A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (9 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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Perhaps men are tapping into an ancient display mechanism we share with other primates, similar to the way girls’ enjoyment of brushing other girls’ hair may reflect our primate grooming mechanisms. It’s true that some women are enchanted by a substantial phallus. But for men, a large penis is always welcome.
AN ANIMATED LADY
 
One way to get a better sense of the visual cues that trigger male desire is to consider erotic art designed for men. An artist is not constrained by gravity or biology but is free to fashion impossible bodies limited only by his imagination. If a particular style of erotic art becomes popular across diverse cultures, this may be a good indication that it is activating men’s innate desire software. With the growth of the Internet, one type of erotic art has risen to unchallenged dominance across all wired nations:
Japanese anime
.
A more relaxed judicial reinterpretation of obscenity laws in the 1990s released the floodgates on Japanese animated erotica, an art form that traces its roots back to nineteenth-century woodblock printings. With the advent of the Internet, Japanese anime quickly spread throughout the world. Japanese anime (sometimes known as
hentai
) is the most searched for type of erotic animation or erotic art on search engines in the United States, Russia, France, Thailand, Brazil, and Australia, suggesting that it is highly effective in exploiting men’s visual cues. (
Animation
, including non-Japanese cartoons, is the ninth most popular category of sexual searches on Dogpile.) So what do the women in Japanese anime look like? The typical anime female is a high school teenager. She has large, baby-like eyes, emulated by Lady Gaga in her “Bad Romance” video. Her voice is extremely high-pitched. She frequently wears school uniforms, complete with pleated skirts, vests, and saddle shoes. She is often sexually inexperienced and reacts with embarassment at the mention of sex (indicated by reddening cheeks). Yet, despite all these vivid cues of youth, she is drawn with impossibly large breasts, a perfectly round and firm butt, a low waist-to-hip ratio, and small feet. It’s also worth noting that Japanese animation frequently contains men with gargantuan penises, sometimes longer than a girl’s arm.
In other words, the Internet’s most popular visual erotic art contains supercharged versions of all the male visual cues. This probably explains why many men are
schediaphiliacs
—sexually attracted to animated characters.
Now that we have a better understanding of
what
men like to look at, we can ask—
why
?
CHAPTER 3
 
Elmer Fudd, Wabbit Hunter
 
Male Desire
 
 
If you put little, warm holes in the wall of my house—given enough time, I’m going to have sex with it.
—Comedian Joe Rogan
 
 
 
 
W
hat does a hen need to turn a rooster on? A sultry clucking, a tail-swinging sashay, a thickly feathered breast? When it comes to sex appeal, the white leghorn rooster has simple tastes. All a hen needs to get a rooster crowing is a red comb. Head and body optional.
When biologists tried to figure out which visual cues evoked sexual behavior in male fowl, they found that roosters would exhibit mating behaviors even when exposed to an
artificial
hen’s comb. About half of all roosters attempted copulation with an artificial chicken head mounted on a feather-covered board. Turkeys are even less discriminating: male gobblers will try to mate with a rubber ball, as long as it’s the size and height of a female head.
The objectification of female anatomy is not limited to farm birds. Male chacma baboons find the bright red rumps of ovulating females to be particularly arousing. Using an ingenious experiment, one scientist attempted to determine whether a female’s scarlet derriere was the actual cue exciting males, rather than her odor or behavior. A nonovulating female baboon was fitted with a “thermoplastic perineum swelling”—a fake baboon butt. The artificially enhanced female was kept in a separate cage where she was visible to the males, but could not be touched by them. The experimenters then counted the number of times the males masturbated. The bigger and brighter the fake butt, the more the male baboons pleasured themselves.
The butt fixation of male baboons would probably come as no surprise to clinical psychologists, who encounter far more men than women obsessed with body parts. Men’s sexual fantasies are more visually explicit than women’s and men remember more visual details from sexual encounters than women do. Erotic stories written by men use more visual descriptions than stories written by women. In the AOL search data, almost no one who searched for “Martha Stewart” searched for “porn,” though “Martha Stewart” searchers were four times more likely than chance to search for erotic stories.
The male brain is designed to be more visually responsive to sexual stimuli than the female brain. Male arousal itself relies on two structures located in the subcortex: the amygdala and the hypothalamus. These are tiny structures that operate without conscious awareness. The amygdala is responsible for emotional responses. The hypothalamus is the engine of sexual arousal. In studies where both men and women viewed pornography, the amygdala and the hypothalamus were activated more strongly in men. This is the case even when women report stronger arousal than men (which happens infrequently). Together, the amygdala and the hypothalamus urge a man to pay attention:
wow, look at those curves!
Visual cues trigger desire in men. If a man’s brain decides a picture is arousing, he swiftly experiences physical and psychological arousal. Immediately following exposure to erotic visual stimuli, the brain areas responsible for the generation of an erection are activated. Men’s greater sex drive may be partially due to the fact that their sexual motivation pathways have more connections to the subcortical reward system than in women.
In other words, what you may have long suspected is true: men’s brains are designed to objectify females. This objectification of women extends deep into the mists of prehistory. The famous 26,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf statuette, hand-carved by a Cro-Magnon in Paleolithic Germany, features GG-cup breasts and a hippopotamal butt, but no face. The 40,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels boasts even more prodigious hips and mammaries—and titanic labia.
Out of the one hundred highest-rated images on Fantasti.cc, twenty-three feature close-ups of female anatomy without a face. One close-up of a woman’s bare bottom generated hundreds of enthusiastic comments, including, “Delicious!”, “This is what I call a MASTER PIECE,” and “Great hindquarters. Now saddle up!” One imagines that if male baboons could speak, they’d shout similar cat calls over baboon booty.
Many adult sites targeting men focus on body parts. Daily Basis features a gallery of glossy bits of female anatomy—lips, toes, butts, eyelashes, bellies, breasts. The site looks like a Victoria’s Secret catalog passed through a paper shredder. Boobpedia is an online “Encyclopedia of Big Boobs,” containing detailed information on almost ten thousand pairs of breasts—and a few notes on the models, celebrities, and porn stars who own them. Mighty Fine Ass rates “amateur submitted nice asses and sexy round butts,” while Foot Fap displays hundreds of images of women’s feet.
Most women find such clinical portrayals of anatomy to be unappealing. But men’s brains scrutinize the details of arousing visuals with the kind of concentration jewelers apply to the cut of a diamond. Consider one of the most popular sexual visual interests in Japan,
zettai ryouiki
, translated as “the absolute territory.”
 
