What Internet Searches Reveal About Human Desire

Hugh Pickens writes "Time Magazine reports that computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam analyzed the results of 400 million online searches for porn and uncovered some startling insights into what men and women may really want from each other. In the first place, although you can find an instance of any kind of porn you can imagine on the internet, people search for and spend money and time on 20 sexual interests, which account for 80% of all porn — the top 10 sex-related searches include variations on youth (13.5 per cent), breasts (4 per cent), cheating wives (3.4 per cent) and cheerleaders (0.1 per cent) among others. Many are surprised that "cheating wives" is such a popular search but Ogas says that it's one of the top interests all around the world because men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused. Women prefer stories to visual porn by a long shot and the most popular erotica for women is the romance novel because female desire requires multiple stimuli simultaneously or in quick succession."

Comments

Fake "Science"

[RandomLinguist]

Their methodology was atrocious, their so-called university affiliation was denied by the college, and they used unethical research practices. this is NOT science; it is GARBAGE.

Check these out, yo:
A thorough summary of the fail
Another roundup

Re:Fake "Science"

[syousef]

Their methodology was atrocious, their so-called university affiliation was denied by the college, and they used unethical research practices. this is NOT science; it is GARBAGE.

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! If they listed midgets and goatse.cx too high up people would have an aneurysm :-)

(Very much tongue in cheek. I agree that this "science" is nothing of the sort).

Re:Fake "Science"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unless that was just Time fucking it up, which probably wouldn't be a first, I would steer a wide berth around a computational neuroscientist who views the mind "as software" rather than "as something usefully analogous to, and modellable by, software".

We don't know as much as we would like about the brain; but we know enough to say that it looks very, very, very unlike a "computer" or something that "runs software" except for near-uselessly broad definitions of those things. If anything, the more or less complete annihilation of analog computers by cheap, fast, transistors and the brutally fast Von Neumman architecture devices that they make possible have made the "brain = computer, mind = software" analogy less useful than it used to be(ironically, of course, at the same time, those same not-very-brainlike machines have brute-forced their way ever closer to being able to model biological neural networks of non-useless size...)

Re:Fake "Science"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's funny how often things go badly when people(even, perhaps especially) very smart ones step out of their discipline and assume that somebody else's disciple must be fairly simply reduceable to the rules and techniques of their own. Economists seem to be the most notable offenders; but these computational neuroscientists seem to have wandered deep into the sociologists' territory just because they saw a database and a tenuous connection to human behavior. Of course the primitive locals who've been developing the study of population behaviors had nothing to teach them... so they stumbled merrily into nonsense.

Sorry kids, it is arguable that some disciplines are utterly useless, or that some disciplines attract smarter people than others; and it is definitely the case that strict segmentation between them is counterproductive; but it is rarely the case that your neighbor's discipline is just a pitiful subset of yours, engulfed in darkness and just waiting for you to enlighten them...

Re:Fake "Science"

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

I didn't RTFA, but I'm going to throw in my conjecture anyway. What about some other considerations:

Is it true that simply the most searched for terms are what the most people are actually looking for? For example, if something is easy to find, why bother doing any searching? Thus the most searched terms could be the ones that people are just most dissatisfied with in what they find. Another example, does 'cheating wives' mean that men are actually desiring to cheat on their wife or fantasize about having sex with a cheating wife? What if it's simply the best search term to find a particular style of porn and not related to the content of the 'skit' nor any desire for the actual act of cheating? Do they think the average user is dumb enough to believe the skits are spontaneous and contain real, cheating wives?

And what is the significance of evaluating searches? How many people simply go to some variety type page and pick out what they like in the feed?

I would say that on such a complicated issue, simply analyzing a table of 400 million results is not a deep enough evaluation to determine people's motivations desires, or interests.

Re:Fake "Science"

[Ginger Unicorn]

Doctor... Venkman. The purpose of science is to serve mankind. You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge... or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable! You are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman!

