IBM Researchers and Dolores Labs did an interesting crowdsourcing experiment with amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.

They showed men and women a body image with a random point highlighted. Would they like to touch their lover there, and separately, would they want to be touched there?

30,000 point ratings aggregate into a heat map of desire – interesting in isolation and in contrast across scenarios.

Here you see where each gender desires to be touched. Not too surprising.

But when you compare to where their lovers think they want to be touched, a few subtle differences emerge, providing guidance. For men, dingle and dangle could use a bit more attention. For women, the back of the neck is more sensual than you might imagine. Otherwise, you probably know where to go.

You can do other Fleshmap pair-wise comparisons here.

Across the straight/bisexual/gay gender matrix, the group least interested in being touched, on average: straight men. Go figure. But the other men bring the overall male average higher than the overall female average. Even older men (over 50) have higher scores than the most desirous female cohort –the 20-30 year olds. (from Dolores Blog)

All good food for thought as I depart for Utah…

9 responses to “Sensual Heat Map”

  1. Hi, I’m an admin for a group called ARTISTIC ORIGINALS ©, and we’d love to have this added to the group!

  2. > Even older men (over 50) have higher scores than the most desirous female cohort –the 20-30 year olds.

    Interesting data, which puts to rest the misconception that the women are the “manipulative” gender, who are apt to “play games”

  3. Let’s not forget foot and scalp massages.

  4. and tummy rubs for our furry friends…

    I just got the Crowdsourcing book by Jeff Howe:

    "The amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing corrects that – but in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction."

    I see a chapter "Why Diversity Trumps Ability" (earlier SFI thoughts on this)

  5. How would this correlate with a FLIR image? Wonder if humans are just heat seeking fiddlers.

  6. well, here’s a FLIR image of me on the right:
    That’s Hot

    As for her, well, the clothes get in the way.

    P.S. A most unusual call came in today from Jeff Howe, the author I mention in the comments above… William Safire is trying to figure out who first used the term "crowdsourcing" and they claim that was by me in this flickr group discussion back in March 2006… Spooky institutional archive here…. Is that really the first use of the term? How random…

  7. Interesting image, and link.

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