Hot Sex on Tuesday: Erotica and Female Desire

From my soon-to-be-released book, Hot Sex: Over 200 Things You Can Try Tonight!.
Illustration: Benjamin Wachenje

It’s Hot Sex Tuesday, yes!

While yesterday, in not hot sex news, I designated time I invest on cross-country flights to reading about the trashy tabloid gossip I generally enjoy when onboard an aircraft carrier of 737 proportions*, today I’m talking about trashy of a different kind.

Today’s blog post has something to do with what may still be affectionately dubbed trash, but it has a whole lot less to do with gossip. That’s because today’s study is from the book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire. It was blogged about at the Wall Street Journal, which is, in most people’s opinions, a much more credible, less trashy place than OK! or US Weekly.

The facts, while of interest, are not at all surprising and still somehow surprising. It is very heterosexually speaking, for those who prefer a wider gender balance, and it does feed into the stereotype, and reality, that men are of simple means and women of more complex brain structures. And although most of us understand that a certain type of man (the type that has a penis, is sexual and likes women) can get turned on by seeing a woman breathe, burp or bend over, ladies need a little more excitement. Here’s what the authors,  Ogi Ogas (I love that name as something you could scream during sex) and Sai Gaddam (not a bad name either, especially as a curse word), have to say about female sexual desire online:

• Women watch porn, they just don’t pay for it. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the visitors to the major pornography sites are women, however, only 1 in 50 porn-site subscriptions are by women. Even more interesting is that the main billing company for porn sites flags female names as potential fraud since a healthy handful of them demand a refund for reasons of non-consensual purchase.
• Take me to her leader: The Romance Novel as Queen. While women don’t buy porn in the form of “two girls, one cup” (and yes, I know you don’t have to buy that one), 9 out of 10 romance novels are purchased by women. And the romance novel is what has been driving the electronic book boom, with three of the top ten e-books being the type of trash that turns women on.
• Men want to see their actors naked, women want to hang out with the actors . When a man likes a particular actor, he goes online and tries to find her naked. He doesn’t care if she loves to hike or help save the sperm whale, he just wants to see her boobies and box. When a woman likes a particular actor, she’s more likely to find out where he’s hanging in his spare time than how it’s hanging.
• Fan Fiction is popular. The world’s most popular “erotic” site for women is fanfiction.net, a site that, in my opinion, is not easy on the eyes.
• Don’t mess with my erotica. When a guy watches a sexy video he’s likely to remark with comments like “hot” or “horny.” A woman is more likely to probe into the emotional qualities of the characters and the story and dissect it. And if it’s not well done, or believable (when it’s popular character driven content), she will eat it up and spit it out.

For more in-depth coverage above female erotic desire, read The Online World of Female Desire. You can also read about the online study dubbed the Tabloid Reality Index done by the fine folks at Gawker. What did I learn there? Next time I fly I can read a lying sack of trash like  OK! Magazine, or a slightly more accurate bag of bogus like US Weekly. Truth is, I buy whatever’s cheapest.