My partner is a non-online kinkster, who has nothing to do with any online community. I read her your posts, and she unambigiously appreciates them. She shares them with her friends, she gains insights from them, and she sees your findings reflected in her communities. (Men who like non-con being hugely sexually popular because it's such a relatively rare subtype).
It's interesting how someone who hasn't built up the internet's preconceptions or biases just unambiguously likes and appreciates your work. Someone could very possibly offer valid critique of it, but that's not the flavour of the pushback you're getting. The flavour of pushback you're getting is clouded in insecurity. You already have the hot and sexually successful card, you can't possibly be doing quality research too. That'd be too unfair.
I wonder, similar to Giles' example below with dominant women but in a different direction, how many dudes into non-con are simply afraid of going to jail (and being raped for real) if the other person turns on them. I was doing completely consensual domination (like, I'd check in before, check in afterward, debrief, and repeat the safeword to them during the scene to see if they wanted to use it) and I still quit after the Gaiman thing came out. Not that he wasn't guilty--I'll never know that for sure--but the fact he kept all the messages and it didn't save him.
Contrary to stereotypes, people high in one dimensions are often high in others--we don't all have the same number of 'character points', to use an RPG metaphor. People with high intelligence can also have high charisma!
I am curious about the non-con thing. I just looked back at a post of Aella’s sharing her results and I didn’t see that mismatch. Would you mind pointing me to what you’re referring to?
i believe what's being seen in aella's research is a result of her data pool being one of convenience. people being sent/shown a survey about what they're sexually into are much more likely to have friends who are more sexually explorative or actively be looking up certain kinda of kink (to be reccomended a kink survey). additionally, non-con is one of those kinks (in my experience) that people are afraid to admit they have even under anonymity, if they know that sort of scenario turns them on at all. the 'demographic' seen in aella's data's mostly skewed towards online people already interested previously in kink/sexual exploration.
> But instead I’ve peeked inside the door and found everyone standing in a circle with their thumb inside the butt of the person in front of them, creating a thumb-in-butt circle.
Now, that's just a very skewed perspective on academia. You completely ignored the small army of people burning years of their lives trying to join the circle, complete with both sabotage from other aspiring circle-joiners and purity testing and hoop-jumping set up by those in the circle in order to protect their current position in the circle, because every other person in the circle wants to either put their thumb in someone else's butt, or to have someone else's thumb in their butt, with both of these making a huge difference if they continue to remain in the circle next year.
Also the cathedral is on fire because in the scramble to get into/stay in the circle candles get knocked over, and there's either no incentive or active disincentive for anyone to try to put it out, so instead everyone blames the idiots outside the cathedral for not accepting the obvious Truth that the cathedral either isn't on fire, or it is on fire but that's a good thing, with these two positions becoming part of the intra-circle position-jockeying.
But I accept that a more complete metaphor may have been a little bit of a derailment from your central point.
I was amused that you needed to write "I AM NOT EXAGGERATING" in capital letters, because I didn't bat an eyelid at the preceding paragraph, and I don't even think it's that cynical. I did a PhD in part because I wanted to understand what the research world was like "for real", and that's what I found. But it all kinda made sense. The primary success metric of an academic is recognition of their work, and that inevitably brings about a system of ego-stroking. I still think most academics are in it for an earnest pursuit of truth, but they get thrown into a system and, well, yeah. Sometimes I would imagine what a purer form of academia would look like, but you need a way to allocate funding and some basic checks, and eventually I would just land on the status quo again. Seems like a hard problem to solve.
Anyway, your work is great, keep it up. Sorry you found the conversations with academics frustrating but I'm glad they seemed keen to help.
The missing variable between the thumb-up-thier-butt circle and the shining cathedral is just academic funding. Pretty much no one is funding research grants on fetish / sex research someone in academia could actually write a grant proposal to and then fund their research (I.e fund their salary, plus whatever grad students / compensation for survey respondents or hiring of professional survey firms) from the grant award.
OKcupid was almost there in terms of having a dating website where survey questions were a big match incentive in online dating, but then Match group bought them and all that data became proprietary to Match Group as a means of improving their algorithm.
I almost feel like if someone were basically to copy the original OKcupid business model, but then adapt it for the modern mobile app/cloud data age, they could be the next big thing in dating apps. At least the way OKCupid used to work where you basically could build your own dating app algorithm based on your preferred survey questions.
It was always kind of a combo of 'conservatives think fetish stuff is evil and not worth funding' and 'liberals fund it as long as it finds things that fit the current wave of feminism'.
I mean, at that point in dating app history, sure. Tinder came along and copied Grindr for straight people and at the time it seemed more abundant to just be on Tinder or an app that basically replicated the short/no bio photos first swiping approach.
