Hello readers!
I have a survey!
I was complaining about not having answers to certain questions about kink and romance, and then it was pointed out to me that I have a readership that can be made to answer surveys.
So please take the survey! It is brief (26 questions) and anonymous, and the only way you will find out about what my questions are is by answering it. I will write a post about my results.
Thing of Things 
I am now SUPER CURIOUS if anyone else gets hyperverbal around their crushes….
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Yup. Sort of this intense desire to over share / be super open / honest?
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Yes! Exactly!
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My crush behavior has changed a lot as I’ve gotten older. When I was a kid I’d harbor secret crushes forever. Now I try to ask them out promptly and either they think I’m cool too or I spend 8 hours depressed then get over it.
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Right.
To me this was a flaw in the survey: I wasn’t sure if I should answer about how I am *now*, or how I used to be. Clearly the survey asked some stuff about pre-puberty, but also stuff *in general*, which I guess means *now*. But I wasn’t sure.
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Given the nature of the survey, it seems that a big box at the end for saying ‘I’m wierd in ways x,y,z so take answers with the following caveats.’ Kinkspace has more degrees of freedom than multiple choice allows.
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If I do that all of you special snowflakes will fill it in and the data will be impossible to analyze. 😛
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Can I get a rough deadline? Taking this soon would be a bit difficult, but I do want to contribute.
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Unfortunately not, it depends on my brains, which have been super-erratic lately.
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The question near the end about whether you want your crushes to reciprocate is awkward. I’m married and mono so I’d say no, but if I weren’t (and most of my life I haven’t been) I’d say yes.
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Yeah, I answered it based on “if I was single”. Also, my crushes are not as frequent, as intense, or as likely to be someone I know/a real person, when I am in a relationship. (I think that it’s based on “when I’m in a relationship”, not “now that I’m an adult”, but can’t be completely sure; I had no romantic relationships before 21, had a short gap between relationships at 22, and started my relationship with my now-husband when I was not quite 23.) So I ended up mostly answering crush questions based on when I was younger, not currently.
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Although I’m arrived and mono too I still have crushes. However I also know that now they are for flirtation only and that’s the fun of it. I would never cheat for that. if I was unhappy enough to cheat then my wife and I would be in counseling. Is my marriage perfect? No. But at this stage of my life I am stable and secure and that’s what is most important to me.
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My ell check said i’m arrived when I meant married. Lol new tab. Hasn’t learned my words yet.
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Nice survey, I enjoyed taking it. I answered “All” on the second-to-last question, but every option on that question would be a true answer in a vacuous sense.
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The crush duration questions were problematic for me. My adult crushes have been people I went on a couple of dates with from OKCupid that went so amazingly that it messed with my head. There is no crush before the dating. Then, generally, I self-destruct from trying too hard before it ends up being a real relationship. So none of the duration answers really matches my experience.
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I really loved taking your survey! I wonder if talking analytically about my sexuality is a kink of mine?
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Since this is one of your central investigatory questions, I want to register that I consume mostly written erotica, but that’s not because I like it better, it’s because I’ve found much more written than video erotica for my kinks. This is a situation that I dislike – more video porn for my kinks is very, very much a thing I wish I had. (I’m a cis woman).
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On a related note, given that the stereotypical teen-girl erotica is erotic fanfiction, I wonder how much the written vs visual answers would change if there was more fanfiction-type erotica that wasn’t in purely written form. IOW, if someone says they mostly consume written erotica, and their preferred erotica is of fictional characters (or nonporn celebrities), how much of it is preference vs availability? (I’ve heard that in Japan, there’s a fair amount of fan-created manga erotica, although you could count that as both written/narrative and visual…) I’m not as familiar with fandom culture as I used to be, but now there are fan-created youtube videos, including ones that are basically a bunch of clips of particular characters in their more fanservicey moments, that you couldn’t exactly say was “porn” but seems like it serves the same purpose. This may be an argument against female demand for visual erotica–“now there is availability, so that argument is out of date” or it may be an argument for it–“there is female demand for visual erotica, and now that it’s getting easier for female fans to create video erotica they’re doing so”.
