8 ms·

Fetish tabooness vs. popularity

168 points by nhchris 4y ago

greggarious 4y ago
>tabooness Oh, ok. I thought you said something else for a second. This is interesting... but please be aware publishing data on these things changes it, since the fetish community is full of weird little edgelords who poop themselves in fear (rather than as part of some mutually agreed upon sex game) when they realize you weren't kidding when you told that cutie in Bloomington that Armin Meiwes did nothing wrong and that next time you don't want to just dry fire their wonder nine. And if you really want to have fun, do as Kinsey did and have them flip a coin and only be truthful if it's heads, then double your sample size to compensate. That's how you gather truly useful data that will keep you entertained long after your IRB certification expires ;-)
- pmarreck 4y ago
  The Kinsey trick is brilliant.
  - greggarious 4y ago
    Then why was I downvoted? Kink shaming is not cool :/
    - pmarreck 4y ago
      It wasn't me! I only downvote with a counterargument comment buttressed by a link to evidence, and I wish that was a thing.
      - greggarious 4y ago
        It’s been a persistent issue for me, on other sites too - trying to be better about paying attention to the comms rather than those kinda things but I’ve had a few times here lately I circle back to a convo to downvotes after I said something elsewhere. People love to abuse their access lol :/
- burnished 4y ago
  Do you have any references to that Kinsey thing? I would just love to read a methodology section including that
  - williamtrask 4y ago
    The technique is called randomised response. Differential privacy formalises it as well
  - raldi 4y ago
    Yeah, I don’t understand why doubling the same size would compensate for instructing half the group to lie.
    - mtlynch 4y ago
      What I think GP is describing is this. Say you want to survey people about something that they may feel social pressure to deny (e.g., cannibalism fantasy). You have people come in, you give them a fair coin, tell them to go into an unmonitored closet and flip the coin (only the respondent sees the result), then come back out. If they flipped heads, the question they should answer is, "Have you ever drank water?" If they flipped tails, the question they should answer is, "Have you ever fantasized about cannibalism?" If you get 55% "yes" responses, you know that about 10% of people answered yes to the cannibalism question. You know that 50% were answering "yes" no matter what, so if you double the percentage above 50%, you get the people answering "yes" to the cannibalism question.
pmarreck 4y ago
And at the very top of the list? Oral sex (for either gender). Can't say I'm shocked. A certain Monty Python scene comes to mind: https://youtu.be/zXT_IOt81Xs https://youtu.be/zXT_IOt81Xs (and... fingering vaginas? Isn't that just foreplay?)
- kragen 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - trabant00 4y ago
    What exactly are you trying to say?
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Or he is man (says so in his profile) and was just wondering?
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  > > (and... fingering vaginas? Isn't that just foreplay?) A good % of women can't orgasm from penetration. As a guy you want to be the person responsible for her cumming (and not leave her to do it herself) so gotta use either fingers or tongue. It's basically in line with the survey that the blogger did.
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    Yes, but the chart was about “fetishes” and I didn’t really consider that as one, but I guess I also note now that it has “missionary position” so I guess…
    - Brybry 4y ago
      [dead]
  - icedchai 4y ago
    The real trick is using both fingers and tongue at the same time. Sadly, this is something I did not discover until I was in my 30's.
zapdrive 4y ago
There are many outliers. For instance, about 30% showed interest in "teens under 18" (which is different from "pre-puberty teens" by the way), but it's ranked 85% on the tabooness score. Another fetish with 30% interest is "thighs" which is only 15% on tabooness.
- pmichaud 4y ago
  I have a hunch that societies generate strong taboos specifically in response to things that are widely appealing to individuals but that are somehow considered harmful to the whole.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Well, sure, but they also have strong taboos to things that are icky to most well adjusted individuals...
    - nhchris 4y ago
      Ickyness correlates well with risk of disease transmission.
- coldtea 4y ago
  Why the fuck would liking thighs be a taboo? Though of course even blow jobs and vagina play weren't seen as 100% clean cut either in the poll, so this sampling includes some puritan backwater people... I think they counter "missionary position" as slightly taboo too?
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    Any survey is going to include people entering random shit for the lulz, so you wouldn't get 100% for "is water wet".
  - kragen 4y ago
    i don't think anyone who had ever met me would describe me as having a puritanical attitude toward sex but i would have been in the 10% of respondents that don't find blowjobs arousing i don't mean i think they're dirty or naughty or something, they just aren't what i'm into i've received blowjobs from partners who enjoyed giving blowjobs, recently even, but it isn't something i'd suggest a partner do with me, unless i know it's something they like a lot human sexual response is pretty varied, maybe more varied than you imagine
Waterluvian 4y ago
I think that the results that lay well off the regression line are fascinating. Seems to suggest a mismatch between people’s interests and society’s acceptance of those interests (not to suggest popular interest implies something should be accepted).
- jayd16 4y ago
  Hmm, I'm not sure it makes sense that they should align. Something might be interesting to many but shunned because of societal concerns if it were practiced widely.
lelandfe 4y ago
This chart's data looks so impossible to me that I'm not putting any faith in it. More than 1 in 5 people taking the survey reported interest in "receiving oral sex from animal"? More than 1 in 50 people admitted to having a pedophilic interest in "pre-puberty children", and just as many have a desire to execute someone? Edit: I suppose, even more incredibly, its rather >1 in 50 people are aroused by the concept of executing someone...