But where we are now? Women overwhelmed by dudes swiping yes on every woman, men frustrated they have to compete with every loser playing the numbers rather than making actual effort? People upset about ‘rose jail’ for their best matches on Hinge?
I think in this environment, people would be happier with a dating app where instead of the app company setting the algorithm to max out cash flows, users could establish their own ‘algorithms.’
Like imagine how much less spam a woman might get if a guy had to match on 10-15 questions *she chose* before a dude could message her?
This is essentially what a lot of ‘date me’ docs are about, an indie way of setting up these kinds of filters using Google forms or surveymonkey poll functions to date with better intention.
And for guys— you’re wouldn’t be competing with every lazy dude who swipes right on hundreds of profiles a night.
There are definitely ways to improve on the old OKCupid system— like the problem was often people would set themselves up so that it would filter out someone who might respond with a 3 or a 5 when the user answered with a 4. The user might be ok with a 3-5 range on a question like “how much do you like tacos on a 1-5 scale?” But the system would only show 4s. So yeah, room for improvement, but the approach could be a better answer than Hinge essays + swipe left or right algos that are the current market.
The core problem with dating apps will remain: illusion of choice breaking everyone's brain.
An ideal dating app would be a dating sim with multiple AI people to test out social skills on, in increasingly difficult scenarios ending with you going out in the real world having the skills to do it yourself.
There is no scenario where the value of matching exceeds the damage of optionality, much less the damage from the perverse incentive of blocking good matches. As long as the function of apps remains connecting people they will inevitably fall into ruin and cause more harm than benefit. Changing the incentive requires changing the core function.
Academia is a messed up place, a lot of which comes down to funding insecurity. When you don't know if your work will get funded beyond the next three years, your priorities often become misaligned with seeking the truth. You're very lucky not to have to join that battle.
It's not that there isn't enough funding, it's that there are too many researchers and, using Alan Smith's point, too many aspiring researchers.
So the funding gets divided and divided again until everyone is into a death match where being part of the circle is the only consideration you are allowed to have (rats on the island image from Scott Alexander https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch).
Less PhDs! Less researchers! Keeping funding constant, you might see an increase in quality research...
What a shame to see it that way. PhDs are aspiring scientists because they're genuinely interested in the world. They are the underpaid work horses who do ridiculous hours for pennies because they want to push the boundaries of human knowledge. It's a shame that our society doesn't value it highly enough to put more funding towards it.
I started my PhD with no funding at all, driving buses part time to make ends meet. Because I wanted to learn about molecules and how they interact with each other. Now I work in admin.
Aella got into research out of genuine curiosity. As another commenter has pointed out, there wouldn't be much funding for her to do this via traditional means. There shouldn't be less people doing scientific research.
More curiosity! More funding! More avenues for scientific enquiry!!!
Well, sure. Everyone always want more funding. For everything. Ask the artists or designers now threaten by AIs. Ask the workers. Ask the engineers. Ask the farmers. More money is always the demand.
Till we live in a post scarcity world, more money for everything isn't possible.
Sure. But we should aspire to abundance of knowledge and understanding along with an abundance of beauty and creativity. No need to be defeatist about it. :)
I liked your comment so I'm obviously not in disagreement with your aims. I too want people to be curious and I think it's good many people want to discover Truth(s).
If anything, the world is definitely suffering from an abundance of incurious and very convicted people right now...
... but I guess I'm old and so I'm a defeatist because I've seen too much. Don't let me be an anchor. I hope you get to live your dreams.
We do essentially live in a post scarcity world for all practical purposes. It's just that the wealth is hoarded by a tiny elite, instead of used to fund the work of the people who created the wealth in the first place (scientists and PhDs mostly).
Sorry but one assertion is factually wrong and the other is subjective.
1- we're already post scarcity but for the billionaires. No. GDP per capita is $85K. That's above median salary as well as median income per capita but it's simply not enough for everyone to live like an aristocrat.
2- All wealth is created by scientists and PhDs. Kinda. But also by farmers (no food = death) and factory workers (all the modern gadgets our lives depend on), the energy producers etc. We're a somewhat complex civilisation. Almost all parts are needed to ensure we keep on going...
Just to clarify my point, that's only partially what I meant. Yes, there is heavy competition, and yes that creates problems. But the bigger issue is that the hoops you need to jump through to get even the chance to apply for funding are set up by people who are more concerned with status games and their own position rather than seeking truth. In part this is driven by funding, but more often it's by just human social dynamics, which can sometimes get pretty toxic once you mix in power dynamics and yes, politics (although I think the power dynamics are a larger variable there).
