If most of the sample size is young and from Tik Tok, I don't see how this could be illustrative bc none of them would actually be "high powered" in the sense of having responsibility for and actual power over lots of people. Almost no one achieves that status til they're about 40…MAYBE in their 30s if they're very, very rare and lucky.
Anyway, classically moat studies showed that people, mostly males, into dominance or submission could get off on both sides of the coin. Just the power play was arousing. So guys into dominating 90% of the time might also enjoy flipping to the other side the other 10% of the time.
Of course, that was before porn changed everyone's views and people starting assuming that being into dominance or submission was not a rare kink in and of itself and irrelevant to most people,but a role that *someone* played in every encounter.
> Of course, that was before porn changed everyone's views and people starting assuming that being into dominance or submission was not a rare kink in and of itself and irrelevant to most people,but a role that *someone* played in every encounter.
I suspect that you are thinking of your own filter bubble.
I think I'm just old enough to remember when there was no such thing as filter bubbles and to have been having sex and remember what the sexual culture was like 30 years ago
This definitely argues pretty strongly against "high-powered people are _more_ submissive in bed", but I feel as though that's not the version I've actually heard, which is something like "a lot of high-powered people want to give up all that power in bed." For women, this seems to back that up - given that the desirability of sexual submission is pretty high and barely changes at all across the whole spectrum of driven-ness, success, and need for control. (Even on the high end of need-for-control, women rate submission as much more desirable than dominance!)
This really doesn’t ask the main questions I think would answer this:
1. How much money do you make?
2. How many people do you manage?
3. Is your job stressful?
Also, it’s quite possible a lot of these phenomena occur at the absolute tail, I don’t think there are that many people in true high level positions of power taking this quiz.
I wonder if the female stats would be closer to the male ones if they included "submission as starfishing" and "dominant bottoms"?
Not everything that looks like submission is meaningfully submission.
Over on reddit, we seem to see a lot of instances of D/s where the purported "/s" is incredibly controlling and narrow in what they want, or really just wants to lie back with no responsibilities and be pleasured in specific ways; "Why can't I get my partner to tie me up and edge me for 3 hours while...?" etc.
You raise a really good point. From her data, I'd say no..."I need to feel in control", which you'd expect to be least correlated if your hypothesis were correct, doesn't seem different from the others. I think you may have made a career out of picking the exceptions!
In my experience, I've met more than my fair share of picky subs, but honestly...they tend to like men who take the lead in and out of the bedroom. But that's n=1 (or 15 or so), not 250,000.
> From her data, I'd say no..."I need to feel in control", which you'd expect to be least correlated if your hypothesis were correct, doesn't seem different from the others.
All the graphs show women as consistently more submissive than dominant at the "RL dominance end" of the X axis.
I'm not trained in statistics, so I may be wrong, but I'm not sure that rules out some of the RL dominant women being controlling bottoms.
Presumably, they don't pick actually dominant partners, which would explain why you don't tend to encounter them.
No, you're right, I'm assuming (implicitly) perfect identity between sexual and general role, which we know is not the case. I'd argue her data suggests there's *some* correlation, so a dominant woman is *less likely* to be a controlling bottom than a randomly selected woman, but we don't know unless she explicitly asks the question.
My impression was that people who perform as high-powered in order to obtain some other reward, but do not enjoy being high-powered in and of itself, are those who like to be submissive in bed. I wonder how the results would look if the question was "Others would describe me as high powered, driven, successful".
Good effort Aella, but these data sets and the methods by which you have acquired them possess notable flaws, you have not accounted for psychological and cognitive bias in self-perception in what is a very nuanced area of psychology. For example, we know that large sections of young women identify as "powerful and independent” as dictated by today’s zeitgeist, and while they may indeed be socially dominant, in reality their actual social and economic positions relative to their perceived self-image are illusory. This is actually shown by your data since women rank very closely and highly vis-à-vis sexual submission and the statements “I’m high powered, driven, successful” (their self-perception bias) and “I don't have very much power over those around me” (their actual experience).
To highlight this issue, we know that Marilyn Monroe had a very poor self-image and self-perception (by her own admission) and was, like most women, most likely naturally submissive in the bedroom, and yet she occupied a position of power and influence over others that the vast majority of women will never experience in their lifetimes. Self-perception and actual power dynamics can diverge significantly, and this is especially highlighted when it comes to the taboo areas of sexual submission and dominance.
