Men’s second-most-common sex question is how to make their sexual encounters longer. Once again, the insecurities of men do not appear to match the concerns of women. There are roughly the same number of searches asking how to make a boyfriend climax more quickly as climax more slowly. In fact, the most common concern women have related to a boyfriend’s orgasm isn’t about when it happened but why it isn’t happening at all.
We don’t often talk about body image issues when it comes to men. And while it’s true that overall interest in personal appearance skews female, it’s not as lopsided as stereotypes would suggest. According to my analysis of Google AdWords, which measures the websites people visit, interest in beauty and fitness is 42 percent male, weight loss is 33 percent male, and cosmetic surgery is 39 percent male. Among all searches with “how to” related to breasts, about 20 percent ask how to get rid of man breasts.
But, even if the number of men who lack confidence in their bodies is higher than most people would think, women still outpace them when it comes to insecurity about how they look. So what can this digital truth serum reveal about women’s self-doubt? Every year in the United States, there are more than seven million searches looking into breast implants. Official statistics tell us that about 300,000 women go through with the procedure annually.
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, if not the posterior distribution itself, 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. (Thank you, Kim Kardashian!)
Does women’s growing preference for a larger bottom 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.
What else do men want in a woman’s body? As mentioned earlier, and as most will find blindingly obvious, men show a preference for large breasts. About 12 percent of nongeneric pornographic searches are looking for big breasts. This is nearly twenty times higher than the search volume for small-breast porn.
That said, it is not clear that this means men want women to get breast implants. About 3 percent of big-breast porn searches explicitly say they want to see natural breasts.
Google searches about one’s wife and breast implants are evenly split between asking how to persuade her to get implants and perplexity as to why she wants them.
Or consider the most common search about a girlfriend’s breasts: “I love my girlfriend’s boobs.” It is not clear what men are hoping to find from Google when making this search.
Women, like men, have questions about their genitals. In fact, they have nearly as many questions about their vaginas as men have about their penises. Women’s worries about their vaginas are often health related. But at least 30 percent of their questions take up other concerns. Women want to know how to shave it, tighten it, and make it taste better. A strikingly common concern, as touched upon earlier, is how to improve its odor.
Women are most frequently concerned that their vaginas smell like fish, followed by vinegar, onions, ammonia, garlic, cheese, body odor, urine, bread, bleach, feces, sweat, metal, feet, garbage, and rotten meat.
In general, men do not make many Google searches involving a partner’s genitalia. Men make roughly the same number of searches about a girlfriend’s vagina as women do about a boyfriend’s penis.
When men do search about a partner’s vagina, it is usually to complain about what women worry about most: the odor. Mostly, men are trying to figure out how to tell a woman about a bad odor without hurting her feelings. Sometimes, however, men’s questions about odor reveal their own insecurities. Men occasionally ask for ways to use the smell to detect cheating—if it smells like condoms, for example, or another man’s semen.
What should we make of all this secret insecurity? There is clearly some good news here. Google gives us legitimate reasons to worry less than we do. Many of our deepest fears about how our sexual partners perceive us are unjustified. Alone, at their computers, with no incentive to lie, partners reveal themselves to be fairly nonsuperficial and forgiving. In fact, we are all so busy judging our own bodies that there is little energy left over to judge other people’s.
There is also probably a connection between two of the big concerns revealed in the sexual searches on Google: lack of sex and an insecurity about one’s sexual attractiveness and performance. Maybe these are related. Maybe if we worried less about sex, we’d have more of it.
What else can Google searches tell us about sex? We can do a battle of the sexes, to see who is most generous. Take all searches looking for ways to get better at performing oral sex on the opposite gender. Do men look for more tips or women? Who is more sexually generous, men or women? Women, duh. Adding up all the possibilities, I estimate the ratio is 2:1 in favor of women looking for advice on how to better perform oral sex on their partner.
And when men do look for tips on how to give oral sex, they are frequently not looking for ways of pleasing another person. Men make as many searches looking for ways to perform oral sex on themselves as they do how to give a woman an orgasm. (This is among my favorite facts in Google search data.)
THE TRUTH ABOUT HATE AND PREJUDICE
Sex and romance are hardly the only topics cloaked in shame and, therefore, not the only topics about which people keep secrets. Many people are, for good reason, inclined to keep their prejudices to themselves. I suppose you could call it progress that many people today feel they will be judged if they admit they judge other people based on their ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. But many Americans still do. (This is another section, I warn readers, that includes disturbing material.)
You can see this on Google, where users sometimes ask questions such as “Why are black people rude?” or “Why are Jews evil?” Below, in order, are the top five negative words used in searches about various groups.
A few patterns among these stereotypes stand out. For example, African Americans are the only group that faces a “rude” stereotype. Nearly every group is a victim of a “stupid” stereotype; the only two that are not: Jews and Muslims. The “evil” stereotype is applied to Jews, Muslims, and gays but not black people, Mexicans, Asians, and Christians.