The difference being, if we imagine funding increased by 100x tomorrow, it would maybe help somewhat, but the borked incentives towards finding novel results which align with a particular narrative rather than methodological rigour would remain, which is the main problem
Yes, you're probably right. Do you think if people didn't have to work for money, in a post AGI/ASI world for eg, that many would pursue scientific research for fun?
Hi Aella! This is such amazing work. Thank you for everything you do for the kink community. I would like to invite you to be on my podcast The Erotic Realm which explores the psychology of desire with a focus on the darker desires of kink and BDSM. Your stats would be much appreciated by my audience. My background is in research and I'd love to pick your brain on all of your findings! I hope to speak to you about this soon.
A big problem with academia, *in addition* to all the others you cite, is that it's so uniformly politically progressive you can only report studies that support the prevailing political orthodoxy--it's always better when women are in charge, women are better at everything, women are mistreated in relationships, etc. It's not always right and it's not always wrong (your last dataset does imply women are happier in same-sex relationships), but it's a big biasing factor.
Also if you are a state university and fund research into, say, fetishes some right-wing representative is going to tell their constituency that the university is 'taking our tax dollars to study dirty sex stuff'. (Leaving aside the current attempts to remove all funding from universities!) They think anyone looking into this stuff is irretrievably immoral.
You're brave enough to tell the truth and go where the data goes, and I have to say I really admire that. The scientists have been tamed, but at least we have Aella.
(As I've said elsewhere I am a paid subscriber under another account to support your work.)
Aella, I really appreciate your research fetishes and paraphilias. It's a difficult task for professional and amateur researchers alike, and the distinction tells us nothing about quality. Here are some comments:
- A larger N isn't always better because it automatically drives down p values and can't improve representativeness (a Twitter sample remains a Twitter sample, regardless of size).
- A sample size of 500 can be more representative than a sample size of 50,000 if it's correctly randomized.
Have you tried Archives of Sexual Behavior? It's the flagship journal, very non political, and I can promise you that they publish stuff that is groundbreaking, criticizes existing ideas, and doesn't require you to be an insider. I wasn't.
I used to read their stuff for fun (admittedly titillation) a decade or so back. I have no idea what they're like now. I can't imagine they're immune to the woke wave.
I almost went into academia, and a number of my friends did. Several of them have since left. We're pretty much all in agreement that most of academia is just fake. Like, it's fake.
I like to go to conferences anyway, and the things I see there, the absolute drivel passing for content, is *insulting* and degrading to the field. As is the bootlicking. I'm not in academia, so I can speak my mind. I asked a question that politely but utterly undermined a plenary speaker's inane thesis, and full professors came up to me in the hallway afterward to thank me for saying what they couldn't.
It's ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.
Mind you, this isn't to say that it's all bad. There is real work being done. But it doesn't take much time interacting with the glowing cathedral to see the rot within.
Don't sell yourself short. My impression is that there are a LOT of researchers who don't have as good an understanding of statistics as you. Your humility in this area helps you not overstate your conclusions.
> Like, if you’re trying to conclude stuff about the personalities of BDSM users by surveying people who go to BDSM clubs vs. normies on the street, you’re almost certainly gonna have confounders with the types of people who like going to clubs at all. And a ton of the studies pulled from exactly this kind of thing - often online, often forums or subreddits.
I think kinky dominant women are underreported, and any samples are biased towars the Agreeable playful end of the domme spectrum. I don't think disagreeable "Alpha" women in general care to answer surveys or join clubs or whatever.
My sample (ok, sample size 1) and comparing notes with other malesubs suggests a direct correlation between sexual dominance and personality.
My wife is ruthlessly dominant and cheerfully sadistic and has low Agreeability and Neuroticism scores, and the former clearly articulates the latter. We've done Femdom for 30 years, sometimes intense, and had an agreed Female Led Relationship for about half that.
However, it all seems really simple to her so she doesn't identify with the BDSM scene or BDSM culture, has no particular interest in comparing notes or delving deeper, doesn't need the validation of a community.
Studies simply don't catch dominant women like that.
This hypothetical could be applied in reverse: to aggressively dominant men. Which would imply that there is an overall dominance underreporting… which I’m not sure is actually true or a significant difference.
I suspect the real alphas are either in the boardroom or jail and not answering surveys. Probably they are dominant in the bedroom too, but who's going to ask them? (Aella perhaps.)
What you get are dorky guys like me who enjoyed playing at it in the bedroom. And surprise, that's enough to let you do polyamory! (OK, technically ethical nonmonogamy but still.)
