Who took my Big Kink Survey?
UPDATE: This is an outdated post. Since writing this, sample size exploded. Here’s an updated analysis
This is a breakdown of the demographics that took my survey, and my theories about how sources might skew results. Planning on linking to this in future posts about findings! I’ll update this post if more data comes in and the demographics change significantly.
How representative is my sample?
I posted links to this survey on my social media, primarily twitter and reddit, with some indirect advertising on fetlife and discord; these made up 74.4% of my results. Another 22.4% reported ‘other’ from the list of sources. The last 3.2% came from telegram, tumblr, and facebook; these categories have low enough sample that I’m not going to include them on graphs in this blog post.
My sample is skewed western-culture (US and Canada making up 43% of respondents, Western Europe and Australia another 22%, ), very white (71% of respondents), raised Christian (52%) or nonreligious (30%), and male (also 71% of respondents). Trans people made up 5.1% of respondents, which is significantly higher than the normal population, which is estimated at around 0.3-1%.
15.8% of respondents reported being at least slightly more polyamorous, which is probably about 3x overrepresented. It’s unclear how to count poly people, but google says around 5% of the US population is poly.
Age also skews young, and my sample is younger females and older males.
There’s a spike at age 18 for both, and my guess is that at least some of this comes from 16-17 year olds lying that they are in fact 18, anticipating that you had to be 18 in order to take the survey (which you didn’t).
Avg male age was 29.2 (stdev 9.6), and avg female age was 24.3 (stdev 7.6).
Respondents also skewed very liberal. On a conservative (-3) to liberal (3) scale, they rated themselves as 1.8 on social issues (females 2.1 and males 1.6), and 1.1 on economic issues (females 1.6 and males 0.9).
This is not surprising to me; the platforms I use skew liberal, and I’m a sex worker, so people who follow me tend to be sex-worker tolerant, thus liberal.
Types of people who follow me
Reddit (~350k followers)
My guess is that there’s a slight pressure towards vanilla interests in the people from reddit due to the type of reddit content I post that attracts followers - basically really standard, generic sexy photos in standard, generic subreddits, with occasional deviations into really tame kinks, such as r/breeding or r/palegirls.
This might imply that that people with particularly unusual kinks, or sexual interest that exclude ‘generic sexy woman photo’, would be underrepresented among my reddit followers.
A good chunk of followers have come from ‘funny’ posts; e.g., my gnome abduction series was the 11th top post of all time on all of reddit for a few years, and I currently hold the #1 top-of-all time post on the biggest seller-friendly porn reddit (r/realgirls).
Of course, there might also be an increased skew towards kinks, as in my data, people tend to be sexually interested in things in bulk - as in, if you’re interested in one thing, you’re more likely to be interested in most other things too. People who follow me on reddit might have a higher sex drive than average, and thus would be more likely to get increased scores on kink interest than the rest of the population. Hard to tell!
I don’t post anything really controversial on reddit, and so I doubt my followers there are selected for disgust sensitivity or having weird brains.
Twitter (~230k followers)
Based on twitter polls for my main twitter (116k followers), I estimate 15-20% of my followers there originate from porn sources, but the majority don’t, and I would guess don’t have significant skew in kink preferences, at least not besides anything attributable to basic twitter demographic imbalances (like ethnicity, age, or location). I do post weird stuff to twitter a lot, and so suspect my followers here are filtered a bit for low disgust-sensitivity and higher openness.
I did also post on my porn twitter though (115k followers), which I anticipate to be pretty similar to the demographics of reddit - the type of guy who uses his social media account to follow horny ladies. This is because I post basically exactly the same content to my porn twitter as I do to reddit.
Fetlife *~200k followers)
Fetlife itself skews older and real kinky, and I expect people coming from Fetlife to score much higher than average interest in kinks across the board. People who follow me specifically on Fetlife are probably a bit more vanilla than the average Fetlife user, as I post only basic normie generic stuff on there.
Discord
People don’t ‘follow me’ on discord, I just occasionally post links to my surveys in large culturally-adjacent servers. This is a anecdotal, but I get the impression the discord population I have access to is disproportionately trans, neuroatypical, and kinky.
Other
I don’t know where ‘other’ is coming from. It might be from my posts on other platforms that I didn’t list as options in the ‘where did u come from’ question in the survey - Instagram (40k followers) and Tiktok (~170k followers). But I only posted on those platforms a little bit, early on, and haven’t posted since, and the ‘other’ category has been steadily growing despite this.
Combine this with the fact that the majority of people from the ‘other’ category are female, and my guess is it’s just from organic stream across the web. My Tiktok and Instagram are entirely thirst traps, it’s unlikely users from there would be majority female!
While the ‘other’ category differs a lot in gender ratio, it doesn’t differ much from the rest of the categories in age, politics, or ethnicity. It does seem to be less kinky though, based on glancing at a little bit of my data.
I’m tentatively guessing ‘other’ might be the most representative source so far, mostly because of the even gender ratio.
In general, my guess is that my data, drawing from disproportionately sex-positive, sex-oriented circles, slightly overrepresents the actual rates of kink interests across the board (if I had to bet, I’d say by 13%).
I don’t think my data is perfectly representative of the US population, much less of the world, but data doesn’t have to be perfectly representative to be useful! It can still update our guesses about what the nature of actual kinks are like. Good science is done with an accumulation of lots of different attempts to gather information, and I’m hoping to contribute one attempt that might point in the right direction.