A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (24 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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However, a minority of bottoms were extremely femaleacting, and these men seemed to possess a Detective Agency that governed sexual desire as it does in women. They needed to get to know the personality of a man before hooking up with him, they were not especially attracted to straight men, they believed that whether someone was a bottom or top was entirely socially determined, and they questioned the very existence of the top/ bottom binary—even though they themselves were quite clearly power bottoms. Perhaps future research might determine whether this group of gay men possesses the largest penises of all.
But despite these dramatic alterations, it appears that excessive androgens leave most of the male brain unchanged. Boys will be boys. Even when they like other boys.
CHAPTER 8
 
A Tall Man with a Nice Tush
 
Female Visual Cues
 
 
I think I might like that.
—Mrs. Alfred Kinsey, upon being asked if she would like to have sex with her husband’s graduate student in the film
Kinsey
 
 
 
 
I
n the early 1970s, nightclub owner Douglas Lambert had a pioneering idea. He observed that even though there was a flood of men’s magazines featuring nude models, like
Penthouse
,
Hustler
, and
Playboy
, there wasn’t a single nude magazine for women. Moreover,
Cosmopolitan
magazine was flying off the shelves. He saw an opportunity to combine
Cosmo
and
Playboy
into a single package. So he founded
Playgirl
.
Sounding somewhat like a gender activist instead of the owner of three strip clubs, he proclaimed: “Women have been suppressed sexually for too long. It’s healthy for people to view a male body.” Lambert hired Marin Scott Milam, a self-described “moderate feminist,” to serve as editor in chief. Milam believed that the absence of nude magazines for women reflected the false assumption that only men enjoyed visual stimulation. “Women want to see more male nudes. They love it,” she reported enthusiastically, though adding, “I think it’s true that women do not accept male nudity in magazines with alacrity. It’s a learning process and women are reacting against years of conditioning.”
Playgirl
was the mirror image of
Playboy
, complete with graphic, high-quality pictures of naked men (though there were no penises in the very first issue, and no erect penises for several years) and a centerfold—the 1973 preview issue featured the Hager twins, Jim and John, from the country variety show
Hee Haw
. Since all the models were selected by women for women, one might have confidently predicted that the magazine would have appealed to female sexual tastes. But things turned out a little differently.
At first, the number of subscriptions to
Playgirl
was a small fraction of subscriptions to
Playboy
, despite the fact that
Playboy
occupied a crowded field of competitors whereas
Playgirl
had a near-monopoly. In fact, the “Magazine for Women” might have gone out of business in its first year, if not for an unexpected set of customers. Here’s the AOL search history of one such customer, user #4416126:
gay frat stories
gay drunk college
gay college
nude photos of men
heath ledger nude—playgirl
playgirl magazine
teen male twinks
shower room guys
straight guys
justin timberlake
signs of homosexuality
Though gay men had their own pornographic magazines, like
Mandate
and
David
,
Playgirl
was easier to buy and featured the kind of models gay men prefer—straight guys. In 1999, former
Playgirl
editor in chief Claire Harth admitted the truth:
Ever since
Playgirl
’s launch in the early ’70s, its full-frontal male nudes and steamy copy have attracted an avid gay following. During my time at the magazine, I was constantly aware of the dual nature of
Playgirl
’s sex appeal and the delicate balancing act involved in maintaining its reputation as “Entertainment for Women.” The
Playgirl
staff was well aware that we owed much of our 400,000 circulation to gay men. And while we tailored the magazine to a supposedly heterosexual sensibility, we made certain to keep an eye on our loyal male readers.
Though
Playgirl.com
doesn’t feature homosexual acts, its advertising consists primarily of gay sites and penis pumps. Few enterprises have attempted to duplicate
Playgirl
’s business model of nude men for women’s pleasure. Titmowse, an adult industry veteran who runs her own resource site for adult webmasters known as Cozy Frog, asserts, “In my 11 years in this business I could count on one hand the number of successful porn for women paysites and after counting I would have three fingers left.”
Men often wonder if women prefer soft-core or hard-core porn, or if they prefer girl-on-girl scenes to girl-on-guy scenes. Men ask other men for tips on which porn sites will get their girlfriends hot and bothered. The psychology-focused Detective Agency and
Playgirl
’s failed tryst with women seem to suggest that these questions may be fundamentally misguided.
“Porn is incredibly DULL DULL DULL,” laments Isabel, a middle-age woman commenting on
Salon.com
. “I watched porn made by women, and it was still DULL DULL DULL.” Many women find porn unarousing. Others, however, find it downright offensive. “Pornography is the theory, rape the practice,” the feminist Robin Morgan famously wrote in 1974, the same year as
Playgirl
’s first full year in print. More than three decades later, sentiments have softened only slightly. In 2010, porn star Ron Jeremy debated antiporn feminist activist Susan Cole at the University of Nebraska. Cole argued that pornography is “not only bad for the people who make it but damaging to society as a whole” and “corrupting of individual sexuality.” Also in 2010, Apple banned porn applications from its iPhone. Apple explained, “It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable.”
So can one safely say that women do not become aroused by graphic sex? Not necessarily. The magazine
Today’s Christian Woman
conducted a survey of its readers, and found that a third of them seek out Internet porn. Chief technology officer for PornHub, Perry Stathopoulos, estimates that about a third of its visitors are women. In order to cater to its female audience, PornHub has recently changed its tagline from “It Makes Your Dick Bigger” to the more equal-opportunity “It Makes Your Dick Bigger and Your Pussy Wet.” PornHub also initiated the new category,
female friendly
, for videos designed to appeal to women. The selection process for inclusion in this category isn’t very scientific, however. A group of women who work in the Montreal office sit together and democratically decide which content merits the pink Venus symbol. The fact is, the tastes of the minority of women who enjoy porn are very hard to pin down.
Here is the abbreviated three-month AOL search history for a female fan of porn, Ms. Juicy:
porn for women
drunk galleries
explicit erotica pictures
juicy gals
explicit movie sex scenes
fucking pictures
erotica for women
drunk springbreak sex
erotic fine art photography
explicit movie stills
x-rated fine art
erotic photography
explicit movie sex scene pictures
pictures of lust
springbreak fuck adventures
washing machine ratings
This searcher avoids using the word “porn” except when qualified by “for women,” but clearly does not shy away from seeking out explicit material. Nevertheless, her sexual searches contain the word “erotic” far more often than the sexual searches of a typical male, and she also focuses on erotic “fine art” and “photography.” Intriguingly, she even looks for images of desire—“pictures of lust.” But these soft-core searches are interspersed with more edgy desires—“drunk galleries” and “springbreak fuck adventures.”
Why do some women enjoy visual porn, while most do not, even though most women respond to visual cues? To answer this question, we’ll start by exploring a unique component of women’s desire software that is even more basic than the Miss Marple Detective Agency.
LADY JEKYLL AND MS. HYDE
 
