Straight women were physically aroused by everything, including the bonobos, but their self-reports often contradicted what the sensors measured.Ĭhivers’s study shed light on the failure to produce a “female Viagra”: while increased blood flow to the penis is sufficient to incite a man to sexual desire, increased blood flow alone will not produce feminine desire. Straight men were physically aroused by videos of straight sex, but not by videos of gay sex or bonobos mating, and their self-reports confirmed what the sensors measured. Since men’s only concern is with the biological fitness of women for childbearing, everything they need to know to feel desire is visible to the naked eye: “The shapely curves of female ornamentation indicate how many years of healthy childbearing remain across a woman’s entire lifetime.” Male desire is “solitary, quick to arouse, goal-targeted, driven to hunt.” That’s why there was a nearly perfect concordance between male reports of sexual arousal and evidence of physical arousal measured by a device attached to participants’ genitals in a well-known study by the sex researcher Meredith Chivers.īy contrast, Chivers found that a lot more blood flowed to the genitals of her female subjects than their self-reports would suggest. “Men’s brains are designed to objectify females,” Ogas and Gaddam write.
“Cheating wives,” “gay” and “penises” all made the top 10. The authors organized those searches into a ranked hierarchy of categories. “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” promises to reveal “the truth about what men and women secretly desire - and why.” Ogas and Gaddam, cognitive neuroscientists who met as graduate students at Boston University, analyzed a year’s worth of terms entered into the search engine aggregator Dogpile between July 2009 and July 2010, and found that 55 million of the roughly 400 million terms were sexual in nature. That ultimate pornographic image in particular, the authors write, “is an erotical illusion that merges the visual with the psychological” and that juxtaposes “three sexual cues within a single stimulus: the penis (a visual cue), the ejaculation (which may be a sperm competition cue or possibly a cued interest in some men), and - most important - the woman’s emotional reaction, which may be a psychological cue of female pleasure (if she expresses delight) or a psychological cue of sexual submission (if she expresses surprise or dismay).” And you thought it was all just masturbation. The enigma of the Gioconda smile the technologically engineered “craveability” of fast food the alluring, “alpha among alphas” quality of the paranormal hero that climactic moment beamed to watchers on a hundred million laptop screens: all rely on the artful manipulation of our brains. Each of these works of human creativity, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam write in “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” exploits perceptual trickery to arouse and gratify our desires. The concentrated essence of this curious book is contained in its 11th chapter, which attempts to explain what the “Mona Lisa” has in common with Chicken McNuggets, vampire novels and the concluding scene of most pornographic videos.