My very cool boyfriend recently gave me the book A Billion Wicked Thoughts by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. One holds a Ph. D in computational neuroscience; the other, a Pd.D in “biologically inspired models of machine learning.” They've combined their expertise in brain science and data mining to tackle an enormously ambitious research question: what do people's internet searches for sexual content tell us about human sexuality?
I figured I already knew some of the answers. I fully expected confirmation of my suspicions that homophobic straight-acting men are secretly looking at gay porn at night while their lady-friends are sleeping, and that far more women have sparkly, smouldering, teen vampire fantasies than would care to admit it out loud. We're not being honest about what really excites us because of shame and stigma and the repression of religious-based moral codes in our society, right? Maybe. But there's a lot more to us than that. The study has unsettled my assumptions about both sexuality and science in a number of surprising ways.
First of all: the research process. Doctors Ogas and Gaddam studied a billion pieces of data from a vast range of topics, from Harry Potter erotic fan fiction to Girls Gone Wild to rape fantasy to a genre that was, perhaps naively, news to me: granny porn. It blows my mind to try to conceptualize how they did some of this research. In one part of their study, they analyzed 1.9 million Craigslist ads posted by men seeking other men for casual sex to try to figure out whether those men prefer a dominant or submissive sexual role. Their discussion of the result of that analysis (that two-thirds of the posters prefer being bottoms) takes up a mere six paragraphs in the book. All those hours, all that work, for six paragraphs (that, albeit, speak volumes about the sexuality of the male posters). As you may be able to tell, I'm new to reading science books. If you do science (as I tend to put it, someone please correct me on the right way to say that), this won't be news to you. But a someone who usually reads novels and poetry and subjective nonfiction about politics, I'm floored by the breadth of the study.
Second: the book's accessibility. These guys are not only highly intelligent, they're very funny and down-to-earth writers. They've managed to translate what could have been dry, hard data into a narrative that is exciting, amusing and (most importantly) very readable for someone like me who isn't fluent in any kind of scientific dialect and feels a moral aversion to alienating language. Two scientists quoting Louis C.K. (twice!) to illustrate their very serious and historically important findings? I'm hooked. They repeatedly find relatable (if clichéd) ways to describe huge, complex concepts. They describe what they found to be a generalizable trait in biological males (regardless of gender expression or sexuality) to respond with desire to singular, visual cues (such as body parts) as Elmer Fudd: “solitary, quick to arouse, goal-targeted, driven to hunt...and a little foolish.” Conversely, observed female tendencies toward seeking out combinations of characteristics (picking up physical, social, emotional cues in combination) in a potential partner is likened to Agatha Christie's iconic Miss Marple Detective Agency. These two handles become shorthand for the differences in sexual interests between biological men and women their research supports. It's clever, and it helps me understand their findings better. It also helps that said findings are so interesting in and of themselves; some are absolutely unforgettable, such as that that the most searched-for single word on the internet's most popular porn site is “mom.”
The authors use evolutionary theories to explain differences they observe in online sexual behaviour between the sexes that aren't difficult to imagine (e.g. men have short sexual attention spans so as to maximize their chances of reproduction with as many women as possible, while women are attracted to male physical and personality cues that suggest a safe and stable child-rearing environment). Particularly because of these findings that seem to solidify out-of-date gender roles, the book has garnered criticism for adding to the bulk of pop psychology that validates those stereotypes. I can understand this concern; it bugged me that some of the things the authors discovered were true. But the third aspect of the book that has me rethinking my own beliefs about why people are into what they're into is the authors' assertion that, based on this research and what they already know about neurology, some differences in biological male and female sexuality are hard-wired. When you're a progressive person who fights oppressions that are largely rooted in oversimplification for a living, this is not a fun fact.
I tend to be of the camp that gives great weight to context, to life experiences, when considering why people act how they do, and I get really bored with explanations for things that are based on a tired old gender binary: "men are like this and women are like that, isn't that weird?" (Reggie Watts satirizes this perfectly). So the study's affirmation that most women seek out erotic fiction in which character development is key and submission to alpha males is central, and most men search for explicit sexual imagery (and prefer big breasts if they're hetero), for example, is irritating. That, in a study that showed groups of viewers violent imagery followed by erotic films, the men could get aroused but the women couldn't, has me inclined to disbelieve it because it sounds too stereotypical (i.e. men want sex anywhere, anytime).
But here's where the teachable moment happens for me. Disliking the results of the study doesn't make them untrue (as some of the critiques I read seem to suggest it should). If the authors presented their findings that biological women and men (regardless of their gender expression or sexuality) have fundamentally different sexual cues and then concluded that this meant that men are inherently drooling, sex-crazed jerks and women are hysterical narcissists preoccupied only with attracting the right kind of man, then it'd be different. But they don't. They root out what we like (if we're straight men and women or gay men, at least; one of the other things that bugged me was that the research ignored lesbians and people of any other sexuality/gender expression) based on what we're actually looking for online and suggest reasons why that might be so based on our biological history. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. But it's a new way of thinking about why we like what we do, and that's exciting to me.
The authors' conclusion is that acknowledging and understanding the fundamental sexual differences between us is key to greater harmony, compassion and authenticity in relationships. In an interview (around minute 30 here) I heard with Dr. Ogas, he asserted that identifying what causes sexual arousal doesn't then determine how people act in relationships and make social and emotional connections to each other. Nor does the study deny or judge anyone whose sexuality doesn't align with the majority of those whose data was used. That's where our independent, evolved brains come into play – we get to decide how we behave (and what judgements we make about those behaviours) in spite of these hard-wired inclinations.