Re:Fake "Science"

[SirWinston]

This "study" was an idiotic exercise in which a couple of junior researchers mined search terms to reinforce their culturally formed and far from unbiased notions about sexuality. All the crap about men searching for cheating wife porn (I believe "cuckold" porn is a popular current term for it) because of jealousy being hardwired and competition triggering arousal was especially telling--these guys are parroting outdated "conventional wisdom" (i.e., assumptions based on post-facto theory rather than formed from evidence-based research) and nothing more. The real work is being done by folks like the authors of _Sex at Dawn_:

http://www.sexatdawn.com/

who look at the anthropological evidence of how human communities used to live in prehistory, and let that guide their conclusions on how contemporary sexuality got where it is. For example, the _Sex at Dawn_ authors would explain that men want to see cheating wife porn not because jealousy is hardwired and competition sexually excites them, but because we used to live for hundreds of thousands of years (maybe a million+ depending on where you put the dividing line for what's "human") in small communal groups where sex with multiple partners in succession or was the norm. So, men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago when agriculture changed a hunter-gatherer society of communally shared lives (mating included) into a hierarchical society of enforced order and scarcity (mating changed into a scarce resource like everything else).

In other words, today we have external software (a legacy of early subsistence-farming civilization) installing a chimp-like sexuality of scarcity and aggression and competition into our heads, when our native OS is more bonobo-like and tells us we want to share sex partners.

And we can actually validate this theory, because we have extensive records of contact with "stone age" tribes some of whom are still around today, and true monogamous marriage is almost unheard-of. Most tribes practicing their ancestral ways without Western influence have marriage--but almost never exclusive marriage where partners are expected to be "faithful." Women are usually expected to be promiscuous, and many tribes have "partible paternity"--the belief that every man a pregnant woman has sex with contributes semen towards making the baby, and that if a woman is not promiscuous enough she's not giving the baby a big variety of helpful traits from the fathers, or that the baby could miscarry from lack of continued semen contribution. Some uncontacted tribes literally have had no idea that sex even causes pregnancy, because from the moment females are physically developed enough to have sex they're doing so, often with multiple partners over time, so that the connection between sex and pregnancy isn't clear to them.

Point being, if you want to really learn about human sexuality, read _Sex at Dawn_ and ignore this other crap.

Re:Fake "Science"

[babblefrog]

I thought by the Church-Turing thesis all Turing complete computers were equivalent. What difference does analog or digital make?

Re:Fake "Science"

[deapbluesea]

Very insightful. Wish I had mod points for you. The trick, of course, would be to prove that the brain is equivalent to a Turing Machine. It's not been done yet, and we don't understand enough to even think about such a thing. That thought notwithstanding, the fundamental insight behind the Church-Turing Thesis is that there are a countably infinite number of TM configurations, and an uncountably infinite number of languages that could be applied to TM's. Therefore there are languages that TMs will be unable to accept by the pigeonhole principle. It is highly unlikely that the human brain has an uncountably infinite number of configurations, therefore it is likely that there are undecidable "languages" that the human brain cannot accept. In other words, the human brain may be a TM. On the other hand, one could make a counter argument of neuron path length being analogue, thus allowing infinite configurations, but the halting problem seems to be a language that is also undecidable by the human brain - showing that there are undecidable languages for the brain.

Re:Fake "Science"

[Anonymous Coward]

Another example, does 'cheating wives' mean that men are actually desiring to cheat on their wife or fantasize about having sex with a cheating wife?

Like many mammals, male humans are wired to try and mate with as many females as possible, while also defending his breeding stock from being impregnated by rival males.
Like many mammals, female humans are wired to try and mate with only the "best" male candidate, and to "trade up" when a more suitable mate comes along.

So yeah, "cheating wives" makes perfect sense in light of the natural mating habits of our species. Of course the religious nutjobs will be on here screaming about free will and all that jazz. Sure, free will allows us to overcome our instinctive urges, but it does not remove them.

Thus the most searched terms could be the ones that people are just most dissatisfied with in what they find.

