- Last Updated: 12:44 AM, January 22, 2012
- Posted: 11:59 PM, May 14, 2011
A Billion Wicked Thoughts
What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam Dutton
Upon leaving his work as a biodefense researcher at MIT and a Department of Homeland Security fellow, Ogi Ogas decided to pursue a field with even more opportunities for practical applications: Sex.
His new book, “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” co-authored with Sai Gaddam, is billed as the first massive undertaking in the field since the Kinsey Reports in the mid-20th century. By analyzing a billion web searches from around the world, Ogas and Gaddam have emerged with the most complete survey yet of our collective sexual id.
“Sex therapists haven’t known which interests are common and which are rare,” Ogas says. “We probably now know more than ever before.”
Among their more surprising findings: Straight men
enjoy a wider variety of erotica than imagined, including sites devoted to elderly women and transsexuals. Foot fetishes aren’t a deviance; men are evolutionarily wired to look for small feet, which are a sign of high estrogen production, which itself is a sign of fertility. Gay men and straight men have nearly identical brains, and their favorite body parts, in order of preference, line up exactly: chests, buttocks, feet. Straight men prefer heavy women to thin ones. Straight women enjoy reading about and watching romances between two men — it’s not about the sex, which is downplayed, but the emotion, which is the focus. (The largest audience for “Brokeback Mountain,” says the book, was straight women.) Straight men have a fascination with other men’s penises, which may be conscious or unconscious.
“The research, as far as I can tell, is pretty damn sound,” says Dr. Stephen Snyder, a sex therapist in private practice in Manhattan for over 20 years. “They worked very hard to acquire a large data set, and they found some very, very interesting stuff.”
Snyder read the book just a few weeks ago, and then he read it again. It immediately impacted the way he began treating patients, especially the ones who presented him with issues that aren’t well-documented in the literature. For example, he says, let’s take a wife who’s alarmed to discover that her husband has been looking at “she-male” porn online. Without much in the way of academic research — let alone patients who self-report — Snyder would straw-poll colleagues.
“Some would say, ‘That’s a normal variation,’ ” Snyder says. “Others would say, ‘That’s really disturbed.’ It’s very helpful, as a sex therapist, to know that this is not necessarily perverse.” He now believes that it’s not necessarily perverse.
---
0 comments:
Speak up your mind
Tell us what you're thinking... !