I’ve recently finished reading “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” by Ogi Ogas PhD. and Sai Gaddam PhD. and I’d have to place it next to The 48 Laws of Power as a seminal work for the Game community. It statistically confirms a lot of Game principles, but at the same time it will challenge more than a few. Highly recommended.
As expected it appears that yesterday’s Women’s Physical Standards post drew a bit of consternation from both sides of the aisle. Women predictably want to cling to what’s always been a useful canard for their victimhood psychology (i.e. men fixate on specific physical perfection) and ‘community’ men, predictably, want to point out that it’s not JUST looks that gets a guy laid. One of the most sacred cows of the Game community is the ‘Game trumps Looks’ debate. Nothing inspires a more heated discourse than when making physical comparisons and drawing conclusions from observable events and behaviors in this regard. But that’s not what I was getting at in yesterday’s post.
Oh, I’ll get to that in time, but what I was driving at in that topic was dispelling the popularized notion (as lamented by the Body Shop’s and many more positive body image ad campaigns) that men have some twisted, media-fueled physical ideal that women can’t possibly attain and that, statistically, it’s really women who have a far more rigid standard for male beauty than they’ll ever publicly admit. Understandably this makes guys squirm for the same reason it makes women squirm; trying to live up to a rigid physical standard.
On the flip side of that coin, I’m fully aware that there are a host of other factors that influence a woman’s overall attraction for a man, (the classics of status, power, affluence, Game, and Alpha dominance come to mind) but I was comparing the isolated physical standards for both genders. I also understand that attraction doesn’t happen in a vacuum, however, raw physical arousal – the precursor to a more protracted degree of attraction – often does. George Clooney and Johnny Depp are sex symbols, but Bill Gates (younger, richer and more powerful than either of them) is not. Women’s chances of marrying any of them is infinitesimal, however, when women fantasize about sex, it’s with the good looking guys, because all they’re thinking about is sex from an arousal perspective.
Now, all that makes for a good response in the comments thread, but I wouldn’t have composed any of this into a fresh post had it not been for another related issue I’ve been recently debating. And this is the issue of how easy-access contemporary pornography has become the greatest catalyst in changing the inter-gender landscape since birth-control and the sexual revolution.
Has high quality ubiquitous porn changed Generation Y men? This may seem like a stretch, but in the same way that women want to cling to the idea that men harbor impossibly high physical standards, the comparative argument holds that women also apply this template to the influence of pornography on men’s sexual appetites. Feminine-centric porn complaints generally lump all porn into the same stereotypical profile. By ignoring the overwhelming variety of porn that any given man may “consume”, the sympathetic reader (mostly concerned women and their white knight sycophantic men) are left to presume “porn” means the unattainable, blonde hair, blue eyed, perky-boobed, perfect bodied girl in nothing but high heels and ready to take the money shot in her mouth. Porn hating women love this caricature of porn because, in this characterization, it’s just as unattainable for them to live up to as it is for most men to actually experience. Needless to say the latent purpose of maintaining this opinion is ensuring a position of sexual selection based on feminine-centric criteria. Biomechanics are a bitch, and reducing the threat of sexual competitors provably outperforming them by example (in porn) is increasingly more imperative as access to the “performances” become more easily available. The logic is one of ignorance is bliss; the less exposure a man has to sexual variety the more valuable her sexual agency becomes to him.
All one need do is look at the sex category sections of any free video porn site (Pornhub, Red Tube, Tube 8, etc.) to see what a parody this really is. Porn’s not just the 80’s standard blonde and brunette in a threesome with some random guy rented from the VHS store. It’s amateurs, asians, lesbians, interracial, orgy, fatties, skinnys, matures, teens, etc. Just name the body type, sex act, racial profile, age, hair color, etc. and there is a pornographic niche for it (Rule 34). Considering the sheer amount of sexual variety available for a myriad of preferences, women bemoaning their inability to “live up to” porn star requirements is ludicrous and indicative of their complete lack of understanding the male sex dynamic. As I stated in yesterday’s post, name the niche and there’s a fan-group ready to bang you.
For the past several decades it’s been a very easy sell for women to characterize porn as degrading women, or setting an impossibly idealized standard of sexual expectation; that is until the rise of digital media and the capacity to empirically track the access to it. A Billion Wicked Thoughts admirably compiles the statistic ‘evidence’, the hard web-trend data of more than a decade, that disproves the idea that porn is ‘one-size-fits-all’. All the self-reporting and biased corollary studies on porn’s influences of the 80’s and 90’s are wiped away in one stroke with the statistically verifiable data of online porn consumption habits – leaving all of us with the question of what were they trying to prove then?
I’ll save the debate on whether porn’s influence is retarding men’s overall maturity by too easily satiating their libido for another thread, but I can’t end this without also pointing out that a great many statistics revealed in this book also contradict more than a few presumed tenets of Game theory. Among those is the same one I’ve just pointed out for women; men have a plethora of sexual tastes and fetishes, not just the “perfect 10”. You simply can’t ignore the statistical variances in men’s appetites for MILFs, Matures, Asians, Big Asses, Chubbys, etc. and come to the conclusion that there is a one-size-fits-all sexual type preference for men. You can argue as to why men opt for these variances, but you can’t argue they don’t opt for them.