Bingo. This applies especially to "youth-related" searches which rank the highest. Go looking for hot chicks 18-21 years old and you either find child porn or a pack of worn-out 40 year old whores. So you spend a lot of time repeating searches with variations until you get lucky and stumble across the one site which is NOT packed full of 60 year old women having sex with animals.

Re:Fake "Science"

[interkin3tic]

But it also sometimes works out very well. Computational neuroscience itself seems to be an example of that. The wiki page for computational neuroscience mentions the term was coined by an Eric Schwartz who appears to have crossed from physics into neurobiology.

The "father of neuroscience", Ramon Y Cajal, had quite a colorful background. He had skill in art, which probably helped him record his observations and study neural cells, and in his professional career started out studying inflammation and cholera before moving into neurobiology.

It doesn't appear to be limited to biology either. I've heard there are well-respected economists who were physicists in previous professional lives. To take it even further, even in music, genre-crossing usually has interesting results, like Richard Cheese, who does lounge-singing covers of pop songs, or that bluegrass cover of Snoop Dog's Gin and Juice.

I'd submit that changing fields can often be productive, bringing a new way of looking at things to the field. Assuming the field is simple is the real problem, but that's a pitfall whether you're switching fields or staying in your own field.

Re:Fake "Science"

[Anonymous Coward]

dude please, no use of "tongue in cheek" in the same comment as "goatse"...

Re:Fake "Science"

[TheCarp]

You can't have 10s of thousands of generations in 10,000 years. maybe for field mice, or some other small mammal but, we generally recognize human generations as being about 20 years.... so, 10,000 years is more like 500 generations.

Also... um... do you really think monogamy has been so strictly practiced that it really would be considered the "dominant strategy"? What family of any size doesn't have one or two "serial monogamists" (on his 4th wife is he?) or know someone who found out that they had adult siblings that they didn't even know about?

Or as Dan Savage put it "If after 50 years of marriage, your husband cheated on you like 3 times? He was GOOD at monogamy". I have been meaning to read the book "Lust in Translation" which looks at attitudes towards adultery around the world, but I heard the author on the radio and she showed several examples that showed a huge variety of opinion, and commonly acceptance of it.

Still think monogamy is 'the norm' to an extent that matters? I would argue that its the "norm" kind of like not being drunk is "the norm".

Expectation

[Boronx]

From TFA:

"The findings also indicated that straight men prefer heavier rather than thinner women, and that straight women, contrary to all expectations, enjoy reading about and watching romances between two men."

All expectation? Anyone who's been around awhile knows this.

Re:Expectation

[pasv]

I like big butts and I cannot lie.

Re:Expectation

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it was a surprise to me.

The men liking heavier women thing wasn't a shock, however. I've long known that negative body image issues among females are caused by other females trying to make each other feel inadequate or sell products, it's not men pushing those preferences.

[captcha: economy]

Re:Expectation

[hey!]

Well, in science even what "everyone knows" doesn't count until it's published and somebody's rivals can kick the crap out it. A necessary first step to getting beyond common sense is putting common sense to the test. Sometimes common sense is just wrong. If you flip a coin and get heads three times in a row, your chance of getting a head on the next flip is 50%. Rockets with motors on the top aren't more stable than ones with motors on the bottom, and disconnecting the front brakes of a tractor trailer truck doesn't make it more stable in a dynamic braking situation.

The list of mathematical or physical common sense intuitions that are provably wrong is long. With issues of psychology it's a lot harder to put commonsense notions to the test, because they involve fuzzily defined concepts, like "personality".

Since the first step is disproving common sense, no doubt disproof is sometimes found simply because people are looking for it. So what is "unexpected" in the literature might well be predicted by common sense. Science doesn't pile up truths like a stack of coconuts; it approaches the truth by successive approximations.

Re:Expectation

[hey!]

Well, if we accept the results of this study, then we'd have to conclude that having "normal" preferences like yours technically makes you a pervert.

Re:Expectation

[erroneus]

Hehehe... then I'm a pervert!!

