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Comment by ffssffss | Hacker News Reader

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.

I'm not sure this is representative of anything other than "people who follow Aella and are interested enough in the topic to fill out a self-report survey".

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You'll have that bias in any study about non-mainstream sexuality. Most people are vanilla or don't express their sexuality (although that did change with 50SoG, but the influx of people "educated" by it is a scourge on the BDSM community), many cultures (particularly religious fundamentalists) shame sexuality entirely, and even among the progressive crowd it's not really an everyday topic you can run surveys with...

The advantage of Aella's research is the sheer mass of people she draws in. Way more than a lot of research, and the mass eliminates trolls, religious fundamentalists and idiots that plague "popular research" aka yellow press surveys.

Isn’t this textbook yellow journalism?

It's a little sensational but I feel like she's pretty up front about the limitations. The problem with representativeness is admitted, not really engaged with (I'd expect a more thorough study to compare with older results with better understood biases and extrapolate from there), but it's not hidden either.

I think the main problem is actually that Aella herself is not a faceless researcher but a somewhat controversial online personality who used her own brand to find participants. So for example anyone who blocked her on twitter probably didn't have a chance at taking this, even if they are also likely to be closer to kink communities than the average twitter user who wouldn't even know of her existence.

what is controversial about her

No? Yellow journalism would be to use these results for headlines like "1 IN 50 AMERICANS WANT TO RAPE BABIES".

Log transforming this data isn’t far off.

What do you mean by “log transforming”? Are you bothered by the log plot? You really should not be: it’s done for one purpose, make the bottom more legible, as she wrote explicitly. Look at any scientific journal and you’ll find loads of plots with log scales. And at least in my fields, no mention of “log transforming” anything.

My issue isn’t the scale itself, my issue is the scale used for _this_ data.

I don’t know exactly what kind of reply you are expecting to your second sentence.

> the influx of people "educated" by it is a scourge on the BDSM community

Rarely have I encountered a bigger bunch of insufferable judgemental assholes than in the "BDSM community". They seem more interested in judging what is "true BDSM" than anything else. Reminds me of early black metal community and stuff like this, where it's not really about the topic you're organizing around but more about rebelling against the perceived "mainstream".

yeah because every ten minutes some guy† walks in the door and says 'oh wow you mean i can actually rape and abuse young women‡ and get away with it, bdsm is super awesome, i am so glad i finally found a bunch of people like me'

and the people who are already there, who are not in fact like him†, have to kick him† out unless they want their friends to get raped and abused, and also experience guilt by association

this extremely frequent phenomenon results in a lot of energy being spent on gatekeeping because the alternative is degenerating into a rape gang

sometimes it results in kicking the wrong people out because the gatekeepers make mistakes

______

† not always a guy or a him

‡ not always young women, though often

That's not even what I'm talking about; it's the "lol they just read 50 shades of grey and are now interested in bondage but they're just p0sers, we're the real kvlt!"

that's a book about intimate partner abuse tho, so it makes sense to be leery of people who got their picture of bdsm from it and then wanted to get involved

That's pretty far from the biggest objection I've heard from the BDSM community about the book. Pretty much universally they have an issue with the way the book treats consent, and thats a real, real, big thing you need to get right when engaging with BDSM.

I have to disagree. I have found the BDSM community here in Spain to be nothing but welcoming and open-minded to newbies like me.

I also haven't seen any other newbies come in like they know everything and own the place. Everyone is super cautious with one another, consent is paramount and the more experienced people are patient guides, not elitist at all. Nobody is obsessed with doing things "the right way" (with some exceptions of very ceremonial things like traditional shibari), and definitely not being judgmental about it, it's more a journey of self-discovery.

I was surprised because what you describe is exactly what I expected.

> They seem more interested in judging what is "true BDSM" than anything else.

I agree and know a couple of these people as well, but my post was not aimed at these, nor at legitimate BDSM newbies.

It was rather aimed at those who got all their ideas about BDSM from 50SoG, but have absolutely zero idea about basic stuff like consent, safety and after-care. Like, if you don't know what you're doing and unwilling to make at least some basic research, you can seriously damage another person - emotionally, mentally and physically.

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