- coldtea 4y ago
  Given how any small town would have the know-and-avoid "local pedo" back in the day, as Louis CK used to joke, it might not be impossible! Those scum are sure a lot! Now sure I believe 1 in 50 admitting to it though...
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    I guess I'm going to be the guy who objects to someone being called scum just for having a thing for kids and never actually acting on it.
    - cwillu 4y ago
      It's like people think that someone just woke up one day and decided to be that way.
      - coldtea 4y ago
        Does it matter? Would a serial killer be any better if "genetics" made them do it? In fact, that would make them more of a beast (as sometimes such people are reffered as), not less. Beast are what they are, they're not what they "chose" to be either... I sure don't agree with unlawful punishment or cruel torment as punishment of course, whatever the crime - as some people think somebody being like that gives them a free ride to kill/torture them. I think those people are also sick, and just finding a convenient widely agreed target for their violent urges...
booleandilemma 4y ago
"maggots/flies".....what does that even mean, in a sexual context? I'm not even sure I want an answer, to be honest. People are weird!
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > "maggots/flies".....what does that even mean, in a sexual context? It is... literal, not a metaphor. It is a subset of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formicophilia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formicophilia
- fudgefactorfive 4y ago
  I truly and sincerely am glad the old creepypasta of Maggot/Blowfly Girl has started to fade out of common consciousness...
l5870uoo9y 4y ago
> Also, general reminder, I use the terms ‘fetish’ and ‘kink’ loosely. I know some people have particular definitions for it, but I don’t care. I do think having and knowing the definition of fetish is meaningful: "a form of sexual desire in which gratification is strongly linked to a particular object or activity or a part of the body other than the sexual organs".
- nhchris 4y ago
  She'd need a separate graph for missionary sex if she adhered to that definition. Like trying to do math without the number zero - you drown in special cases.
- Hizonner 4y ago
  That's a technical definition from the early to mid 20th century. It has zero currency with the public and I'm not even sure it sees a lot of technical use any more.
ffssffss 4y ago
I posted links to this survey on my social media, primarily twitter and reddit, with some indirect advertising on fetlife and discord; these made up 74.4% of my results. Another 22.4% reported ‘other’ from the list of sources. The last 3.2% came from telegram, tumblr, and facebook; these categories have low enough sample that I’m not going to include them on graphs in this blog post. I'm not sure this is representative of anything other than "people who follow Aella and are interested enough in the topic to fill out a self-report survey".
- mschuster91 4y ago
  You'll have that bias in any study about non-mainstream sexuality. Most people are vanilla or don't express their sexuality (although that did change with 50SoG, but the influx of people "educated" by it is a scourge on the BDSM community), many cultures (particularly religious fundamentalists) shame sexuality entirely, and even among the progressive crowd it's not really an everyday topic you can run surveys with... The advantage of Aella's research is the sheer mass of people she draws in. Way more than a lot of research, and the mass eliminates trolls, religious fundamentalists and idiots that plague "popular research" aka yellow press surveys.
  - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago
    Isn’t this textbook yellow journalism?
    - rippercushions 4y ago
      No? Yellow journalism would be to use these results for headlines like "1 IN 50 AMERICANS WANT TO RAPE BABIES".
      - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago
        Log transforming this data isn’t far off.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> I posted links to this survey on my social media, primarily twitter and reddit, with some indirect advertising on fetlife and discord; these made up 74.4% of my results. Another 22.4% reported ‘other’ from the list of sources. The last 3.2% came from telegram, tumblr, and facebook; these categories have low enough sample that I’m not going to include them on graphs in this blog post. So, mostly, this tells us about the compiler’s social media bubble?
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Exactly. Aella's statistics can be entertaining (especially when she sources them from Twitter), but their treatment should probably end there.
xenago 4y ago
> Aella People are taking this seriously? SMH
- GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
  Not surprised the woman who runs "polls" about sexually abusing dead animals has a correspondingly perverted audience.
Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago
Is this an attempt at trolling statisticians?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
threadweaver34 4y ago
I follow the author on Fetlife and remember when she was fishing for people to fill out a survey.
blamazon 4y ago
> sex with your own dead body That's one I've not heard before!
- kergonath 4y ago
  It’s not something you can achieve often, to be fair.
  - quotemstr 4y ago
    > It’s not something you can achieve often, to be fair. Anything is possible with sufficiently good VR.
phkahler 4y ago
So the things people like are not considered taboo. People think they are "normal" and expect others to be normal too.
GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
Flagging this. Aella regularly runs these type of polls, which only get a few thousand biased votes, then wraps it in scientific language to make it seem legitimate. She mostly runs polls for shock value [1]. [1] - https://twitter.com/aella_girl/status/1543653487233351683?lang=en https://twitter.com/aella_girl/status/1543653487233351683?la...
more_corn 4y ago
Why do people use the annoying sub stack subscribe interstitial? Just stop.

