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It's that time again folks, furry survey 2011-

Kitsune_Morric

Kitsune_Morric

Wearer of Many Masks
the sad part is i am fairly certain the results are smeared by people not truthfully answering or just plucking around with it
 
Attaman

Attaman

"I say we forget this business and run."
Kitsune_Morric said:
the sad part is i am fairly certain the results are smeared by people not truthfully answering or just plucking around with it
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What was your first clue?

Mine was when I saw about 76% more points in Fursuit importance, on average, than sex importance. Not that bad... but only about 20% of the survey takers were Fursuiters. Or, in other words, removing fursuits from the fandom would only directly influence about 20% of the survey takers. More humorous insofar as the "art" on average is just shy of 1.6 points more important (out of a ten point scale) than Fursuits, and - as Lizardking and others have proven in the last few weeks - there is a very lopsided percentage of views toward mature / adult art as opposed to "clean".

Or, basically, some furries on there are lying out of their ass. The majority of people voted it (the art) at 10 points (the only way you could have an average of greater than 9 on a ten-point chart), and yet the majority (at the same time) voted under five points for the average importance of sex. Considering the major Furry art sites (FurAffinity, Inkbunny, SoFurry), the majority of the page views on (at least) FA, the main topic of about 90% of Furry Art Boards, Furry-based avatars, and so on... it just doesn't add up.

It doesn't help that anyone who answered truthfully (or, in this case, any one of the 80% who don't Fursuit that might consider something they directly participate in as more important than something they don't), an amazing (if you consider that anyone who voted eight points or higher, and one third the people who voted seven) 340 people of a possible 1868 (or 20%!), will probably be seen as either "sex addict" if they acknowledged as a fandom member (See: Too big to just label troll), or, well... be labeled "troll" / "purposeful poll skewer!".

Basically, while it helps in some areas (such as information that wouldn't be considered compromising, like economic views, sex demographics, and so on), when it comes to stuff like that it's a bunch of furries just covering their ass with "I consider the art of the fandom to be MAJORLY important, and sex / porn so little that I'm going to give it only HALF the points!"
 
T

Tycho

Guest
Definite discrepancies. One should not take polls about furries conducted by a furry terribly seriously in the first place, though.

To get a decent poll result you'd need to run a much tighter ship than the average amateur pollster.

Remember, this fandom is both overly ashamed of itself and overly proud of itself, at the same time. Put that in your poll and smoke it. You've got people swearing up and down "I'M NOT A SEX FIEND, TOTALLY NOT A SEX FIEND" and fibbing on their result, ranking sex lower than it should be. And they do this because they are convinced that the rest of the world thinks they are depraved sex fiends, which (surprisingly) really isn't that true. Hence the number for "outsiders think the fandom is about sex" being so high. In reality, the person filling out the poll isn't a depraved sex-mad lunatic, nor is he a chaste paragon of celibacy and prudence. He's in between. And most of us are, honestly.
 
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Kitsune_Morric

Kitsune_Morric

Wearer of Many Masks
well i didn't actually believe this would be accurate in the first place, i was just amazed by how MUCH lying there was
 
Klisoura

Klisoura

Member
Attaman said:
Mine was when I saw about 76% more points in Fursuit importance, on average, than sex importance.
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Strictly speaking, the numbers you're quoting are apples to oranges, in the sense that while I do ask "How important do you think sex is to the furry fandom," that number isn't the one you're reporting (presumably, that is, since it's not part of the results page). Actually, because of the design of the survey, I don't think they can actually be accurately compared (this isn't a wholly trivial point, because it appears to inform a sizeable objection on your part); for that matter, they weren't intended to be.

The two sections graph substantially different aspects of the fandom. The grouping of sex questions is designed to address what I would describe as a relatively common view of the fandom as being sex-driven or fetishistic in scope; in that case, the four questions "How importance is sex to the fandom?", "How important is it to you personally?", "How important do you believe it is to others?" and "How important do you think the public perceives it to be" can only be compared amongst themselves.

