The Online World of Female Desire

For women indulging their curiosity, Internet erotica is less about flesh than about finding Mr. Right

By OGI OGAS

If a woman is attracted to an actor, she might seek out stories featuring one of the characters he portrays, such as Orlando Bloom's Legolas.

It's no secret that hundreds of millions of people around the world now routinely use the Internet to indulge their sexual curiosity. Today you can ogle more naked bodies in a single minute online than the most promiscuous Victorian could have seen in a lifetime. Because this online activity leaves behind a trail of digital crumbs, for the first time we can gather reliable data on the erotic interests of a broad swath of humanity.

My colleague Sai Gaddam and I have analyzed a billion of these web searches, using data sets that firms like AOL and Excite make publicly available, obtaining other data from adult web sites, and using web-analysis techniques to gather additional data.

One of our most interesting findings was that women are very different from men in how they use these online services. All across the planet, what most women seek out, in growing numbers, are not explicit scenes of sexual activity but character-driven stories of romantic relationships.

The female cortex contains a highly developed system for finding and scrutinizing a prospective partner—a system that might be dubbed the Miss Marple Detective Agency. Agatha Christie's fictional sleuth is often dismissed as scatterbrained, but she is actually a shrewd judge of character and harbors deep knowledge of the dark side of human nature. She uses her surprising analytical acumen to solve mysteries that have stumped the police.

Using similar investigative skills, the female brain evaluates all available evidence regarding a potential mate's social, emotional and physical qualities to make an all-important decision: Is he Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong? Only if Miss Marple gives her stamp of approval do physical arousal and psychological arousal harmoniously unite in the female brain.

This unconscious evaluation is the source of "feminine intuition." Though the female brain carefully processes many stimuli simultaneously, it is experienced only as a general feeling of favorability or suspicion toward a potential partner. This feminine intuition is designed to solve a woman's unique challenge of determining whether a man is committed, kind and capable of protecting a family.

Orlando Bloom as Legolas

Female erotica demonstrates how the detective agency operates—and how it differs from the much simpler male brain. Whereas two-minute video clips are the most popular form of contemporary erotica for men, the most popular form for women remains the romance novel, an artifact that takes many hours to digest. Like pornography, the romance novel has established a strong presence in the digital domain. It is the primary engine behind the electronic book boom. Currently, three of the top 10 books on Kindle are e-romances.

Women account for only one out of 50 purchases of porn-site subscriptions, but they make nine out of 10 purchases of romance novels. (In fact, the main billing company for porn sites flags female names as potential fraud, since so many of these charges result in an angry wife or mother demanding a refund for the misuse of her card.) In 2008, 74.8 million people read an English-language romance novel—close to the number of men who visited online pornography sites that year in the U.S. and Canada.

All romance novels, whether written by the likes of Jane Austen, Nora Roberts or Stephenie Meyer, employ a narrative formula that follows the gradual elucidation of the hero's inner character, leading to an emotional epiphany between hero and heroine. On this journey, the heroine—and the reader—investigates the character of the hero. The goal of a romance novel's heroine is never sex for its own sake, much less impersonal sex with strangers. All romance novels end with a "happily ever after": a marriage or committed long-term partnership.

In addition to providing a new platform for traditional romance tales, the Web has fueled an explosion of stories written by a highly interactive community of female amateurs: a genre called "fan fiction." These pop culture "fandoms" consist of enthusiasts for such familiar franchises as "Harry Potter," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Twilight," as well as for other books, television shows and movies. The most popular fan fiction website—and the world's most popular "erotic" site for women—is FanFiction.net, which boasts more than two million different stories and more than 1.5 million visitors a month. Nor is fan fiction limited to English-speaking countries; there are vibrant fan fiction communities in Russia, Japan, Brazil and China.

Men who are attracted to a particular actress may go online looking for racy photos of her. Women who are attracted to an actor are more likely to seek out personal details about his life or erotic stories featuring one of the characters he portrays. Consider these terms from one woman's AOL search history concerning the actor Orlando Bloom: "orlando bloom as vampire fanfiction," "gossip on orlando bloom," "legolas erotica" (Legolas being Bloom's elfin character in "Lord of the Rings").

Fan fiction also reveals another fundamental difference between male and female sexuality. Men almost always consume pornography alone. But in the fan-fiction community, the online discussion of a story is as important as the story itself. This reflects one of the primary investigative techniques of Miss Marple: soliciting information from other detectives.

Whereas the typical comments beneath videos on websites for men are mostly brief ("Hot!"), women want to discuss in probing detail the emotional qualities of a story, the authenticity of its characters and the nuances of the relationships. Remarking on a story set in the Harry Potter fandom, one fan observes, "Oh, and, on a side note, would Ron really use the expression, 'hooking up'? It sounded very Muggle, very American and very post-early '90s to me." Another fan comments: "I liked his surges of anger every now and again, made for a more compelling and realistic Harry. I also thought his spat with Ginny was done very appropriately."

Some female readers might be thinking, "This doesn't describe me at all!" And, in fact, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the visitors to the major pornography sites are women. Our data suggest that these women probably have a higher sex drive than other women and that they are more socially aggressive and more comfortable taking risks.

For most women, however, Miss Marple is the master sleuth. Her fact-finding mission must be completed before mind and body are united in sexual harmony.