“A Billion Wicked Thoughts” Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam
“’I think I might like that.’ –Mrs. Alfred Kinsey, upon being asked if she would like to have sex with her husband’s graduate student in the film Kinsey” (P. 152). This illustrates just one aspect of female sexual desire, sex with a younger man. This book explores the concepts of sexual desire for both males and females and answers the question of why we desire what we desire. Since most people are often worried about what society would think about their specific sexual desires, and therefore lie about what they truly desire, Ogas and Gaddam came up with a rather intelligent solution to this problem: The internet. The internet provides anonymity, so people don’t have to worry about what society will think. Using the internet as their database for approximately a year, they we able to compile a wide range of data concerning male and female desire. From this data, they discuss the differences in the male and female sexual psychologies, their variations in desire, and why we desire what we desire. It is also worth noting that they do so in a humorous way that is interesting and easy to understand. They explain the different kinds of kinky, and non-kinky, behavior that the two sexes are interested in, and they provide information and insight for the reasons behind this. Not only do they tell us what males and females desire, but they give explanations as to why we desire what we do. Using evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and the internet, Ogas and Gaddam provide us with a better understanding of human sexual desire.
The way the authors present their information is clear and organized. They present it in a way that entices the reader to keep reading. One of the ways they keep...
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...even twenty, this research method was inaccessible to us. The society in which we live in now is also different from the society in which we lived in twenty/thirty years ago. This subject has always been a bit offensive, though perhaps less now than twenty/thirty years ago, for the simple reason that it involves sex and sexual desires. The fact that this research was conducted and published shows us just how much our culture is growing and becoming more accommodating. I would definitely recommend it to other students and future students, and I have already recommended it to everyone I know. This book gets five stars.
Bibliography
American Pie. Dir. Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz. Universal Studios, 1999. DVD.
Ogas, Ogi, and Sai Gaddam. A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About
Sexual Relationships. New York: Plume, 2012. Print.
At the beginning of the 1900s, there was a “sexual revolution” in New York City. During this time, sexual acts and desires were not hidden, but instead they were openl...
hand out questionnaires that students are encouraged to fill out concerning their sexual behavior because of no previously recorded research. However, many students failed to respond and Kinsey decided to conduct i...
Overall, this article provides and does a good job of discussing gatekeeping and why and how it occurs. I think it would make it better if they did a more widespread study to find out if teens really have such unhealthy view of sexuality. This would help to get a better understanding for the parents and would give us better insight from teens.
The two books examined in this paper, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's Homicide and David M. Buss's The Evolution of Desire, suggest that human mating strategies have an evolutionary basis. The book written by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson supplies the theoretical groundwork and the book written by David M. Buss gives validity and empirical support for the theory. The two books make a strong scientific argument for evolutionary adaptations as the most crucial element to understanding human sexuality and desire. According to this argument, the key to understanding human sexuality lies in the evolutionary origin of our species.
Alfred Kinsey was an American Professor of biology and zoology at Indiana University. During his career he decided to shift his focus from studying gull wasps to that of human subjects. He embarked on a study of human sexual behavior by doing a series of interviews consisting of 18,000 people. The first installment of nine books was “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.” This 30 year project was anything but non-controversial especially with in the realm of the FBI and the United States government. As any breakthrough research goes through, there were positive and negative critiques of his study.
Well explained data is another essential criterion to successful nonfiction books because they give the credible data that proves the authors claim and helps them understand what the author is trying to persuade them of. The data if well explained helps the reader understand difficult concepts that may be hard for them to grasp and it also helps convince the reader about the author’s claim. Furthermore it establishes a credible ethos for the author as they have hard proof backing their claim.
Every person stands for a single quality. It is then up to the human psyche to make-up what the individual stands for. The archetypes from Carl Jung are portrayed by the characters in “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hossieni. Through out the novel the archetypes begin to be revealed through the characters emotion, actions and ambition. Firstly, Mariam’s heroism is shown by her unusual circumstances of birth helping others, sacrificing her life and living through traumatic events; secondly Rasheed is portrayed as the shadow by reeling others into being fearful of what they believed was once right; finally, Rasheed’s self-centeredness and interest in only achieving his goals demonstrates that he is the trickster as well. These archetypes not only eventually evoke the deep emotion within the characters, they become apart of the human psyche bringing out the good and evil within all.
Milstein, Susan A. Taking Sides Clashing Views in Human Sexuality. Ed. William J. Taverner and Ryan W. McKee. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.
In today’s heterosexual and patriarchal society sex and sexual desires revolve around men, and Hoagland sets out seven patterns showing how this is the case. Sex is thought of as a “powerful and uncontrollable urge” and male sexuality therefore is a basic component to male health, sexual acts show male conquest and domination, sexual freedom gives men total access to and over women, rape is, by this logic, natural and women who resist a man’s advances are “‘frigid’”, sex involves losing control and sexual desire, when described as erotic, “involves a death wish (eros)”. The bottom line is that in today’s heterosexual and patriarchal society sex is all about men having a natural power over women; sex involves a total loss of control which creates a split between reason and emotion since being in control is a matter of reason controlling emotions, “we tend to believe that to be safe we must be rational and in control but to...
No matter what the age, every person, man or woman, wants to feel desirable. Too often it is that very desire that leads one to suffer a grievous error in judgment. However, while both man and woman can lay claim to this error, it has and will continue to be viewed differently, by society at large, in the harsh light of gender. A man, then and now, is allowed to "sow his wild oats" and society him for doing so. Unfortunately, let a woman do the same and she is labeled as promiscuous, among other not so flattering terms. Marvell and Donne, respectively, have captured the very essence of a struggle older than time itself, female versus male, and sexuality versus virtue. So, as one can see, obsession with sexuality, is not a generational matter; in fact sexuality exists independently of both time and place.
Schakel, Peter J., and Jack Ridl. "Everyday Use." Approaching Literature: Writing Reading Thinking. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 109-15. Print.
The initial study, implemented in 2005, surveyed thirty people, who proclaimed they have “great sex”; the initial finding of these thirty people found six different components of optimal sexuality. With their follow up study,
... decades ago. This book is one that will allow the reader to view many aspects of sexuality from a social standpoint, and apply it to certain social attitudes in our society today, these attitudes can range from the acceptance of lesbian and gays, and the common sight of sex before marriage and women equality. The new era of sexuality has taken a definite "transformation" as Giddens puts it, and as a society we are living in the world of change in which we must adapt, by accepting our society as a changing society, and not be naive and think all the rules of sexuality from our parents time our still in existence now.
In today’s society things are being expressed and experienced at younger ages, than ever before in our time. Children and teenagers are discovering their sexuality at very early ages. Sexuality is the discovering of who you are and what makes you different from everybody else.
Urvashi Butalia in her book, The Other Side of Silence, attempts to analyze the partition in Indian society, through an oral history of Indian experiences. The collection of traumatic events from those people who lived through the partition gives insight on how history has enveloped these silences decades later. Furthermore, the movie 1947 Earth reveals the bitterness of partition and its effect of violence on certain characters. The most intriguing character which elucidates the silence of the partition is the child, Lenny. Lenny in particular the narrator of the story, serves as a medium to the intangibility created by the partition. The intangibility being love and violence, how can people who grew up together to love each other hate one another amidst religion? This question is best depicted through the innocence of a child, Lenny. Through her interactions with her friends, the doll, and the Lahore Park, we see silence elucidated as comfort of not knowing, or the pain from the separation of comfort and silence from an unspoken truth.