Fetish % link that i found to be interesting

[SneezeDoc4u]

Hopefully this hasnt been posted before, but here is the link to a site that has the % of people worldwide with certain fetishes, and apparnetly we seem to be the minority, but we made the list...WOO HOO. There are even more people worldwide with an amputee fetish... lol....

well here it is

http://www.geocities.com/gungesurvey/fetishstats.html

[Jemmabean]

Quite interesting... However, I wouldn't take this to be at all representative of the number of people worldwide with these fetishes. He's basing his data on one thing, and one thing only: the number of Yahoo clubs under each specific category.

He claims that this sample would be representative of the world at large, although I can't think why - it's got so many confounding factors! For example, every single one of the people in the sample either:

1) Owns a computer

or

2) Has internet access of some kind (and, presumably, spare time and money to obtain it)

from which you actually CAN conclude, that these people are reasonably affluent (sure, there may be the odd homeless guy sitting in the library browsing the Yahoo! fetish clubs, but I think we can agree they'd be outliers ). So, no, Mr. Random-Geocities-Account-Survey guy, your sample is NOT representative. QED.

Still, it remains an interesting little statistic about the online fetish world. Thanks for posting!

Edit: Changed A and B into 1 and 2... I hate that stupid smiley...

[count tiszula]

Yes, interesting. Even though he clearly regards the fetish as wicked [look at all those exclamation marks] he still says there are a million of us .

Whereas the orthodox line has not gone above twenty thousand [a fiftieth of that]. Though there have been recent higher estimates eg by me.

As time goes on we are increasingly aware of more than one of us existing in the same town or university, so a figure of one in 6000 is perhaps not so unreasonable as used to be thought.

[sneezybreezy]

I agree with thosand yard stare, yahoo groups doesn't represent the populations very well..It is interesting but not good statistics.

I find it hard to believe that we have less people than the amputee fetish...not by much but still.

[zneeze]

I'd be surprised if there was 1,000,000 sneeze fetishists in the world. If you take the number of SFF members at the time of my posting this reply, and round up, there is somewhere between three and five thousand of us.

[Jemmabean]

Except most of those accounts have been inactive for a long time, are dupes, or are trolls. There's at most a few hundred active members.

[count tiszula]

Yees. yees, of course they are. As time goes on it becomes more and more difficult to maintain the official line here that there are only two thousand of us in the world, that is fewer than the number of active members, and this, though not new is a good argument.

As I say, the poster of this linked thing knows we are wicked but still says there are a million of us; but we know that we are much more wicked, 500 times as much in fact, so there can only be 2000 of us. Interestingly in another place the accepted figure is now about 20,000; so we are only 50 times as wicked.

What's a dupe? Indeed, what is a troll, I;ve always wondered.

[Jemmabean]

Dupe is two things, the way I just used it:

1) An account owned by a user who also owns another account (Those are not allowed, by the way )

or,

2) An account created that never posted - i.e., Why the hell did this dupe even register?

A troll is someone who joins for the sole purpose of making fun of other posters, stirring up shit, and just generally being a fuckwit. (Those aren't allowed either! Raar!! *waves stick*)

[Niceguy]

Couple of things...

RE the link: Taking the number of clubs is a useless way to determine popular interest, if you don't consider the number of members in each. We'd still be in the monority, but how many of some those clubs don't really have any memebers at all? And how many share most of the their members? (As our group does somewhat.)

But, in general, you can't even go by the number of accounts, or who's active, or anything like that to determine "How many of US there are in the world."

New people sign on every week. And some people (a lot I'm guessing) may have the fetish, but don't know about it or about "us" (haven't thought to look online, or may not yet realize that what they have is even a "fetish", or are in denial) or just don't feel like participating. I mean, look at the age distributon! Do you really think that (basically) no one over 50 has the fetish? I doubt it. It's more like: few people over 50 participate in these kind of online groups in general, as compared to the under 40's.

