You're not as kinky as you think: Huge internet sex study reveals what people really want

Scientists have finally found out what makes us horny by looking at what people type into Google when they need a quick fix.

The findings have been published in a new book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, and it's billed as the first massive research in the field of collective sexual identity since the Kinsey Reports in the mid-20th century.

The former MIT scholars (yep, this is real research by proper scientists) have examined one billion online sex-related searches from around the world to find out what users click on when no one else is looking.

The survey is so vast it is viewed by many experts as the most complete analysis of human sexual desires.

So what have they found I hear you ask with nervous excitement?

Among their more surprising findings are:

• Straight men enjoy a wider variety of erotica than imagined, including sites devoted to elderly women and transsexuals.
• Foot fetishes aren’t a deviance; men are evolutionarily wired to look for small feet, which are a sign of high estrogen production, which itself is a sign of fertility.
• Gay men and straight men have nearly identical brains, and their favorite body parts, in order of preference, line up exactly: chests, buttocks, feet.
• Straight men prefer heavy women to thin ones.
• Straight women enjoy reading about and watching romances between two men — it’s not so much about the sex as it is the emotion, think “Brokeback Mountain” whose largest audience were straight women.
• Straight men also have a fascination with other men’s penises, which may be conscious or unconscious.
• Straight men like "cockold" porn where he has to watch another guy have sex with his wife.
• Men fantasize about group sex far more than women and picture more men than women in the action.
• Straight men prefer to watch amateur porn online, and the authors theorize it’s because of perceived authenticity — a fake orgasm, it turns out, may be as disappointing as one in real life.
• One of the most popular and diverse areas of interest in sexuality is domination and submission, with straight women and gay men most interested in the latter role.
• Straight men and women enjoy gay porn.
• Gay men enjoy straight porn in large numbers.

Our most popular sex and porn searches

Interestingly 80% of all internet searches are composed of just 20 interests so it seems we are not as diverse as we think we are!

According to the search engine Dogpile — which provided the authors with search data from Google, Yahoo! and Bing — the Top 10 sex-related searches are variations of these terms:

1. Youth (13.5%)

2. Gay (4.7%)

3. MILFs (4.3%)

4. Breasts (4%)

5. Cheating wives (3.4%)

6. Vaginas (2.8%)

7. Penises (2.4%)

8. (Blocked out in the book — too dirty even for the authors?)

9. Butts (.9%)

10. Cheerleaders (.1%)


According to the book, in 1991 — before the birth of the Internet as we know it — there were fewer than 90 porn magazines published in the US. Today, more than 2.5 million porn sites are blocked by CYBERsitter. In 2008, approximately 100 million men in North America logged on to porn. (Also: One-third of the subscribers to Today’s Christian Women seek out erotica online.)

“Web porn has changed everything,” said Gaddam — including, he theorises “our predispositions long-term.” Whereas once men may not have had access to unique sets of sexual triggers, now that they do, and now that we know large numbers of men are searching for them, perhaps male desire is evolving.

America’s pre-eminent evolutionary psychologist, Donald Symons, a pioneer in the field of human sexuality, isn’t so sure. While he admires the scope of Ogas and Gaddam’s research, he’s not convinced a causal line can be drawn from hard data to human desire — that, for example, the popularity of sites devoted to granny porn and transsexuals is a sign that straight men somehow find these images erotic he told the New York Post.

“One of the first things I asked Ogi about was curiosity versus arousal,” Symons told New York Post. “Ogi is convinced that when people are searching for things, it’s primarily for sexual arousal. I’m not so sure about that. If there was a porn star with three breasts — I bet there would be a zillion hits. Would that be a sign men were suddenly aroused by that? I think not.”

What ever came first - the desire or the cuiosity - the underlying and reassuring thesis, which Ogas and Gaddam believe will be proved correct, is that: There’s no such thing as a sexual deviance.

PHEW! Now send me a pic of your nana's feet...