168 points by nhchris 4y ago

>tabooness Oh, ok. I thought you said something else for a second. This is interesting... but please be aware publishing data on these things changes it, since the fetish community is full of weird little edgelords who poop themselves in fear (rather than as part of some mutually agreed upon sex game) when they realize you weren't kidding when you told that cutie in Bloomington that Armin Meiwes did nothing wrong and that next time you don't want to just dry fire their wonder nine. And if you really want to have fun, do as Kinsey did and have them flip a coin and only be truthful if it's heads, then double your sample size to compensate. That's how you gather truly useful data that will keep you entertained long after your IRB certification expires ;-)

pmarreck 4y ago
The Kinsey trick is brilliant.
- greggarious 4y ago
  Then why was I downvoted? Kink shaming is not cool :/
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    It wasn't me! I only downvote with a counterargument comment buttressed by a link to evidence, and I wish that was a thing.
    - greggarious 4y ago
      It’s been a persistent issue for me, on other sites too - trying to be better about paying attention to the comms rather than those kinda things but I’ve had a few times here lately I circle back to a convo to downvotes after I said something elsewhere. People love to abuse their access lol :/
burnished 4y ago
Do you have any references to that Kinsey thing? I would just love to read a methodology section including that
- williamtrask 4y ago
  The technique is called randomised response. Differential privacy formalises it as well
- raldi 4y ago
  Yeah, I don’t understand why doubling the same size would compensate for instructing half the group to lie.
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    What I think GP is describing is this. Say you want to survey people about something that they may feel social pressure to deny (e.g., cannibalism fantasy). You have people come in, you give them a fair coin, tell them to go into an unmonitored closet and flip the coin (only the respondent sees the result), then come back out. If they flipped heads, the question they should answer is, "Have you ever drank water?" If they flipped tails, the question they should answer is, "Have you ever fantasized about cannibalism?" If you get 55% "yes" responses, you know that about 10% of people answered yes to the cannibalism question. You know that 50% were answering "yes" no matter what, so if you double the percentage above 50%, you get the people answering "yes" to the cannibalism question.