With that caveat noted, I do suspect that, if "adult content" were listed alongside "writing," "fursuiting," &c it would be rated somewhat lower. This is trivially unsurprising. I think, though, that you are giving very short shrift to the idea that this might be an accurate statement. There are, fundamentally, two currents in play. The first is a putative desire on the part of individual furries to misrepresent themselves favorably; the second, your belief that the reality is substantially darker than it is.

Probably, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Consider that there are at least three possible interpretations of what it means to be "important," which would naturally result in different scoring (and which I call out in the survey question guide). The first is entirely personal. I'm not a fursuiter and I'm not an artist; if I were to vote entirely personally, I would rate conventions and writing extremely highly, and toss a "1" at fursuiting and artistry. Of course, this is transparently silly; you would have to be a fool to think that art was completely unimportant to the fandom. So set that one aside.

The second, then, considers the relative degree to which the fandom would not be the same without any given element. And, of course, nobody is saying that sex is unimportant to the fandom. Properly phrased, the contention would go something like this: "if fursuiting were removed from the fandom, the fandom would be more different than if sexual content were removed from it."

Perhaps you disagree with this notion, and you are well within your rights to do so, but I don't think it's ridiculous on its face. I think people could quite reasonably argue that, in terms of core elements to the fandom, fursuiting is more important. That is to say, if when I think of the fandom I think of someone breakdancing in a wolf suit, and you think of two dragons getting it on... that's on you, not on the fandom — isn't it?

In a sense, you can think about this view as a formulation of the following statement: "if someone is a furry, they are more likely to ________ than if they were not a furry". If I were to tell you that "if someone is a furry, they are more likely to play MUDs than if they were not a furry," or "if someone is a furry, they are more likely to dress up in costume than if they were not a furry," I don't think I'd really get much disagreement. Sex? "If someone is a furry, they are more likely to be interested in sex than if they were not a furry"? Maybe that's accurate — but would you really make the claim that furriness is a better predictor of pornographic consumption than it is a predictor of dressing up as an animal? Really?

Similarly with the third view of importance: the relative degree to which something defines the fandom in comparison to other elements. Fursuiting is uniquely furry. The prodigious quantity of user-generated furry art, and the consumption thereof, is something that definitely separates furry from other activities like, say, being a Browncoat. Writing? Well, I dunno. A lot of Trekkies write, too. Again, very few people would argue that sex is, on a broad spectrum, unimportant to furrydom — but is it really more important to defining furry than other things?

This view of importance translates into the following statement: "if someone _______, they are more likely to be a furry than someone who does not ______". And again: "If someone dresses up in costume, they are more likely to be a furry than someone who does not dress up in costume." "If someone goes to conventions, they are more likely to be a furry than someone who does not go to conventions." "If someone consumes a staggering quantity of pornography, they are more likely to be a furry than someone who does not"? Even stipulating that this is true, again, are you really going to argue that this is a better predictor of furriness than suiting is?

Attaman said:
Or, basically, some furries on there are lying out of their ass.
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Oh, come off it. Lying implies disingenuousness or a deliberate attempt at deception. There are at least two other explanations, one of which is at least as plausible and the other of which is substantially more so. The first is that people genuinely believe that sexual content does not define the furry fandom and is not important to it any more than it is important to the human race as a whole. I just covered that and, given the raw amount of pornography out on the Internet, I don't actually think this is an unsustainable assumption. But perhaps you do.

The second explanation is that people genuinely underestimate the degree to which sex is important to them in the contexts of the fandom. That wouldn't be particularly surprising, since that general trend is true in virtually all surveys that ask loaded questions. I don't think it's a conscious effort on people's behalf to choose to be more noble than they actually are; nor do I think it's a desire to avoid being stigmatized.

For example, I'd argue that the otherkin community is relatively outré; if it's purely a desire to avoid being seen as strange, you'd expect anyone willing to fess up to that to also be willing to own up to being a right horndog. In fact, we do find that the average response to the question "How important is sex to you, personally, in the context of the furry fandom" to be higher.

On the other hand, that question is also positively correlated to other questions that naturally influence the importance of sex in the context of fandom (chiefly, plushophilia and zoophilia). Cut those out, and the difference in average response between otherkin and non-otherkin in terms of how important they personally view sex drops to .1, from 3.88 to 3.98. Top three box response (A >= 8 ) percentage to the question differs by .5%, which is not statistically significant at any confidence level not brought on by heavy drinking.

