A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

The book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, is neither as good nor as bad as its polarized readers maintain. Its real flaw is that it starts from a very reasonable - intriguing, even - analysis of a research project and then unfortunately overextends.

Before we throw away the baby with the bath, let's look at what is worthwhile about it. Knowing how hard it is to study human sexuality directly, because of an overwhelming tendency toward preserving our modesty and privacy, the authors decided to study the best available proxy - the internet search patterns for porn subjects by literally millions of people from publicly available aggregate databases of search queries. You have to give them credit for a clever insight - what we are "googling" is as revealing as a million questionnaires, but can be accessed without the time and trouble of sexological data gathering.

From that data come some remarkably interesting insights, such as:
* Although the cultural meme, "Rule 34," (There is a porn site for every taste and twist imaginable) may be true, 95% or more of porn searches congregate around less than a dozen, mostly vanilla, themes.
* Men and women, in broad generalities, have hugely different tastes in and appetites for porn, but homosexuals and heterosexuals do NOT have the significant differences: gay and straight porn for men are almost exact thematically duplicates of each other, and in the same proportions.
* Interest in feet may be considered a fetish, but at least on the internet it is so common as to be on par with interest in, um, more directly-involved body parts.
* Predictably to anyone who has observed the social preoccupation with youth, porn about the barely-legal is the most popular theme of all, accounting for over half of all porn use. Surprisingly, however, porn about sex with those a generation or two older (moms, dads, grannies and grandpas) is popular enough to make the top ten topics.
* Porn featuring hermaphroditic transexuals is popular, but appeals almost exclusively to straight identifying males. It holds little interest for its previously presumed audience of gay men.

These revelations from our unguarded, anonymous internet use are fascinating. They constitute the first broad survey of sexual interests since Kinsey. It was a clever insight that internet records could be used to provide a 50,000 foot overview of sexual tastes and preferences. When the authors stick to reporting the actual results from their research results they make a genuinely valuable contribution to the literature.

Unfortunately, they are not content to leave it there. They not only report results, they spend well over half of their time attempting to explain why we like what we like sexually. Here is where they stumble badly. For each of the billion wicked thoughts they seem to offer a billion random speculations.

It is somewhat understandable, given the internet source of their data, they would use the internet as their major research tool for theoretical explanations of their findings, but they seem so gullible and unscientific in the acceptance and repetition of every crackpot theory placed on a web page that the mind reels.

On the least offensive end of the spectrum they borrow low-level metaphors as explanations: In sexual styles men are like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbit, while women are like Miss Marple playing detective. Okay, sexist oversimplification, but taken at the broadest level, not that far from the (far from uncontroversial, but standard) explanations provided by evolutionary psychologists we read everyday in the mainstream press.

They build up from there, however, into the scientifically unacceptable. For example, they build an entire chapter around a citation of a single survey as the definitive basis for their blanket statement that gay men have longer sexual equipment than their straight counterparts, without so much as a indication that maybe average male penis size is a controversial topic, let alone not easily determined. (When you turn to the footnote where you expect to find some context about this hugely speculative and controversial finding, you instead get a helpful additional that contends gay penises are also thicker.) They spin that into a fanciful statement about "possible" hormonal explanations for homosexuality - explanations that were first conclusively disproven by Kinsey over 70 years ago now. That devolves into speculation that teenage males somehow "imprint" on their first sexual object like baby ducks on the first moving thing they see as their mothers, (The authors' horrendously misguided metaphor, not mine) and if they get it wrong they turn into homosexuals. How one does wish that they would not have filled the book with so many "maybe, possibly, and potentially" statements, or at least, that once introduced they would not henceforth be treated as social scientific certainties.

Baby ducks pale in comparison to the unabashed statement, repeated several times, that gay men are universally more powerfully attracted to straight men than to each other. The "insight" that gay men prefer straight partners comes to the authors not from a study but from the gossipy insight of, literally, "a guy" who told them so.

Women's sexuality is explained through the filter of their general preference for romance novels to truly hardcore porn. The book does eventually look into female use of porn, but because it is so much less common than male use, this is treated as uninformative and passed over quickly. We don't get the granular details of the author's study, which would have been interesting even if it was less reliable because it is examining a minority taste. Surely, however, even if the authors were going to go the route of examining verbal, as opposed to visual forms for females, explicit erotica is the proper comparison. Their taste in novels ought to be directly compared to male literary tastes, not to men's pornographic interests. When they do get around to examing a popular form of erotic writing - fan fiction - they stumble all around another fascinating insight that a lot of this amateur erotica depicts male-male sexual relationships between pre-created "heterosexual" characters from commercial literature.

Would that they had spent more time on this than venturing on to their most egregious "explanation." When their survey shows that women with an interest in the theme of being sexually dominated, they often do so in combination with specifiers for racial qualifications. Jumping right past the most likely explanations for this - that there is a long, sad history of exoticizing and eroticizing the black penis which is still in play, they simply accept without reflection that men of African decent must have larger equipment and employ it in a more domineering manner.