I think your thought is really interesting - I see male doms splashed on dating sites (tinder, okcupid), certainly on fetlife, as well as clubs. Female dommes (I feel) arent accepted so well by society as a whole - I know several who do go to clubs/conferences (Winter fire) but to find us on dating sites isnt taken well. Its more acceptable for a cute girl to want to be called baby girl than a male to be called baby boy so the opposite roles to those seem to be more acceptable. I did meet 2 male subs on bumble and was stood up - my thought because their incidence for meeting people (female dommes) was a desire but seemed too daunting and overwhelming. Putting female domme out there minimizes us to a small group of recipients. I also am ok not dating male subs but not all doms would feel the same. Its easier to be a male dom as female subs seem to be a dime a dozen. I havent seen any surveys online asking about female dommes so thats an issue there.
Maybe the general problem of crapsubs means dominant women tend to try to date, fail and give up in irritation, or find a good sub they like and leave whatever scene they're part of.
Interesting take! I’ve kept some memberships open despite my relationship status (I enjoy reading) but stopped going to clubs so much but one partner loved clubs so I went with them. There are some female domme only groups too (I looked into joining but never did) but not sure how their membership attendance ebbs and flows (femdom dinners monthly).
Crapsubs (male): Fantasists, do-me subs, weird men focussed on niche fetishes they want to launder through a F/m relationship, ones who get off on DMs but then are no shows. The ones who turn up once then ghost. The married ones. That sort of thing.
Theres a website called femdom that you can pay female dommes - thats what I thought your term femdom meant but appears you shortened female dommes. For anyone else confused
Yes sorry, trying to be terse. My understanding is the terminology isn't fixed. E.g. not so long ago the term dominatrix was a catchall, then it became pay to play. I think almost any term invented to indicate "kinky sexually dominant woman" will be appropriated... which is a problem in itself. Having to define oneself as not in pro relationship is wearing.
I always wondered that myself, given how many unpleasant women are out there and how many of them enjoy manipulating and hurting men. Come on, all those misandristic Netflix shows are getting watched by somebody.
There are dom-versus-sub MBTI surveys out there, and ETs (roughly = high extroversion, low agreeableness) tend to be doms and IFs (roughly = low extroversion, high agreeableness) subs. Sadly MBTI famously has no neuroticism correlate.
I’m not sure it you’re analyzing women in everyday relationships that seem to drag men around/treat them like crap/take all their money to live or particularly bdsm relationships. I do see alot of manipulative muggle women but I would never plop them in the bdsm context.
You're awesome, you are literally living out my lifelong dream of just running your own personal research agency for your own curiosity. My whole life I've fantasized about how if I won the lottery, I would fund my own private research institute, to do studies on all the things I've wondered about. *You're actually doing it!*
Academia is dusty and ridiculous. I had to edit a journal in grad school and it's just preposterous, tradition-bound often pointless busy work credentialism that everyone has to do because everyone before then had to do, and the types of reasons for being selected for publication is absolutely the type of stuff you mentioned here. I think everyone knows that. Your haters don't actually think you're dumb or unserious...*they're* unserious. They're just expressing their disapproval of your lifestyle. You probably have more academics and actual researchers reading your stuff than 99% of audiences. Most are likely envious of your reach. Anyway, ignore the haters.
Have you indeed tried to publish your stuff in peer-reviewed journals? I love your work, and I have always wondered how you would do. I have a couple of working papers in sexual ethics, and I always thought it would be very convenient if I could just quote your stuff.
One thing to note is that academic sex research mostly belongs to the social sciences, which have a massive talent-pipeline problem. If you are smart enough to be a quant or stats person, then you go into physics or math, and if you want to work in the humanities/social sciences, then you go into economics or analytic philosophy.
So the disciplines that do research on sex and kinks—mostly sociology or social psychology—end up with people who could not or would not sort themselves into any of the above. And there is a second selection effect: people who work on sex in general often have a political point to make, usually a variation of heteropessimism BS. Sexual ethics has this problem too.
Hi Aella,
Retired PhD in statistics here, if you'd like the occasional comment on something you're thinking about then DM me. I love your work.
Frank Ashe
I would like your input on some of my own psych research; Nice to meet you
Sure, if I can. DM me, I've started following you.
My partner is a non-online kinkster, who has nothing to do with any online community. I read her your posts, and she unambigiously appreciates them. She shares them with her friends, she gains insights from them, and she sees your findings reflected in her communities. (Men who like non-con being hugely sexually popular because it's such a relatively rare subtype).
It's interesting how someone who hasn't built up the internet's preconceptions or biases just unambiguously likes and appreciates your work. Someone could very possibly offer valid critique of it, but that's not the flavour of the pushback you're getting. The flavour of pushback you're getting is clouded in insecurity. You already have the hot and sexually successful card, you can't possibly be doing quality research too. That'd be too unfair.