Furthermore, we have to ask what the perception and definition of being sexually submissive is to most men (and women)? Most men identify it as not being confident with women or as taking a backseat role in the bedroom, which mostly translates to social submission and not to actual sexual submission, i.e. kneeling before a Dominatrix. Male sexual submission is also highly stigmatised and risks social humiliation (much more so than female domination does), which also presents various biases in acquiring data.
Your data set being so large does not make it more accurate or conclusive, and I think perhaps a smaller sample collected at say a Femdom club night, (accounting for biases there too) would provide a more realistic view. Although anecdotal my experience at such fetish events certainly does support the adage that, disproportionately, “powerful men are actually secretly sexually submissive in bed”, there are just too many high powered execs, CEOs, bankers etc. at these events (when they admit it eventually). Men like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, men who, to my eye, are blatantly submissive in bed.
You’ve made a great effort with this data, however it still does not dissuade me against the common wisdom.
Is it possible that their is a filter on who reports about high powered people being into submission... For example I expect most of this idea comes from dominatrixes whose clientel are into submission, however, dominatrixes can usually only be afforded by "powerful people" therefore their is already a filter on who their clientele are.
How did you get 640,000 responses to your survey? That's many more than your number of subscribers on substack and Twitter combined. (I can't find your Tiktok account.)
What I see here is that male sexual response depends on current status but females are majority sub regardless. Explains why dominatrices make a good living.
Hi! it would be really interesting if you could either test for the statistical significance of these results or give open access to your data so somebody else could. Your research is really cool and having a more comprehensive analysis of the data would add a lot to it imo
CI is in the graphs, it's just such a narrow range it's invisible. Testing for statistical significance starts to get pretty meaningless at sample sizes this large.
If most of the sample size is young and from Tik Tok, I don't see how this could be illustrative bc none of them would actually be "high powered" in the sense of having responsibility for and actual power over lots of people. Almost no one achieves that status til they're about 40…MAYBE in their 30s if they're very, very rare and lucky.
Anyway, classically moat studies showed that people, mostly males, into dominance or submission could get off on both sides of the coin. Just the power play was arousing. So guys into dominating 90% of the time might also enjoy flipping to the other side the other 10% of the time.
Of course, that was before porn changed everyone's views and people starting assuming that being into dominance or submission was not a rare kink in and of itself and irrelevant to most people,but a role that *someone* played in every encounter.
I think sanity checking this by age would be a good idea
> Of course, that was before porn changed everyone's views and people starting assuming that being into dominance or submission was not a rare kink in and of itself and irrelevant to most people,but a role that *someone* played in every encounter.
I suspect that you are thinking of your own filter bubble.
I think I'm just old enough to remember when there was no such thing as filter bubbles and to have been having sex and remember what the sexual culture was like 30 years ago
Citation please?
This definitely argues pretty strongly against "high-powered people are _more_ submissive in bed", but I feel as though that's not the version I've actually heard, which is something like "a lot of high-powered people want to give up all that power in bed." For women, this seems to back that up - given that the desirability of sexual submission is pretty high and barely changes at all across the whole spectrum of driven-ness, success, and need for control. (Even on the high end of need-for-control, women rate submission as much more desirable than dominance!)
Or is it really "high powered people like to starfish in bed"?
This really doesn’t ask the main questions I think would answer this:
1. How much money do you make?
2. How many people do you manage?
3. Is your job stressful?
Also, it’s quite possible a lot of these phenomena occur at the absolute tail, I don’t think there are that many people in true high level positions of power taking this quiz.
how many C-levels are on TikTok?
Interesting.
The alpha in me like domination and physical control.
The exhausted side the frustrated side just wants someone else to run the show. I've fantasized about dominant older women life long.
As the graph points out, many people (especially men) are switches!
This fits with my experience!
I wonder if the female stats would be closer to the male ones if they included "submission as starfishing" and "dominant bottoms"?
Not everything that looks like submission is meaningfully submission.
Over on reddit, we seem to see a lot of instances of D/s where the purported "/s" is incredibly controlling and narrow in what they want, or really just wants to lie back with no responsibilities and be pleasured in specific ways; "Why can't I get my partner to tie me up and edge me for 3 hours while...?" etc.
