Fetish Tabooness and Popularity (v3)

Survey results

I’ve done the fetish/taboo chart a few times before, but I think this might be the happy medium. Last time I put in ~300 fetishes, and they were absolute percentage interest (like, a binary thing - were people into it at least a little bit or not at all?), presented on a log scale. This got a bit complicated, so I decided to make a simpler version.

For this one, I did factor analysis on my original Big Kink Survey to find out the most predictive items to include. This might look a bit weird - for example I have "brother/sister” and “mother/daughter” incest on this graph, but not “father/son” - this is because the former two made it onto more of a factor analisussy spectrum than the latter.

After picking the most predictive items from factor analysis, I then eyeballed it personally and selected a few more that I thought should also be included (like financial domination, for example). And iirc Tailcalled was like “you seem to be weak in items around romance/gentle/sweet stuff”, so I made sure to add in a few more of those.

Though absolutely not perfect, I think this collection of fetishes might be the best-collected list of fetishes that I’m aware exists. Of course you can get a vast list - I have one of 800 or so - but if you wanna narrow it down into a chunk of ~120, which I have here, this is a really good landscape of ‘core fetishes’ from which most other fetish subcategories are associated with, distributed roughly evenly across gender, popularity, and tabooness.

This chart shows average reported interest - so I asked people to rate how erotic they found things on a 0 (not at all) to 5 (extremely) spectrum, and simply took the average score. Same with taboo ratings.

I collected fewer taboo ratings (~1300) to interest ratings (~30,000), because with the taboo survey I was asking people to rate how taboo does your culture view this interest, and I figure we all share culture quite a bit more than we share kinks, and answers converged pretty fast. With kinks, you need a higher sample to really get a good sense of the less prevalent fetishes, so I went harder on that.

I got kink-survey participants partially from posting the survey on social media, but also by linking it in my Big Kink Survey. The Big Kink Survey has a life of its own now, great SEO, it’s linked in a lot of places, still getting a lot of traffic, which means the audience that comes from there is way more normal-internet distributed than people who follow me. I now occasionally link other surveys I’m trying to get participants for, from the Big Kink Survey, to capture some of that more organic audience.

Though in general, I would consider my data in this particular set to be more trustworthy when it comes to comparisons between fetishes as opposed to absolute prevalence of fetishes.

Participants were around 60% male, 40% female, which is much better than my normal personal audience of around 15% female.

In general, I find a kink gap between men and women regardless of survey source; buying test takers from Positly, or from the tiktok influx in my Big Kink Survey, or my own audience. My own audience seems to have a larger gap between men and women, but generally just accentuates a gap that already exists.

I didn’t do any reweighting for anything besides biological sex, which I weighted equally for both taboo and interest scales. This sample skews pretty white and western and young (though in my data last I remember, it seems age and ethnicity doesn’t impact fetishes very much anyway, though location does).

I did do a lot of data scrubbing too, where I deleted some inconsistent response sets, people who answered too many questions too fast, overall averages too outside the norm, etc.

I added some items late (like necrophilia and feedism), so they got a much lower sample size, but I checked confidence intervals and they were small enough that it didn’t seem to matter.

Overall, in this collection of fetishes, the correlation between tabooness and popularity is r=-0.75.

Raw data will be available on my website soon!

You can find the actual surveys I used here - taboo, and kink