To produce a collective portrait of desire, we polled hundreds of people’s opinions about parts of the body. To do so, we teamed up with Dolores Labs to crowdsource the data gathering step through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site—a marketplace where paid workers perform simple tasks. This means that we set up an open call to anyone on the Mechanical Turk site who was interested in answering questions about desire and the human body.

We developed the rating interface below, which prompted users to rank how exciting several points of the body were to the touch. Overall, we asked questions for 707 different points on male and female bodies.