With its expansive range and unprecedented potential for anonymity,
the Internet gives voice to our deepest urges and most uninhibited thoughts. Inspired by the wealth of unfettered expression available online, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, who met as Ph.D. candidates at Boston University, began plumbing a few chosen search engines (including Dogpile and AOL) to create the world’s largest experiment in sexuality in 2009. Quietly tapping into a billion Web searches, they explored the private activities of more than 100 million men and women around the world. The result is the first large-scale scientific examination of human sexuality in more than half a century, since biologist Alfred Kinsey famously interviewed more than 18,000 middle-class Caucasians about their sexual behavior and published the Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953.
Building on the work of Kinsey, neuroscientists have long made the case that male and female sexuality exist on different planes. But like Kinsey himself, they have been hampered by the dubious reliability of self-reports of sexual behavior and preferences as well as by small sample sizes. That is where the Internet comes in. By accessing raw data from Web searches and employing the help of Alexa—a company that measures Web traffic and publishes a list of the million most popular sites in the world—Ogas and Gaddam shine a light on hidden desire, a quirky realm of lust, fetish, and kink that, like the far side of the moon, has barely been glimpsed. Here is a sampling of their fascinating results, selected from their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts.
LESSON ONE: Age is important, but youth is not the only attractor
The most influential male cue of all is chronological. Age dominates sexual searches, adult Web site content, and pornographic videos. On Dogpile, terms describing age are the most frequent type of adjective in sexual searches, appearing in one out of every six of them. When a man’s desire software evaluates a woman’s appearance, one of the most prominent criteria is age—and not just youth, either. Many sexual searches on Dogpile contain specific ages, such as “naked 25-year-olds” or “sexy 40-year-olds.” Though the popularity of adult women doesn’t quite reach that of teens, it is worth observing that more men search for 50-year-olds than search for 19-year-olds. There is a rather shocking number of searches for underage women, but you may be equally surprised to discover there is significant erotic interest in 60- and 70-year-olds. At one high-traffic porn site, the single most popular term users enter into the search engine is mom. On AOL, one out of four people who searched for sexually attractive mothers (MILFs) also searched for teens. Though the total number of granny searches amounts to less than 8 percent of the total youth searches, there are more sexual searches for grannies than for some common fetishes like spanking...
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