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Nirvana

Par Nirvana,
dans La Taverne

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Alchimi

Alchimi

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Posté

Tiens ça a l'air intéressant. (Y'a un com' amazon qui en fait une critique mi-figue mi-raisin, en faisant remarquer ce qui ressemble à des gros foirages pas scientifiques pour deux sous, genre la moyenne de la taille de la bite chez les homos(!), tout en disant que c'est un bouquin qui vaut la peine d'être lu si on prend les conclusions des auteurs avec un gros grain de sel).

 

edit: la critique en question, que j'ai lu un peu en diagonale: https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Wicked-Thoughts-Internet-Relationships/dp/0452297877

The book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, is neither as good nor as bad as its polarized readers maintain. Its real flaw is that it starts from a very reasonable - intriguing, even - analysis of a research project and then unfortunately overextends.

Before we throw away the baby with the bath, let's look at what is worthwhile about it. Knowing how hard it is to study human sexuality directly, because of an overwhelming tendency toward preserving our modesty and privacy, the authors decided to study the best available proxy - the internet search patterns for porn subjects by literally millions of people from publicly available aggregate databases of search queries. You have to give them credit for a clever insight - what we are "googling" is as revealing as a million questionnaires, but can be accessed without the time and trouble of sexological data gathering.

From that data come some remarkably interesting insights, such as:
* Although the cultural meme, "Rule 34," (There is a porn site for every taste and twist imaginable) may be true, 95% or more of porn searches congregate around less than a dozen, mostly vanilla, themes.
* Men and women, in broad generalities, have hugely different tastes in and appetites for porn, but homosexuals and heterosexuals do NOT have the significant differences: gay and straight porn for men are almost exact thematically duplicates of each other, and in the same proportions.
* Interest in feet may be considered a fetish, but at least on the internet it is so common as to be on par with interest in, um, more directly-involved body parts.
* Predictably to anyone who has observed the social preoccupation with youth, porn about the barely-legal is the most popular theme of all, accounting for over half of all porn use. Surprisingly, however, porn about sex with those a generation or two older (moms, dads, grannies and grandpas) is popular enough to make the top ten topics.
* Porn featuring hermaphroditic transexuals is popular, but appeals almost exclusively to straight identifying males. It holds little interest for its previously presumed audience of gay men.

These revelations from our unguarded, anonymous internet use are fascinating. They constitute the first broad survey of sexual interests since Kinsey. It was a clever insight that internet records could be used to provide a 50,000 foot overview of sexual tastes and preferences. When the authors stick to reporting the actual results from their research results they make a genuinely valuable contribution to the literature.

Unfortunately, they are not content to leave it there. They not only report results, they spend well over half of their time attempting to explain why we like what we like sexually. Here is where they stumble badly. For each of the billion wicked thoughts they seem to offer a billion random speculations.

It is somewhat understandable, given the internet source of their data, they would use the internet as their major research tool for theoretical explanations of their findings, but they seem so gullible and unscientific in the acceptance and repetition of every crackpot theory placed on a web page that the mind reels.

On the least offensive end of the spectrum they borrow low-level metaphors as explanations: In sexual styles men are like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbit, while women are like Miss Marple playing detective. Okay, sexist oversimplification, but taken at the broadest level, not that far from the (far from uncontroversial, but standard) explanations provided by evolutionary psychologists we read everyday in the mainstream press.

They build up from there, however, into the scientifically unacceptable. For example, they build an entire chapter around a citation of a single survey as the definitive basis for their blanket statement that gay men have longer sexual equipment than their straight counterparts, without so much as a indication that maybe average male penis size is a controversial topic, let alone not easily determined. (When you turn to the footnote where you expect to find some context about this hugely speculative and controversial finding, you instead get a helpful additional that contends gay penises are also thicker.) They spin that into a fanciful statement about "possible" hormonal explanations for homosexuality - explanations that were first conclusively disproven by Kinsey over 70 years ago now. That devolves into speculation that teenage males somehow "imprint" on their first sexual object like baby ducks on the first moving thing they see as their mothers, (The authors' horrendously misguided metaphor, not mine) and if they get it wrong they turn into homosexuals. How one does wish that they would not have filled the book with so many "maybe, possibly, and potentially" statements, or at least, that once introduced they would not henceforth be treated as social scientific certainties.

Baby ducks pale in comparison to the unabashed statement, repeated several times, that gay men are universally more powerfully attracted to straight men than to each other. The "insight" that gay men prefer straight partners comes to the authors not from a study but from the gossipy insight of, literally, "a guy" who told them so.

Women's sexuality is explained through the filter of their general preference for romance novels to truly hardcore porn. The book does eventually look into female use of porn, but because it is so much less common than male use, this is treated as uninformative and passed over quickly. We don't get the granular details of the author's study, which would have been interesting even if it was less reliable because it is examining a minority taste. Surely, however, even if the authors were going to go the route of examining verbal, as opposed to visual forms for females, explicit erotica is the proper comparison. Their taste in novels ought to be directly compared to male literary tastes, not to men's pornographic interests. When they do get around to examing a popular form of erotic writing - fan fiction - they stumble all around another fascinating insight that a lot of this amateur erotica depicts male-male sexual relationships between pre-created "heterosexual" characters from commercial literature.

Would that they had spent more time on this than venturing on to their most egregious "explanation." When their survey shows that women with an interest in the theme of being sexually dominated, they often do so in combination with specifiers for racial qualifications. Jumping right past the most likely explanations for this - that there is a long, sad history of exoticizing and eroticizing the black penis which is still in play, they simply accept without reflection that men of African decent must have larger equipment and employ it in a more domineering manner.

All of that would be small quibbles if the authors didn't rely almost exclusively on a single snarky, irreverent guide to the "rules" for writing convention-laden romance novels for their complete explanation of female sexuality. Women want to believe they have a "magic hoo-hoo" is one such gem. (To their credit the authors do have a way of spotting a memorable phrase, but seem unaware that many of the best lines they repeat are comic overstatements from witty satirists, not sex researchers.) By the time you finish the chapter postulating that what women want in bed is a vampiric Fabio, you begin to understand where all the "one-star" hostility is coming from.

Despite feeling compelled, myself, to call out some of the worst excesses of this book, I can't say I am sorry I bought it or own it. There is so much that is interesting. It could have been a much, much better book by just sticking to what was revealed by their research without attempting any explanations whatsoever, but while frequently offensive it is far from worthless. Buy it, and pick up more than a few grains of salt from the grocery section at the same time.

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Rincevent

Rincevent

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En fait, le principal reproche qu'on pourrait faire à "A Billion Wicked Thoughts", c'est de commencer à dater. On pourrait faire tellement plus avec les logs des sites du groupe Manwin qu'avec un dump accidentel des logs d'AOL...

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Alchimi

Alchimi

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Posté

En fait, c'est fou, on dirait vraiment une image sortie de l'illustration classique de la SF des annees 40-50's avec des fusées posées sur des astroports. Sauf que là c'est vrai.

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