Now, I could be missing out on something about the otherkin community that makes them perplexingly and singularly asexual. Otherwise, your contention has to be that for some reason, people are more unwilling to admit to thinking sex is important than to admit that they don't believe themselves to be human beings. I guess it's possible — people can be pretty prudish — but color me skeptical.

Tycho said:
In reality, the person filling out the poll isn't a depraved sex-mad lunatic, nor is he a chaste paragon of celibacy and prudence. He's in between. And most of us are, honestly.
Click to expand...

In other words, you'd expect the average to center around, say, 5?

Before we get too critical of our furry friends, let's take a look at something interesting. The survey tracks, among other things, the following four questions:

"How important do you think sex is to the fandom?"
"How important is sex to you personally, in the context of the furry fandom?"
"How important do you believe sex is to other furries?"

and

"How strongly do you consider yourself a part of the furry fandom?"

So, let's put together a quick table showing the average scores for those first three questions, matched up against the degree to which the respondent considered him or herself a member of the fandom.

Code: 
  Important to You | Important to Others | Important to Fandom
1     3.60              7.04 (3.44)          6.15 (2.55) 
2     3.49              6.45 (2.96)          5.68 (2.19) 
3     3.74              6.45 (2.71)          5.82 (2.08) 
4     3.71              6.32 (2.61)          5.32 (1.61) 
5     3.73              6.26 (2.53)          5.39 (1.66) 
6     4.12              6.38 (2.26)          5.42 (1.3) 
7     4.36              6.29 (1.93)          5.35 (0.99) 
8     4.57              6.27 (1.70)          5.66 (1.09) 
9     4.84              6.36 (1.52)          5.39 (0.55) 
10    4.76              6.05 (1.29)          5.40 (0.64)

The numbers in parentheses represent the difference between that column and the first — that is, how different, on average, people feel their views are from the perceptions of others and to the fandom as a whole. From this, we can take a note of several things.

Firstly, as respondents become more immersed in the fandom, the degree to which they consider sex important to their experience in the fandom increases, by greater than 1 point. This is self-evidently logical: somebody who is just coming into the fandom from Robin Hood or Watership Down is probably going to be less stoked at the prospect of Tod and Copper going at it than someone who has been around for awhile.

At the same time, however, their perception of how radically sexualized the fandom is also drops, to the point that the difference between the two converges steadily over time. By the time people consider themselves extremely strong members of the fandom, the perception that there is a difference between "me" and "those other guys" remains, but it has dropped sharply — from "I'm pretty puritanical, and those guys are hanging out in Babylon" to "We're both about average, me on the lower side and them on the higher side.

This is marked, as well, by (with the exception of a slight outlier at the low end of the scale) the relatively constant scoring of "how important is sex to the fandom" of around 5.5, hanging out as sort of the midpoint between "me" and "those other guys." The general consensus appears to be that the fandom is concerned with sex to a more or less average degree, possibly on the slightly higher side. People view themselves as being slightly less sexualized, and others as being slightly more, but... not to put too fine a point on it, so what?

At its core, I agree with your basic assumption that most people are relatively average. Indeed, people who are well immersed in the fandom appear to agree as well. I'd consider a score of 5 or 6 to be average. For people who are strongly part of the fandom — say, a score of 8 or more — this appears to be the case; the average response to the question of "how important is sex to you, personally," is 4.7.

Now. If you'd like, you can view a difference of .3 on a 10 point scale to be evidence of massive collusion in an attempt to overrepresent the virtues of the fandom. Me, I think that's taking it a bit far.
 
skinwalker3

skinwalker3

Aleya
I voted! Yay ^^
 
S

Sar

Guest
*Finshes survery. Scrolls down*

CannonFodder said:
you-get-nothing.gif

Better luck next year.

I wonder what this year's results will be, cause realistically you can only predict the outcome to a certain point and a +/- 5% guess isn't exactly accurate since the guess could go either way.
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NNNNOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
I wanted a cookie
 
wolfystar

wolfystar

New Member
Not to bad, really wish I could have checked more of the conventions
 
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