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I skipped the question ‘About what percentage of your romantic partners have been someone you originally experienced crush symptoms for?’ because I haven’t had any romantic partners. ‘Very few’ just didn’t cut it…
I am the one whose description of what romantic attraction is like uses language as a simile and ends with ‘Fuck.’
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I think I misunderstood the definition of crush as you are using it. “Love interest you are not with” is how I was applying it in my head, but after the survey I think you actually mean “new interest, not yet acted on, probably unknown to object of interest”.
These have been largely unimportant to me since my first girlfriend and I started going out (Sr Year in HS, many years ago).
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…”made” to?
*checks the corners*
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Survey forced introspection to answer questions, except introspection didn’t stop after ‘submit’… any way to change answers?
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I wish the crush duration questions had included some way of indicating the maximum duration of the relationships you had experienced.
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A question regarding “Do you experience romantic attraction?”
What is “romantic attraction”? Is it the same as having a “crush”?
What is “romance” anyways? Does it imply jealousy? Does it imply exclusivity? Does it imply sex? Does it mean mere emotional attachment? Is it any different from intense friendship? Do I have a romantic relationship with my cat?
The question “About what percentage of your romantic partners have been someone you originally experienced crush symptoms for?” needs the option “zero” (and also the option “I’ve never had a romantic partner”).
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You can skip questions.
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How to answer, if I don’t remember since when I know what sex is and since when I started thinking about sexual interest?
Also, all the things ululio already said.
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Thanks for letting me take your survey! I’m a cis woman and my best fantasies are totally visual, but growing up strict Christian has given me massive guilt over visual porn, so the only visual porn I consume is very tame, SFW stuff, and the rest of my erotica consumption is literary, which always surprises me in how well it turns me on.
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I thought the “crushes” section of the survey was kind of confusing. Like, it asked stuff that didn’t really fit how I structure my crushes. For one thing, I’m pretty good at flirting with people I only marginally like, but LITERALLY CANNOT flirt with people who I like a lot. (This is perhaps suboptimal.) Anyway, I don’t really end up dating my crushes. Instead, I end up dating people who had crushes on me.
(Someday I will change this and become a dating-my-own-crushes master. But today is not that day.)
It was hard for me to guess percentages. Each crush is its own thing.
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Can I ask a survey-inspired question about BDSM here? Apologies if this is too off-topic.
I noticed the question “I am interested in nonsexual BDSM”. I wasn’t sure what to make of this question. Now, one possibility would be to simply be to leave it at “It’s BDSM if you think it’s BDSM”, but then the question goes and defines the term for the purposes of this question: “bondage, giving or receiving pain, and power exchange”. Now, “bondage” is pretty concrete, as is “giving or receiving pain”, but “power exchange” seems to me to have a substantial line-drawing problem.
Namely, how are you separating this from the ordinary status play between friends? As described e.g. in Impro (of which I’ll admit I’ve only ever read the much-quoted “status” chapter). Relevant paragraph:
If status can’t even be got rid of, then what happens between friends? Many people will maintain that we don’t play status transactions with our friends, and yet every movement, every inflection of the voice implies a status. My answer is that acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together. If I take an acquaintance an early morning cup of tea I might say ‘Did you have a good night?’ or something equally ‘neutral’, the status being established by voice and posture and eye contact and so on. If I take a cup of tea to a friend then I may say ‘Get up, you old cow’, or ‘Your Highness’s tea’, pretending to raise or lower status. Once students understand that they already play status games with their friends, then they realise that they already know most of the status games I’m trying to teach them.
And it can certainly get considerably more overt and physical than that — if someone comes at me in a “dinosaur pose”, and I cower against a wall; or if I take someone’s hand and lead them around the room in circles, while they go along with it, uttering complaints all the while… pretty definite exchange of power, right? So what distinguishes this from the “power exchange” component of things labeled “BDSM”?
