A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (25 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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Women’s dual sexuality is indirectly captured in the comments of one woman on
Salon.com
, who offered, “George Clooney and Sean Connery are sex symbols, but Bill Gates (younger, richer, and more powerful than either of them) is not. Our chances are abysmal for marrying any of the above men. That being the case, of course we’re going to fantasize about the good-looking ones, because all we’re thinking about is sex. If we were contemplating who to marry and had a choice from among them, that would change things considerably.”
Research has found that when ovulating, women in long-term relationships are also more likely to express an interest in an affair. It’s not that a woman’s attraction to her primary partner goes up and down across the cycle; it appears to be fairly steady. Instead, when a woman is ovulating, her attraction to
other
men goes
up
. One British study asked women to keep diaries of their sexual activity. Married women were significantly more likely to have sex with an outside partner during ovulation. When cheating on a primary partner, women expressed the desire that their lover possess sexiness, sensuality, physical attractiveness, and that he be highly desired by other women. In addition, women focused on sexual gratification—especially orgasms.
If women are more likely to seek affairs when ovulating, have men developed an evolutionary countermeasure? Yes. Studies have shown that men are more protective and guard their mates more during ovulation. But women have evolved counter-countermeasures to combat men’s heightened surveillance. When ovulating, women more frequently resist men’s efforts to track their activities. All of these ovulation-related behaviors—such as dressing more provocatively and resisting men’s surveillance—may occur without a woman’s conscious awareness. The unconscious shifts in desire may be designed to prevent her from accidentally betraying her intentions to her long-term partner. Similarly, most women lack conscious awareness of their ovulations, another countermeasure designed to prevent men from discerning when a woman is truly fertile.
The Detective Agency operates most of the time in the female brain to evaluate prospective long-term mates using both psychological and visual cues, giving preference to psychological cues. During ovulation, the Detective Agency still functions, but it appears to increase its valuation of visual cues. In fact, studies have shown that women show a greater interest in visual sexual material if they were first exposed to the material when they were ovulating.
So what visual cues arouse the female brain?
SSSH!
 
Sssh.com (pronounced “shoosh” to rhyme with “push”) is one of only two commercial porn sites that have been able to turn a profit while targeting heterosexual women. One could even argue it’s the only successful porn Web site to
exclusively
target heterosexual women, since its main competitor, For the Girls, does attract some gay men, though in much smaller numbers than
Playgirl
.
Sssh was founded by Angie Rowntree in 1995, when 9600 baud modems were the norm and America Online charged an hourly fee for Internet access. Angie, who could pass for a lively, lovable aunt from an Enid Blyton novel, was initially motivated by the same impulse as
Playgirl
’s Marin Scott Milam. “Why do the guys get all the fun? Women like sex, too. I knew there had to be a market for an erotic site for women.” But though she shared the same vision as Milam, Angie took Sssh in a different direction. “I used mainstream women’s magazines like
Cosmopolitan
,
Redbook
, and
Elle
as my model, rather than
Playboy
or anything else. I wanted to create
Cosmo
with balls.”
Unlike
Playgirl
magazine, Sssh is filled with articles on health, diet, and sexual how-to’s. It includes a very active forum where women can chat with one another. There is a stable of men, ranging in age from their twenties to their fifties, who answer subscribers’ questions about male sexuality. Sssh contains horoscopes, beauty tips, video tutorials on topics such as how to do a striptease, and erotic stories. It also features pornographic videos.
“We’ve listened to what women wanted to see, and over time we’ve gotten pretty good at it,” says Angie proudly, commenting on her fifteen years of experience. “Women want to see foreplay, a lot of kissing, a lot of talking before the action gets going. They like to see women with a little more weight on them, a little older, not skinny young girls. The guys have to be clean, well-dressed, and well-kept. They hate men that are sloppily dressed.”
According to a member survey, the most popular type of sexual content was couples having intercourse. The least popular was facials—a man ejaculating on a woman’s face. Sssh costs $19.95 per month. So who subscribes? Most subscribers are age thirty-five to forty-nine, though they range from eighteen to sixty-four. Most are married, though more than 70 percent of members say they view the site alone, without their partner. The average length of a subscription is three months—longer than the average subscription length to male sites—and Angie points out that Sssh has active users who have subscribed for more than a decade.
Though Sssh and For the Girls are the most popular paysites targeting heterosexual women, there are a handful of similar sites for women, such as Candida Royalle and Seska 4 Lovers. There are also sites that sell videos targeted at women (though they often claim to target “couples”), such as Comstock Films and Viv Thomas. But the greatest growth is in new, smaller Web sites that target lesbian, bisexual, and “alternative” female audiences, such as Feck and I Feel Myself.
So what kinds of men do women like to look at?
WHY WOMEN SHOULD WORK AS NFL SCOUTS
 
