Neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam may seem like unlikely authors of what is being called the most systematic and comprehensive study of human sexual desire to date. Then again, Alfred Kinsey was an entomologist and zoologist before he pioneered the field of sexology. What all three men have in common is an ability to collect, categorize, synthesize, and present unfathomable amounts of information in a language the rest of us can understand. While Kinsey surveyed 18,000 middle class Americans in the 1950s, Ogas and Gaddam analyzed the anonymous Internet activities of a hundred million men and women from around the globe. The result, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, is a straightforward, entertaining, astounding, and sometimes shocking look at the nature of sexual desire.
* * * Shawn Alff: A Billion Wicked Thoughts begins by pointing out how most research on human sexuality is flawed because sample pools are often limited to college undergraduates. Your research is based on the premise that when given the anonymity of something like the Internet, our true sexual natures are revealed. Were you at all worried that by studying the anonymous activities of Internet users, you were examining sexuality in an artificial environment? Are the desires we explore in secrecy true reflections of our sexual natures?
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2011.
