Half a million kinksters can't be wrong

I just took the survey, answering with complete and total honesty, and<p>&gt; Your kink equivalent is Mother Theresa (2nd percentile)<p>LOL! I mean, I know I&#x27;m vanilla (a rich, complex, and expensive spice, I&#x27;ll have you to know), but if Mother Theresa represents the 2nd percentile, who&#x27;s the standard-bearer for 1st?<p>My serious point is that I strongly suspect that people towards (ahem) <i>my</i> end of the spectrum are likely to be under-represented among the takers of the survey. The people most likely to take a survey about kink are the people most into, well, kink. I don&#x27;t know how any survey design, no matter how good it is in a vacuum, can square that circle.<p>(I say that with all possible respect for Aella and her work. I&#x27;ve followed her blog for ages - her essay about growing up within, and trying to shed, a fundamentalist upbringing is one of the best things I&#x27;ve ever read - and sexology research is fascinating. I just don&#x27;t know how you can draw robust conclusions from survey data, given the social pro- and in-hibibitions most people have inherited.)

Aella being open about her own experiences has been a huge inspiration. She gets a lot of hate, but somehow she lets it roll off her.<p>For my part, I’m happy to see polyamory becoming more mainstream. The idea that we have to choose one partner for life is so indoctrinated into the fabric of society. It was wonderful discovering that there are a whole community of people who live happy lives without this.<p>Aella’s surveys help people make grounded and informed decisions about baseline behaviors. Most people don’t want to talk about their true feelings, and when they do, they usually dress it up to make it socially acceptable. Polling large numbers of people is at least one antidote.

Minor point as the main body of the article doesn&#x27;t attempt to answer it, but:<p>&gt; Why are there way more women interested in submission than men interested in dominance?<p>In my anecdotal experience, there are more everyone interested in submission than dominance. And the gap between male subs and female doms is even greater.

not a response of the article - just a contribution to the conversation here: anyone into kink should be able to understand there is a complex relationship between constraint and freedom. Yes monogamy is as a constraint, but that constraint creates a space of freedom, in which people can reveal themselves honestly while minimizing any sense that anything revealed good or bad will be judged relative to alternative partners. Not everybody needs that, not everybody needs monogamy to create that dynamic, but it would be mistake to think that monogamy doesn&#x27;t offer anything for thoughtful liberated people in exchange for the constraints it requires

this is brilliant:<p>8&lt;--------------------------<p>The entire process was a series of tiny, painstaking tradeoffs. Each time I decided to make a question into a scale, this boosted the total time it took to complete the survey by a few seconds. And I had to care about those few seconds.<p>In the end, the average time it took users to complete the survey was 40 minutes. This is really long for a survey! You really have to get people to care about it in order to finish.<p>So: How do I get them to care?<p>I decided to give users a score at the end — How freaky are you compared to others?

&gt; But this meant I needed to define fetish categories, and there is no good research on this anywhere. I had to invent them.<p>This is a problem I see in many different domains. There will be lots of research papers, lots of small-scale categorization, but nothing that truly categorizes the whole subject.

Are kinks really that rare? Like, don&#x27;t most people have <i>something</i> that turns them on, in some way? Or does this article only refer to a very specific definition of &quot;kink&quot; past a certain degree of &quot;freakiness&quot;?<p>If someone is turned on by cuddling or emotional bonding, are those kinks? I personally consider cuddling a kink. So does hugging, or holding hands, or whatever.<p>Is this not a popular sentiment? Are kinks only things like vore..?

I feel like she points out a lot of reasonable constraints. I don’t think she really overcomes many of them. You just won’t get a reliable survey on such things. But that’s ok. A sample of Vore fforumers is probably just as interesting as Vore festishists. I don’t think it needs to generalize at all.

I mean the survey tried to be &quot;equal&quot; across the board, but as a gay man it wasn&#x27;t really...<p>There were plenty of questions specifically directed at &quot;enjoy doing this to a woman&quot; but no &quot;enjoy doing this to a man&quot; equivalent.<p>Ie &quot;Assume you&#x27;re answering for scenarios that involve your preferred gender;&quot; doesn&#x27;t really work when one of the answers involves &quot;into a vagina&quot;. Perhaps it would&#x27;ve been better to generically phrase it as &quot;into your partner&#x27;s vagina&#x2F;anus&quot; or something.<p>Plus I find it interesting that most of the &quot;kinksters&quot; I know (from the furry&#x2F;pup&#x2F;gay community) will often loudly &amp; proudly claim to be into something when it&#x27;s really only something they may have tried once before, or only do on occasion. I think there&#x27;s definitely a lot of posturing involved.<p>score is 67.09 aka &quot;The Joker&quot; (90th percentile). Hmmm, I suppose most people do find cat boys&#x2F;furry stuff weird, then...

&gt; There were nearly 900 fetishes<p>That is way higher than I would have expected. By at least an order of magnitude. Has she published a list?

sample data based on clinical porn addicts isn&#x27;t good representation of spciety, and thats one of the reasons why I ignore any &quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;research&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot; she does.