Plus, what about a former member (like Amber, for example, for those who remember her) who decided (for whatever personal reasons) that she didn't want either the community of the fetish to be part of her life anymore. Would you say that she now "doesn't have it"? (Put another way: If you're in the closet, does that make you not gay?) There are many other formely popular and even semi-famous members that have basically disappeared. Do they "no longer have it" or are "no longer part of the community?" You get into a tricky semantic argument there as well.

Now don't get me wrong: I don't think this is anything close to a mainstream fetish, (like Leather, BDSM, Golden Showers, Brown Baths, etc...) but I think looking at the numbers of members in these forums grossly underestimates the true number.

If for all the tolerance now present in our society, no one can even get an even remotely accurate estimate of homosexuals in the general population, do you think we'll ever be even close to getting an accurate number of fetishists in general, let alone sneeze fetishists? I'm not optimistic. (But I do believe that it's MANY, MANY, MANY times as many as we have registered here!)

[Guest SneezyB]

quite interesting

it makes you think doesnt it

[Jemmabean]

What I find really neat is this: who here knew (psych majors, this one's for you ) that by the definition of "Fetishism" given in the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4th Revision - basically the psychologist's diagnostic handbook), ours doesn't even count?

I can't remember the exact text and wording (and my old textbook is at my other dwelling, curses ) but essentially they specified that the attraction/fixation/arousal had to be centered on either an object (e.g. latex/leather clothing, shoes, women's underwear - this is what is defined as fetishism) or a part of the body (i.e. feet, breasts, buttocks - this is what is defined as partialism). They had no provision whatsoever for "action" fetishes such as our own, and... (damn, the others always feel so vulgar by comparison. I'm such an elitist bastard. ) hiccuping, crying, yawning, farting, etc.

I really think any psychologist worth their salt would be willing to allow for a grey area (or an under-representative text, haha) there and (if t'were needed) apply the diagnosis of "fetish" to one of us (assuming it were causing that person distress, lolol - that's always one of the criteria for diagnosing disorders), but I've always found that interesting nonetheless.

[sneezybreezy]

This study is basically showing a graph with very big error bars. Its basically saying these are population of people with the fetish... but not really. Maybe since I'm a scientist, I like results that are actually composed of real data, not imaginary.

[chui]

*insert random commentary* do i smell a fellow scientist? O_o

[sneezybreezy]

*insert random commentary* do i smell a fellow scientist? O_o

yes, the smell is definetly from the pyridine and other VOCs. haha.

[count tiszula]

What I find really neat is this: who here knew (psych majors, this one's for you ) that by the definition of "Fetishism" given in the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4th Revision - basically the psychologist's diagnostic handbook), ours doesn't even count?

I can't remember the exact text and wording (and my old textbook is at my other dwelling, curses ) but essentially they specified that the attraction/fixation/arousal had to be centered on either an object (e.g. latex/leather clothing, shoes, women's underwear - this is what is defined as fetishism) or a part of the body (i.e. feet, breasts, buttocks - this is what is defined as partialism). They had no provision whatsoever for "action" fetishes such as our own, and... (damn, the others always feel so vulgar by comparison. I'm such an elitist bastard. ) hiccuping, crying, yawning, farting, etc.

I really think any psychologist worth their salt would be willing to allow for a grey area (or an under-representative text, haha) there and (if t'were needed) apply the diagnosis of "fetish" to one of us (assuming it were causing that person distress, lolol - that's always one of the criteria for diagnosing disorders), but I've always found that interesting nonetheless.

*I* knew that.

In fact, I have been slightly reluctant to use the word fetish of my..er...interest, although i'm more or less used to it now; but it's not like hair or boots, is it?

The fact is, I don't know who decides what is a fetish and what isn't. Obviously sneezing isn't , but noses? Why are noses fetishistic but not lips? In fact what are people supposed to find attractive? It's difficult to think of anything much more directly sexual than buttocks; not only are breasts not sexual at all, but they're in the wrong place; and they haven't got an arrow marked on them.

[Guest SneezyB]

interesting