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Arch Sex Behav (2013) 42:11011103 DOI 10.1007/s10508-013-0170-5
BOOK REVIEW
ABillionWickedThoughts:WhattheInternetTellsUsAboutSexual Relationships
By Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. New York, Penguin, 2011, 416 pp., $16.00 (paperback)
Paul L. Vasey Miranda Abild
Published online: 30 July 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Forty years ago, psychologist Kenneth Gergen conducted a bold social psychology experiment that would have a snowballs chance in hell of passing muster with a contemporary ethics committee (Gergen, Gergen, & Barton, 1973). Gergen wanted to know what people did under conditions of extreme anonymity.Tondout,heconstructedanexperimentwhereby 4 men and 4 women entered a small, padded room, one at a time. The participants did not know each other before the experiment and were kept in isolation prior to entering the room. Once the participants entered the room, they were free to do whatever they liked. There were no instructions and no rules. At the end of the experiment, the participants left the room one at a time without learning each others identities. What makes the experiment so interesting was that the room, itself, was pitch dark, providing the participants complete anonymity.
To say the least, the results were astonishing. Approximately 90 % of the subjects intentionally touched someone else. A third of the subjects began kissing one another. Overall, 80 % of the men and women reported feelings of sexual excitement. With their anonymity ensured by the veil of darkness, the participants expressed behaviors free of the shackles of social constraints.
Intheirbook,ABillionWickedThoughts,OgasandGaddam use Gergens darkened room as a metaphor for the Internet. Astheynote,theInternetisamuchlargerversionoftheGergen experiment, ensuring anonymity for billions of individuals and freeing them to act upon their sexual desires unbound by social judgment. In effect, [b]illions of people around the
planet are free to satisfy their most secret erotic desires while remaining hidden and anonymous within the Internets virtual darkness(p. 9).
Ogas and Gaddam tap the Internets vast information stores to unearth expressions of male and female mating psychology, which remain unltered by social expectations. To do so, they used Dogpile.com, a search meta-engine that combines search results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other major search engines. They analyzed approximately 52 million different sexual searches between 2009 and 2010. These searches were performed by approximately 2 million people. Two thirds of the searches were from individuals...