A Billion Badly Researched Assertions

There’s a logical fallacy called “cherry picking” which is essentially this: you come up with a hypothesis. You then seek out data to back your assertions. You ignore any contradictory evidence and only use the stuff that supports your theory.

Then you write a book about it. Cue the articles in major newspapers and interviews on TV. Suddenly, your delightful theory is accepted uncritically as fact.

Thus, we come to A Billion Wicked Thoughts, the book by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. It’s subtitle is “What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire” and it’s main idea is that the authors have revealed fundamental differences between men and women by looking at internet porn (or, specifically searches for internet porn). You’ll never guess what that fundamental difference is. Yep, men like sex, women don’t.

I’m a bit late with this blog post. Plenty of other bloggers have already pointed out the various problems with this book and the methodology used (link, link and I figured I didn’t need to add my voice to the protest. Indeed, I didn’t pay a lot of attention when it first came out.

But today I discovered that the researchers had asserted that the (alleged) lack of popularity of For The Girls was proof that women are only interested in romance fiction. And well, fuck that, I’m kind of angry.

Before I go there, let me direct you to the article (and assertion) in question. It’s this: Censored by the Wall Street Journal: The Female Sexual Brain in Psychology Today. Yes, the same Psychology Today that recently published an article saying black women are objectively less attractive.

Here is the main thing they have to say about the differences between men and women when it comes to sex:

“Men seek out visuals and go straight for orgasm. Women prefer stories and often favor conversation over culmination.”

Sound familiar? It’s the same thing Kinsey was asserting 60 years ago, back when there was no porn for women. It’s the same idea that is repeated ad nauseum in any discussion about women and porn. And it’s the same idea I’ve been battling for the last 11 years.

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Note the blanket statement about what men like and what women like? No detail, no nuanced acknowledgement of the wildly varying sexuality and tastes of men and women. And no concept of bisexuality or homosexuality or queerness or transgenderism at all.

(Let me say this – I’ve been called out on this in the past, saying “women like this sort of thing”. And they were right. I’ve done my best to change my views. It’s wrong to say “all women like this” because it’s just too broad a statement to be accurate).

This use of search statistics to support the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” idea was apparent from the very beginning of their research. This was posted on Slash fan fiction sites in 2009:

We’re deeply interested in broad-based behavioral data that involves romantic or erotic cognition and evinces a clear distinction between men and women. (my bold) Fan fiction matches this criteria perfectly. Let us make clear, however: fan fiction is not the subject of our research. Our subject is the human brain. For us, fan fiction is a wonderfully rich source of data–like single-neuron recordings in rhesus monkeys–albeit a unique and invaluable one.

Suffice to say, the researchers fell foul of the fanfic community on whom they based many of their conclusions about women and romance – the response can be seen here.

So, on to the bee in my bonnet. It’s this:

The five most popular adult sites for men are all within the top 100 most popular sites on the entire Internet. All are webcam or video sites featuring anonymous graphic sex, such as PornHub, the most popular adult YouTube clone, which draws about 13.9 million visitors a month. In contrast, the most popular adult video site for women, For The Girls, draws a meager 100,000 a month (and up to half of those visitors are gay men). All across the planet, with women free to access any erotic content they wish, they mostly seek out character-driven stories of sexual relationships: romance novels, erotic romance (sometimes called EroRom or Romantica®), fan fiction, slash fiction, gay romance novels, and erotic stories.

The most popular “erotic” site for women is fanfiction.net, featuring more than 1.5 million visitors a month and more than two million stories, about half of which are tagged as “romance.”

The bit in bold is their assertion about For The Girls. According to them, FTG is a minnow in terms of traffic and half of our members are gay men. That’s quite the statement to make when you have never contacted the owners and don’t have access to a site’s statistics or membership details. Let me say this now: it’s totally inaccurate.

Today I sent them an email asking where they got the data to make such statements.

I can only assume they’ve come to this conclusion by looking at the figures on Alexa, an Amazon-owned company that keeps track of people’s surfing habits via a toolbar. As alluring as that data can be, it’s not very accurate. It relies on people willingly installing their software, allowing themselves to be tracked. And the info is often 3 months out of date. Interestingly, Alexa says our main audience is 65 year old women without children – exactly the kind of person who would unknowingly install spyware or a toolbar.