Re:Expectation

[xwizbt]

Your post saddens me in ways that I shouldn't even consider. What does it mean when you say you're 'sickened' by something? Does it mean you feel you're unlikely to do that thing, or that the thing in question would make you physically ill, and you might vomit. Would you be prepared to try it to find out, or are you so certain it's... well, not 'wrong' per se, but 'sickening', that you'd be unable to physically contemplate it?

I'm gay, and I regularly place other men's penises in my mouth. Well, one man in particular, actually, in the same way that you probably place your penis in your wife's mouth, vagina or, judging from your post, not her anus. One might ask why it's acceptable for you to push it in her mouth or vagina but not her anus, and while that's entirely the point here, let's not go there. Oh, look - I made a nearly-funny.

I sleep with my partner, and what we do in the bedroom involves inserting parts of me into parts of him, in the same way that you insert parts of you into parts of her. Nothing's dirty or nasty; you don't even know which parts go into which parts. In fact, there are millions of people who insert parts far weirder than you've even considered into places you've never even imagined parts can be inserted. You can buy the DVDs if you're interested. I'm not: what I'm interested is in if you can convince me that you placing your most private, most intimate part into someone else's most private, most intimate part is somehow more special and somehow sacred than me placing my most private, most intimate part in someone else's chosen private, most intimate orifice?

In short, Mr. 'I'm sickened' - oh, whatever. I've been gaybashed on the street by thugs who made a more eloquent argument.

Re:Expectation

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I have some bad news(no, not pornographic or anything, just a site-ranking) for anybody to whom female enthusiasm for reading about male homosexual relationships is a surprise...

Re:Expectation

[erroneus]

It sickens me in much the same way that my eating meat sickens vegetarians. I accept that people do what people want to do and I in no way want to impose my own ideology on anyone else. But I shouldn't have to conceal my straightness any more than you should have to conceal your gayness. I spent a couple of years working at an "alternative news weekly" and I'm quite sure at least 30% (and possibly even up to 60%) were gay or bi- or whatever. There's simply no problem with it.

As for my wife letting me put my stuff in her stuff? Well -- it's nature. She likes it and I like it. On the other hand, if she wanted me to put it places I don't want it, we might have to do some negotiations on the matter.

Still, seeing two guys kiss in the street or in the movies or on TV? Yeah, I'm pretty sure I don't like it. I don't like the way guys smell -- even with cologne. Women smell good to me usually. There's a lot of nature going on there for me. And I'll be the first to assert that there's a lot of nature going on there with you too. I'm quite certain that you do what you do because it's what you feel compelled to do deep down. It's just that the idea of me doing it is repulsive... and quite likely in much the same way that vegetarians find my eating a chewy bacon and egg sandwich repulsive.

And if anyone is interested, I am not christian. My feelings are not related to any such thing as religious morals and ideology. I didn't choose to be straight and I don't know why I am now defending it.

Re:Expectation

[Wrath0fb0b]

... but there's an evolutionary reason why.

When a girl walks in with an itty-bitty waist and a round thing in your face you get vital evolutionary information that acts as a fairly accurate indicator of overall health.

My anaconda don't want none unless you have a high likelihood of producing healthy offspring with a minimal chance of genetic disabilities, hun.

My homeboys tried to warn me, but that butt you got makes me so confident of your current well-being and future child-rearing potential

So ladies (yeah!) ladies (yeah!) You wanna advertise fertility? (hell yeah!) Then turn around, stick it out, even other women have to admit that you appear to have the necessary physical attributes to produce many healthy offspring.

[ Copypasta from this Reddit, all credit to original authors: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/gibxk/i_like_big_butts_and_i_cannot_lie_but_is_there/ ]

Re:Expectation

[radtea]

So read what he wrote again

What he wrote was that his straight and vanilla sex life was not just unsickening but "the way it was meant to be", which implies a very strong normative element in addition to his visceral response. As it happens, his visceral response is one I happen to share, but I'm not an idiot or three years old, so I don't infer normative value from hind-brain emotions.