You raise a really good point. From her data, I'd say no..."I need to feel in control", which you'd expect to be least correlated if your hypothesis were correct, doesn't seem different from the others. I think you may have made a career out of picking the exceptions!
In my experience, I've met more than my fair share of picky subs, but honestly...they tend to like men who take the lead in and out of the bedroom. But that's n=1 (or 15 or so), not 250,000.
> From her data, I'd say no..."I need to feel in control", which you'd expect to be least correlated if your hypothesis were correct, doesn't seem different from the others.
All the graphs show women as consistently more submissive than dominant at the "RL dominance end" of the X axis.
I'm not trained in statistics, so I may be wrong, but I'm not sure that rules out some of the RL dominant women being controlling bottoms.
Presumably, they don't pick actually dominant partners, which would explain why you don't tend to encounter them.
No, you're right, I'm assuming (implicitly) perfect identity between sexual and general role, which we know is not the case. I'd argue her data suggests there's *some* correlation, so a dominant woman is *less likely* to be a controlling bottom than a randomly selected woman, but we don't know unless she explicitly asks the question.
My impression was that people who perform as high-powered in order to obtain some other reward, but do not enjoy being high-powered in and of itself, are those who like to be submissive in bed. I wonder how the results would look if the question was "Others would describe me as high powered, driven, successful".
Good effort Aella, but these data sets and the methods by which you have acquired them possess notable flaws, you have not accounted for psychological and cognitive bias in self-perception in what is a very nuanced area of psychology. For example, we know that large sections of young women identify as "powerful and independent” as dictated by today’s zeitgeist, and while they may indeed be socially dominant, in reality their actual social and economic positions relative to their perceived self-image are illusory. This is actually shown by your data since women rank very closely and highly vis-à-vis sexual submission and the statements “I’m high powered, driven, successful” (their self-perception bias) and “I don't have very much power over those around me” (their actual experience).
To highlight this issue, we know that Marilyn Monroe had a very poor self-image and self-perception (by her own admission) and was, like most women, most likely naturally submissive in the bedroom, and yet she occupied a position of power and influence over others that the vast majority of women will never experience in their lifetimes. Self-perception and actual power dynamics can diverge significantly, and this is especially highlighted when it comes to the taboo areas of sexual submission and dominance.
Furthermore, we have to ask what the perception and definition of being sexually submissive is to most men (and women)? Most men identify it as not being confident with women or as taking a backseat role in the bedroom, which mostly translates to social submission and not to actual sexual submission, i.e. kneeling before a Dominatrix. Male sexual submission is also highly stigmatised and risks social humiliation (much more so than female domination does), which also presents various biases in acquiring data.
Your data set being so large does not make it more accurate or conclusive, and I think perhaps a smaller sample collected at say a Femdom club night, (accounting for biases there too) would provide a more realistic view. Although anecdotal my experience at such fetish events certainly does support the adage that, disproportionately, “powerful men are actually secretly sexually submissive in bed”, there are just too many high powered execs, CEOs, bankers etc. at these events (when they admit it eventually). Men like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, men who, to my eye, are blatantly submissive in bed.
You’ve made a great effort with this data, however it still does not dissuade me against the common wisdom.
Is it possible that their is a filter on who reports about high powered people being into submission... For example I expect most of this idea comes from dominatrixes whose clientel are into submission, however, dominatrixes can usually only be afforded by "powerful people" therefore their is already a filter on who their clientele are.
How did you get 640,000 responses to your survey? That's many more than your number of subscribers on substack and Twitter combined. (I can't find your Tiktok account.)
What is the y-axis and how were the submissive/dominant questions framed? These charts are kind of impossible to decipher much less interpret.
What I see here is that male sexual response depends on current status but females are majority sub regardless. Explains why dominatrices make a good living.
An interesting study, slightly flawed because there might be some dunning-kruger effect regarding perception of high power.
Hi! it would be really interesting if you could either test for the statistical significance of these results or give open access to your data so somebody else could. Your research is really cool and having a more comprehensive analysis of the data would add a lot to it imo
CI is in the graphs, it's just such a narrow range it's invisible. Testing for statistical significance starts to get pretty meaningless at sample sizes this large.
What the fuck do the CIs even refer to?
Oh amazing didn’t see that! not used to working with data that large. Well done, in that case nothing to complain about
could there be a bias, due to ticktock usage and therefore low .......
Make sense.