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

When we are first confronted with this awesome diversity—as expressed in the Dogpile sexual searches—we might believe it cannot be reduced to a simple set of elements. But our brain’s taste software shows how an apparent infinitude of appealing stimuli can be reduced to a finite set of cues.
    We sifted through a billion different Web searches, including a half million personal search histories. We analyzed hundreds of thousands of online erotic stories and thousands of romance e-novels. We looked at the forty thousand most trafficked adult Web sites. We examined more than 5 million sexual solicitations posted on online classifieds. We listened to thousands of people discussing their desires on online message boards.
    The goal? To understand the specific innate cues that trigger desire in women and men.

CHAPTER 2
     
    Monkey Pay-Per-View
     
    Male Visual Cues
     
     
A large penis is always welcome.
    —Atia of the Julii, Rome , season 1
     
     
     
     
    W olfgang likes to look at images of female derrieres. He prefers certain poses: bent over, legs splayed, leaning on her knuckles. He likes these images so much that he is willing to pay for the privilege of looking at them. Sometimes he pays several times a day. This might seem excessive, though not exactly remarkable, except for one fact: Wolfgang is a monkey.
    Rhesus macaques at Duke University Medical Center’s monkey colony are able to trade fruit juice for peeks at photos of female perinea (the scientific term for “bright pink monkey butts”). Researchers led by neurobiologist Michael Platt have consistently found that males are willing to trade juice to view these images and will trade more juice to look at monkey erotica than any other image, including powerful males or friendly female faces.
    Men aren’t the only primates willing to spend money just to look at females, but they’re the only ones to develop it into an industry. The most popular paysites featuring adult videos, including Brazzers, Bang Bros, and Reality Kings, typically attract an audience that is around 75 percent men. Of course, that does mean that one out of four visitors is a woman—a minority, though a significant minority. But when it comes to actually paying for porn, the gender gap widens into an abyss. According to CCBill, the billing service most commonly used by the online adult industry, only 2 percent of all subscriptions to pornography sites are made on credit cards with women’s names. In fact, CCBill even flags female names as potential fraud, since so many of these charges result in an angry wife or mother demanding a refund for the misuse of her card.
    A willingness to drop cold hard cash on porn is certainly the best indication that men’s motivation to ogle images is stronger than women’s. But there are plenty of other indicators. Consider one surprising investigation sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
    The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a federal government agency that funds approximately 20 percent of all basic research in American universities in every field of science and engineering, including the mapping of the genome and the construction of radio telescopes. Its board of directors is appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. No other institution has a greater influence on American science. But in 2009, a certain activity was stealing so many hours from employees at the NSF headquarters in Washington, D.C., that the agency’s inspector general launched a formal inquiry. The activity? Surfing Internet porn.
    More than two dozen employees at all levels of management were spending thousands of work hours watching pornography on taxpayer-purchased computers. These were smart, educated people used to interacting with America’s intellectual elite. But these white-collar executives couldn’t resist the temptations of online erotica. One senior executive spent 331 days viewing naked girls on his office computer,