Spiders creep me out too, in pretty much exactly the same way, and I don't pretend there's anything wrong with them because of that: if anything, there's something wrong with me, although it's pretty trivial as I'm not about to let such feelings influence my stand on public policy, which is based on the conscious recognition that homosexuals have as much right to do what they like with their own bodies as the rest of us.

Re:Expectation

[seanvaandering]

We didn't need a report to prove this point. :)

Re:Expectation

[thetoadwarrior]

Exactly. Real men don't run fashion shows or fashion magazines. If we did then at the very least there would be more exposed tits.

Re:Expectation

[hexagonc]

If you flip a coin and get heads three times in a row, your chance of getting a head on the next flip is 50%.

Don't mean to nitpick, especially since I agree with the gist of everything else you wrote but this is not necessarily true. The probability of getting heads on the next flip is only 50% if the coin really is fair. Now, three coin tosses are really not enough to know whether the coin is fair or not but if you flipped the coin a hundred times and they all came out heads then that would be pretty solid evidence that there was some asymmetry in the characteristics of the coin or the way it was being tossed. Of course, even in this case, it is still possible that it was fair but less likely.

I would say that the biggest problem with common sense is drawing conclusions from too small of a sample. However, there is a logic to common sense. If you're in a situation where a decision has to be made then there might not be enough time to determine rigorously the probabilities of costs or benefits. A small number of samples may simply be all that you have to go on. So long as we accept common sense as ONLY a short-term heuristic, to be refined by more careful study, then we should be okay. The problem comes from when people refuse to accept scientific results simply because it contradicts their common sense notions.

Re:Expectation

[Mad Merlin]

I call Susan on your 'it's nature' argument. Prove it's natural to be heterosexual. Go on. You'll please a lot of fundamentals, and greatly displease me. Prove it.

Well, if it wasn't, our population count would certainly take a nose dive. Consider that most first world countries average somewhere close to two children per family. Now, what happens if ~90% of people are homosexual instead of ~10%?

Don't get me wrong, if that's what you want to do, go for it. However, I think it's difficult to argue that we're not hardwired to reproduce given that we're still around.

Busted...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

the top 10 sex-related searches include variations on youth (13.5 per cent), breasts (4 per cent), cheating wives (3.4 per cent) and cheerleaders (0.1 per cent) among others. Many are surprised that "cheating wives" is such a popular search...

Is it just me or does this read like somebody succeeded in passing off their browser history as research?

SurveyFail

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to know more about how much their methodology fails: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Surveyfail

false cheating wives conclusion

[iggymanz]

well known men on dating sites like to seek cheating wives because they are more likely to be discrete, have same risks associated with discovery, than single women who might try to attract attention to disrupt marriage for their benefit.

Re:false cheating wives conclusion

[meta-monkey]

That's completely different. The article is talking about men searching for pornography online that features fictional cheating wives in videos or stories, generally imagining their own wife is the one cheating. You're talking about people looking for actual sex partners online. The article is about men looking for fantasy pornography, and you're talking about men looking for real sex partners. Fantasy =/= reality.

Arousal through cheating?

[kvvbassboy]

(Some experts are of the opinion that) men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused.

Is this true? I would be jealous for sure, but sexually aroused when my girlfriend cheats on me? I don't think so. Are these proven facts, or just a theory based on some weakly correlated evidence?

Re:Arousal through cheating?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

As with much of "evolutionary psychology"(especially the stuff that has the misfortune to be human-facing enough to make it into pop-psych publication), the notion is at nontrivial risk of being nonsense floating on a foundation of methodological malpractice; but there is the suspicion in some quarters that humans bear some of the adaptations one sees in primates where sperm competition, as well mate selection competition, exists.

In large primates, for instance, the more promiscuous species tend to have comparatively large testicles for their body size, in order to produce more sperm, either for more frequent matings, or to have the advantage of numbers against competitors mating with the same partner. Humans are not at the top of that list; but they aren't at the bottom, either.

There is a bunch of other stuff about mate-guarding behavior, possible structural adaptation of the head of the penis for scraping out competitors' sperm, and the like.

