So far the response to the survey has been amazing. I was taken aback by how fast we reached the 1,000 responses milestone - 48 hours in and we were at 1,050. I’m excited!
So far the responses have been 99% positive.
There has been a bit of bad. Like technical glitches, including a hosting issue overnight right after launch - sigh. A few of you got angry when you couldn’t find the survey, and I apologize for that - I hope that you all found it later, and took it.
And there has, of course, been a bit of ugly. Like a string of comments in a Fetlife group calling the community "an awful transphobic and mysogynistic garbage dump” - and suggested what I felt were insulting responses the survey would bring.
While these folks may have had the best of intentions - they feel that surveys of th ABDL community should never be done, but if they must be done should be done only by qualified and trained mental health or survey professionals - the tact they took made me sad for a certain segment of our community. There are some dark, dark corners of the ABDL community - and they’re apparently filled with "creeper messages, transphobia, and misogyny.” And anger.
Thankfully, outside of this project, I have no dealings with any of this, and the part of the community I regularly interact with, and have interacted with during my 9+ years of blogging, is 99.9999% fucking amazing.
It does make me sad that not everyone has gotten to have that same experience, or been left with that same feeling. Be nice to each other, people. Accept, and respect, people’s differences. And don’t be creepers.
I’ve also gotten some very nasty text messages from someone angry that I didn’t include their favorite ABDL event in my list of cons, accompanied by insults and threats to get my class shut down unless I add their event to the poll.
It makes me sad that people would represent an event they seem to be very passionate about by trying to mar the experience of people at another event.
But, again, these are people I can be 99.9999% sure I’ll have no interactions with, ever, outside of this survey project, so it's whatever.
For the most part, though, save for the above, the responses have been nothing short of amazing.
I have read through hundreds of the surveys so far, and have been spending a lot of time putting data together. I’m excited about sharing the results with you.
And while I fully acknowledge that the results are not going to be the ‘smoking gun’ to discovering why we are the way they are, I think they’ll provide some good evidence to prove - or, probably, disprove - my own theory - more on that later. At the very least I hope that they’ll open the door to some valuable conversations in the meantime.
I understand that there is a segment of the community for whom exploring the answers to why we are the way we are is a very negative, and even threatening, possibility. There are people who just want this left alone - who even conspire to get things like discussions about it shut down. For them, painful triggering memories may be a part of their own ABDL past. I get that, and I wish it weren’t that way for anyone.
For more of the people I’ve talked to during my years of blogging, though, than not, the questions about what lead us to love diapers and/or ageplay is a fascinating topic that deserves examination.
So we’ll try to do that, to whatever degree we can.
Now, I’d like to share some numbers from the 48 hour mark:
Survey responses so far:
USA 764
Canada 94
UK 64
Australia 35
Germany 22
Netherlands 13
Norway 8
France 7
New Zealand 6
Sweden 5
Ireland 4
Denmark 3
Finland 3
South Africa 3
Spain 3
Austria 2
Belgium 2
Czech Republic 2
Malaysia 2
and 12 other countries with only 1 responding ABDL.
After 48 hours:
15.4% of my survey respondents (so far) are under age 21.
Of those, 9.58% are female. That is opposed to 4.43% female overall.
Trans, under 21: 7.78% - as opposed to 4.14% trans overall.
It’s not a huge difference, and it probably should surprise no one, but if these poll numbers represent our community overall, it does suggest that we may have become a bit more gender diverse with our youngest generation. That’s probably in line with society at large.
15.1% of my survey respondents (so far) are age 40 or older.
Of those, .62% are female and 2.47% are trans.
This last part does raise some interesting questions.
For example: are there 15x the number of females under 21 responding because something is causing younger people - females, especially - to develop this fetish? If so, what?
Or does something happen to females by the time they reach 40 to drive them away from this community?
Or, is my survey not accurately representative of the actual numbers of ABDL females over 40 for some reason? Maybe women over 40 just don’t have the patience for polls?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
I’ll explore these and other questions during my presentation (if the angry left-out convention crowd doesn’t succeed in getting it shut down lol) - and you know I’ll be sharing those details on my blog!
In the meantime, if you want to be a part of the continued conversation, please keep checking back here, or subscribe to my mailing list, where I’ll be posting six different questions for people to answer that will hopefully provide a more human component than a survey ever could.
Thanks for taking it if you have already, and if you haven’t, please consider!
Cwis
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