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LRealist  6mo ago (text post)   1498 thread views

Political Survey

Some of you (OK so like... three of you) may remember the last time I ran a survey on political values; I was really happy with the responses everybody gave me at TheMotte, and now a few other people I know who post on Substack are wanting to use the results to answer some questions of their own. So long story short, here's another poll:

PLEASE TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

Don't worry if you think you're unusual and might skew the results - in fact we'd very much appreciate your perspective, whatever it is.

Thanks guys!

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If you chose one of the two last alternatives on the previous question: Why are you only interested in sex within some kind of relationship? (More than one alternative can be chosen).

I didn't choose one of the last two options in the previous question

I find sex with someone I don't know meaningless

I find sex with someone I don't know disgusting

Casual sex can be physically dangerous

Casual sex can lead to unwanted pregnancy

Casual sex risks transmitting STIs

Casual sex can lead to unwanted psychological consequences for me

Casual sex can lead to unwanted social consequences for me

Casual sex can lead to unwanted psychological consequences for the other person

You omitted "casual sex/cheating is immoral for other reasons".

Reasonable, though I didn't write that question, so I guess insert shrug smiley here?

Vaccine mandates are a good idea - businesses and schools need to be able to prevent the unvaccinated from entering.

These two clauses say different things. Businesses being able to do something (exclude unvaccinated) is different from businesses being required to do it.

Imagine it would be socially allowed for you to have sex with whomever you choose (permissive partner, permissive religion). How many percent of all people of your preferred age and sex would you then consider as sexual partners?

I don't know what this means. If it's "socially allowed" why does the next question offer a reason of "unwanted social consequences"?

The question seems to be treating sexual morality as very rules-based and divorced from any consequences. Kind of like, it's this good thing that only outdated moral rules are preventing people from enjoying. I don't think of sexual morality in these terms. Sex is a means to an end: creating successful kids. Sex that doesn't help with that is a vice, akin to gluttony or sloth (I'm atheist, not Catholic, but Catholics have a good taxonomy of vices). By "vice" I mean something that distracts from useful efforts or that has negative consequences. I checked the box for "I find sex with someone I don't know meaningless" but that is not adequately expressing my stance.

Would you consider "one-to-two-storey, adjacent buildings share walls" to be urban or suburban? It's clearly higher-density than the "freestanding houses with green between" in your "suburban" picture", but way, way short of the skyscrapers in your "urban" picture.

So I actually was responsible for that question, and I began by thinking about population density, and thinking of sending people to Wikipedia, and wondered whether I should ask people to give their answer in terms of persons per square mile or square kilometer. Then I realized "Who am I kidding, this survey attempts to measure intellectual ability with two questions you can either get right or wrong; the granularity is so coarse and reliability so low that we'll need n ~ 200 to see anything anyway, just try this handy picture of idealized living spaces."

I would go with "urban", in Europe it would count as urban for sure, since there are not so many cities with skyscrapers' districts. And sharing walls as well as having common frontage is a distinct feature of a town.

How far do you have to walk to touch grass? If it's less than half a block, it's suburban IMO.

There is grass right outside my front door, but no one would consider it anything other than downtown. I don't think whether something is urban is determined by the density. I think it's determined by the proximity to the centre of the city or town.

Are we talking grass on residential properties, or any grass? There's a trade-school campus across the road with plenty of grass, there's a nature strip on the road a half-block or so down, and a public park a (small, 2 minute walk) block away, but I don't think there are any houses with grass around them in the immediate area.

I don't think there are any houses with grass around them in the immediate area.

I'd call that the deciding factor. It's not a super-principled decision, but the density you're describing doesn't sound suburban.

The primary reason I've turned down sex is not in the list: I don't trust the motives of the other party.

I very much agree; in fact, I never have sex even at my own parties.

But why did you cared about those motives at all?

To give a bad example, "I worship Ebola-chan, have deliberately infected myself with ebola, and am trying to infect random people with it via sex" would be a motive most people would care about.

To give a better example, there are various forms of badger games or pseudo-badger games, only some of which are highly CW-loaded in one direction or another.

The first example falls in the case of fearing sexually transmitted diseases. I'm not sure Ebola is officially one of them but in practice it is.

Badger games fall in the case of unwanted social consequences.

