In her new post, Calico looks at the results of a sex and relationships survey and finds she has many questions — including the question of why the group which administered the survey sucks so hard at math. Also, when respondents said they were least likely to want to have sex right after visiting their own family, was this a response to a multiple-choice question, or was it volunteered randomly? Did anyone ask them whether they prefer the idea of having sex while riding a garbage barge on the East River? Also, if they hate having sex while family is on their mind, why do the same women profess to enjoy calling their male partners “daddy” during sex?
Read all about it in Calico’s latest article “Oh Goodie – It’s Bullshit Sex Survey Time Again!” Read on…
by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com
When it comes to drumming up support for making sweeping generalizations about large groups of total strangers, nothing beats a good survey.
It’s even better when you don’t tell the reading audience anything about how your respondent pool was selected, or how (or, for that matter, if) the respondents were screened to assure are what they claimed to be, like male, female, above the age of majority, or gray aliens pretending to be human respondents just to skew alien-related survey results, or whatever.
Granted, some survey results are so awesome, even if the survey was flawed, I don’t want to know about it. Like finding out 11% of Americans think HTML is a sexually-transmitted disease, for example, or 51% of people think stormy weather interferes with cloud computing. (To be fair, if the storm gets bad enough that it swamps several major, interconnected data centers, technically stormy weather could affect cloud computing somewhat, I suppose.)
Still, the fun of these other kinds of surveys pales in comparison to a sex-and-relationships survey, mostly because they rarely include questions like whether women enjoy it when their partners ask to be called “daddy” during sex.
Survey Says… Forktip Sucks At Math
I’ll admit, it’s a strange thing to start with in my critique of Forktip.com’s newly published sex/relationship survey results, but someone involved in writing up the analysis of the results seriously sucks at math.
In reporting the response to the question of whether they’d be open to a “bisexual threesome with another woman,” the data says 27.7% of female respondents said yes. Forktip’s take on this is “1 in 3 women” said yes – but 1 in 3 women is 33.33%, not 27.7%, which in truth is closer to 1 in 4, if we’re going to start rounding things off here.
Later in the survey, under the heading “Partners who want more sex,” 35.3% of women responding to the survey said they’d like more sex, which Forktip interprets as “only a third” of women. So, sometimes when the results are 5.6 percentage points below one-third, that’s a third, while other times being 2.0 percentage points above one-third is a third?
This makes me want to pose one of those SAT-style word problems to the Forktip staff: If 33 women are on a train traveling from Chicago to Milwaukee at 40 miles per hour and 12 women get off in Waukegan, then 6 women get on the train in Kenosha, what percentage of the women still on the train when it gets to Mt. Pleasant will think you’re a total putz? (Hint: More than 1/3)
More Context, Please
Another thing I love about this Forktip survey is the total lack of context, or even numbers, when it comes to some of the responses.
Take the results listed under the heading “Situations you are least likely to want sex with your partner” (which isn’t really a question, or even a grammatically-coherent statement, but let’s not get too picky with this shit).
The three situations listed are “just visited family,” “hungover” and “hungry.” My question about these responses isn’t addressed by Forktip’s snarky analysis; namely, were these offered as part a multiple-choice question, or volunteered as a response to a wide-open question about situations which people find particularly counter-arousing?
If it was a multiple-choice question, what other options did respondents have? Was “while working on a garbage barge on the East River” among them? How about “right after descaling a large fish?” C’mon Forktip – America needs to know!
Inconsistencies Not Even Noted, Much Less Explained
I’d also like it if Forktip could hazard a guess as to what explains some of the inconsistencies from one response to the next with this survey.
For example, while Forktip was happy to speculate why so many respondents were turned off by the idea of having sex right after a visit with family (“Thinking about family while doing it seems to be too weird for most people”). How does this theory jibe with the fact many of their female respondents claimed to like it when their partner wants to be called “daddy” in bed?
I’m not saying there’s no explanation which would work to explain this apparent discrepancy, but it would have been nice to see the survey administrators try to account for it, at least.
Then again, maybe I’m just overthinking this survey. Maybe it’s all just another example of results which are just too good to question, like one-quarter of Americans thinking God determines the winner of the Super Bowl.