A while back I came to you fellows asking for assistance in doing some research. I asked for interviews, and I got many, and a lot of good data for coming to conclusions. Today I finally got to give that presentation (er, well, I say that, but it was a poster presentation, so it was more, talking to individual people in the field of sexology about my results rather than talking to a room or group at once).
I thought perhaps you guys might like to ask me questions about my research, what conclusions I came to, what I talked about, and so on.
Here is my poster. Obviously, lacking a lot of in the information from the interviews, and focusing mostly on results, but I was encouraged to try to get this published in some academic journal, so if I do that it will be more in depth. Though again, you could always ask me any questions you like about it.
Note, I will be somewhat occupied for the next couple days, so I'll try to get back and answer questions as soon as I can, but patience is appreciated.
Are you a zoo? if so, you have balls (ovaries?) of steel to present this with a straight face. Even one on one.
Very neat stuff though. what were the reactions you got?
The reactions were mostly positive. Interestingly, the reactions were correlated with age - older individuals reacted more positively towards the subject of zoophilia than younger ones at the conference. I suppose maybe because younger individuals hadn't spent as much time in the field, and so their reaction to new information about a controversial sex topic was still more close-minded? I'm not entirely sure. It's the opposite of what I expected though.
And thank you for the compliment on my gonads.
That is interesting, I would have expected the opposite, too. I wonder about the nature of the approval (distanced academic understanding or empathy) or for that matter the disapproval (similarly, moral outrage and/or a lack of distanced academic understanding).
The age-approval relationship would, unfortunately, go some way to explaining why we lost places like Denmark when we were once defended by their parliament…
Actually one of the people who I talked to had an interesting observation, based on how the gay rights movement went.
He thought that the recent move towards criminalization makes sense if you consider it as a reaction towards increased acceptance. There are some other bits of evidence suggesting increased acceptance of zoophilia, so... I guess that might be worth something? A silver lining, if you will.
I can only hope. There is far more complexity in global politics than I feel I can grasp — it's like a language which I only know through loan words.
Very interesting! I too want to hear about any reactions. How big was your sample group, and did you interview both male and female zoophiles?
Edit: Also, would it be all right to spread this poster further on other social media? Would you like to be credited with your reddit handle or something else?
I'm thinking I'm going to do a writeup on the topic one way or another, and I'll be fine with that being spread around. I'm not sure about the poster. I'll get back to you on that when I decide.
Thanks for the update. I hope you got a lot of interviews, and some great data on our population.
My main questions are dry, procedural things. How many interviews did you complete? How did the self-reported orientations toward humans and animals compare with previous studies like Miletski and Williams-Weinberg? Did the population skew on the young side, as I might expect from this sort of selection, and was there a significant difference between different age categories? For example, did younger zoos express more desire for activism and change?
As for the poster having not much information, that's to be expected, especially for a data-heavy project like this. The Klein grid gives you too much information to express cleanly on such limited space, and I can only imagine how adding animals to it might complicate things.
I got 24 interviews total, and that was enough to get a lot of good data, considering the depth of the interviews.
I'm not comfortable saying anything about statistics based on my sample, because it was clearly heavily biased, being a convenience / snowball sampling. That said, the majority of participants were attracted to both humans and animals, if that's what you're asking.
The population was generally younger, mostly 20s, but there were some in their thirties and forties.
I didn't ask specifically about activism, so I don't have any data on how that might differ. And even if I did, the number of interviewees and the biases of the sample make that kind of analysis impossible.
The research was more qualitative than quantitative.
I'm glad you know well enough not to put much stock in the statistics here, due to the problems mentioned. Besides, for a qualitative study, they aren't needed to get some idea of how the people you interviewed think about the subject. Thank you again.
I also want to express my gratefulness for putting much effort in the creation of this. It´s always nice to see someone actually doing something, you now? ;) But at the same time, I´d like to say that this kind of online interviews and surveys suffer from a basic flaw...they´re based on data that´s not validated. Our community consists of several different types of participants; amongst them surely are enough genuine and honest folks, but there are others who see this entire thing as some kind of role play. They create some alternate persona, create a legend around this persona and the smarter ones of these "role players" even put effort in research on zoo sites so their story won´t be recognizable as fantasy and being made up too quick. Another thing that keeps online surveys from gathering data you can trust is the issue of honesty. What if I was a violent bestialist and would tie my mare up and hit her during intercourse? Do you think I would be honest about it? To prevent people from being pissed off of me right from the start because I am honest and tell them what really happens, I probably would have the tendency to impersonate some character who doesn´t hit and tie up his sex partner, to gain reputation as a true zoo. I hope you get what I´m trying to put across.