So it seems to me you don't need another case. But perhaps I'm missing something

"Unwanted social consequences" is actually not in the list for "If you did decline one or more offers to have sex, what was the reason?". It's listed in a later question, but not that one.

I'm also not sure I'd consider some forms of pseudo-badger-games to be "social" consequences. Most obviously, the one where you literally just lure the guy in for a robbery.

Ok I didn't remember it correctly. I think economical consequences (losing money or things) are a special kind of social consequences, at least in a poll where you can't have infinitely many options

Did you ever post results for the last one? I might have missed it.

Yes, right here: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kynw2u/four_factors_of_political_attitudes/

Huh, turns out I even responded to it. I'm getting old ;_;

I kept running into the same problem I always run into on these political self-report surveys: I had to answer “Neither Agree Nor Disagree” on a number of questions not because I don’t have a strong opinion or stance on the issue in question, but because I reject the framing or ideological vocabulary of the way the question is written. I fear that my responses may skew the survey toward seeming to reflect that I’m apathetic about a host of hot-button issues, when actually my opinion is too complex to be adequately expressed by answering a single-sentence question.

Answering in that way won't skew anything. Some might argue that whenever the average departs significantly from Neither, your abstaining with Neither then functions as a dissenting opinion. But even taking this as a meaningful concern, the point of the survey is to get a sense of what everyone thinks, even people who throw up their hands in exasperation by simple attitude scales.

Out of curiosity, do you find the items on the Wilson-Patterson C Scale more or less frustrating? You just look at a word or phrase and respond Yes / ? / No: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Zitem-scale-of-social-conservatism-Henningham/764c5607d921d88d1cf9197f46858c38022899fb/figure/1

I think I may have messed up the last question.

Up or on?

I was reading the items on Aella's graph and my face hardening into an ever more pronounced frown the further right I went.

It seemed more logical to me to start from the right.

I didn't click on the Aella link bc I'm at work. Nevertheless, I chose "past 4" with confidence. Take that as you may.

I expected to fall farther to the right than I actually ended up, although I suspect I'm still farther to the right than most people close to me would figure. I think that's probably common. I went on to take her actual survey, I found it interesting. I also read several of her write-ups about her insights about the data on her substack.

I do think you should probably look at the "past 4" section before being confident about telling people you're in there.

Yeah, I assumed I'd get "past 4" but I didn't (though it was a ruler-effort due to clear nonconsent rape; I might not want to be involved in it IRL but I do like my bodice-rippers).

Ha, I already regret writing it here. It seemed funny to me when it happened, so I posted it here, but it comes of as overly edgy in retrospect.

So you're into at least one of these (scat, grandparent/child incest, necrophilia, pedophilia, executions, bestiality, brutality, mother/daughter incest)?

Mother/daughter is a smidgen below 4. I checked at max size.

Yes.

On another note, am I the only one who thinks scat and the two incests seem out of place compared to the others? In particular mother/daughter seems outright tame to me.

Scat is there because poo contains coliforms and if those wind up in your mouth you are reasonably likely to get sick.

"Mother/daughter" is a smidgen below 4, actually, and I believe that's a misstatement of general "parent/child" (there are no categories listed for "mother/son", "father/son", or "father/daughter").

And yes, necrophilia/paedophilia/executions/bestiality score higher than the rest.

It's not that clear to me what they mean with "mother/daughter". Looking at a daughter and a mother having sex (incest porn)? Or for a daughter to want to have sex with her own mother? Or for a mother to have desires for her daughter? Because incest porn is quite widespread, but it's not the same as being excited by your own daughter.

At least in the survey, incest has an escalating rate of expected disapproval as age gaps and reproductive risks start getting involved, starting with sister-sister as the least taboo (presumably het guys with twin threesome fantasies?), with an exception for brother-brother and father-son incest being considered more taboo (... presumably because there's a lot of het guys in the sample).

There's also a lot of items that weren't included in the final v3 graph or v3 taboo survey which were in the v2 taboo survey, and were probably more heavily focused on disgust or norm violations than such severe norm violations that they were clear violations of law. Not sure if they were dropped do to low interest or expected overlap with other statements, or just to streamline the survey.