“Considering the sheer amount of sexual variety available for a myriad of preferences, women bemoaning their inability to “live up to” porn star requirements is ludicrous and indicative of their complete lack of understanding the male sex dynamic.”
Exactly.
There is a niche for every type of female, but *not* for every type of man.
“Biomechanics are a bitch,
The term “biomechanics” refers to sprained ankles and broken necks. Maybe you mean “biology”.
It’s a reference to the movie Blade Runner. “Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn’t let you into heaven.”
Anyway, give me a SuicideGirl, GodsGirl, or Burning Angel any day of the week over a Playboy.
My philosophy is, if you want to see what a man REALLY likes – look at who he chooses as his LTR companion, wife, mother of his children and g/f. Not who he is viewing in online porn. There may be a “niche” for sexual fetishes for women and not men but as I said in the other post what women desire and fantasize about and what they end up liking are two different things. Men who don’t fit the aesthetic profile of what most women sexually desire can make up for this in other areas with personality and MASCULINITY… Read more »
Neecy, what I find interesting about virtually all your (really most women’s) responses is that your default is to take any factual instance and build it into a large whole that presumes the female imperative is the correct frame for everyone. In two posts now you’ve completely missed the point that what I’m getting at is the physical, arousal response. The the goal is what arouses him, not the long term planning that implicates him in being the father, husband, man role you would cast him in without a forethought as to if what serves the feminine would ever be… Read more »
Here in small town England I see plenty of couples walking down the street holding hands where the woman is an oldie or a fatty.
There are more “conventionally ugly” couples than “conventionally hot” ones.
I’m just guessing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s true in small town USA as well.
Rollo, I understand the arousal part, but could it be that arousal of men for a variety of physical aesthetics in women has more to do with the fact that hormonally men are biologically wired to be sexually aroused more and have more needs of sexual release more often on average than women? This would mean that men NEED TO have a wider net of what they consider sexually arousing and attractive while being less discriminatory b/c they are so often in need of sex. It would be more of a sexual survival technique for men to develop a wider… Read more »
Interestingly, food for thought, science shows women actually have broader arousal patterns than men and are turned on by anything sexual, but have less conscious awareness of it. You will be turned on by watching monkeys having sex, but I doubt you would know that when watching monkeys have sex; you can be shown lesbian pornography and most women will deny being aroused, even though all are aroused. In contrast, we men have straightforward awareness of when we are or are not aroused.
Ya, I’ve mentioned this before, and sometimes people ask me for the studies about this, but I misplaced the links. Do you know of them, or some good google keywords?
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/haselton/papers.html
One reason I have Dr. Martie Hasselton in my link list. She’s an experimental behaviorist, with an emphasis on evo-psych. You won’t find a more stringently vetted experiment researcher.
Thanks Rollo. She has quite a lot of research listed there. Do you know offhand the name of the study that measures pussy moisture while showing girls pictures?
It’s called a plethysmograph device.
The first experimental study was done by Dr. Meredith Chivers.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/06/030613075252.htm
“Considering the sheer amount of sexual variety available for a myriad of preferences, women bemoaning their inability to “live up to” porn star requirements is ludicrous and indicative of their complete lack of understanding the male sex dynamic.”
They may be more worried about what we expect them to do rather than what we expect them to be…
Still, you could also ask what effect their romantic fiction has on their expectations of men.
Neecy- “My philosophy is, if you want to see what a man REALLY likes – look at who he chooses as his LTR companion, wife, mother of his children and g/f. Not who he is viewing in online porn.” Brilliant. You just employed both projection and the apex fallacy in one litte comment. Overwhelmingly, women are the gatekeepers, and therefore the choosers. Only the highest SMV men (no more than 10% of the male population, perhaps less, IMO) are able to truly choose the sort of mate which they are most attracted to. The rest of men settle for whichever… Read more »
Neecy’s comment also demonstrates the maxim that, to women, what a man is and should be must meet certain predetermined female criteria, and not what the man really, truly is. He needs to fit into her mold and meet her 463 bullet point checklist. No thought is given to what he wants or needs.
I’m sorry but how did you pull this from what i was saying? Not true. I never suggested anything of the sort.
Deep Dish and others, very interesting scientific data about women’s sexuality. very good food for thought as you said. So women are basically HORN DOGS is what I should take from this? lol
Very good blog. But I would have expected a bit more details on this sentence: ” It statistically confirms a lot of Game principles, but at the same time it will challenge more than a few.”
[…] the Beta 80% of them) this fantasy remains just that, a fantasy. In fact, according to the book A Billion Wicked Thoughts most men reserve their sexual fantasies, and consciously limit their extent, for sexual encounters […]