Smut Science: What Internet Porn Reveals

Scientists explore the sexual motivations of the human mind by surverying millions of Internet searches.

Consider all the searches you have made, websites you visited and videos you have watched online. The Internet is a place where you can anonymously search for anything and indulge your deepest curiosities. Tapping into someone’s Internet history can almost be like reading his or her personal diary.

“Motorcycles, Angora, watches, readings for class, Demi Moore – yeah, my searches say a lot about me.  They definitely say I am random and quirky,” said Mara Mellstrom, a sophomore in the College of General studies, while looking up her most recent searches on Google.

Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, two computational neuroscientists with Ph.D’s from Boston University, have examined the Internet activity of millions of people in recent years. Using the information they collected, they have drawn conclusions about how men and women’s brains are sexually wired, as reported in their new book, “A Billion Wicked Thoughts.”

The researchers analyzed the sexuality of countless men and women by using publically available data to probe into 400 million Internet searches from around the world. They defied conventional scientific norms of data collection and research in favor of Internet data, which they say has been ignored by both computational neuroscientists and sex scientists.

“It’s certainly not ordinary science,” said Dr. Steven Snyder, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

The conclusions they have drawn are not ordinary, either.

TITILLATING 

TECHNOLOGY

“Men prefer overweight women to underweight women. Women enjoy reading about two heterosexual men having sex. Men often seek erotic videos featuring women in their 50’s and 60’s. Other than preferring males, gay men have almost identical sexual desires as straight men,” Ogas and Gaddam said on the website for the book.

“‘A Billion Wicked Thoughts,’ while not a study of people’s actual sex experiences, offers something perhaps more interesting – a glimpse of the deeper sexual motivations of the human mind,” said Snyder, who studies sexual and relationship issues.

The researchers have also drawn conclusions on the differences between the sexual brains of men and women.

Ogas and Gadam said, “Though men and women share [some of] the same cues, their sexual cues are very different.”

The two scientists explain in the book that, while a single cue triggers male arousal, multiple cues are required in a women’s brain for arousal.  They also report that men develop their sexual interests during adolescence and rarely change, while a women’s sexual interest is constantly changing.

“In men, physical arousal and psychological arousal are united, while in women, psychological arousal is separated from physical arousal,” the researchers wrote.

CARTOON CAMEO

The researchers draw interesting parallels to illustrate how they see men and women’s brains, reports Discover Magazine. Ogas and Gaddam compare the male brain to Elmer Fudd, the Looney Tunes character. Fudd is a lone hunter seeking one specific target – a rabbit, the point being that the male brain is just as goal-oriented.

Both Fudd and the male brain react to triggers, according to Ogas and Gaddam. The moment they see what they want or think that they do, they react, also leading them to be easily fooled.

The female brain, on the other hand, is one of the most sophisticated neural softwares on Earth that is designed to “uncover, scrutinize and evaluate a dazzling range of informative clues,” said Ogas and Gaddam.  They call it the “Miss Marple Detective Agency” after the fictional detective from the novels of Agatha Christie.

“[Miss Marple] is actually a shrewd judge of human character and harbors deep knowledge of the dark side of human nature. She frequently solves mysteries that have stumped the police. The unique detective skills of the female sexual brain were honed over hundreds of thousands of years of sleuthing, investigating the character of sneaky, aggressive men in an extraordinary variety of contexts,” wrote Ogas and Gadam. “Like Miss Marple, a woman’s built-in detective mulls evidence concerning a potential partner’s character, weighs physical and social clues, and examines her own experiences and feelings before permitting – or pursuing – sex.”

“If you just think about it scientifically, you realize that, chemically, men and women are completely different.  We have different hormones and I think that [has] different responses in our bodies,” said Devi Mody, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.

HEDONISM IN 

HISTORY

Ogas and Gaddam found their inspiration in the studies of Alfred Kinsey.  In the 1940s, Kinsey set out to study human sexuality by interviewing 18,000 men and women in order to determine their real sexual interests.

But Kinsey’s study was not without technical problems: the test population was predominantly middle-class Caucasian and not a random sampling. Meanwhile, it was very difficult for researchers to gather accurate information without observation. How could they observe peoples’ sex lives?

“What would really benefit researchers is a machine that unobtrusively recorded people’s private behavior in real time in their natural environment.  It would be great if the machine could operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” wrote Ogas and Gaddam. “Even better if researchers could install these machines all around the world, to record behavior from a true diversity of humankind. It would be better still if the machine could record the activities of large numbers of people. Such a machine exists. It’s called the Internet.”

TRUTH TO THE TURN-ONS?

The scientific reliability and accuracy of using the Internet is under question, and many have questioned the validity of the study and book.  The research methods used and data collected are dubitable, and the researchers skipped the usual process of writing a scientific publication in favor of a popular book, explained Snyder.

“There are problems with the authors’ unique dataset,” Snyder said. “For instance, we know very little about the individuals that Ogas and Gaddam studied in their large sample of two million people who did Internet searches for sexual material.  We don’t know their ages, their genders or their sexual orientations. All we have are their mouse clicks.  Is this sample a valid representation of a population we’re interested in?  Is it representative enough that we should base a model of human sexual motivation on it?”

“Feminists do not believe that sexuality can be wired,” BU women’s studies professor Barbara Gottfried said. “Society has cultured us to think that way.  This seems like an extreme study as it does not represent people who do not look at porn so it is not an equal sample.”

Commenting on some of the researchers’ conclusions, such as the idea that men react to instant triggers and are designed to objectify women while women seek out romance and stories, Gottfried continued, “These are the tritest clichés of gender differences. Where did they get this? What basis do they have other than pornography? Why would they draw such a conclusion? This is not true in the natural world outside the Internet.”

“I don’t think you can stereotype every women into a certain type. Maybe some women act like Miss Marple and think a lot before pursuing a sexual relationship, but there are many who certainly don’t,” said Sonal Jain, a sophomore in CAS.

Snyder noted,  “Sex is complicated.  Sexuality operates at many levels – biological, psychological, social, cultural, economic, and political.  The book strip-mines through this terrain without addressing many of the fundamental complexities.  It generalizes too broadly about the differences between men and women.”

Snyder warns readers to be wary of Ogas and Gaddam’s book.

“Let’s hope that most readers of ‘A Billion Wicked Thoughts’ don’t interpret the authors’ findings as a general guide to sexuality. Because if they do, then many more people will be even more misguided about sex than they are already.”