Sharing Impregnation Stories

Like Kinsey, Hite and others, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam used unconventional methods to break through people's usual embarrassed evasions and gather their data.

One of the problems hampering studies of sexuality is the lack of large survey information. Kinsey's project surveyed 18,000 men and women across the United States, with findings that were astonishing, like homosexuals existing in far greater numbers than thought, or that more than half of women masturbated. However, since then there has not been a sexuality survey of comparable scale to Kinsey's.

Ogas and Gaddam got around this problem by the most modern of methods: they looked to the Internet. They compiled the search data from sites such as Dogpile (nearly 400 million searches over a year) and AOL. Though the data was anonymized, they could still compile profiles of individuals from their search history, and give them nicknames like "Mr. Bikinis" and "Mr. Playstation." (If that doesn't give you pause for thought, it should.)

The authors say that this method is more revealing of the truth than surveys, and also provides insight into the sexuality of people who are not "WEIRD", that is, "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic."

Even though the Internet is no longer the enclave of male, white, middle-class Anglophone computer users, it is still skewed heavily towards that demographic. What do non-English speakers search for? There are also millions of Internet users separated from the larger world by the "great firewall" of China and other large scale censorship systems, whose desires aren't reflected in the search data. This seriously undermines the author's claim to the universality of their findings.

Evolution's evangelists

Still, Ogas and Gaddam do have a large data set to work with. Just a cursory scan of the most popular sexual search categories on Dogpile is provocative. Who knew that "MILFs" were so in demand, coming in at #3 after "Youth" and "Gay"? Taboo topics like "Incest" and "Bestiality" are in the top 15, but both are beaten out by "Cheating Wives.