But wait! Here I read that the authors contacted fellow women’s erotica site Sssh.com. Interesting. Did Sssh give them the figures on FTG? If so, why would the authors listen to a competitor site who also does not have access to our stats? And if they contacted Sssh, why isn’t THAT site the one they quote in their Psychology Today article?

I’m not about to publicly bandy about the traffic figures for FTG. That’s given out on a need-to-know basis. But rest assured, we get a shitload more traffic that 100,000 visitors a month. A metric shitload.

To be honest, though, I’m more offended about the assertion about the gayness or otherwise of our membership. Assuming they relied on the dodgy data from Alexa… there’s absolutely NOTHING on there that discusses the sexual orientation or otherwise of site visitors (and if there was, well, damn, there’s bound to be a human rights violation in it). I can only assume this assertion is based on Playgirl’s readership figures – which have absolutely nothing to do with us.

The fact is, I have no idea how many of our members identify as gay. We don’t collect that kind of data. Asking would be rude. And, what’s more, it doesn’t fucking matter. What I do know is that the majority of names on members’ credit cards are female.

Yes, we do get men joining For The Girls but I don’t know whether they’re straight or gay. Given that our content is half straight hardcore and half nude men, I don’t think it’s remotely accurate to say we resemble a gay site or that we are trying deliberately to cater to gay men. Our target audience has always been straight women. I do get emails from straight men thanking us for offering a more positive version of porn or saying they joined to share the experience with their wife or girlfriend.

Beyond this, let me say that comparing FTG to a fan fiction site (or free mainstream tube sites) is not even remotely comparing like to like. Notice how the authors called us an “adult video site” as if we’re the same as Pornhub? We’re a membership site that requires people to be aged over 18. A great deal of our visitors arrive there having clicked on an ad, knowing we’re a commercial product. We self identify as a porn site and offer hardcore content but we’re also a magazine with articles and fiction. Compare that with your average free fan fiction site. It’s apples and oranges. What’s more… FTG doesn’t offer slash or gay fiction (although we’re changing that soon). So right there you’ve got a vast difference in individual tastes.

And that’s the problem with this research. It doesn’t seem to understand the idea that women’s tastes ARE different and different women will seek out different things on the net depending on who they are, how old they are and what turns them on at that very moment.

So to use For The Girls as “proof” of the assertion that “women aren’t visual” and are more turned on by romance novels or “conversation” is just a nonsense.

By the way, let me say I’m so disappointed in this research. The idea of looking at internet porn searches IS interesting. For one thing, it seems to suggest that Gail Dines’s assertion that men are seeking out violent porn is way off the mark. But I couldn’t in good conscience use this data in a debate.

If they can’t get the facts right about For The Girls, what other information did they fudge or fuck up?

If or when I get a reply from the authors as to the source of their assertion, I’ll add it to this post.

* Note: I thought I’d include the above image from the Billion Wicked Thoughts website. Nice indication of the gender stereotypes they’re selling.

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Update 25th June
I’ve had a reply from Sai Gaddam. He says they emailed us in July 2009 and got no reply. I searched back, couldn’t find any emails from them. Perhaps they went into spam.

Sai says:

We used the web analytics services Quantcast and Alexa to obtain traffic and demographic estimates. Both report a monthly traffic of less than 100k.

Quantcast also reports that 54% of the visitors are male and the most correlated site are freebuddymovies.com and outpersonals.com, which are both categorized as Gay.

We understand that these numbers rely on random sampling and are estimates — but reasonably useful ones.

We will be happy to update these articles with more accurate information about your site if you can share any relevant data with us.

Quantcast is an analytics service that relies on websites to volunteer their own data by inserting code onto their pages. When a website does not use Quantcast (and For The Girls doesn’t), they estimate. I have no idea how they estimate, but the figures they apparently pull out of thin air look impressive. Thus, according to Quantcast, 54% of our traffic is male and the majority of our surfers are black. Uh, OK.

There’s also an “Audience Also Likes” feature which says “The people who visit forthegirls.com are also likely to visit these categories and sites.” Apparently our surfers are “likely” to visit Outpersonals, Ebaums World and Urban Dictionary.

The truthiness presented by this information was “reasonably useful” enough for our intrepid authors to present it as fact and then use us to prop up their assertion that women aren’t visual.

Not good enough. As I said, if they fudged the stats here, what else did they fuck up?