…I have a hypothesis as to what the answer might be, actually, but as someone with zero experience with the things normally labeled “BDSM”, I’ll hold off on stating it for now and leave this as a question. 🙂
(By the way, this is not exactly the same as but very closely related to the thing I meant to but didn’t get to here. Maybe you can infer what that was, and if not, I’ll probably get to it some other time…)
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Presumably the same way you separate friendly “flirting” from seduction? Friendly activities seem to be deliberately lighthearted, while BDSM/sex/romance/etc. strive for the opposite — greater intensity and focus, altered mental states.
I was also confused about the nonsexual BDSM question, but in a different way.
What if the kink itself doesn’t involve sex, but I only practice it in a sexual context? I can imagine having a no-sex BDSM partner, but I would probably still think sexy thoughts about the kink. So, is that sexual or not?
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What if the kink itself doesn’t involve sex, but I only practice it in a sexual context? I can imagine having a no-sex BDSM partner, but I would probably still think sexy thoughts about the kink. So, is that sexual or not?
Yeah, I had trouble sort of along those lines. I consider my kink to be sexual, just not a genital-involving kind of sexual; however, pretty much all of the people with similar ways of experiencing kink I’ve come across have been people calling themselves “nonsexual kinksters”.
I ended up saying “I only practise nonsexual BDSM”, answering according to my experience neighbourhood rather than my personal views. (I figure I’m more likely to be understood that way.)
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Presumably the same way you separate friendly “flirting” from seduction? Friendly activities seem to be deliberately lighthearted, while BDSM/sex/romance/etc. strive for the opposite — greater intensity and focus, altered mental states.
That is pretty close to what I was thinking, actually! What I was going to suggest was that the friendly sort makes use of the usual human play signals and stop-play signals to delineate its boundaries, while it’s “BDSM” once you decide/agree to blow past those and emulate things that include the ordinary stop-play signals as part of what you’re doing — hence the frequent focus on explicit consent. (And before Ozy raises the obvious objection, this is, again, intended to apply to the “power exchange” component, not any of the others!)
But again I have zero experience with any of this so, y’know, I’m more offering this to be confirmed/denied by other people than as something I’m arguing to be true. Still, it’s reassurring to see that your answer lines up pretty well with mine.
…so yay, this might actually be a pretty easy question, for once. 🙂
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Well, if two people do precisely the same behavior, except one of them does it in a leather harness, then the latter is kink. The leather harness is optional.
I once attended a cool kinky tea party, wherein tea was served by lovely femme people. They served the tea. We drank the tea, ate the adorable little sandwiches, and chatted about sophisticated things. My server was this hottie trans gal in a catgirl outfit.
Much fun. That was kink.
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I love surveys (it must be the vanity appeal of talking about myself) so of course I couldn’t resist this one.
Though I would have liked had there been an option for “have you ever had a sexual/romantic partner?”, just to let people like myself and Adrift clarify our situation.
Re: the BDSM question – I had to answer that “no”, since the “bondage, spanking, giving/receiving pain, verbal or physical humiliation etc.” part absolutely has no interest and does nothing for me (the amount of spanking stories I’ve skipped because I got part-way into what looked like a decent fanfic, then the spanking made an appearance and it excites me as much as doing the ironing, i.e. not one tiny bit…)
Power exchange, on the other hand, would interest me. Someone managed the feat of hooking me on a BDSM-themed story precisely because it wasn’t about spanking, tying up etc. but explored the dynamics of the relationship between the dom and the sub, their needs, what was going on in their heads, etc.
Pain for its own sake does not interest me or do anything for me, and most of the BDSM stuff I’ve tried reading is of the “beat ’em till they bleed” variety – which is perfectly fine, that’s what the majority of the readers seem to want, good luck and much enjoyment to you all.
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If I take a cup of tea to a friend then I may say ‘Get up, you old cow’, or ‘Your Highness’s tea’, pretending to raise or lower status.
I think I sort of disagree with the “We play status games with our friends all the time” thing? Though I’d lean heavily on the qualifying play and games part of it; that is what distinguishes it from status transactions with rivals, strangers, colleagues, school mates and so forth.