The psychological side is a bit more speculative, and it is hard to measure things like that accurately in humans "Please rate your level of arousal, on a scale of one to five, at the notion of cuckoldry...)

What *is* porn, anyway?

[poppycock]

I'm curious as to how they decided what is porn in the first place, and how much of their own biases leaked into what they decided constituted a "search for porn."

Error establishing a database connection

[rizole]

Just like my wife. As soon as I show an interest, she wont let me in.

Re:Error establishing a database connection

[Opportunist]

*sigh* There's protection against that, has been for ages. I still can't understand why people refuse to use it. It's simple, it's easy and it protects you from so much hassle. Sure, there's a bit of overhead but ain't that worth it? A few minutes of care can save you a lot of headaches when trying to get rid of the infection.

Suspiciously uncontroversial data

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, and interesting factoid I got from a database optimizer who was working to improve the searches on some major-ish porn site at one point: the popularity of certain kinds of porn (as per the number of searches) actually had almost nothing to do with the supposed popularity (that is, the porn that was available because people produced it, presumably based upon what they thought people wanted). About the best you could say was: there are more people who like male+female sex, than otherwise. Beyond that, results are all over the place.

For example, the incest-related searches work out to between 5% and 25% of searches, depending upon various factors, even though something like 0.05% of porn is incest porn (probably less is genuine; that's how much gets labeled as such). This was true even after normalizing for the fact that people who don't find what they're searching for might rephrase it and search again. One way that they semi-verified this was renaming a few clips and galleries to seem like they contained incest, and look at the decrease in repeat searches and the number of comparative downloads.

The fact is, what we think of as "normal porn" is about as relevant as what we think of as "normal sex" - there's no such thing, beyond the vague fact of most encounters being male+female, which would probably be due to biology more than preference.

Search doesn't equate to browsing...

[Sir_Sri]

Lets say I'm really into Strategy games. So I search for strategy games once or twice. Find some awesome strategy games sites, bookmark them, and then visit the bookmarks directly. I'm not generating search traffic for strategy games. But I will generate a lot for FPS, games and maybe sports games, because I'm not to into those, and when I do want to find something on them, I have to search for it.

Porn is, in that sense, no different that a series of specialized niche markets. If you're really into something and, through a successful search find that 'thing', well...then you don't search for it anymore. Differentiating between traffic and search is probably not trivial however. Search to me represents traffic that is under represented, or that is advertised badly (imagine if I did a search for 'news for nerds' and didn't find /. that would not say much about interest in news for nerds, only that one of the biggest sources of news for nerds wasn't providing good results).

Re:Search doesn't equate to browsing...

[BeaverCleaver]

I wish I had mod points. Search terms are, if anything, a way to find what people _don't_ browse frequently. I spend plenty of time on Slashdot, but I'm pretty sure I've never googled "news for nerds."

ORLY?

[ACE209]

but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused.

If by "aroused" they mean "pretty fuckin' angry" then they got that one right.

Re:ORLY?

[meta-monkey]

But it's fantasy, not reality. Just like an awful lot of women have fantasies of rape or force, but I'm pretty sure they don't actually want to be raped. There are men who might fantasize about watching their wife cheat on them, but would be horrified if it happened in reality.

It's the same with a lot of non sex-related fiction. We love watching movies where the hero battles evil space monsters, imagining ourselves in that role being that brave, but we would crap our pants and run screaming if we were actually in that situation.

Right of Passage

[retroworks]

Well, you have to have people criticize your methodology to be taken seriously. That's how Kinsey Institute got its mojo.

Speaking of which, Kinsey Institute has many similar findings in previous research. http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/FAQ.html#fantasy Now, I did find myself wondering, since I never heard of a MILF before the past decade, whether people are searching for something until they FIND it and then look for it over and over and over again. Survey may be biased against people who use bookmarks. So I've heard.

Re:Don't have to search

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Let's compare the trends for "black women" and "white women":

Google trends for "white women" vs. "black women" (+ sex).

Does this mean people are 5 times more interested in black women? Or maybe white women are just easier to find online, so there's no need to refine the search. Likewise:

Google trends for "gay sex" vs. "straight sex".

