Search zeitgeist, sex edition

This piece analyzing data on how people use Google to search for topics related to sex is a fun tour of the submerged portion of the human psyche.

Of particular interest to me was this:

Women also show a great deal of insecurity about their behinds, although many women have recently flip-flopped on what it is they don’t like about them.

In 2004, in some parts of the United States, the most common search regarding changing one’s butt was how to make it smaller. The desire to make one’s bottom bigger was overwhelmingly concentrated in areas with large black populations. Beginning in 2010, however, the desire for bigger butts grew in the rest of the United States. This interest has tripled in four years. In 2014, there were more searches asking how to make your butt bigger than smaller in every state. These days, for every five searches looking into breast implants in the United States, there is one looking into butt implants.

Does women’s growing preference for a larger behind match men’s preferences? Interestingly, yes. “Big butt porn” searches, which also used to be concentrated in black communities, have recently shot up in popularity throughout the United States.

In a recent post, I wondered what factors drove the frequent shifts in the ideal female body? Are women driving the change or are they reacting to male preferences? And what part of the change has roots in culture rather than evolution?

More and more, I suspect the cultural impact to be significant. If female bodies were purely evolutionary signals of physical fitness, the ideal shouldn't change so frequently decade to decade.

Why don't people have more sex?

An older but still amusing post from Marginal Revolution.

3. Freud was right and we are all repressed.  The will is not unitary and the utility-maximizing part is not always in control.

4. There has been a market failure, but the Internet is remedying it.  People are having more sex and this will only go up.

5. Sex stops being fun when you do it to close a gap between your marginal utilities.  It requires spontaneity or some other quality inconsistent with the classical model of the consumer and the equation of marginal rates of substitution.

Someone is lying about their number

Everyone knows men are promiscuous by nature. It’s part of the genetic strategy that evolved to help men spread their genes far and wide. The strategy is different for a woman, who has to go through so much just to have a baby and then nurture it. She is genetically programmed to want just one man who will stick with her and help raise their children.

Surveys bear this out. In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women.

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5.

But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.

The mathematics of mating. That there is a social incentive for men to exaggerate their figure and women to lower theirs must factor into it, whether or not you agree with that social norm.

Dr. Gale is still troubled. He said invoking women who are outside the survey population cannot begin to explain a difference of 75 percent in the number of partners, as occurred in the study saying men had seven partners and women four. Something like a prostitute effect, he said, “would be negligible.” The most likely explanation, by far, is that the numbers cannot be trusted.

Ronald Graham, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, San Diego, agreed with Dr. Gale. After all, on average, men would have to have three more partners than women, raising the question of where all those extra partners might be.

“Some might be imaginary,” Dr. Graham said. “Maybe two are in the man’s mind and one really exists.”