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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9466671" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading Drs. Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam's 2012 book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Wicked-Thoughts-Internet-Relationships/dp/0452297877" target="_blank">A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships</a>.I'd been hearing about this one off and on for a while, mostly for the methodology used by the authors in how they examined sexual fantasies: rather than using questionnaires (which have issues with how honest the responses are, regardless of assurances of anonymity, as well as selection bias problems), they used multiple aggregations of what terms people entered into search engines when looking for Internet porn (though the authors avail themselves of other scientific studies as well).The chapter breakdown for the book discusses various aspects of sexuality in terms of what comes up most often in these searches. While the authors (correctly) note that everyone is an individual, and these searches largely present various groups (e.g. straight men, gay men, straight women, bisexual women, etc.) as aggregates, they note that certain things come up often enough (across cultural barriers) that we can make some (tentative) insights into the nature of human sexual fantasies, and why we are the way we are.Without going into too much detail, which I suspect wouldn't be allowed on this site anyway, I'll say only that this book was fascinating for what it presented regarding why we like what we like, and why certain fetishes and fantasies are so prevalent for certain sexes and orientations. In fact, I only have one real complaint (well, two complaints, in that they threw around "novelty" as a term for one psychological cue for arousal instead of using the proper term, which is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolidge_effect" target="_blank">Coolidge effect</a>):That complaint is the endnotes, as their numbers don't appear in the chapters.For the life of me, I can't figure out what's going on. They're all at the end of the book, segregated by chapter and having a numerical identification tag. They cite papers and quotes, provide the full versions of truncated material, and otherwise do everything you'd expect an endnote to do. But the numbers don't appear in the main body of each chapter. It's so odd; did my copy accidentally omit them? Do I have some sort of weird note-blindness condition where I somehow overlooked over two hundred numerical superscripts? I just don't get it.That quirk aside, this is a great book that I think everyone should check out. This is one of those books that's somewhat awkward to discuss with other people, but that doesn't mean that its subject is any less important in what it presents.</blockquote>

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