I think the point there is yes, pretending. With a stranger or acquaintance or someone of higher status (like a boss), you’d bring in the tea and make a neutrally friendly comment. With a family member or friend, you pretend to raise/lower status (e.g. What did your last slave die of? pseudo-complaint) but the whole interaction is based upon the assumption of equal status.
If someone lets you take them by the hand and lead them around in circles, even while complaining, then that’s playing and assuming equal status between you. I’m going to quote C.S. Lewis on Affection here:
If you think, in regard to relationships, that you’re engaging in status interaction games, even if you think you’re playing, you may be slighting Affection 🙂
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All this is true, but how does it answer the question? You haven’t given anything to distinguish. I would expect people practicing BDSM to say that they are similarly playing. They use the word, after all, and do make a big point of the fantasy/reality distinction.
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Have most people had a test to determine their hormone balance, or do they just work it out somehow? I ask because I’m a cis-by-default male with reason to suspect I have low testosterone, and I don’t know how I would tell the difference between a testosterone-dominated and an estrogen-dominated hormone balance.
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It is very unlikely you would manage to have a cis female hormone balance without noticing it. For one thing, you would look like a woman.
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So I filled out the survey. I would be quite willing (enthusiastic actually) to talk more about my answers should Ozy have questions. I suspect others would also be so willing. (Though I dunno if that’s within the scope of Ozy’s mission/of interest to zir.)
Thus, to preserve anonymity to the outside world (though not to Ozy), I propose the following: Ozy, should zie want more info from a survey participant, for curiosity or other reasons, should post something like “Could the person whose answers included talk to me?”, and then that person will step forth in some kind of private method of communication.
(Man it feels great to have a person as safe as Ozy to talk to, even in an indirect and anonymous way, about things One Does Not Talk About In Polite Company.)
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So I’ve recently started identifying as neither male nor female (still working out labels), and I’m not really sure if therefore I count as heterosexual. I mean, I’m attracted to the gender I wasn’t assigned at birth, so… yes? Maybe?
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Maybe this might be of help. I have pondered sex, sexuality and gender for a very long time. As times have changed i came up with a way to integrate all of my musings in a way that eas meaningful to me and to the world around me. This relates to the black/white view of what men and women are, the stereotypes, the gender roles, and all of that that separates people from reality. The one thing that I think we’ve all taken for granted is that the strict gender ideation this culture has to date is “normal”. So trying to define normal is a task in itself. I came up with what I feel is a new way to describe an individual in their most comprehensive identity that can be at this time. I call it the SIMPLE scale (Sexual Identity MultiPhasic Linear Expression scale). It goes like this:
A person has a biological sex, Male or female, generally an xx, xy chromosomal makeup that is fixed. So one would start with that as a beginning of a 4 part descriptor as M, or F. Then gender is how one feels internally, and which would most likely be outwardly expressed, which would follow the biological descriptor and be MM, FF, MF, or FM. That would describe transgender as well. Not a judgment, just an is-ness. Then we’d have affection attraction, so obviously straight or gay. Now the person would be MMS or G, MFS (attracted to same sex as biology, pre-surgical trans) FFS or G and so on. Finally a numerical value to be assigned by the individual answering their own questions as to how far they deviate from the current culture’s ideal of men or women.
The cool thing about that is that as culture changes over time that number could change. So if you are a MMS you could also have a strong integration of feminine stereotypical behavior/interests and yet would NOT be subject to bullying as this is merely the individual expression that everyone would do and be. If you were the girliest of girl according to culture, you may be a FFG95. Or of course FFS95. That way people would know how to relate to you. You might be a farm raised girl, liking mechanics and typically male activities so no matter what you looked like you could easily be a FFS60 (or 30 for that matter). The numerical value is subjective in relation to the culture, and hence highlights cultural deficiencies in identification of reality. And if there are cultural deficiencies, then how in the world could one expect to argue in FAVOR of such? That would be a neat trick.
