by Ogi Ogas
Alexa is a company that measures traffic to different Web sites through the use of its Alexa toolbar. Alexa publishes a list of the million most popular Web sites in the world. According to our analysis, 42,337 of these Web sites were adult sites in March 2010, or about 4 percent of all sites. We’ll call this set of the most popular adult sites in the world the Alexa Adult List.
Out of the 42,337 sites on the Alexa Adult List, 313 are granny sites. In fact, there’s an active and well-defined community of granny porn enthusiasts, with sites such as GILF Porn, Tube Granny, and Granny Rides Again. The popularity of GILFs presents a serious challenge for evolutionary science. A broad body of research has demonstrated that men prefer smooth skin to wrinkles and long, lustrous hair to short, gray frizz. What might be going on with all these searches for sexy women of a certain age?
Two countries boasting the highest interest in granny porn are Kenya and England. In Kenya, the “rules of sexual shame” encourage young people to discuss sexual matters with grandparents. Among the Kisii, the grandmother is often the confidante of her grandchildren regarding sexual experiences and sexual technique. In fact, for many Kisii boys, their first acquisition of sexual knowledge from a woman comes from an older woman.
Following a somewhat different pattern, the United Kingdom features a widespread boarding school culture involving strict rules, corporal punishment, and severe, elderly matrons. “There’s a lot of interest in older ladies from the Brits because when a lot of them were schoolboys they were spanked or slapped or pinched by a schoolmarm,” explains a longtime adult industry veteran. “It might have been their first intimate contact with a woman.” We’ll explore these cultural possibilities further in the next chapter.
Some of the interest in older women may simply be due to their greater availability. On the Web site Granny Sex Forum, a user named LoveSelsie describes where he goes to pick up GILFs: “WalMart is very close to my home so it is common for me to visit the store almost daily. Some time ago, I noticed a new greeter at the door. She was about 5 foot 5 inches tall and just a little fluffy. Her hair was gray, short and straight. She was a very appealing lady and I wanted to get to meet her.” It’s worth observing that LoveSelsie focuses on the visual attractiveness of GILFs, as do many other granny fans.
Even though there are sizable male audiences for both moms and grannies, youth remains the empress of the Internet. Youth is the number one sexual interest by a wide margin on search engines in Russia, Japan, Europe, and India. On the Alexa Adult List, there are 2,462 adult sites that feature youth, compared to 1,237 sites that feature MILFs or mature women. In Web site names, “Teen” is a prefix or suffix applied to just about every interest imaginable: CandyCoatedTeens.com, TeenSnow.com, FineArtTeens.com, DrunkTeenParty.com, DoctorTeen.com.
“Legal teen content has been a consistent earner in the adult industry,” observes Stephen Yagielowicz. “It’s the most competitive niche, with the lowest conversion [to paid subscription] rates. But it’s also got the highest traffic. If you throw up a site with young women, you’re guaranteed plenty of eyeballs. But with so much competition, you certainly aren’t guaranteed profit.”
THE MYTHIC APPEAL OF SKINNY
“Essentially the fashion world sees toothpicks toppling under the weight of their false lashes as attractive,” blogs Claire L on the fbomb Web site. “Arms must be willowy, stomachs trim and God forbid your thighs touch . . . and all for the convenience and pleasure of the male population.”
A recent Girl Scouts survey found that almost nine out of ten girls between thirteen and seventeen say they feel pressured by the fashion and media industries to be skinny. It’s true that many magazines often feature women with a lower-than-average body mass index (BMI), but these magazines—such as Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and InStyle—target women, not men. The porn that men seek out in the privacy of their laptops tells a different story—one supported by male visual cues rather than women’s fashion.
Like youth, a woman’s body size is another cue that appears to be an innate trigger of male arousal. Adjectives describing body size (such as “chubby” and “thin”) are the third most frequent category of adjectives appearing in Dogpile searches. Are most of these searches seeking the slender bodies of cover models? For every search for a “skinny” girl, there are almost three searches for a “fat” girl.
