A Billion Wicked Thoughts: Intro: Fifteen Years Later
The World's Largest and Most Transformative Research Ever Conducted on Human Sexuality, Updated and Illuminated
The study of desire has never been for the faint of heart.
.Marta Meana, sex scientist.1 THE RESEARCH
It’s been 15 years since Dr. Sai Gaddam and I, mathematical neuroscientists, launched the research into human sexuality that would become A Billion Wicked Thoughts.
This series of articles is both retrospective—looking back over our groundbreaking research from a deeper and broader perspective, and timely—putting contemporary culture into context and identifying shocking trends in the ongoing transformation of global human sexuality.
Though I will be recapping significant content from our 2010 book, there will also be much that is completely new:
New analyses and interpretations of our old data.
A new emphasis on individual sexuality, where our book focuses on human sexuality in the aggregate.
A more extensive exploration of the neural dynamics of the human sexual brain, using the very latest mathematical models of perception, attention, feeling, and consciousness.
An examination of how human sexual behavior has been transformed—and is transforming—into something new and unprecedented in the history of our species, and the implications of these radical transformations for individual sexual fulfillment.
A special emphasis on autism. How autism played such an important role in the execution of our research, and more importantly, an explanation of why autistic folks often experience gender issues.
Dr. Gaddam and I set out to answer two specific questions:
What do men and women find sexually arousing?
And Why?
.2 OUR IRREPLICABLE WINDOW OF DATA.
We gathered a massive and unprecedented quantity of data about the global population’s sexual behavior. Our research was like going from studying astronomy using a pair of binoculars (oh look! Jupiter has four moons!) to using the James Webb telescope (oh look! A black hole on the far side of the universe!)
Before our research, the most comprehensive study of human desire ever conducted was Alfred Kinsey’s research in the 1940s and 50s. Roughly eighteen thousand men and women who were primarily educated, middle-class Caucasians. Kinsey’s survey data consisted of recollections the subjects chose to share, rather than verifiable information or direct observation.
We moved science forward from the 1950s by analyzing detailed data on the sexual behavior of more than a billion humans. Here’s the primary data sets we sifted:
Web searches (Dogpile; ~400 mil; AOL; Excite; Google; Yandex, 12.5 mil; EntireWeb, 17 mil)
Individual search histories (AOL, ~650K users)
Website traffic (Alexa, 1 million sites; Quantcast; Compete)
Website names (~42K names)
Erotic stories (Literotica, ~550K stories; ASSTM, nifty, ~100K stories; fictionmania, Hindi)
Erotic fan fiction (fanfiction.net, 570,596 stories; adultfanfiction.net, 147,567 stories)
Digitized romance novels (10,344 novels published between 1983 and 2008)
Delicious tags (~450K bookmarks)
Erotic images and erotic videos (fantasti.cc, PornHub, many others)
Personal sex seeking ads (Craigslist, ~5 million ads)
Online dating site survey and user data (OKCupid, ~6.4 million users)
Adult site-specific proprietary data on user behavior (PornHub, ssh.com, wasteland.com, others)
Credit card processing data (CCBill*)
Other niche data (Webcam sites, adult star details, pirated porn, others)
Fifteen years on, it’s now possible to say that our research will never be replicated. That may sound like hype, but here’s why I make such an audacious-sounding claim. Though we certainly didn’t know it at the time, we conducted our research during a one-of-a-kind window of opportunity, in three different ways:
One: We conducted our research before social media and contemporary privacy norms got established. Commercial websites and businesses shared proprietary data with us—or released data to the public—that would never get shared today, for justifiable fear of lawsuits and public pushback.
Two: We conducted our research during a major transition point in the development of sexual content and sexual commerce on the Internet. At the time, the original business model for selling erotic content online was still in effect: the subscription model. There were tens of thousands of sites devoted to a diversity of specific sexual tastes that earned money from monthly subscriptions. This model has gone extinct, but we gathered rich data on it at its peak.
The subscription model was wiped out by the model that remains dominant today: the tube sites. Emulating the nascent success of YouTube, dozens of sites had just started springing up as we conducted our research that offered huge amounts of free video content. Though the biggest tube sites have survived to today, they’ve also undergone massive changes since we conducted our research—changes that make it harder to study sexuality and that are altering human sexuality, as we’ll see.
We collected data on both the old business model and the new one.
Three: Most vitally of all, when we conducted our research, the human species was moving their sexuality online for the very first time. It was a sexuality that had been formed offline, all around the planet. Homo sapiens had already developed their sexual interests and proclivities out in the “real world.” The data we collected was a reflection of this offline sexual nature, made digital for the very first time.
However, ever subsequent generation has and will develop their sexual identity through engagement with the Internet. Through tube sites and story sites and ebooks and webcam sites and AI-generated content and lots and lots of social media. This is the biggest change of all since we conducted our research: the human race has established a closed loop of sexual development, where young people develop their sexuality online and then feed that sexuality back online in an endless spiral.
We managed to acquire massive data on what human sexuality looked like “in the raw” before we were transformed by the all-encompassing influence of the digital world. We obtained a very-high-resolution snapshot of real-world human sexuality before it became, forevermore, online sexuality.
.3 NO POLITICS, NO AGENDAS
I am apolitical, without any agenda other than using math and data to illuminate the neural dynamics of autism, consciousness, and the human brain. My autism impairs my ability to engage in tribal thinking: a boon for a sex researcher, as I have no personal interest in benefiting or undermining one tribe over another.
(And no, I will not be voting in the upcoming election.)
Human sexuality does not conform to any ideology. The truth of human desire violates tenets held by liberals and conservatives. It’s far more important to me to provide readers—especially autistic readers—with accurate, unbiased information about the operation of the brain. I am no culture warrior, which is why I keep delaying writing this series! I don’t wish to serve as fodder for any faction’s claims: the truth is far weirder, more subtle, and more complicated than any politics.
My only intention is to educate and inform. To provide you with facts—massive, detailed, comprehensive facts. To illuminate the shadows of ignorance and shame that perpetually haunt human attraction and desire.
And I want to help autistic folks understand why their own experience of sexuality and gender is sometimes different from others’.
Buckle up, because this’ll be one wild ride. By the end of it, I can promise you one thing: you’ll understand the nature of human desire with a clarity you never thought possible.
NEXT SEX ARTICLE: A Billion Wicked Thoughts [1]: What is the difference between Women and Men? Sexually?