I figured I already knew some of the answers. I fully expected confirmation of my suspicions that homophobic straight-acting men are secretly looking at gay porn at night while their lady-friends are sleeping, and that far more women have sparkly, smouldering, teen vampire fantasies than would care to admit it out loud. We're not being honest about what really excites us because of shame and stigma and the repression of religious-based moral codes in our society, right? Maybe. But there's a lot more to us than that. The study has unsettled my assumptions about both sexuality and science in a number of surprising ways.
First of all: the research process. Doctors Ogas and Gaddam studied a billion pieces of data from a vast range of topics, from Harry Potter erotic fan fiction to Girls Gone Wild to rape fantasy to a genre that was, perhaps naively, news to me: granny porn. It blows my mind to try to conceptualize how they did some of this research. In one part of their study, they analyzed 1.9 million Craigslist ads posted by men seeking other men for casual sex to try to figure out whether those men prefer a dominant or submissive sexual role. Their discussion of the result of that analysis (that two-thirds of the posters prefer being bottoms) takes up a mere six paragraphs in the book. All those hours, all that work, for six paragraphs (that, albeit, speak volumes about the sexuality of the male posters). As you may be able to tell, I'm new to reading science books. If you do science (as I tend to put it, someone please correct me on the right way to say that), this won't be news to you. But a someone who usually reads novels and poetry and subjective nonfiction about politics, I'm floored by the breadth of the study.
Second: the book's accessibility. These guys are not only highly intelligent, they're very funny and down-to-earth writers. They've managed to translate what could have been dry, hard data into a narrative that is exciting, amusing and (most importantly) very readable for someone like me who isn't fluent in any kind of scientific dialect and feels a moral aversion to alienating language. Two scientists quoting Louis C.K. (twice!) to illustrate their very serious and historically important findings? I'm hooked. They repeatedly find relatable (if clichéd) ways to describe huge, complex concepts. They describe what they found to be a generalizable trait in biological males (regardless of gender expression or sexuality) to respond with desire to singular, visual cues (such as body parts) as Elmer Fudd: “solitary, quick to arouse, goal-targeted, driven to hunt...and a little foolish.” Conversely, observed female tendencies toward seeking out combinations of characteristics (picking up physical, social, emotional cues in combination) in a potential partner is likened to Agatha Christie's iconic Miss Marple Detective Agency. These two handles become shorthand for the differences in sexual interests between biological men and women their research supports. It's clever, and it helps me understand their findings better. It also helps that said findings are so interesting in and of themselves; some are absolutely unforgettable, such as that that the most searched-for single word on the internet's most popular porn site is “mom.”
The authors use evolutionary theories to explain differences they observe in online sexual behaviour between the sexes that aren't difficult to imagine (e.g. men have short sexual attention spans so as to maximize their chances of reproduction with as many women as possible, while women are attracted to male physical and personality cues that suggest a safe and stable child-rearing environment). Particularly because of these findings that seem to solidify out-of-date gender roles, the book has garnered criticism for adding to the bulk of pop psychology that validates those stereotypes. I can understand this concern; it bugged me that some of the things the authors discovered were true. But the third aspect of the book that has me rethinking my own beliefs about why people are into what they're into is the authors' assertion that, based on this research and what they already know about neurology, some differences in biological male and female sexuality are hard-wired. When you're a progressive person who fights oppressions that are largely rooted in oversimplification for a living, this is not a fun fact.
I tend to be of the camp that gives great weight to context, to life experiences, when considering why people act how they do, and I get really bored with explanations for things that are based on a tired old gender binary: "men are like this and women are like that, isn't that weird?" (Reggie Watts satirizes this perfectly). So the study's affirmation that most women seek out erotic fiction in which character development is key and submission to alpha males is central, and most men search for explicit sexual imagery (and prefer big breasts if they're hetero), for example, is irritating. That, in a study that showed groups of viewers violent imagery followed by erotic films, the men could get aroused but the women couldn't, has me inclined to disbelieve it because it sounds too stereotypical (i.e. men want sex anywhere, anytime).
But here's where the teachable moment happens for me. Disliking the results of the study doesn't make them untrue (as some of the critiques I read seem to suggest it should). If the authors presented their findings that biological women and men (regardless of their gender expression or sexuality) have fundamentally different sexual cues and then concluded that this meant that men are inherently drooling, sex-crazed jerks and women are hysterical narcissists preoccupied only with attracting the right kind of man, then it'd be different. But they don't. They root out what we like (if we're straight men and women or gay men, at least; one of the other things that bugged me was that the research ignored lesbians and people of any other sexuality/gender expression) based on what we're actually looking for online and suggest reasons why that might be so based on our biological history. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. But it's a new way of thinking about why we like what we do, and that's exciting to me.
The authors' conclusion is that acknowledging and understanding the fundamental sexual differences between us is key to greater harmony, compassion and authenticity in relationships. In an interview (around minute 30 here) I heard with Dr. Ogas, he asserted that identifying what causes sexual arousal doesn't then determine how people act in relationships and make social and emotional connections to each other. Nor does the study deny or judge anyone whose sexuality doesn't align with the majority of those whose data was used. That's where our independent, evolved brains come into play – we get to decide how we behave (and what judgements we make about those behaviours) in spite of these hard-wired inclinations.