On the Web, many men are fans of BBW, which stands for Big, Beautiful Women. On the Alexa Adult List, there are more than 504 adult sites explicitly dedicated to heavy ladies (such as Fat Tube, Sugar Fat Girls, and Hippo Girls), and only 182 explicitly dedicated to skinny ones (such as Skinny Teens Naked). There are also more than 150 nonerotic BBW dating networks, such as Large and Lovely, Large Passions, and Chubby Fishing.
The women on adult BBW sites have very large and round breasts, large and curvy hips, and large and round butts. Indeed, the overall impression is one of supersized visual cues of femininity. “It’s simply better when there’s more,” explains a thirty-one-year-old natural gas engineer and BBW fan from central Pennsylvania. “Tits are great, why wouldn’t I want more? An ass is great, why wouldn’t I want more? It’s just nice to be able to really feel a woman there with you instead of trying to search for even a bit of some skeletal girl’s arm or leg to hold on to when you’re having sex. Bigger girls will have more fun, and will work twice as hard to meet the standards of the skinny girls most people find attractive.”
Nevertheless, though the popularity of chubby sites is indisputable, it’s true that the majority of women in mainstream porn are skinnier than average. We analyzed the average BMI and weight of 202 popular American porn actresses under age thirty. In addition, psychologists Martin Voracek and Maryanne Fisher analyzed the bodies of mainstream European porn actresses. The following table compares the BMI and weights of these porn stars with other women.
American porn actresses have an average weight and BMI that is below the average for all American women ages 20–29, but still remain within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s healthy range. European porn actresses dip just below healthy.
Many sex scientists believe that women’s waist-to-hip ratios are a visual cue for men. Some research suggests that men around the world find a specific waist-to-hip ratio (.7) to be most arousing. This is the same average waist-to-hip ratio Voracek and Fisher found among European porn actresses. A particular part of the male brain associated with reward processing, the anterior cingulate gyrus, even appears to be activated when a man views an ideal waist-to-hip ratio. However, it’s worth observing that “hips” and “waists” themselves rarely appear in sexual searches. There are no Web sites on the Alexa Adult List devoted to hips or waists, nor could we find any online list of “Top 10 Hips” (though there are plenty of such amateur lists of “best” breasts and butts). None of the major adult tube sites have a hips or waist category, and there are no hip fetishes reported in the clinical literature.
If the male desire software does target a particular waist-to-hip ratio, this must operate using a different neural mechanism from the desire software used to process other visual cues, since men do not search for hips, use “hips” as a tag when labeling videos, or fetishize hips the way they do breasts, butts, vaginas, feet, and penises. However, if men do prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio, this may be one reason why some men prefer heavy women, since many of the models featured in BBW porn have a low ratio due to their excessive hip size.
But one thing is clear: willowy, toothpick-thin women are a rarity in male-targeted pornography.
GIANT, HUGE, AND JUMBO
There is an anatomical mystery taking place all around the world. Women’s breasts are getting larger. And not just because women are getting heavier.
“In a country [Britain] where one in three women is overweight, you’d think there was a simple, fat-related reason for this, but obesity alone doesn’t explain the jump in cup size, nor the biggest growth area in bra sales: smaller back size and bigger cup size,” ponders Guar
dian journalist Alice Fisher. “Judging by recent underwear figures, there are more slimmer women with larger boobs than ever before. Women are happy about this. Men are happy about this. But no one seems happy to explain why this is happening.”
Breasts, no matter what size, are the most popular body part in sexual searches in every country we looked at, including the United States, Russia, India, Germany, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. Breasts is the third most popular category of sexual search—and the most popular category exclusive to heterosexual men. Large breasts are extraordinarily popular in Internet porn, dominating images, stories, videos, and most international variations of animated erotica. Their popularity was confirmed in an experiment conducted by psychologist Nicolas Gueguen, who used padding to vary a female confederate’s breast size from A-cup to C-cup, then counted the number of times she was approached by men at a nightclub and bar in France.
