A billion wicked thoughts

"A Billion Wicked Thoughts" was written by two young neuroscientists who decided to explore the human sexuality from a scientific point of view, by observing the sexual habits of more than a hundred million people. Yes, that's a lot. They actually observed and analysed the habits of anonymous people watching porn on the Internet, their searching keywords, the frequency, the material, the websites and videos… These insights and statistics enabled them to draw conclusions about today's sexuality.

The researcher Kinsey (if you still haven't watched the movie "Kinsey", I advise yo do asap) was the first person to study sexual behaviour by interviewing 18.000 people in the 50's. Now Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam combined Internet insights and neuroscience to understand better the sexual behaviour of men and women.

On their official website, they say they discovered that: "Men prefer overweight women to underweight women. Women enjoy reading about two heterosexual men having sex. Men often seek erotic videos featuring women in their 50s and 60s. Other than preferring males, gay men have almost identical sexual desires as straight men."

I personally don't really think it's important not to generalise. I'm sure these results are true, but the most important are not the results themselves but the acknowledgement of different ways of experiencing sexuality between men and women. Mainstream porn is not the representation of everybody's fantasies and it is a good thing to have a look at what real people like you and I actually like.

They also go further by describing the differences between female and male sexuality: "Just like the hard-wired taste cues on your tongue–sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter–humans have hard-wired sexual cues. But though men and women share the same taste cues, their sexual cues are very different. And they work differently: a single cue triggers arousal in the male brain, but women's brains require multiple cues to become aroused.  Men's brains form their sexual interests during adolescence and rarely change, while women's sexual interests are dynamic and change frequently throughout their lives. In men, physical arousal and psychological arousal are united, while in women, psychological arousal is separated from physical arousal."

If you're interested in this study, you can already read the first chapter of the book online or buy it.