Web Searches: Passing curiosity or Genuine Interest? .::. A Billion Wicked Thoughts

Shemales, Bestiality, and Granny Porn: Mere Curiosity or Genuine Sexual Interest?

WARNING: This article contains language that some may consider offensive or obscene.

When people hear about some of the popular yet unconventional sexual interests described in our research—such as shemales, grannies, and bestiality—they usually respond with one of these reactions:

Unlike me, fans of those interests are deviants!
Unlike me, fans of those interests are sex addicts!
Like me, those people aren’t really interested in that stuff—they’re merely curious, like visiting a circus freakshow.

So how can we distinguish whether a Web search for one of these erotic genres reflects mere curiosity or genuine interest?

The America Online dataset contains the individual search histories made by 657,427 men and women over a period of three months. A cursory examination of these search histories often reveals that individuals search for the same unconventional interest week after week:

At some point, such repeated searches must surely reflect a genuine erotic urge. After all, searches for shemales occur more frequently than searches for butts, fellatio, and Asians: Are men really spending more time satisfying their curiosity than their libido?

But we don’t need to settle for a cursory examination of search histories. Using the entire set of AOL search data, we can compare the pattern of searches for Paris Hilton Sex Tape (presumably reflecting curiosity) with searches for NBA and lottery (presumably recurring interests) and searches for three types of porn frequently claimed to reflect “mere curiosity”:

We see that about three fourths of people who search for Paris Hilton sex tape only search for it once—a convincing indication of curiosity. When it comes to searches for lottery—presumably a recurring interest—about half of searchers search for it once. This is the same fraction of people who search for granny porn and shemale porn only once. In other words, shemale porn and granny porn are probably not curiosity. It’s also worth observing that bestiality searchers search for bestiality more often than NBA searchers search for the NBA. Note: See Addendum for more about search and browsing patterns.

But even those users who search for unusual sexual interests just once might be more than curious:

The specificity of the search suggests it is not mere curiosity, even though they only made one “shemale” search in a three month period.

There are a few other sources of evidence that unconventional sexual searches reflect interest and not curiosity:

The popularity of these unconventional searches corresponds to the popularity of websites devoted to these interests.
There are significant numbers of purchases of memberships to porn sites devoted to these unconventional interests. Are men willing to pay $29.99 and have World-Shemale.com appear on their credit card bill just to satisfy their curiosity?
There are significant numbers of erotic stories written about these unconventional interests. Reading an erotic story is a greater commitment than clicking on an image, and writing such a story is an even greater commitment.
Many free sites devoted to unconventional interests have message boards where one can read fans’ appreciation for the content.

Our brains appear to be designed to react to unfamiliar sexual interests with fear, repulsion, or dismissal. This natural sexual intolerance probably evolved to keep us focused on our own reproduction-driven interests during long prehistoric eras when a sexual interest in animals, post-menopausal women, or unusual sexual anatomy was a genetic dead end. But in an age of democracy, digital technology, and easy birth control, these biological mechanisms of instinctive intolerance are obsolete.

Western democracies have slowly overcome religious and racial intolerance. But overcoming sexual intolerance appears to be the most difficult battle of all.

Addendum: Browsing Patterns

A commenter on our Psychology Today blog asked: “If somebody had a recurring interest in something, like the weather forecast, wouldn’t they search for it once and then bookmark the site they found which delivered best on what they wanted, thus obviating the need for any future searches, and therefore becoming subsequently invisible to the methods being employed...”

Search behavior is quite varied and doesn’t always align with our expectations. The single most frequently searched term is facebook — a lot of users seem to use the search bar as the navigational toolbar.

It is important to note that users are also exploring content belonging to a particular search category and don’t necessarily want it all from the same website, like they might for a weather forecast.

Here are NBA related searches and the visited websites of an individual in the AOL dataset:

Searchers often repeatedly seek out what are considered common interests. The fact that “youth” is the single most common category undermines the argument that people search for content that isn’t easily available.

Here are the searches made and the websites subsequently visited by another individual:

The greatest advantage of looking at vast amounts of behavioral data in this fashion is that it allows us to get a raw, unfiltered glimpse of what people seek out, without letting our intuitions or assumptions coloring the picture. The data reveals truths that are ideology-free.