The Online World of Female Desire

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. 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.

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.

George Michael – I Want Your Sex

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