I wonder, similar to Giles' example below with dominant women but in a different direction, how many dudes into non-con are simply afraid of going to jail (and being raped for real) if the other person turns on them. I was doing completely consensual domination (like, I'd check in before, check in afterward, debrief, and repeat the safeword to them during the scene to see if they wanted to use it) and I still quit after the Gaiman thing came out. Not that he wasn't guilty--I'll never know that for sure--but the fact he kept all the messages and it didn't save him.
Contrary to stereotypes, people high in one dimensions are often high in others--we don't all have the same number of 'character points', to use an RPG metaphor. People with high intelligence can also have high charisma!
I am curious about the non-con thing. I just looked back at a post of Aella’s sharing her results and I didn’t see that mismatch. Would you mind pointing me to what you’re referring to?
i believe what's being seen in aella's research is a result of her data pool being one of convenience. people being sent/shown a survey about what they're sexually into are much more likely to have friends who are more sexually explorative or actively be looking up certain kinda of kink (to be reccomended a kink survey). additionally, non-con is one of those kinks (in my experience) that people are afraid to admit they have even under anonymity, if they know that sort of scenario turns them on at all. the 'demographic' seen in aella's data's mostly skewed towards online people already interested previously in kink/sexual exploration.
> But instead I’ve peeked inside the door and found everyone standing in a circle with their thumb inside the butt of the person in front of them, creating a thumb-in-butt circle.
Now, that's just a very skewed perspective on academia. You completely ignored the small army of people burning years of their lives trying to join the circle, complete with both sabotage from other aspiring circle-joiners and purity testing and hoop-jumping set up by those in the circle in order to protect their current position in the circle, because every other person in the circle wants to either put their thumb in someone else's butt, or to have someone else's thumb in their butt, with both of these making a huge difference if they continue to remain in the circle next year.
Also the cathedral is on fire because in the scramble to get into/stay in the circle candles get knocked over, and there's either no incentive or active disincentive for anyone to try to put it out, so instead everyone blames the idiots outside the cathedral for not accepting the obvious Truth that the cathedral either isn't on fire, or it is on fire but that's a good thing, with these two positions becoming part of the intra-circle position-jockeying.
But I accept that a more complete metaphor may have been a little bit of a derailment from your central point.
I was amused that you needed to write "I AM NOT EXAGGERATING" in capital letters, because I didn't bat an eyelid at the preceding paragraph, and I don't even think it's that cynical. I did a PhD in part because I wanted to understand what the research world was like "for real", and that's what I found. But it all kinda made sense. The primary success metric of an academic is recognition of their work, and that inevitably brings about a system of ego-stroking. I still think most academics are in it for an earnest pursuit of truth, but they get thrown into a system and, well, yeah. Sometimes I would imagine what a purer form of academia would look like, but you need a way to allocate funding and some basic checks, and eventually I would just land on the status quo again. Seems like a hard problem to solve.
Anyway, your work is great, keep it up. Sorry you found the conversations with academics frustrating but I'm glad they seemed keen to help.
The missing variable between the thumb-up-thier-butt circle and the shining cathedral is just academic funding. Pretty much no one is funding research grants on fetish / sex research someone in academia could actually write a grant proposal to and then fund their research (I.e fund their salary, plus whatever grad students / compensation for survey respondents or hiring of professional survey firms) from the grant award.
OKcupid was almost there in terms of having a dating website where survey questions were a big match incentive in online dating, but then Match group bought them and all that data became proprietary to Match Group as a means of improving their algorithm.
I almost feel like if someone were basically to copy the original OKcupid business model, but then adapt it for the modern mobile app/cloud data age, they could be the next big thing in dating apps. At least the way OKCupid used to work where you basically could build your own dating app algorithm based on your preferred survey questions.
It was always kind of a combo of 'conservatives think fetish stuff is evil and not worth funding' and 'liberals fund it as long as it finds things that fit the current wave of feminism'.
I mean, at that point in dating app history, sure. Tinder came along and copied Grindr for straight people and at the time it seemed more abundant to just be on Tinder or an app that basically replicated the short/no bio photos first swiping approach.
But where we are now? Women overwhelmed by dudes swiping yes on every woman, men frustrated they have to compete with every loser playing the numbers rather than making actual effort? People upset about ‘rose jail’ for their best matches on Hinge?
I think in this environment, people would be happier with a dating app where instead of the app company setting the algorithm to max out cash flows, users could establish their own ‘algorithms.’