The absolute territory is the band of skin visible between a woman’s skirt and the top of her socks—or, even more tantalizing, between a miniskirt and thigh-high stockings. “The socks and skirt are usually darker shades than the skin,” explains one fan on the blog Anime Desho Desho. “Therefore the skin is the light at the end of a dark tunnel, gleaming in an aura of brilliance. Always seek the light!”
The anatomical fixations of men are often subject to intense analytical and mathematical scrutiny. Women are “Perfect 10s.” Baby Boomers described girls as 36-24-36. Fans of
zettai ryouiki
categorize the bewitching strip of skin into six different types, ranging from Grade E (too much skin and too much skirt) to A (very thin strip of skin and very short skirt). Fans spend hours measuring the ratio of skirt to skin to sock length on a wide variety of
zettai ryouiki
images in order to derive a “golden mean.” According to one blogger’s laborious calculations, the most sublime ratio for [skirt length]:[skin length]:[length of socks above knees] is 4:1:2.5. Another fan adds, “memorizing this formula is as important as knowing the first 30 digits of pi.”
The interest in the absolute territory is almost exclusive to Japanese men. In India, the belly is a common male obsession. In Victorian times, ankles were considered highly erotic. Salvador Dalí claimed to be aroused by a woman’s earlobe. Thus, culture does seem to play some role in determining what part of a body the male brain targets. Nevertheless, internationally, three of the most consistently popular sexual searches on the Web are parts of the female body:
breasts
,
butts
, and
feet
. So how does the male brain guide some men to ankles and others to bellies—and most men to breasts and butts?
A SULTRY JAR OF PENNIES
 
Gentlemen, if you decided to participate in an intriguing experiment run by psychologists Joseph Plaud and James Martini, here’s how it would go down. First, you look through a collection of slides of women. Some are nude, some partially nude, but you select five that you find arousing. Next, you sit down in a comfortable reclining chair, remove your pants, and slip a loop of wire around your penis. This device, known as a
plethysmograph
, measures blood flow to your private parts. After relaxing as best you can for five minutes, a slide show begins.
A rather boring picture appears on the screen for fifteen seconds: a jar of pennies. Then, one of your personally selected erotic slides appears, this one for thirty seconds. Then it vanishes and you wait two minutes. If you were especially aroused by the pictures, you’d wait even longer, since the researcher would wait for you to return to “baseline detumescence.” Then the slide show repeats itself fourteen more times: pennies, porn, wait. That’s it! You’d collect your $20 for your contribution to science, drop the plethysmograph in a bowl of sanitizing fluid, and head home.
Plaud and Martini’s experiment tested the hypothesis that specific male desires are formed through a process known as
conditioning
. Famously associated with Ivan Pavlov’s salivating dogs, conditioning exposes a subject to a neutral stimulus (such as a ringing bell), followed immediately by an arousing stimulus (such as tasty dog food). According to the science of conditioning, if the neutral and arousing stimuli are paired enough times, then eventually the neutral stimulus should acquire the same properties of the arousing stimulus; the dog salivates at the mere sound of the bell.
So what did Plaud and Martini find? By the end of the experiment, two out of three subjects became aroused by the jar of pennies. This demonstrated in a very limited fashion that visual conditioning can influence arousal in men. So could
social
conditioning be responsible for men’s interest in specific parts of the female anatomy? Most of the time, the answer is probably no.
First of all, the jar of pennies did not make any of the men become erect. There was only a slight increase in blood flow to some of their penises. But more important, after a few weeks the men in the Plaud and Martini experiment were no longer aroused at all by the jar of pennies. In contrast, for virtually all men, a sexual interest in breasts, butts, or feet is sustained for life, and may even get more intense with age. In conditioning, if the neutral stimulus (e.g., the jar of pennies) is repeatedly shown to a subject without the arousing stimulus (e.g., naked woman), the neutral stimulus will eventually lose its power—a process known as
extinction
. But men spend their lives looking at presumably neutral stimuli (such as breasts or butts) without ever experiencing extinction. Moreover, few men are sexually aroused by the sight of a flat-screen monitor or a box of Kleenex, though both are frequently associated with arousing stimuli. Something else must be happening in the male brain to maintain a lifelong interest in specific female anatomy.

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