Some of you (OK so like... three of you) may remember the last time I ran a survey on political values; I was really happy with the responses everybody gave me at TheMotte, and now a few other people I know who post on Substack are wanting to use the results to answer some questions of their own. So long story short, here's another poll:
Don't worry if you think you're unusual and might skew the results - in fact we'd very much appreciate your perspective, whatever it is.
Thanks guys!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Another question: if incest is hovering around 1 in average reported interest, why for the last ~ten years has the front page of Pornhub been dominated by stepbrother, stepson, stepdaughter etc.?
Does it have some correlates that are otherwise hard to search for directly? I imagine for example that the incest framing would be anticorrelated with the actors being old or trashy, or the action being violent or non-passionate. Maybe it's simply the easiest way to find nice vanilla sexual encounters between normal-looking people in a domestic setting.
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I don't know about pornhub but I know on xvideos that the website automatically appends "step" to words like "brother" or "dad" (and also completely removes other certain words) so maybe pornhub operates the same way
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One side's that the Likert Scale has some really awkward ramifications, and while it's well-accepted as a scientific tool (so I can't blame individual researchers for using it), I'm not convinced it should be. It's notoriously prone to anchoring problems, but worse than that it tends to give a very constrained summary of its results. An average score of 1 can reflect either reflect all of your participants saying that they find it only the slightest bit arousing, or ~15% finding it the most arousing thing ever and everyone else hating it, or anywhere in-between.
In practice, this kinda averages out for all but the most polarizing interests (eg, "gay men" has 15,878 zero scores to the 34,977 "brosis" does in the raw data despite 'only' having a 1.5ish score), but it still means 25% report at least "somewhat arousing" to brother/sister.
Which is only part of the explanation; I don't know non-fur stuff that well, but from your reaction it sounds like 25% would be a low estimate for the front page of pornhub (and I don't think my checks would be representative).
The other side's kinda boring. At least for video, 'incest' as a kink is cheap and easy to advertise for how taboo it is. Trivially, a lot of it's just random videos uploaded with an eye-catching title, but even a video leaning very heavily into the genre only needs two porn actors/actresses and a video camera. Ideally somewhat similar-looking actors and actresses, but honestly when you strap 'step' onto the front they don't even necessarily have to be the same race. That makes it a lot easier to produce content (and with clear weightings for recently uploaded content, that matters), and for that content to get enough interest to be promoted to the front page. (To be unreasonably charitable, it also means that people really squicked by incest can avoid the stuff easily, rather than getting a money shot and then faked moans of "hey bro".)
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Presumably the inclusion of "step" means it's not incest people seek, but, as someone else put it, a potential sexual partner you don't need to painstakingly swipe on Tinder/barfly/scan friends' groups for because you're already intimately familiar.
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