely relieved.”

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