Women can only conceive during five days of their ovulatory cycle. Yet women are unique among female mammals in their willingness to have sex every day of their cycle, including
all
nonfertile days. Biologists call a willingness to have sex during nonfertile periods
extended sexuality
.
Among many species, extended sexuality is favored by natural selection because it allows females to trade sex for resources from men. For example, female chimpanzees exhibit a red sexual swelling on their rump for about twelve days during each ovulatory cycle. However, they can only conceive during three days. During the nine days when they have no chance of getting pregnant, female chimps actively solicit sex from males. In fact, though males solicit sex during the entire time a female has a sexual swelling, the female chimps actually initiate
more
sex and are
less
resistant to male solicitations on days of low fertility. They’re more sexually active when they
can’t
get pregnant, in other words. What do the females get in return for this promiscuity? Food, protection, and perhaps most important, a reduction in the males’ aggression toward the females’ offspring.
For many years, it was believed that the sexual swellings and bright red butts of female primates signaled fertility (ovulation) to males. But contemporary scientists realized that males need no special prompting to initiate sex. As comedian Mitch Fatel put it, “When it comes to sex, men have the secret ingredient. But unlike any other secret ingredient, we’ll give it to anyone who asks.” Instead, female ornamentation—such as chimps’ bright butts and women’s round breasts—evolved to benefit females. Female ornamentation garners attention and resources from males.
Extended sexuality generates a fascinating pattern of behavior in females. Women and their cross-species sisters have two distinct “modes” of sexual interests during their ovulatory cycle. Each mode favors a different set of erotic cues:
short-term interests
during ovulation and
long-term interests
when not ovulating. Most of the time, Miss Marple behaves like a long-term portfolio manager, looking for clues indicating the probable return on investment for investing in a man. When a woman is not ovulating, she prefers men who are willing and able to provide nongenetic benefits, such as food, protection, and child support.
But during ovulation, Miss Marple can become a day trader. Now she gives special preference to males with superior genes, in the form of good looks and social dominance. In women, the sexual cues emphasized during each mode reflect this dual sexuality: visual and physical cues during ovulation, and the Detective Agency’s psychological cues when not ovulating.
Female marmosets, Tasmanian devils, and kangaroos all prefer males with superior genes when fertile, but mate less selectively during infertile phases. Though female chimps are highly promiscuous and mate with relatively subordinate males when they can’t conceive, they mate much more selectively and strongly favor socially dominant males when they can conceive. Macaques also repeat this pattern: female rhesus macaques who are ovulating prefer males whose faces have been experimentally manipulated to reveal exaggerated red coloration, a testosterone-facilitated male sexual ornament that signals social dominance.
Ovulating women demonstrate a stronger preference for men with masculine faces, masculine voices, and masculine scents, and who display conspicuous signals of social dominance. They also tend to flirt more, dress more provocatively, and express greater interest in going out to bars, clubs, and socializing. One study even found that ovulating women tend to move around more, as if maximizing exposure to new opportunities. Ovulating women express a greater awareness of personal safety and are more likely to avoid risky places. They also exhibit a greater aversion to squicky sex, such as bestiality and incest. Put simply, ovulating women seek out conventional sex with alpha males.
One intriguing study examined the effects of ovulation on the tips that professional lap dancers received while working in gentlemen’s clubs. Women with normal ovulatory cycles earned about $185 when they were menstruating, $260 when they were not menstruating nor ovulating, and $335 when they were ovulating. Perhaps the increase in tips was because the dancers unconsciously behaved differently.
When women are not ovulating, they prefer men with more feminized faces. Female steroid hormones such as progesterone appear to drive this shift in attraction: women who are pregnant or using hormonal contraception share the same sexual interests as nonovulating women. It’s important to note that nonovulating women do not
ignore
indicators of good genes, but rather the Detective Agency balances physical attraction with many other psychological cues relevant to long-term prospects. Women are always attracted to a physically sexy man, in other words, but they’re more likely to actually have sex with him when they might get pregnant. The rest of the time, the Detective Agency decides whether it’s worth it to hold out for a hot guy who’s
also
sweet.

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