W;;; ;;; ;;;;;;;;; ;;;;; ;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;; ;;; ;;;;;;;;;, the Internet gives voice to our deepest urges and most uninhibited thoughts. Inspired by the wealth of unfettered expression available online, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, who met as Ph.D. candidates at
Boston University, began plumbing a few chosen search engines (including Dogpile and ;;;)
to create the world’s largest experiment in sexuality in ;;;;. Quietly tapping into a billion
Web searches, they explored the private activities of more than ;;; million men and women
around the world. ;e result is the ;rst large-scale scienti;c examination of human sexuality in more than half a century, since biologist Alfred Kinsey famously interviewed more than
;;,;;; middle-class Caucasians about their sexual behavior and published the Kinsey reports
in ;;;; and ;;;;. ¶ Building on the work of Kinsey, neuroscientists have long made the case
that male and female sexuality exist on di;erent planes. But like Kinsey himself, they have
been hampered by the dubious reliability of self-reports of sexual behavior and preferences as
well as by small sample sizes. ;at is where the Internet comes in. By accessing raw data from
Web searches and employing the help of Alexa—a company that measures Web tra;c and
publishes a list of the million most popular sites in the world—Ogas and Gaddam shine a light
on hidden desire, a quirky realm of lust, fetish, and kink that, like the far side of the moon, has
barely been glimpsed. A sampling of their fascinating results follows.
LESSON ONE
The most influential male cue of all is
chronological. Age dominates sexual
searches, adult Web site content, and
pornographic videos. On Dogpile, terms
describing age are the most frequent
type of adjective in sexual searches,
appearing in one out of every six of them.
When a man’s desire software evaluates
a woman’s appearance, one of the most
prominent criteria is age—and not just
youth, either. Many sexual searches on
Dogpile contain specific ages, such as
“naked 25-year-olds” or “sexy 40-year-
olds.” Though the popularity of adult
women doesn’t quite reach that of teens,
it is worth observing that more men
search for 50-year-olds than search for
19-year-olds. There is a rather shock-
ing number of searches for underage
women, but you may be equally surprised
to discover there is significant erotic
interest in 60- and 70-year-olds. At one
high-traffic porn site, the single most
popular term users enter into the search
engine is mom. On AOL, one out of four
people who searched for sexually attrac-
tive mothers (MILFs) also searched for
teens. Though the total number of granny
searches amounts to less than 8 percent
of the total youth searches, there are
more sexual searches for grannies than
for some common fetishes like spanking.
AGE IS IMPORTANT, BUT YOUTH IS NOT THE ONLY ATTRACTOR
of All Sexual Searchers on Dogpile Adjective Example Search 5. 8 Teen Free non-nude teen video 2.0 Young Young naked waitresses 1. 4 Mom My friend’s hot mom 1. 3 MILF MILF next door 0.5 Grannies Hot nude grannies 0.3 Old Free porn of old women 0.2 Older Busty older women 0.1 Cougar Cougar seductions 0.1 Mature Mature women in bikinis