I guess this proves "scientifically" that 98% of the population is gay...

You don't know what you are talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/05/17/the-neuroscience-behind-sexual-desire-authors-of-a-billion-wicked-thoughts-answer-your-questions/:

Some comments contend that our alma mater Boston University disclaimed us, revoked our websites, and rescinded our emails. This is just plain silly. Though we’re now alumni, we still maintain the same BU web addresses we’ve always had, and still have access to our same BU email accounts, though we now rely on non-university accounts.

Neither the Boston University IRB nor our former department (nor any other BU entity) ever issued any reprimand because we did not violate any university policy or regulation. Though it’s true that many colleagues in our former department were uncomfortable with our choice of research subject—some explicitly tried to dissuade us from studying sexual desire—there’s an enormous gap between disliking our research and disclaiming it.

So, well done spreading that particular line of FUD.

I’m not saying that these researchers did everything right (they almost certainly did not), but really, what sort of methodology *would* these people like to see? It is basically impossible to do *any* research in this area, as has been stated repeatedly both in the book and in the discussions online, due to how politically and emotionally charged these issues are. It’s like complaining that scientists using telescopes to find planets with habitable atmospheres are doing bad science because they aren’t there scooping up samples of the atmosphere to check its actual composition.

It’s also totally unclear to me as to what these people are complaining about since there is absolutely no mention of what the problem is in either of the two journals you linked to. As far as I can tell, it seems some people believe the entire book is based on a single survey posted to LiveJournal, which is great for their egos but entirely non-factual.

Atrocious, indeed.

Cheating wives? WTH?

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife cheated on me and I was not turned on at all!!! I searched the internet for help to understand why and half of the stuff that turned up was cheating wife porn. It disgusted me to no end. It seemed to be one of those fantasies that is better as a fantasy and not a reality. I would do anything to NOT have had my wife cheat on me; I deal with the psychological effects everyday even though it's been over a year this month.

The internet did have some help, but I wonder if some of those searches were just guys looking for help with real cheating wives?

AOL

[smisle]

I was mildly interested until they said that they had only used AOL search data ... wow. No wonder there's so much old lady porn, it's the user base.

First suspicious data point

[Livius]

"female desire requires multiple stimuli... in quick succession."

No, it requires it dragged out for as long as possible, to demonstrate that the male has resources (including time) to spare. Hence the plots of romance novels/chick flicks typically revolve around pointless hesitation and inefficiency.

So you are saying man need's to write a novel?

[SluttyButt]

OK, let us be specific here in order to make everyone happy.

So, woman needs multiple stimuli simultaneously in quick succession, and the most popular erotica for women is the romance novel?

So if a man were to woo and seduce a woman, he's to write his perhaps 500-page novel, while at the same time hoping his erection does dissipate by the time his novel is done?

Ladies, don't complain that you don't get laid enough.

Very good point

[Paul1969]

And it applies to many of the "scientists" touted by global warming deniers. An astrophysicist, for example, may think he/she has spotted a flaw in the interpretation of the data, and will announce loudly that he/she has "disproved" AGW while failing to see the fatal flaw in his own interpretation.
This is of course not true of the pure sellouts, who simply repeat the scripts provided by their paymasters: "We have no conclusive proof that cigarettes cause lung cancer, Senator."

Cheating Wives

[sonicmerlin]

I'd also like to point out this "Fetish" for cuckolding is generally centered around white-dominated societies. I've never seen that kind of interest in Eastern countries. Even in hentai the "cheating wife" is portrayed as a terrible, immoral person who eventually suffers greatly for what she's done.

Only among white people do you see the obsession with women cheating. In fact historically western culture has been far more concerned with the "purity" of women than their fidelity, whereas in Asian countries fidelity and loyalty to the partner and family has always been the most highly valued characteristic.

Re:What, no pyronecroxenopedocanophila?

[shikaisi]

I used to be into sadism, necrophilia and bestiality, but then I found that I was flogging a dead horse.