There are more than 1,672 large breast Web sites in the Alexa Adult List, making them one of the most popular categories of sexual sites. Dozens of synonyms for “large” appear in sexual searches for breasts—busty, big, gigantic, monster, huge, massive, ginormous—while there are only three common synonyms for small breasts—small, tiny, petite. As Alice Fisher observed, there does seem to be an intriguing coincidence between men’s preference for large breasts and the increase in women’s actual breast sizes. Of course, not all men are fans of busty.
“I like small breasts. They’re like, Hi! How can I help you!” muses comedian Mitch Fatel. “Large breasts are like, I’m sorry, we’re closing in 5 minutes.”
Flat-chested women have enthusiastic fans. The Web sites Flat Chested Coeds, Sexy Small Boobs, and I Love Small Tits all celebrate women who are less endowed. In Japan, a woman with small breasts is called “Delicious Flat Chest” or DFC, and there are many popular animated DFC characters, such as Sailor Moon, Lina Inverse, Konata from Lucky Star, and Nagi from Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens. Keira Knightley and Kate Hudson are both A-list and A-cup movie stars with devoted male followings.
But it’s the big ones that dominate Internet porn. Just like “Teen,” “Busty” is a common prefix used in a variety of porn site names: Busty Island, Busty and Dusty, Busty Elders, Busty at Work, Busty Party. “It’s just nice to have something big right there . . . and you can do way more with them. When they’re bigger, right?” asserts Lee Malden, a twenty-two-year-old music producer. “Grab ’em, hold on to ’em, fuck ’em if you’d like! Bigger tits are better tits, man.”
The significant historical and cross-cultural popularity of breasts supports the notion that they are an innate visual cue triggering male desire. However, one possible challenge to this notion is the fact that breasts are rarely fetishized in primitive hunter-gatherer cultures—the type of cultures that may be most similar to our Stone Age ancestors. But it’s worth observing that in these cultures, such as the Amazonian Yanomamo, a twenty-two-year-old’s breasts often resemble a Western forty-year-old woman’s breasts. In modern societies, dramatically improved nutrition, health, and fitness mean that women can maintain firm, youthful breasts well into adulthood—or MILFhood.
Though there seems to be a cross-cultural preference for larger breasts, the preferred size of a woman’s areola seems to be highly variable. There are no nipple-size-specific Web sites on the Alexa Adult List, but there are many large-nipple sites, and many small-nipple sites. One cross-cultural study found that men in Papua New Guinea preferred large areolae, Samoan men preferred slightly smaller areolae, and New Zealand men preferred medium-sized areolae. The color of a woman’s nipples is an even less influential visual cue. There are no adult sites dedicated to dark-colored nipples or light-colored nipples, and out of the 55 million Dogpile sexual searches, fewer than two thousand specified the coloration of the nipple.
Butts are almost as popular as breasts in sexual searches, and there are almost as many porn sites dedicated to butts as breasts, hinting that men may also have an innate sensitivity to buttocks cues. Regarding butts and breasts, bigger is usually better. Not so for another male visual cue.
AN EXQUISITE PAIR OF JIMMY CHOOS
“I do have a bit of a foot fetish, yes,” affirms comic actor Jack Black. “I find myself staring at feet. I like a heel. If she’s wearing clogs, that does something for me. Flip-flops. Sandals. Bare feet are the best.”
Scientific attempts at explaining the widespread male interest in feet have been quite varied. Richard von Krafft-Ebing believed such an interest could develop when “emotional and visual impressions are brought into associative connection.” Freud thought a foot fetish reflected a submissive, immature personality. Social scientists have speculated that they form because of the strong odor of feet or because fancy women’s shoes draw heightened attention to ladies’ feet. But another possibility is that men’s brains are designed to respond to women’s feet. The biggest piece of evidence supporting this possibility is men’s preferred foot size.
The anthropologist Daniel Fessler found that men from a broad variety of societies (including Iran, Brazil, Tanzania, and Papua New Guinea) rate small female feet as more attractive than large feet. In contrast, women rated an average male foot size as most attractive. Moreover, on sexual foot Web sites, small feet are represented almost exclusively. If an interest in feet was purely cultural, we might expect to see at least one society or Web site celebrating large female feet.
