Erotic Emotions (updated)
Survey results, n=436,000 cis people
Since my kink survey exploded (currently n=463,196, only measuring cis people for this one), more data came in, and I updated the graph with a bigger sample.
I also used only percentage of people who marked any interest, and didn’t include the “did they also mark the thing as the thing they’re most interested in”, which I did include in the last version.
So everyone likes to be desired and to fall in love, but the ladies like to be safe (makes sense given the risk) and powerless and for the guy to be primal and smug (but they really don't like it when the guy's powerless), whereas the guys like to be safe and primal but less than half are actually into power play.
You know, Aella, I think they're not after you because you're Not an Official Researcher. I think they're after you because you say all the stuff they've been lying to us about for years. And you've got a sample of hundreds of thousands.
The emperor has no clothes. I hope you keep roasting sacred cows. I like steak.
One thing that strikes me about erotic emotions (and kinks) is that they are so widely expressed in popular culture. Take grief. Bottom of the list. When my favorite aunt died I went to the funeral with my wife. Afterward, we had passionate sex (mostly brief non-climaxing) about 20 times that day. So my reaction to death and loss was an erotic (so many mirrors) celebration of life while also seeking comfort and companionship. This seemed a bit odd to me but it later was explained in a show I watched as a common reaction to a death. I have since observed this as fairly common in others (with the caveat that death is not so common where I live).
I think there is a difference between the erotic experiences we seek and erotic responses to life. Our cultural stories suggest we respond to and can understand a much wider range of erotic responses than are commonly intellectually identified. In some sense, cinema is often looking at obscure themes but it also often looks at common human reactions to less common events. "Harold and Maude" comes to mind and "Six Feet Under." We don't think of grief as sexy but our stories suggest it does often turn people on.