Like imagine how much less spam a woman might get if a guy had to match on 10-15 questions *she chose* before a dude could message her?
This is essentially what a lot of ‘date me’ docs are about, an indie way of setting up these kinds of filters using Google forms or surveymonkey poll functions to date with better intention.
And for guys— you’re wouldn’t be competing with every lazy dude who swipes right on hundreds of profiles a night.
There are definitely ways to improve on the old OKCupid system— like the problem was often people would set themselves up so that it would filter out someone who might respond with a 3 or a 5 when the user answered with a 4. The user might be ok with a 3-5 range on a question like “how much do you like tacos on a 1-5 scale?” But the system would only show 4s. So yeah, room for improvement, but the approach could be a better answer than Hinge essays + swipe left or right algos that are the current market.
The core problem with dating apps will remain: illusion of choice breaking everyone's brain.
An ideal dating app would be a dating sim with multiple AI people to test out social skills on, in increasingly difficult scenarios ending with you going out in the real world having the skills to do it yourself.
There is no scenario where the value of matching exceeds the damage of optionality, much less the damage from the perverse incentive of blocking good matches. As long as the function of apps remains connecting people they will inevitably fall into ruin and cause more harm than benefit. Changing the incentive requires changing the core function.
Academia is a messed up place, a lot of which comes down to funding insecurity. When you don't know if your work will get funded beyond the next three years, your priorities often become misaligned with seeking the truth. You're very lucky not to have to join that battle.
I liked your comment but I have a different pov.
It's not that there isn't enough funding, it's that there are too many researchers and, using Alan Smith's point, too many aspiring researchers.
So the funding gets divided and divided again until everyone is into a death match where being part of the circle is the only consideration you are allowed to have (rats on the island image from Scott Alexander https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch).
Less PhDs! Less researchers! Keeping funding constant, you might see an increase in quality research...
What a shame to see it that way. PhDs are aspiring scientists because they're genuinely interested in the world. They are the underpaid work horses who do ridiculous hours for pennies because they want to push the boundaries of human knowledge. It's a shame that our society doesn't value it highly enough to put more funding towards it.
I started my PhD with no funding at all, driving buses part time to make ends meet. Because I wanted to learn about molecules and how they interact with each other. Now I work in admin.
Aella got into research out of genuine curiosity. As another commenter has pointed out, there wouldn't be much funding for her to do this via traditional means. There shouldn't be less people doing scientific research.
More curiosity! More funding! More avenues for scientific enquiry!!!
Ha!
Well, sure. Everyone always want more funding. For everything. Ask the artists or designers now threaten by AIs. Ask the workers. Ask the engineers. Ask the farmers. More money is always the demand.
Till we live in a post scarcity world, more money for everything isn't possible.
Sure. But we should aspire to abundance of knowledge and understanding along with an abundance of beauty and creativity. No need to be defeatist about it. :)
I liked your comment so I'm obviously not in disagreement with your aims. I too want people to be curious and I think it's good many people want to discover Truth(s).
If anything, the world is definitely suffering from an abundance of incurious and very convicted people right now...
... but I guess I'm old and so I'm a defeatist because I've seen too much. Don't let me be an anchor. I hope you get to live your dreams.
Aella is certainly an inspiration to pursue your interests regardless.
We do essentially live in a post scarcity world for all practical purposes. It's just that the wealth is hoarded by a tiny elite, instead of used to fund the work of the people who created the wealth in the first place (scientists and PhDs mostly).
Sorry but one assertion is factually wrong and the other is subjective.
1- we're already post scarcity but for the billionaires. No. GDP per capita is $85K. That's above median salary as well as median income per capita but it's simply not enough for everyone to live like an aristocrat.
2- All wealth is created by scientists and PhDs. Kinda. But also by farmers (no food = death) and factory workers (all the modern gadgets our lives depend on), the energy producers etc. We're a somewhat complex civilisation. Almost all parts are needed to ensure we keep on going...
Just to clarify my point, that's only partially what I meant. Yes, there is heavy competition, and yes that creates problems. But the bigger issue is that the hoops you need to jump through to get even the chance to apply for funding are set up by people who are more concerned with status games and their own position rather than seeking truth. In part this is driven by funding, but more often it's by just human social dynamics, which can sometimes get pretty toxic once you mix in power dynamics and yes, politics (although I think the power dynamics are a larger variable there).
The difference being, if we imagine funding increased by 100x tomorrow, it would maybe help somewhat, but the borked incentives towards finding novel results which align with a particular narrative rather than methodological rigour would remain, which is the main problem
Yes, you're probably right. Do you think if people didn't have to work for money, in a post AGI/ASI world for eg, that many would pursue scientific research for fun?