All of that would be small quibbles if the authors didn't rely almost exclusively on a single snarky, irreverent guide to the "rules" for writing convention-laden romance novels for their complete explanation of female sexuality. Women want to believe they have a "magic hoo-hoo" is one such gem. (To their credit the authors do have a way of spotting a memorable phrase, but seem unaware that many of the best lines they repeat are comic overstatements from witty satirists, not sex researchers.) By the time you finish the chapter postulating that what women want in bed is a vampiric Fabio, you begin to understand where all the "one-star" hostility is coming from.

Despite feeling compelled, myself, to call out some of the worst excesses of this book, I can't say I am sorry I bought it or own it. There is so much that is interesting. It could have been a much, much better book by just sticking to what was revealed by their research without attempting any explanations whatsoever, but while frequently offensive it is far from worthless. Buy it, and pick up more than a few grains of salt from the grocery section at the same time.

This very interesting book on sex was viciously flamed when it first came out. It's been called disorganized, "man-splaining," "science-fail," and worse. The New York Times Book Review unfortunately assigned it not to a sex writer but to a culture critic, who called it a "farrago."

It's none of those things. It's a very creative, cleverly written, tightly argued book on sex differences, erotic cues, and the authors' massive dataset concerning sex searches and other offerings on the web that are countable and categorizable. True, the book has real weaknesses -- the one that bothered me most was its liberal crossing of species lines in search of analogies for human behavior. Its "biologizing" becomes irritating after awhile. I would have preferred if the authors stuck to their data rather than jumping into purely biological explanations for everything. This was distracting to me, and I think needlessly alienated lots of readers.

Its Chapter 11, however, is alone worth the trip. I wonder how many of the book's critics actually made it to Chapter 11 -- or really paid attention to the book's argument on the way to Chapter 11.

Fortunately, the book is beginning to attract more reasoned attention. Now that it's finally in paperback, let's hope the book now starts to generate more intelligent discussion. Especially since the mass popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey is confirming some of the authors' ideas about desire.

I picked up this book enthusiastically after hearing part of author Ogi's interview with Dan Savage. (Oh, Dan Savage, you are usually so awesome, but when you lead me astray, you lead me astray so hard!) In theory I am the most ideal of possible audiences for the authors: I'm a PhD student in a related quantitatively-oriented discipline, have a similar perverse love of wrangling revealing insights on humanity out of large datasets, and also have a side interdisciplinary interest in applying the techniques of my own field towards understanding human sexuality. In fact, my partner and I once conducted a similar private 'study' of a popular erotic website that I will not name here - crawling a subset of the website and processing publicly-available user information into an array of revealing figures and tables, just for fun and to satisfy our own curiosity.

The disdainful recent Sunday New York Times review of a Billion Wicked Thoughts gets it right - this book is a "farrago" (I had to look it up, too: meaning a "confused mixture"). It feels as if the authors spent years carefully collecting and curating a number of different sexual datasets that were of particular interest to them, then realized their book deadline was in two weeks, and hastily strung one summary statistic from the next in a jumbled narrative arc, using only their own stereotypes as a guide.

The authors try to justify their most foundational stereotype, that men and women are separated by a vast sexual gulf, with the observation that men like porn and women like romance novels. On first pass, I found this strange because I am a woman who is attracted to men, and while I have watched porn, I have never read a romance novel. Reading the book, their description of my purported female sexuality just did not resonate at all with my experience with my actual female sexuality. The vast majority of romance novels' readers are female, yes, but where is the evidence that the vast majority of women read romance novels? It's a cheap shot, I know, but I'm genuinely left wondering if the authors turned to the internet to understand women because they have not had much real-world experience with them.

Whether or not that is the case, the authors seem to suffer most from a major lack of humility regarding what they are able to actually conclude from their data. They have a relatively large, fairly easily interpretable dataset of men's tastes, via male-targeted porn site subscriptions, and while they try to essentialize male sexuality just as much as they do female sexuality, they are forced to acknowledge the very vast array of men's sexual desires, simply because they are squarely confronted with them.

With female sexuality, they don't seem to really know where to look online, so they turn primarily to romance novels. From them they build a monolithic theory of female sexual desire, where women swoon for alphas, have an internal "detective agency" which is concerned with ferreting out a mate's qualities as a provider, and have a fundamental architecture that is sexually submissive. Although they do touch on a few varieties of women's sexuality, they only see those differences as reinforcement of their monolithic view of these basics. The large numbers of women with kinks, fetishes, and predilections that run counter to these narratives are missed or ignored. Why don't we get the same treatment as men, the same cataloguing of the vast diversity of our desires? Because they needed large datasets that they could be constructed and analyzed quantitatively. And so they draw from the handful of female-centric genres of which they were aware (most prominently, romance novels and fan fiction - they missed an awful lot of obvious web sites/sexual communities that would have been goldmines on female sexuality, presumably because they have never heard of them), and from which they could easily collect data, and wishfully assume them to be representative of all women. They lack the humility to wonder if they might not have missed something important.