pmarreck 4y ago

And at the very top of the list? Oral sex (for either gender). Can't say I'm shocked. A certain Monty Python scene comes to mind: https://youtu.be/zXT_IOt81Xs https://youtu.be/zXT_IOt81Xs (and... fingering vaginas? Isn't that just foreplay?)

kragen 4y ago
[flagged]
- trabant00 4y ago
  What exactly are you trying to say?
- coldtea 4y ago
  Or he is man (says so in his profile) and was just wondering?
JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
> > (and... fingering vaginas? Isn't that just foreplay?) A good % of women can't orgasm from penetration. As a guy you want to be the person responsible for her cumming (and not leave her to do it herself) so gotta use either fingers or tongue. It's basically in line with the survey that the blogger did.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  Yes, but the chart was about “fetishes” and I didn’t really consider that as one, but I guess I also note now that it has “missionary position” so I guess…
  - Brybry 4y ago
    [dead]
- icedchai 4y ago
  The real trick is using both fingers and tongue at the same time. Sadly, this is something I did not discover until I was in my 30's.

zapdrive 4y ago

There are many outliers. For instance, about 30% showed interest in "teens under 18" (which is different from "pre-puberty teens" by the way), but it's ranked 85% on the tabooness score. Another fetish with 30% interest is "thighs" which is only 15% on tabooness.

pmichaud 4y ago
I have a hunch that societies generate strong taboos specifically in response to things that are widely appealing to individuals but that are somehow considered harmful to the whole.
- coldtea 4y ago
  Well, sure, but they also have strong taboos to things that are icky to most well adjusted individuals...
  - nhchris 4y ago
    Ickyness correlates well with risk of disease transmission.
coldtea 4y ago
Why the fuck would liking thighs be a taboo? Though of course even blow jobs and vagina play weren't seen as 100% clean cut either in the poll, so this sampling includes some puritan backwater people... I think they counter "missionary position" as slightly taboo too?
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Any survey is going to include people entering random shit for the lulz, so you wouldn't get 100% for "is water wet".
- kragen 4y ago
  i don't think anyone who had ever met me would describe me as having a puritanical attitude toward sex but i would have been in the 10% of respondents that don't find blowjobs arousing i don't mean i think they're dirty or naughty or something, they just aren't what i'm into i've received blowjobs from partners who enjoyed giving blowjobs, recently even, but it isn't something i'd suggest a partner do with me, unless i know it's something they like a lot human sexual response is pretty varied, maybe more varied than you imagine

Waterluvian 4y ago

I think that the results that lay well off the regression line are fascinating. Seems to suggest a mismatch between people’s interests and society’s acceptance of those interests (not to suggest popular interest implies something should be accepted).

jayd16 4y ago
Hmm, I'm not sure it makes sense that they should align. Something might be interesting to many but shunned because of societal concerns if it were practiced widely.

lelandfe 4y ago

This chart's data looks so impossible to me that I'm not putting any faith in it. More than 1 in 5 people taking the survey reported interest in "receiving oral sex from animal"? More than 1 in 50 people admitted to having a pedophilic interest in "pre-puberty children", and just as many have a desire to execute someone? Edit: I suppose, even more incredibly, its rather >1 in 50 people are aroused by the concept of executing someone...

coldtea 4y ago
Given how any small town would have the know-and-avoid "local pedo" back in the day, as Louis CK used to joke, it might not be impossible! Those scum are sure a lot! Now sure I believe 1 in 50 admitting to it though...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  I guess I'm going to be the guy who objects to someone being called scum just for having a thing for kids and never actually acting on it.
  - cwillu 4y ago
    It's like people think that someone just woke up one day and decided to be that way.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      Does it matter? Would a serial killer be any better if "genetics" made them do it? In fact, that would make them more of a beast (as sometimes such people are reffered as), not less. Beast are what they are, they're not what they "chose" to be either... I sure don't agree with unlawful punishment or cruel torment as punishment of course, whatever the crime - as some people think somebody being like that gives them a free ride to kill/torture them. I think those people are also sick, and just finding a convenient widely agreed target for their violent urges...