Hi Aella! This is such amazing work. Thank you for everything you do for the kink community. I would like to invite you to be on my podcast The Erotic Realm which explores the psychology of desire with a focus on the darker desires of kink and BDSM. Your stats would be much appreciated by my audience. My background is in research and I'd love to pick your brain on all of your findings! I hope to speak to you about this soon.
A big problem with academia, *in addition* to all the others you cite, is that it's so uniformly politically progressive you can only report studies that support the prevailing political orthodoxy--it's always better when women are in charge, women are better at everything, women are mistreated in relationships, etc. It's not always right and it's not always wrong (your last dataset does imply women are happier in same-sex relationships), but it's a big biasing factor.
Also if you are a state university and fund research into, say, fetishes some right-wing representative is going to tell their constituency that the university is 'taking our tax dollars to study dirty sex stuff'. (Leaving aside the current attempts to remove all funding from universities!) They think anyone looking into this stuff is irretrievably immoral.
You're brave enough to tell the truth and go where the data goes, and I have to say I really admire that. The scientists have been tamed, but at least we have Aella.
(As I've said elsewhere I am a paid subscriber under another account to support your work.)
Aella, I really appreciate your research fetishes and paraphilias. It's a difficult task for professional and amateur researchers alike, and the distinction tells us nothing about quality. Here are some comments:
- A larger N isn't always better because it automatically drives down p values and can't improve representativeness (a Twitter sample remains a Twitter sample, regardless of size).
- A sample size of 500 can be more representative than a sample size of 50,000 if it's correctly randomized.
- Base rates are interesting even if you can't take them at face value because assumed abnormality is often treated the same as deviance: https://thehumanconditionrevisited.substack.com/p/how-unusual-are-unusual-fantasies
>it automatically drives down p values
That's not a problem with large N. That's a problem with statistical methods you're using.
Have you tried Archives of Sexual Behavior? It's the flagship journal, very non political, and I can promise you that they publish stuff that is groundbreaking, criticizes existing ideas, and doesn't require you to be an insider. I wasn't.
I used to read their stuff for fun (admittedly titillation) a decade or so back. I have no idea what they're like now. I can't imagine they're immune to the woke wave.
I almost went into academia, and a number of my friends did. Several of them have since left. We're pretty much all in agreement that most of academia is just fake. Like, it's fake.
I like to go to conferences anyway, and the things I see there, the absolute drivel passing for content, is *insulting* and degrading to the field. As is the bootlicking. I'm not in academia, so I can speak my mind. I asked a question that politely but utterly undermined a plenary speaker's inane thesis, and full professors came up to me in the hallway afterward to thank me for saying what they couldn't.
It's ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.
Mind you, this isn't to say that it's all bad. There is real work being done. But it doesn't take much time interacting with the glowing cathedral to see the rot within.
Don't sell yourself short. My impression is that there are a LOT of researchers who don't have as good an understanding of statistics as you. Your humility in this area helps you not overstate your conclusions.
> Like, if you’re trying to conclude stuff about the personalities of BDSM users by surveying people who go to BDSM clubs vs. normies on the street, you’re almost certainly gonna have confounders with the types of people who like going to clubs at all. And a ton of the studies pulled from exactly this kind of thing - often online, often forums or subreddits.
I think kinky dominant women are underreported, and any samples are biased towars the Agreeable playful end of the domme spectrum. I don't think disagreeable "Alpha" women in general care to answer surveys or join clubs or whatever.
My sample (ok, sample size 1) and comparing notes with other malesubs suggests a direct correlation between sexual dominance and personality.
My wife is ruthlessly dominant and cheerfully sadistic and has low Agreeability and Neuroticism scores, and the former clearly articulates the latter. We've done Femdom for 30 years, sometimes intense, and had an agreed Female Led Relationship for about half that.
However, it all seems really simple to her so she doesn't identify with the BDSM scene or BDSM culture, has no particular interest in comparing notes or delving deeper, doesn't need the validation of a community.
Studies simply don't catch dominant women like that.
This hypothetical could be applied in reverse: to aggressively dominant men. Which would imply that there is an overall dominance underreporting… which I’m not sure is actually true or a significant difference.
I suspect the real alphas are either in the boardroom or jail and not answering surveys. Probably they are dominant in the bedroom too, but who's going to ask them? (Aella perhaps.)
What you get are dorky guys like me who enjoyed playing at it in the bedroom. And surprise, that's enough to let you do polyamory! (OK, technically ethical nonmonogamy but still.)
Yes, I think both are underreported.
However I suspect maledoms are more attracted to public forums and clubs than femdoms as forum for general status display.