“In the Cinderella folktales the prince is never canvassing his kingdom in search of a girl whose feet will fill out a gravy boat of a shoe,” observes Donald Symons, who also points out some additional clues supporting an innate male interest in foot cues. Women’s feet typically grow during pregnancy, sometimes a half or even a full shoe size, and pregnant women should be less attractive from an evolutionary perspective since further reproduction is not possible during pregnancy. Several cultures, such as the Chinese and Persians, historically practiced foot binding in an effort to make the feet physically smaller. Many American women habitually wear shoes that are too small for their feet. Women themselves often seem to eroticize their feet, as epitomized by Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, indicating an awareness (even if unconscious) that men are paying attention.
Another challenge for cultural theories of the male sexual interest in feet: why feet and not hands? Hands are more visible in all cultures, and the general shape and detail of the hand is quite similar to the foot. Women’s hands are often decorated with bright, manicured fingernails, drawing attention to them. In online porn, women’s hands are frequently portrayed as actively participating in sexual acts: there are far more handjobs than footjobs. So hands are highly visible, attractively adorned, and presented as sexual instruments. Yet in the Dogpile data there were 93,885 sexual searches for feet and only 5,831 sexual searches for hands. There are 276 different foot sites in the Alexa Adult List, but we could only find one Web site that could be construed as hand-focused: Glove Mansion.
So if men are attracted to feet because of an innate receptivity to foot cues, was Freud mistaken in his belief that a foot obsession is related to submissiveness? Perhaps not. According to the AOL search data, searches for foot erotica are highly correlated with searches for bondage and submission porn. Many webmasters cross-link their foot sites to submission sites to capture cross traffic from each. One popular type of foot porn consists of a man being stepped on by a domineering woman or being forced to lick a woman’s feet. It’s not clear whether these submissive interests arise as a way of simply engaging the foot in a more intimate way, whether an interest in feet may drive an interest in submission, or whether feet and submission are both related to some other unknown factor.
Searches for women’s shoes, pantyhose, and stockings are also highly correlated with sexual searches for feet. There are many Web sites and online forums that cater to an erotic interest in women’s footwear, such as Pretty High Heels, Cute Pantyhose, and Teens’ Pantyhose. “I definitely love girls with beautiful feet,” admits rap star Ludacris. “Som
etimes she can trick me and just wear boots and not even show her feet. But when I see the feet, it’s a wrap.”
Men’s interest in breasts, butts, and feet are well known and well documented. The next anatomical cue, however, may come as something of a surprise.
HOSTING A SPECIAL EXHIBITION
Comedian Ron White describes a conversation with his cousin Ray.
“I told him we’re all gay, buddy. And Ray goes, That’s bullshit, man. Do you like porn? Yeah, I love porn. Oh, and do you only watch scenes with two women? No, I’ll watch a man and a woman makin’ love. Do you like the guy to have a half-flaccid penis? No, I like big, hard, throbbing cock.. . . See? You like looking at a big cock.”
The fact of the matter is that men are more interested in penises than women are—and men are much more interested in large penises than women are. In a recent academic survey of more than fifty thousand respondents between the ages of eighteen and fifty, just 15 percent of women reported dissatisfaction with their partner’s penis size, while 45 percent of men wanted a larger penis. But it’s not just their own penis that men are concerned with.
An eye-tracking study recorded what men and women looked at as they viewed different (nonerotic) images. They found that men consistently direct their gaze to the male crotch, though women rarely do so. In romance novels, even ones that include explicit descriptions of sex, visual details about a man’s penis, including size, are seldom offered. But in porn, the penis is always under the spotlight. The Web site Fantasti.cc is a community-based adult content aggregator, a social networking site where the predominantly male users rate and comment on more than 1 million images and videos. Out of the hundred top-rated images on Fantasti.cc, twenty-one feature close-up shots of a penis. The number of Dogpile searches for “pussy” just barely beats out searches for “dick,” 1,096,614 to 938,134. Big Dick is a popular category of porn on all of the major adult tube sites, including PornHub.
