We all know crowds can tell us the weight of an ox, but can they help us in bed?
With artists Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, we took pictures of the nude human body, and asked people online to rate how much they’d like to touch, or be touched at, different positions all over the body. Here is where men most like to be touched, front and back:
We got this data by posting a survey on the Amazon service, Mechanical Turk — an online marketplace for simple tasks — and offered to pay a few cents for a hundred ratings. In a few days we collected more than 30,000 responses over 700 body positions, from about 280 different people. The above image is from Fernanda and Martin’s Skin to Skin visualization, you can compare silhouette heatmaps of the data. For example, from the woman’s back, here’s a comparison of where women want to be touched, versus where men (and some women) want to touch them.
Some patterns jump out — for example, the back of the neck seems to be a neglected area. (Take note!) But otherwise, desire to touch and be touched seem pretty well matched up.
What’s also interesting about this experiment is that, despite the subjectiveness of the task and large variability in the data, patterns still emerge. To get some idea of how noisy the data is, here are rating histograms for several of the “desire to be touched” locations for women. (You can explore all body locations with the Sorting Out Desire visualization.)
We had from 20 to 50 responses for most positions. While there are clear differences between these locations, there’s enough noise such that a large amount of data is necessary to discern the signal. This is exactly the same finding we have seen with other types crowdsourcing work. If we didn’t have access to such a large and available-on-demand pool of participants, we wouldn’t have gotten any coherent results at all.
Finally, we collected demographic data from the raters. 10% reported as gay, and 19% as bisexual. Interestingly, straight men are the least likely to report wanting to be touched. (Feel free to hypothesize why!)
We also asked for the age of the rater. What ages have more desire? Is there truth to the stereotype of a lecherous old man? Our evidence is mixed. Below are average ratings when answering “How good would it feel to touch this area?” People in their twenties and thirties give higher ratings, but older men give higher responses than do women — even considering that men give higher responses overall.
Many thanks to Fernanda and Martin for approaching us with this fun idea. This has definitely been the most ludicrous task we’ve ever worked on :) Take a look at this — and other great work — at their site, Fleshmap.com.
jln
08/28/08
I love it… the informative content is not scoop, of course, but the process to ask people, the idea of thousands of clicks on pictures, and the results very nicely visualized make it a very strong piece. It’s net-art really using the web.
When I first discovered Dolores Lab a few month ago, via the color experiment, I thought that I should do a piece using your services. But now the standard is raised, and I better think of something really cool !
Anyway, i’m doing a web based info-sculpture, due to be online next year (around women street harassment stories) and Fleshmap is really an inspiration to continue my project.
PS : “straight men are the least likely to report wanting to be touched”
It’s purely anecdotal, but I’ve seen that in my performance art work too. Women for example engage a lot more easily in the performance. But in my experience men over 45 seems to be more open to play with their body, in an performance art context. Do you confirm ? (do they older men like more to be touched than younger men ??)
Adrian Kuhn
08/28/08
I wonder why know one want to touch, be touched at the feet. Do you have an explanation?
Brendan O'Connor
08/28/08
jln: Thanks for the kind words, and the information from your performance experiences. That’s pretty interesting.
Adrian: I really don’t know, but I do know that some people have ascribed it to how sensitive different areas of the body are. The feet have few nerves compared to other parts of the body.
Hadley
09/14/08
Interesting data and lovely visualisations, but please make sure your bar graphs start at 0!
nicole
10/24/08
great article thank you for the nice read
james
10/25/08
nice one
Gregory Kohs
11/21/08
I’m going to give you your next great idea…
Produce a user-clicked heat map of the United States, asking “Assuming you could find appropriate work and income, where in the United States would you most like to live? You may choose your current area, too.”
In exchange for this brilliant idea, you and your readers have to watch the 10-minute video on my website, linked through my name above. Fair deal? ;-)
Alex Pilafian
05/11/09
please do what comment #7 says.
Raw Shark
05/15/09
So why does the male show front and back desire to be touched …but the female only has back views with 2 different fields?
glassgun
06/04/09
Izzen
10/01/09
I was also wondering why there was no Female to Male “desire to touch” map. We like it to touch too! Maybe the voters just weren’t as open about it…
I also notice that the Female “desire to be touched” map is much more evenly distributed than either Male perspective map; I think that the response is greater, sometimes, if that desire (like touching the back and neck) is only occasionally indulged. We might like it more because those areas are neglected in daily interaction. We don’t touch anyone but lovers anymore…
David
10/01/09
# Raw Shark Says:
May 15th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
So why does the male show front and back desire to be touched …but the female only has back views with 2 different fields?
I agree with this fellow, I want to know the front as well.
brendano
10/01/09
Izzen and David: these are just a few images from the entire site fleshmap.com . Look there.
sos media
10/13/09
Interesting finds. Its funny to use such technological science to figure out such a subtle personal preference and then graph it like this.
Paul Wuerfel
01/07/11
Very interesting, thank you. I did not know much yet
Parki
01/07/11
I’ve never seen that like this. thanks
Dan
10/31/11
Ok, now I see that there are more than just these at fleshmap.com. It becomes even more interesting when you compare these to the other images