What Internet Searches Reveal About Human Desire 224
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."
Fake "Science" (Score:5, Informative)
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 [journalfen.net]
Another roundup [livejournal.com]
SurveyFail (Score:2, Informative)
Suspiciously uncontroversial data (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Fake "Science" (Score:4, Informative)
The "father of neuroscience", Ramon Y Cajal [wikipedia.org], 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.