Methodologically, they don't give us much to work with in order to understand how solid their nuts-and-bolts research practices are. We know they draw conclusions from search histories and sites like Literotica, but don't know how they process that data (what about multiple users of a computer or IP address?) or how they categorize users into male or female. In their Q&A session on the Freakonomics blog, they answer this question by showing two search histories side by side, one purportedly male and one purportedly female, and basically saying "it's obvious, duh." But how do you implement this subjective division of users into male and female on a larger scale without introducing dizzying bias into the results? If there is a majority chance that a person searching for "shemales, strapons, hot latina babes, and baseball cards" is male, they will on their grand scale of millions of searches miss the fact that a minority of people into these things are women (translating into many, many women), and will have only succeeded in creating a dataset that by its very construction can do little but circularly confirm their own biases about men and women's desires.

Perhaps this is how they came to the conclusion, for one example, that gangbang fantasies are a male thing, when a large number of kinky women with whom I'm acquainted are into gang bangs. (How do we know that men are into gangbangs? Because that's what they search for online. How do we know that the people who search online for gangbangs are men? Because men are into gangbangs. How do we know that men are into ganbangs?...) I can only imagine that my own search history, which of late consists of motorcycles, queries related to my male-dominated academic field, and sexual searches that they similarly categorize as literally being in the "exclusive domain of the male mind," would simply serve as more evidence of the "very gulf that separates a woman's brain from a man's brain." Instead of acknowledging their limitations, they plough ahead, for they have a deadline to meet.

As another reviewer pointed out in regards to anime, there are many astounding moments which suggest how much the authors seem to be reaching beyond the bounds of their abilities and knowledge. A few of my personal favorites, which are less a part of my main critique and more just illustrative of how very terrible the book is:

- For the sheer "dear lord have you ever even *met* a woman?": "Women strive for consensus and equality... Most women do not feel the burning ambition to outcompete other women on the way to becoming alpha female." One need look no further than a recent movie like Bridesmaids to see the role female competition for alpha status in a group of women plays in our culture. Googling for "alpha female" comes across a huge number of hits, including such bastions of feminist thought as Ask Men (which is, in fact, the top hit). A cursory search reveals reams of academic articles on competition in groups of women. Etc, etc.

- For the blatant contradiction: "There is a profound difference in the brain software of men and women. It explains why the pharmaceutical industry's quest for female Viagra kept running into dead ends. Stimulating the vagina or the spine does not automatically fire up desire in the conscious mind. Instead, women need to feel *psychologically* aroused... This is why there can be no female Viagra." (Chapter 4) "Female Viagra already exists and it's called testosterone." (Chapter 10)

- For the appeal to dubious authority: "Men's brains are designed to objectify females." Checking the endnotes, their cited source? Hugh Hefner ("The notion that Playboy turns women into sex objects is ridiculous. Women are sex objects.")

- For the apparent utter inability to string two ideas together with any logical coherence: "Whereas the male brain is designed to become jealous over physical infidelity, the female brain is designed to become jealous over emotional infidelity." Their evidence? Women tend to get jealous about their men watching porn, while men do not get jealous about their women watching porn. Am I missing some hidden emotional resonance behind the plotless sex of most mainstream porn, because, huh?

- For the missing forests for trees: "This fundamental difference in desire software is reflected in the type of erotic obsessions that men and women develop. As we saw in the previous chapter, men are quite prone to developing sexual obsessions with objects, which they frequently use for masturbation.... Women however, rarely develop sexual fetishes for objects. They do, however, develop emotional fetishes, a condition known as objectum sexualis."

Although the prevalence of female fetishists is probably in fact lower than that of male fetishists, one look at sites like Fetlife easily disproves the idea that female fetishism is particularly rare, either. On the other hand, what we know about objectum sexualis (OS) is that *it* is exceedingly rare (one article put the total number of known OS people at around 40). Further, a minority of OS people (5/21 in one survey) are male. It's as if they saw that sensationalist OS documentary on Youtube that made the rounds a few years ago and thought "squicky!! we have to work this into our book somehow!!"

- For the mindblowingly offensive (and very revealing): Quoting "seduction community spokesman Roissy" approvingly as a source of insight on the female mind. Leaving aside how one becomes a spokesman for any amorphous and dispersed online community, Roissy is an anonymous blogger (rather, now, I believe, Roissy's site is a conglomerate of anonymous bloggers) who purports to know the secrets to attracting women, while providing exactly zero proof of his/their own ability to get tail. Given female reaction to Roissy is vociferously, nearly uniformly, negative, one must subscribe to the belief that women know absolutely nothing about themselves in order to see Roissy as a valuable source on the subject. I am unsurprised to discover that these authors are the type.

- For the sadly typical: Bisexual men and lesbians, as well as transgender people of all sexual orientations, don't exist/don't have sexualities worth thinking about (yet somehow those with objectum sexualis make the cut!)

It's truly a shame that these two were the first to publish a book on what is, I think, a really promising line of inquiry.