A BILLION WICKED THOUGHTS by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam is about porn. It’s not directly about sex, physical or otherwise, it’s about PORN as a business. What they have done is brilliant: they “scraped” the records of hits kept by the porn companies for marketing purposes and then sorted them statistically. In addition they did read porn (a lot of it online) and talk to a lot of people in the industry. They captured some interesting and surprising stuff, but it’s important to remember that it was a vertical drill-down interpreted with some early brain neurotheories, convincing as they are. This is our contemporary Kinsey report. The best thing about it is its land mine effect on our hypocritical political, moral and pederastic assumptions. (A pedophile has a sexual love for pre-adolescents, a pederast has a sexual love for adolescents. At least that’s the way I understand the categories.)
There are some things strategically omitted: tentacle porn (oh, shucks), or the impassioned msm combat relationships described by Geoff Mains, accounted for by hormones like serotonin. No sheep jokes or other inter-species adventures. That’s okay. I was already almost overwhelmed trying to assimilate what they were saying. If the readers of “Fifty Shades of Grey” read this book, they may feel sheepish, but they will be more enlightened than they could be by any novel -- perhaps unwillingly.
To give the whole enterprise a light touch, men are modeled as Elmer Fudd, single-minded hunter of "wabbits". (My note: Some men are Trickster rabbits who can NOT be defined nor addressed with baby talk. “Wats” are not discussed.) The women are styled as “Miss Marple,” which is an appellation that has been applied to me, but not in a romantic context. Women want a dossier of info on the significant other. Still, as the themes are explored, they do help keep things clear. Since I was born in 1939, I appreciated learning that there are porn sites called “Granny porn” that get a lot of traffic and that in some cultures it is the grandmothers who have the responsibility of teaching what sex is all about. (How does that work out if they were SF hippies? I’m not passing judgment -- might be very good!)
The beginning point was supplied by another book, written by Donald Symons: “The Evolution of Human Sexuality.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHIQUixjljY He realized that het men and gay men were wired the same way, but simply aimed their Fudd gun at different wabbits. Lesbian women were usually as Marpley as heterosexual women and much of the detection goal of both was to discover who would be good for raising children. The “smoking gun” for women might be a turkey baster but that’s not porn related. These writers claim that campy feather-boa-waving queens are not appealing to gays. Well, then, why do they do it for an audience? Who’s out there? The sexual use of young boys is also ignored except in terms of anthropology. (New Guinea is always way out there.)
Female porn is attached to romantic fiction, the complex elements that play out in exciting stories, most recently fan fiction and most intensely involving supernaturals -- vampires and werewolves. These materials are so close to the surface that once hearing them described, one sees clearly that the elements are everywhere. The more recent and pop-sounding book is “Warrior Lovers” with Catharine Salmon as co-author. I just ordered it from Amazon for a penny. Maybe people don’t want to know what they’re doing. In fact, this copy of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” is a library discard, though it was just published in 2011.
The writers, understandably, seem more convincing when they write about men, so the men sound as though they’re about the same demographic as the authors. Both are “brown” which I consider good, but they’re computer quants which is a little more dubious though it’s the key to the value of their findings. The neurotheory was trailing a bit.
Once I figured out what “slash fiction” is -- a romantic scene between a known character and (backslash) another, usually both male (Kirk/Spock was the first example someone gave me years ago) -- my head went racing off and I had to reread several pages. I’ve been trying to imagine a Steinbeck/Hemingway romantic encounter. Steinbeck is such a warm and open guy, while Hemingway is so ego-involved that it’s hard to get him to recognize there’s someone else in the bar. http://articles.latimes.com/1989-04-09/books/bk-1963_1_john-steinbeck-john-o-hara-hemingway-and-faulkner I did find this excellent place to start. Remington/Russell would be harder to pull off. Why would an old cowboy who hung around in brothels fall in love with a big-bellied Easterner who loved cavalry?
The key to the whole book is the age-old animal struggle for domination or submission, either of which can be a move towards survival, both of which power our stories, even porn. They are tales that change through the ages as the circumstances become new and newer. I was interested to hear that the female romances of the 70’s and 80’s were pretty rough -- the bodices really DID get ripped -- but even if the hero raped the heroine at the beginning of the book, they reconciled as “lovers” later. The authors claim that today women will get indignant if they perceive any injustice or disrespect. Rough sex is evidently passé among the sophisticated these days.
The authors were bemused that men (and those women who were “gazers”) looked at faces, breasts/chests, butts, penises and feet. Universally. Male and female. Small feet are evidently a result of estrogen during gestation. Something else happens in gestation that flips a switch somewhere, causing some male mammals to be gay. It is built in and doesn’t change, but it’s imprintable to some degree by the experiences of the men. The lesbian switch is pretty vague. Both genders have two identifiable brain centers: one for domination and one for submission. They are balanced by hormones in both genders. T turns up the domination, E turns up the submission. Since behavior and incidents affect hormone secretion, there’s plenty of wiggle in the system.
These guys are not biologists so there were a few small blunders. (You cannot take a photo of a vagina because it’s an internal tube, but you can take a photo of a vulva which is the entry part with the ruffles and fur.) What they were going for seems to be the statistical revelations and they did that with huge success without being so dry that their audience began snoring. Concepts here are a dose of a certain kind of reality. Both the fuddy-duddies and the young who consider themselves to be so daring are in for some surprises. The porn here was explicitly self-identified by the computer users themselves -- there’s nothing philosophical about defining it or accounting for it as a phenomenon. The two authors say, “Everyone eats -- what’s on the end of your fork?” Not elegant, but eloquent. Poor bare forkéd creatures that we are.
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