A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire

Writing thoughtfully about sex is “hard.” See!? When it comes to sex, there’s an endless supply of sophomoric humor waiting to be unearthed, so striking the appropriate balance between earnest discussion and comic relief seems to be one of the most difficult stylistic choices an author needs to make when composing a book like “A Billion Wicked Thoughts.” Ultimately, I found Ogas and Gaddam to have trouble finding their equilibrium between humorous and scientific prose, which distracted me from w

Writing thoughtfully about sex is “hard.” See!? When it comes to sex, there’s an endless supply of sophomoric humor waiting to be unearthed, so striking the appropriate balance between earnest discussion and comic relief seems to be one of the most difficult stylistic choices an author needs to make when composing a book like “A Billion Wicked Thoughts.” Ultimately, I found Ogas and Gaddam to have trouble finding their equilibrium between humorous and scientific prose, which distracted me from what is otherwise an interesting first swipe at gathering data on sex in the Internet age.

Overall, this book veers towards the clinical and data heavy. The backbone of the research is the search history from millions of users of the Dogpile.com website along with some pretty exhaustive reviewing of the top couple thousand porn and erotic fiction sites on the Internet. There’s also a revealing supplemental set of data from AOL that shows the chronological search history of millions of anonymous users so you get to watch how someone digs themself down the rabbit hole of a sexual search starting at, for example, ‘college cheerleaders,’ moving on to ‘college cheerleader pics in bikinis’ and ending up at ‘christian advice on lust’. All of this data ends up uncovering some interesting facts to bring with you to your next night out with friends. For example, did you know that well over 90% of the world’s Internet porn is being purchased by men? Did you know that the #3 most searched for sexual category is the MILF? Neither did I! Facts such as these abound.

I also liked the fact presented in the book that based on recent DNA evidence, over the course of human history, approximately 80% of women have reproduced compared to only 40% of men. The authors do a nice job of advancing that statistic and theorizing that at least some of male aggression and competitiveness comes as the result of needing to separate from the pack in order to mate, whereas with females, historically speaking, if you wait around long enough, odds are a man will come around and be interested in bearing children with you. Hence the objective for females isn’t to just find a man, but rather to find the right man, so many of the sexual preferences of women are driven by trying to sift and winnow the pool of available men down to the ones that will best fit the father bill.

With that being said, there are a few problems that I had with the book that hampered my experience. For one, (and I don’t necessarily blame the authors for this) it turns out that there isn’t a whole lot of good research out there on sexual behavior. The cadence of this book is to first present some data from the Internet research and follow that up with a scientific study or explanation as to why we do what we do on the Internet. Unfortunately, there isn’t always a great correlating study, in which case the insights seem either forced or nonexistent. Relatedly, I think that the authors are loath to explore the possible connections between social norms and our sexual tastes. In some instances, they’ll acknowledge that a scientific study had varied results among countries, however, such distinctions are not explored in much depth. It seems that the authors’ position is broadly tethered to the idea that our sexual tastes can’t be influenced by cultural cues. However, in supporting that assertion, the authors rely heavily on an extreme case wherein a male who had his penis burned off as a baby had his genitalia converted to a vagina and was raised as a girl. Unsurprisingly, the effort was a spectacular failure and the person had gender identity issues their whole life. But to say that since that experiment failed, we should conclude that we don’t incorporate social cues into our sexual desire framework seems to be a big stretch.

My other complaint is that despite all of the data presented in the book, the authors choose to dumb down the male/female desire mechanisms to an ‘Elmer Fudd – ready, fire, aim’ metaphor for males and a ‘Miss Marple’s Detective Agency’ metaphor for females. Using the Elmer Fudd and Miss Marple shorthand throughout serves to minimize any sort of nuance that may exist and points the reader in the direction of traditional male/female stereotypes that we all already know. Again, it made me feel like I wasn’t sure if I was reading a serious study on sexual behavior or a book that confirms the suspicion that all men are on the hunt for ‘wascilly lady wabbits.’

Lastly, as I was reading this book, I realized that it was the first time that I was offered a large amount of data from the Internet that was presented as fact on par with a clinical research trial. I can see the benefits of such research, especially on the topic of sex, where what a person might tell you in an official questionnaire with a researcher could be wildly different than what their desires actually reflect based on their Internet behavior. Still, I have some trouble when a wall post on a porn video serves as validation of a theory being advanced. But maybe that’s what research is going to start looking like in the Internet era. And if that ends up happening, a question that we’ll need to think about more is, which version of a person is their ‘true self?’ Is it the person that shows up to answer a questionnaire in a psych lab? Is it the person that anonymously trolls Internet message boards while in the privacy of their basement? The person posting on their Facebook wall? It’s probably none of the above, but the ways in which those selves are different from our true selves may vary greatly. All in all, I think that this book was a good first stab at meshing the new and the traditional in terms of research, however, in retrospect, I’d probably rather wait for the sequel.