Hani Miletskis research suffers from the same scientific flaw, she also relies totally on what people have told her. No validation, no further investigation of the facts presented by the participants of her study.
By doing such a study, you completely have to rely on the "facts" given. Your sources of this data could be people who are honest 100 percent. They also could turn out to be complete liars and you would never be able to tell. They could be bestialists who use animals as sex toys but tell you otherwise because they have an interest in creating positive data to make sex with animals more "sellable" to the public. You could get stories from people who actually never had any contact with animals and present their fantasies as reality.
As long as this basic flaw isn´t avoided, your and all the other surveys lack of scientific significance. No real scientist would use such biased data for his work. I can´t offer you a solution to this problem as you may know that outing oneself to another person is a real matter of trust and usually, we zoos try to avoid being open to strangers for very good reasons. And even when outing to another one, the tendency to present all the good facts and leaving out the not so good ones is blatantly obvious as you don´t out yourself to someone to make him/her hate you...no, you want to gain understanding and so you naturally tend to say only things that you think this person wouldn´t find too disturbing and offensive.
I really don´t intend on disencouraging you, I just want to remind you to acknowledge the possibility of being fooled by flawed data. We as a community are a magnet for all kinds of strange individuals. There are "fantasizing manchilds", role players who do it for the thrill and the kinkiness of this subject, full blown impostors, loners with low self esteem who participate in "deviant" groups like ours because they think that we "deviants" naturally have to be the most tolerant folks around, etc.....
As one of the three major taboos left, it is very hard to get reliable data on zoophilia. You only had contact with 24 people and the possibility is high that some of those people you interviewed were not telling the truth in one way or another.
Until a survey comes out with checked stories and facts, I´m very sorry to say that your work is meaningless, scientifically spoken. To show you how carefully you have to be in this community, I´d like to tell a little story.
Someday,in BF a user opened a thread on "sucking a mare´s teats". Lots of replies followed, mostly praising the "incredible sensations" sucking on a mare´s udder. Then, I posted my experiences. Some may already know that mares have a udder with two teats and in between those two, there´s usually a smelly,smeary substance consisting of dead skin cells, urine, feces, sand, dried sweat etc. This is definitely the only part of a mare´s body that´s not so damn sexy.;) Getting this into your mouth makes you want to throw up instantly, believe me. Not one of the "oh so experienced, real, true horsepeople" replying has mentioned that simple fact before I posted. After my post, all those "experts" "remembered" this fact all of a sudden and tried to adjust their stories according to this "new" fact. You see, within our community it´s a real challenge to tell the fakes from the real ones, even for genuine and experienced zoos. Please keep all of that in mind and add a little disclaimer to your survey hinting at the fact that your work and the results have to be read with caution.
It is absolutely incorrect to say that a low sample size means that the work is scientifically meaningless. Surveys are only one manner of collecting information. A good number of the other studies at the conference actually had a lower sample size than my own, and yet had been published, and had some significant results.
Surveys are important, but so are interviews, and even case studies. They vary in the number of participants, but also in the depth of analysis. Each has limitations, and each also has advantages. The point is though, even with n = 1, you can still get useful results.
Also, certainly, some individuals were probably dishonest. Some individuals were almost certainly honest. Honesty is always a problem when dealing with sexual matters, and the zoophile community, such as it is, is by no means unique in that regard. Various methods exist to try to mitigate the amount of dishonesty, some of which I employed, but none are perfect. That does not invalidate the study though.
It is essentially guaranteed that some individuals lied to interviewers for the Kinsey Reports, for instance, and yet they still manage to get cited even to the modern day.
I don't mean to be rude, so I apologize if I've come off that way, but... Yes, I've considered - and openly discussed - the issues you've mentioned. I hope that eventually better studies, and better methods in general, get used. But I don't think those things are grounds for dismissal of what I found out.
I was going to say something similar, but wasn't sure if it was correct. Thanks for validating what I thought I remembered in high school psych class... that even weak sample size studies in highly unresearched areas are considered useful. This qualifies.
I'm glad to hear it went well. I'm curious, you mention "zoophilia" as a sexual identity, I wonder if the topic of "zoosexuality" ever came up, as a possible alternative to being associated with an established paraphilia.
It was mentioned once, but in my interviews I found relatively few people who preferred seemed to prefer the term zoosexual, so I didn't generally use the term myself. I did make the point quite a few times that there is disagreement about terminology on this subject though.