Now what if we found in this typical American culture that a norm male is really a MMS65? That is what a healthy American balanced male is. He is a man in all sense of the word and world, but integrates an intellectual and emotional capacity that allows him to not be the caricature of what he is told how he is “supposed” to act like. Or a female is norm at FFS80? How would that change the whole idea of what a real person is, and can anyone tell if you are an 80, or a 60? I think not, it’s only a way for the individual to get a grounded sense of who they are in relation to the whole. I think that would change everything, more concretely, like a Myers Briggs, or the MMPI, and that would take away the stigma of you are not enough of a mythical standard, that was found to be false in the first place, since the norm value really is over here, not there. The impact it may have on interrelations between the sexes, violence, war and aggression could be immense. That way, you could also predict the people from early on most prone to violence and provide interdiction to help them get back to the norm, versus merely telling them that’s not nice
Now the fact that you’re attracted to the sex opposite from your chromosomal makeup is really irrespective of this. You coukd be mms35. Even if you choose to transition you’d still not be lesbian because in this scheme you’d be mfs65 but maybe now the matyer of straight vs gay wouldn’t mean all thst much. I view myself as probably mms70 at best but since now i can see myself much clearer and feel alot less stress trying to fit some cultural viewpoint that i instinctively know is false. As popeye would say, i yam what i yam. Jump a bit higher and get over it. 🙂
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I know you’re trying to be helpful, but you are invalidating my identity here.
It’s taken years, decades even, for me to confirm that I identify as neither male nor female. Telling me I have to choose one or the other, but it’s okay because I don’t have to confirm to society’s expectations… no. Gender is personal; it’s not the same as gender performance.
I know the appeal of models like these, I like them too, but I think you might have to rethink aspects of this one.
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Then i apologize if it doesn’t fit.
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This isn’t precisely responsive to the survey, but it is sort of apropos to the subject of crushes, and there aren’t open threads any more so…
I’ve been pondering the fact that people seem to recognize that sexual libido exists along a spectrum, but treat romantic bonding as a binary (if they even recognize that aromantics exist). But I suspect it’s not, and this explains a lot of friction I’ve had with well-meaning friends, who tend to say things to me like, “You shouldn’t be so depressed just because your having trouble finding a relationship. You have a steady job, a supportive family, and hobbies that you like. Relationships aren’t everything. You can’t expect a relationship to make you happy; happiness has to come from within.”
It never occurred to me explain it this way before, but I think I’m just much further toward the opposite end of the romantic spectrum from aromantics than the poor-advice-givers are. Pair-bonding is an overriding imperative that swamps everything else in life.
Unfortunately, this also explains the crush –> become quasi-manic and try way too hard –> potential relationship implodes dynamic.
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I’ve recently noticed the same thing myself. I was shocked the first time I heard someone of my age saying, “I don’t understand why some people are so intent on having a significant other. Being in a relationship has never been a need for me; it’s nice, but I can imagine myself having a perfectly happy and fulfilled life without ever finding someone.” Still, it makes sense that there should be plenty of people who feel this way, just as I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t really feel the need for an enjoyable job.
As for the “happiness has to come from within” part, that just sounds like bad advice in general, whether towards someone discouraged about romantic relationships or towards someone discouraged about their career.
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Had some trouble with the “crush effects” part.
I have different crush effects now than I did when I was a teenager. I marked all the ones I’ve ever had. Have fun with that.
They have different durations; For example, “Unable to speak around them” doesn’t last for too long. Basically until I manage to actually push past it, but this is likely to be on the order of hours, not days. Where “imagine yourself in romantic situations with them” seems to never go away, which is especially frustrating when it’s my abusive ex-wife.
So, that.
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“When you experience crush symptoms for someone, do you generally want them to return your affections?”
I was not sure how to answer this. I don’t like telling people how to feel, if someone I had a crush on liked me romantically then I would want them to, if not then that’s fine
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Hey Ozy, sorry if I missed it – have you posted any results? No hurry, I just didn’t want to overlook it.
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