Many of the sensory cues that arouse women are not visual. A sexy voice, a masculine scent, and a sensuous touch all ignite greater arousal in women than feminine versions of these qualities ignite in men. This might be another reason for women’s general lack of interest in Internet porn: they can’t
feel
it in a physical way that activates their sensory cues. Or perhaps there simply aren’t enough cues to meet the threshold of the Power of And.
Though romance novels offer an even more disembodied experience than videos, they contain a greater density of psychological cues, especially in the form of emotional details. And female-targeted stories still contain visual details. “I have consumed vast quantities of female-created (written) porn created for female audiences, written by (mostly) straight women,” shared AlaraJRogers on Salon. “And almost no one ever talks about the size of the penis. But the color and intensity of the eyes, the hair color, the general shape of the body, a brief description of the face—those are de rigueur. And occasionally discussion of the butt. Women like butts.”
We analyzed the text of more than ten thousand romance novels published from 1983 to 2008 to determine the most common descriptions of the hero’s physical appearance. Here are the seven most frequent words describing his masculine features:
cheekbones
jaw
brows
shoulders
forehead
waist
hips
And the seven most common
adjectives
used to describe masculine features?
lean
handsome
blond
tanned
muscular
masculine
chiseled
AlaraJRogers was correct—no synonym for penis appears in the hundred most common physical descriptors used to describe the romance hero. If we wished to describe the ideal-looking hero, we could use the most common two-word physical descriptions: the perfect hero boasts “blue eyes,” a “straight nose,” “high forehead,” and “square jaw” together making a “handsome face.” His head is framed by “dark hair,” which accents the “white teeth” in his “sensual mouth” curved into a “crooked smile.” He stands tall with “broad shoulders,” a “broad chest,” “narrow waist,” “flat stomach,” “strong arms,” “big hands,” “big feet,” and “long legs”—though the heroine’s eye might ultimately be drawn to his “powerful thighs.”
Brain imaging studies show that the female brain processes a man’s visual features with the same speed that the male brain processes female features. Attractive visual features trigger similar subcortical circuits responsible for sexual arousal in both men and women, but in women this automatic, unconscious reaction gets intercepted by the Detective Agency before it gets converted into conscious, sex-seeking desire. Because of the Power of And, the Detective Agency weighs other factors—especially contextual cues—before reaching the threshold for generating subjective arousal. This is one reason why almost no women masturbate while looking at a single image. It takes other psychological cues, such as a story about why this rakish man in a tuxedo is lifting up the skirt of the innocent Latina maid, before a woman’s sexual imagination takes off.
We saw how men are aroused by the physical features of women associated with estrogen. Similarly, women are attracted to the physical features of men associated with testosterone. This attraction is especially strong during ovulation and when seeking an extramarital affair. But estrogen and testosterone signal very different qualities. Estrogen indicates a woman’s health, energy, and future reproductive potential. In contrast, some studies suggest that high levels of testosterone are associated with poorer long-term health. Moreover, testosterone levels do not indicate a man’s future reproductive potential: men produce steady levels of sperm during their entire lives regardless of whether they’re sick or starving. Even a ninety-year-old man can have kids. Though testosterone does not indicate a man’s health or fertility, the hormone is correlated with another quality of great importance to the Detective Agency:
dominance
.
Many scientists view testosterone as the “male competition” hormone, since elevated levels of testosterone cause a man to become more prone to fight with other men to preserve or enhance status. Fans of a losing sports team suffer a drop in testosterone after the game, while the fans of the winners experience a testosterone rush. “My husband has a suit that, when he puts it on, turns him into a real jerk,” offered one woman upon hearing that an increase in status will cause a rise in the male hormone. “He swaggers about the room and I just try to stay away from him. I call it his ‘testosterone suit.’ ” Testosterone diverts bodily resources to physiology required for male-male competition, such as musculature and fast energy burning. It also increases sex drive.
Deep, masculine voices and masculine scents are correlated with testosterone levels; both are attractive to women. Studies have shown that they are more attracted to the odor of sweat from dominant men than subordinate men. Faces that are rated as more masculine—chiseled jaws and well-defined cheekbones—are also correlated with high testosterone levels. Women prefer bodies that are muscular, particularly through the chest, arms, and back, without being clumsily overbuilt; these features also indicate testosterone levels.
One of the most potent visual cues for women is unrelated to testosterone: height. Perhaps height simply serves the same role as it does in the NFL and NBA: it indicates a greater ability to outcompete other men in physical competition. “I do love tall men, especially the ones that are over 6 feet tall who look real strong and masculine,” confesses one woman on the Experience Project Web site. “For me, tall men make me feel more secure than guys who are under 6 feet. They look more dominant.” Numerous studies find that the vast majority of women prefer to date men who are taller than they are, and virtually no women express a preference for shorter men. Most women cite a desire to feel safe as a reason for their preference for tall men. “It makes me feel small and secure; which is a lovely feeling,” says one woman.
Women also express a preference for men in uniform and well-dressed men. A marine in dress blues with white gloves and peak cap, a police officer with boots and a badge, or a well-heeled businessman in an Issey Miyake suit and Testoni loafers all stimulate female arousal. Fashion blogger Teresa McGurk speculates on why women like a man in uniform: “A dress uniform is flattering to the male figure (Ooh-YAH!). The whole demeanor of a man in dress blues, or whites, or whatever is confident and dependable. Very sexy. Since a man in uniform knows all about responsibility and duty, he could well be counted on to take out the garbage. Theoretically, at least.” McGurk’s analysis also illustrates the influence of the Detective Agency—analyzing visual details and converting them into psychological speculation about a man’s character.
Women are far less likely to focus on anatomical details than men are, and generally show little interest in viewing a guy’s penis—especially compared to men’s special phallic interest. One eye-tracking study found that women spend no more time looking at the penis in images of nude males than any other part of the body. You’ll find no “top 10 penises” lists by women on the Internet, though you’ll find plenty of “top 10 boobs” lists by men. Whereas most male-targeted porn sites categorize videos according to anatomical features, female-targeted porn sites often lack any anatomical categories at all. For example, the male-targeted Hot
Movies.com
contains video categories for Big Tits, Small Tits, Natural Tits, Tit Fucking, Mouth and Tongue, Shaving, Legs and Nylons, Big Butts, Big Cocks, Big Clits, Camel Toe, and several others. But the female-targeted
HotMoviesForHer.com
does not contain a single anatomical category.

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