“Is My Husband Gay?” How a New Book Uses Big Data to Unearth Women's Secret Obsessions
By Liz Brody. Photos: Stocksy.
What can surveys tell you about us? Women are happier than men. Women are more ambitious as entrepreneurs and liberal as college students than men. Women are less happy than men...
The problem with surveys is they depend on what people tell you—and that's often what they think they should tell you (a phenomenon known as “social desirability bias") or what they choose to tell you. As the title of a new book puts it, everybody lies.
Written by former Google data scientist, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big data, new data, and what the Internet can tell us about who we really are skirts the whole survey problem with a dose of what he calls digital truth serum. In addition to analyzing all kinds of online data, Stephens-Davidowitz uses Google searches like a metal detector to hunt for the kind of secret questions, worries, and obsessions people will share with their computers, but might never say out loud. For example:
What is the top Google complaint by women about their boyfriends? a) He won’t text me back. b) He won’t talk to me. c) He wont’ have sex with me.
The answer is C. “There are about twice as many complaints that 'my boyfriend won’t have sex with me' than 'my girlfriend won’t have sex with me,'"says Stephens-Davidowitz. "The myth that men want sex more than women is just not true—and it comes across the data in a striking way.” Does that mean he's seeing searches by men worried about how to keep up with their women? “NO!" he laughs incredulously. "Google is very honest but you need to be aware of things to ask the questions. Men probably have concerns that don’t even reach that level of consciousness because they just can’t deal with them."
What do women search most about a man’s orgasm? a) Why he’s not having one. b) How to make him have one quicker. c) How to make him last longer.
The answer is A. Not surprisingly, when guys take to Google, it's all about lasting longer (this being a demographic that conducts more searches on "how to make my penis bigger" than "how to change a tire.") Which is amusing because, on the whole, women don’t appear to care so much. "Women do as many searches about delayed ejaculation as premature ejaculation," says Stephens-Davidowitz. “Their main concern is that it’s not happening at all.”
What do wives worry most about? a) My husband is bipolar. b) My husband is gay. c) My husband is cheating.
Unbelievably, it's not cheating. The answer is B. “'Is he gay?' is definitely top on the list," says Stephens-Davidowitz. "It’s interesting that in states where there’s a high intolerance for homosexuality, like Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina—places where my evidence suggests that more men are in the closet and married to women—the question for women is much more common.“ But if there's reason for the suspicion, statistically it's unlikely (his data shows that only 1 or 2 percent of gay men are in the closet). "Women should be more concerned about whether their partner has mood swings because he’s more likely to be bipolar than gay," he says.
Some of Stephens-Davidowitz's findings (and he explores all kinds of issues in the book) beg more questions than they answer, like the fact that 25 percent of women's searches on PornHub are for videos featuring females subjected to pain and humiliation—twice as many as men's searches for such porn. But there are also quirky gems (In India, the top way to complete the search for “my husband wants…" is “for me to breastfeed him.”) And this is sweet: When guys in the U.S. think about their lovers' breasts, they don't ask Google about "plastic surgery" or "cancer"; they're more more likely to type, “I love my girlfriend’s boobs."
So wait, what's the question? "I don't know," says Stephens-Davidowitz says. "Maybe they just want hi five from Google. Sometimes this data is very weird.“
This story originally appeared on Glamour.
More from Glamour:
What's That Salad the Kardashians Are Always Eating on Their Show?
A Look at the Emmy It Girls of the Past 20 Years: Taraji P. Henson, Tina Fey, and More
Major Skin Mistakes You're Making in Your 20s, 30s, and 40s