Also, "alpha" men can express physical dominance without kink, whereas their female counterparts need the mechanisms and tools of kink to do that.
So, maybe as kink becomes more discoverable, there will be more personality-congruent-femdoms than similar maledoms.
Unfortunately, even if this were true, the current the studies won't see it.
I think your thought is really interesting - I see male doms splashed on dating sites (tinder, okcupid), certainly on fetlife, as well as clubs. Female dommes (I feel) arent accepted so well by society as a whole - I know several who do go to clubs/conferences (Winter fire) but to find us on dating sites isnt taken well. Its more acceptable for a cute girl to want to be called baby girl than a male to be called baby boy so the opposite roles to those seem to be more acceptable. I did meet 2 male subs on bumble and was stood up - my thought because their incidence for meeting people (female dommes) was a desire but seemed too daunting and overwhelming. Putting female domme out there minimizes us to a small group of recipients. I also am ok not dating male subs but not all doms would feel the same. Its easier to be a male dom as female subs seem to be a dime a dozen. I havent seen any surveys online asking about female dommes so thats an issue there.
Maybe the general problem of crapsubs means dominant women tend to try to date, fail and give up in irritation, or find a good sub they like and leave whatever scene they're part of.
Interesting take! I’ve kept some memberships open despite my relationship status (I enjoy reading) but stopped going to clubs so much but one partner loved clubs so I went with them. There are some female domme only groups too (I looked into joining but never did) but not sure how their membership attendance ebbs and flows (femdom dinners monthly).
"Crapsubs" doesn't seem to be a Googlable term?
Crapsubs (male): Fantasists, do-me subs, weird men focussed on niche fetishes they want to launder through a F/m relationship, ones who get off on DMs but then are no shows. The ones who turn up once then ghost. The married ones. That sort of thing.
Theres a website called femdom that you can pay female dommes - thats what I thought your term femdom meant but appears you shortened female dommes. For anyone else confused
Yes sorry, trying to be terse. My understanding is the terminology isn't fixed. E.g. not so long ago the term dominatrix was a catchall, then it became pay to play. I think almost any term invented to indicate "kinky sexually dominant woman" will be appropriated... which is a problem in itself. Having to define oneself as not in pro relationship is wearing.
I always wondered that myself, given how many unpleasant women are out there and how many of them enjoy manipulating and hurting men. Come on, all those misandristic Netflix shows are getting watched by somebody.
There are dom-versus-sub MBTI surveys out there, and ETs (roughly = high extroversion, low agreeableness) tend to be doms and IFs (roughly = low extroversion, high agreeableness) subs. Sadly MBTI famously has no neuroticism correlate.
I’m not sure it you’re analyzing women in everyday relationships that seem to drag men around/treat them like crap/take all their money to live or particularly bdsm relationships. I do see alot of manipulative muggle women but I would never plop them in the bdsm context.
I was...trying to say something like Giles was saying, but he can obviously express his own ideas better than I can.
That's true. But there are also woman who strain against the constraints of "being nice" who might really enjoy fem-centred femdom.
You're awesome, you are literally living out my lifelong dream of just running your own personal research agency for your own curiosity. My whole life I've fantasized about how if I won the lottery, I would fund my own private research institute, to do studies on all the things I've wondered about. *You're actually doing it!*
Academia is dusty and ridiculous. I had to edit a journal in grad school and it's just preposterous, tradition-bound often pointless busy work credentialism that everyone has to do because everyone before then had to do, and the types of reasons for being selected for publication is absolutely the type of stuff you mentioned here. I think everyone knows that. Your haters don't actually think you're dumb or unserious...*they're* unserious. They're just expressing their disapproval of your lifestyle. You probably have more academics and actual researchers reading your stuff than 99% of audiences. Most are likely envious of your reach. Anyway, ignore the haters.
Have you indeed tried to publish your stuff in peer-reviewed journals? I love your work, and I have always wondered how you would do. I have a couple of working papers in sexual ethics, and I always thought it would be very convenient if I could just quote your stuff.
One thing to note is that academic sex research mostly belongs to the social sciences, which have a massive talent-pipeline problem. If you are smart enough to be a quant or stats person, then you go into physics or math, and if you want to work in the humanities/social sciences, then you go into economics or analytic philosophy.
So the disciplines that do research on sex and kinks—mostly sociology or social psychology—end up with people who could not or would not sort themselves into any of the above. And there is a second selection effect: people who work on sex in general often have a political point to make, usually a variation of heteropessimism BS. Sexual ethics has this problem too.
Hey Aella, you should collaborate with Zara Dar on writing a paper. She could help you with her engineering and ML experience.