That said, the survey asked about what you expected social ramifications would be, were you revealed to be interested in the topic to family or strangers, which is probably going to different results than whether something is tame or weird. The central case of parental incest in the real world and especially real-world awareness is incredibly abusive, and that's likely to drive how people expect social response to be, even if a lot of the people who fantasize usually have a wildly different focus.

The thought that a person could be sexually aroused by any item on this list fills me with a profound, disquieting horror. There are differences in degree (scat horrifies me less than paedophilia), but none of them fail to horrify me.

If it's any consolation, I'm about as vanilla as it gets irl. I'm lucky insofar as I don't have an obligate fetish; I get off on perfectly normal sex with my wife just fine. But the fact remains, we don't have control over what turns us on, and for some people that includes some fucked up things.

Oh wild.

I'm pretty far left on that scale myself; on the other hand, I was shocked to learn that people I know and trust are far to the right.

I found that graph very funny. "Sensuality" listed as a fetish stunned me for a second.

There is apparently a continuum of tabooness from white to Asian to black...

"Indifference" is a fetish now.

There's a subreddit called something like "bored and ignored", for videos of couples having sex and the woman is paying no attention to the man e.g. because she's too engrossed in the video game she's playing. Half a million subscribers - no idea how that compares to other fetish subs but it seems like there's a sizeable market for this kind of content.

I've heard in the porn industry, a white girl doing a scene with a black guy pays more than a white girl doing anal with a white guy.

"Some studios pay white women more for their perceived willingness to perform IR scenes, and white women can launch lucrative careers by planning a trajectory that leads up to interracial porn."

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/07/164569/racism-pay-interracial-porn-industry-glamour

Mutt's law being what it is, I can only assume so.

Apparently some of the softer or more romantic 'kinks' were added because "iirc Tailcalled was like “you seem to be weak in items around romance/gentle/sweet stuff”".

"Tabooness" is specifically "how much would society judge you" in the taboo survey, specifically:

To calibrate, you can ask How bad would it be if you: told your grandmother you have this fetish, [or] announced to a crowd of strangers you have this fetish [or] had search history for this fetish leaked.

Notably, it does not have the disclaimer about fantasy that the kink survey did. So it's got a lot of overloading, somewhat at cross purposes. Most stuff on the >80% is the sort of conduct that gets you jailed and/or disowned, while most of the <40% is stuff that at most would be awkward.

Another question: if incest is hovering around 1 in average reported interest, why for the last ~ten years has the front page of Pornhub been dominated by stepbrother, stepson, stepdaughter etc.?

Does it have some correlates that are otherwise hard to search for directly? I imagine for example that the incest framing would be anticorrelated with the actors being old or trashy, or the action being violent or non-passionate. Maybe it's simply the easiest way to find nice vanilla sexual encounters between normal-looking people in a domestic setting.

I don't know about pornhub but I know on xvideos that the website automatically appends "step" to words like "brother" or "dad" (and also completely removes other certain words) so maybe pornhub operates the same way

One side's that the Likert Scale has some really awkward ramifications, and while it's well-accepted as a scientific tool (so I can't blame individual researchers for using it), I'm not convinced it should be. It's notoriously prone to anchoring problems, but worse than that it tends to give a very constrained summary of its results. An average score of 1 can reflect either reflect all of your participants saying that they find it only the slightest bit arousing, or ~15% finding it the most arousing thing ever and everyone else hating it, or anywhere in-between.

In practice, this kinda averages out for all but the most polarizing interests (eg, "gay men" has 15,878 zero scores to the 34,977 "brosis" does in the raw data despite 'only' having a 1.5ish score), but it still means 25% report at least "somewhat arousing" to brother/sister.

Which is only part of the explanation; I don't know non-fur stuff that well, but from your reaction it sounds like 25% would be a low estimate for the front page of pornhub (and I don't think my checks would be representative).

The other side's kinda boring. At least for video, 'incest' as a kink is cheap and easy to advertise for how taboo it is. Trivially, a lot of it's just random videos uploaded with an eye-catching title, but even a video leaning very heavily into the genre only needs two porn actors/actresses and a video camera. Ideally somewhat similar-looking actors and actresses, but honestly when you strap 'step' onto the front they don't even necessarily have to be the same race. That makes it a lot easier to produce content (and with clear weightings for recently uploaded content, that matters), and for that content to get enough interest to be promoted to the front page. (To be unreasonably charitable, it also means that people really squicked by incest can avoid the stuff easily, rather than getting a money shot and then faked moans of "hey bro".)

