Read A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire for Free Online

you Google “skeleton porn” or “sexy funeral director” or “erotic stories about lumpy potatoes” you will find results. But most of us aren’t spending our time looking for this stuff. Instead, the vast majority of our desires are shared by crowds of other people.
    But some of you are probably thinking, hang on. There’s something pretty glaring about this list of sexual searches. It sure seems to reflect the tastes of men . Certainly breasts , cheerleaders , and gay are predominantly male interests. Does this mean that women don’t use the Internet to satisfy their own desires?
    The following tables list the most popular “erotic” Web sites, though it would be more accurate to say these Web sites reflect the interests of men and women’s sexual brains. The first table shows the five most popular Web sites among men. The second table shows five Web sites popular among women, including the most popular fan fiction Web site, the most popular romance author Web site, the most popular romance novel Web site, and the most popular porn site for women.

     

     
    On the Web, men prefer images. Women prefer stories. Men prefer graphic sex. Women prefer relationships and romance. This is also reflected in the divergent responses of men and women when asked what sexual activities they perform on the Internet.

     
    When men and women are free to search for anything they want behind the anonymity of their computer screen, they don’t just seek out different interests. They seek out different modes of stimulation. Men prefer to watch, women prefer to read and discuss. This fundamental dichotomy in sexual interests confirms the predictions of one of the most influential sex scientists, Donald Symons.
    “In the male fantasy realm of pornotopia, sex is sheer lust and physical gratification, devoid of courtship, commitment, durable relationships, or mating effort. Porn videos contain minimal plot development, focusing instead on the sex acts themselves and emphasizing the display of female bodies, especially close-ups of faces, breasts, and genitals,” explains Symons and psychologist Catherine Salmon in their book, Warrior Lovers . “The female fantasy realm of romantopia is quite different. The goal of a romance novel’s heroine is never sex for its own sake, much less impersonal sex with strangers. The core of a romance novel’s plot is a love story in the course of which the heroine overcomes obstacles to identify, win the heart of, and ultimately marry the one man who is right for her.”
    Biological anthropologist Donald Symons is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Symons is retired from research, living with his wife in a canyon looking up at the chaparral-covered Santa Ynez Mountains. He’s a vegetarian and an ardent fan of comedian Richard Pryor. He is also the most cited living researcher in the contemporary science of sex. His pioneering work is referenced by scientists investigating an astonishingly diverse range of phenomena, including gay relationships, female fantasies of coercion, incest avoidance, anal sex, and porn star hip size.
    Richard von Krafft-Ebing established the science of human desire with Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886. But the establishment of the “hard science” of human desire waited nearly another century for the publication of Symons’s 1979 book The Evolution of Human Sexuality . Many prominent scientists have been influenced by this book, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker: “ The Evolution of Human Sexuality was a landmark in its synthesis of evolutionary biology, anthropology, physiology, psychology, fiction, and cultural analysis, written with a combination of rigor and wit. It was a model for all subsequent books that apply evolution to human affairs, particularly mine.” For the first time, human desire was integrated within the theoretical framework of evolutionary biology. This theory-based approach to desire was something quite