booleandilemma 4y ago

"maggots/flies".....what does that even mean, in a sexual context? I'm not even sure I want an answer, to be honest. People are weird!

dragonwriter 4y ago
> "maggots/flies".....what does that even mean, in a sexual context? It is... literal, not a metaphor. It is a subset of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formicophilia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formicophilia
fudgefactorfive 4y ago
I truly and sincerely am glad the old creepypasta of Maggot/Blowfly Girl has started to fade out of common consciousness...

l5870uoo9y 4y ago

> Also, general reminder, I use the terms ‘fetish’ and ‘kink’ loosely. I know some people have particular definitions for it, but I don’t care. I do think having and knowing the definition of fetish is meaningful: "a form of sexual desire in which gratification is strongly linked to a particular object or activity or a part of the body other than the sexual organs".

nhchris 4y ago
She'd need a separate graph for missionary sex if she adhered to that definition. Like trying to do math without the number zero - you drown in special cases.
Hizonner 4y ago
That's a technical definition from the early to mid 20th century. It has zero currency with the public and I'm not even sure it sees a lot of technical use any more.

ffssffss 4y ago

I posted links to this survey on my social media, primarily twitter and reddit, with some indirect advertising on fetlife and discord; these made up 74.4% of my results. Another 22.4% reported ‘other’ from the list of sources. The last 3.2% came from telegram, tumblr, and facebook; these categories have low enough sample that I’m not going to include them on graphs in this blog post. I'm not sure this is representative of anything other than "people who follow Aella and are interested enough in the topic to fill out a self-report survey".

mschuster91 4y ago
You'll have that bias in any study about non-mainstream sexuality. Most people are vanilla or don't express their sexuality (although that did change with 50SoG, but the influx of people "educated" by it is a scourge on the BDSM community), many cultures (particularly religious fundamentalists) shame sexuality entirely, and even among the progressive crowd it's not really an everyday topic you can run surveys with... The advantage of Aella's research is the sheer mass of people she draws in. Way more than a lot of research, and the mass eliminates trolls, religious fundamentalists and idiots that plague "popular research" aka yellow press surveys.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago
  Isn’t this textbook yellow journalism?
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    No? Yellow journalism would be to use these results for headlines like "1 IN 50 AMERICANS WANT TO RAPE BABIES".
    - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago
      Log transforming this data isn’t far off.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> I posted links to this survey on my social media, primarily twitter and reddit, with some indirect advertising on fetlife and discord; these made up 74.4% of my results. Another 22.4% reported ‘other’ from the list of sources. The last 3.2% came from telegram, tumblr, and facebook; these categories have low enough sample that I’m not going to include them on graphs in this blog post. So, mostly, this tells us about the compiler’s social media bubble?

woodruffw 4y ago
Exactly. Aella's statistics can be entertaining (especially when she sources them from Twitter), but their treatment should probably end there.

xenago 4y ago

> Aella People are taking this seriously? SMH

GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
Not surprised the woman who runs "polls" about sexually abusing dead animals has a correspondingly perverted audience.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago

Is this an attempt at trolling statisticians?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

threadweaver34 4y ago

I follow the author on Fetlife and remember when she was fishing for people to fill out a survey.

blamazon 4y ago

> sex with your own dead body That's one I've not heard before!

kergonath 4y ago
It’s not something you can achieve often, to be fair.
- quotemstr 4y ago
  > It’s not something you can achieve often, to be fair. Anything is possible with sufficiently good VR.

phkahler 4y ago

So the things people like are not considered taboo. People think they are "normal" and expect others to be normal too.

GaryNumanVevo 4y ago

Flagging this. Aella regularly runs these type of polls, which only get a few thousand biased votes, then wraps it in scientific language to make it seem legitimate. She mostly runs polls for shock value [1]. [1] - https://twitter.com/aella_girl/status/1543653487233351683?lang=en https://twitter.com/aella_girl/status/1543653487233351683?la...

more_corn 4y ago

Why do people use the annoying sub stack subscribe interstitial? Just stop.