Presumably the inclusion of "step" means it's not incest people seek, but, as someone else put it, a potential sexual partner you don't need to painstakingly swipe on Tinder/barfly/scan friends' groups for because you're already intimately familiar.

This is like a spicyness scale but about halfway through you stop eating chillis and start getting actual literal lava put in your mouth.

I'm very surprised insects was so far to the right. I thought that stuff was mainstream.

I am surprised that oviposition was to the left of bestiality. Is it because giant insects with penis-sized ovipositors don't exist, but people might think you could have actually fucked a dog if you tell them you have such books in your collection?

The taboo survey doesn't emphasize fantasy the way the kink survey does, which probably has some impact.

At least from the survey format, I also wouldn't have associated oviposition with giant (non-sapient) insects, tbh. I've probably been spoiled because of the furry fandom having a lot of dragons or eggs sometimes just happening, but even for non-furs I would associate it more with stuff like silicone eggs or aliens/monsters, especially post-Alien, or (more rarely) as a sanitized pregnancy/birth kink first. There was another question that was more focused on infestation sorta stuff that seems a closer fit to the often-degradation-focused insect egg kink, though no guarantee that the average survey-taker would get the questions in the same order.

Oviposition's still weird, but it's not the sorta thing you'd get taken to court or jail over the way abusing an animal can.

The taboo survey doesn't emphasize fantasy the way the kink survey does, which probably has some impact.

I had no idea these were two separate surveys.

Yeah, it's more explicit on her site. The taboo survey had many fewer responses (around 1300 to the around 30,000 of the kink survey as of Aug 2023) and looks like it was collected more heavily from Aella's readership until later in the process (where she started to sell through Positly). She assumes that a lot of the taboo stuff will converge quickly with fewer data points because it's such a social thing, and that's probably not wrong, and keeping the surveys separate probably does help avoid lower kinks scores because of people feeling shamed about kinks.

Right, then my assumption makes sense, it's explicitly formulated as "what would people think". Someone's interest in sexualized oviposition probably weirds out just as many people as their interest in sex with other species of mammals, but it creeps them out less, since it's clearly an imaginary act.

((Apologies if I've missed sarcasm or Bee Movie joke.))

I think "insects" is short for "sexual scenarios involving creepy crawlies, like rodents, insects, etc.", so contextually probably more along the lines of live vermin touching you than "I will not eat the bugs/I will not live in the pod" or anthro bug material. I'm personally surprised it's not further to the right (perhaps because it's less likely to result in criminal charges?), but I'm pretty sure it's a fairly rare kink even in complete fantasy form.

EXTERMINATUS

Right? I mean who knew execution would be female-coded?

Same, the bottom right quickly became nightmare fuel

Also, the way the wording on that question gave me pause, specifically on what constitutes “interest”. There’s certain things that I would possibly fantasize about or find fantasies of arousing, but would straight up never indulge in IRL even with an enthusiastic & willing partner.

Even as an atheist, I think a lot of this stuff is bad for your soul. And I don’t even believe in souls.

Yeah, this could stand to be more clearly described. The underlying kink survey specifically says:

Reminder: this test assumes ALL THINGS ARE BY DEFAULT, FANTASIES. It is possible to ethically fantasize about a scenario that would not be ethical if done in real life. This test is asking about what would be hypothetically erotic, NOT about what you would act on.

And it's not really clear if the political survey is aiming the same direction.

ven within that there's going to be a lot of variation depending on how central an example of the class you want. The body horror question expands to "I find sexual scenarios involving body horror to be: such as mutations, bodyswap, malicious surgery, infestations", and there's going to be a very big disparity between "you're being Alien facehuggered", "The Thing thinks you're cute", "frankenstein'd heads" and this (cw: featureless nudity), but while it's the most overt variation it's far from the only one.

I'm guessing bestiality (survey question "meaning sexual interaction with at least one non-human animals/amphibians/insects/birds/etc. This is not being an animal") is more about non-sapient and non-talking critters, and that's something that I'm pretty uncomfortable in that 'bad for your soul' way even if it's 'just' a fantasy. But the strict definition includes even the standard furry anthros, and there's a reason that the Harkness Test is a thing in the furry fandom.

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