Participants needed for University study looking at people's attitudes and their relationship with sexuality

[lexijordi]

Hi,

My name is Alex and I am a final year student at the University of Portsmouth, UK. I am currently working on my dissertation which looks at people's attitudes towards situations which may evoke disgust reactions and the relationship with sexuality. My main focus is on asexuality in comparison to other sexual orientations and I would really appreciate it if you could spare a few moments to complete my questionnaire.

My study is completely confidential and anonymous and it takes around 10 minutes to complete. All situations given are verbal only so you won't have to look at any pictures/ videos etc.

Also, if you choose there is a prize draw to win a £10 Tesco voucher available for you to enter once you have submitted your responses all you need to do is enter an email address (this is completed on a separate page and cannot be connected to your data so is still entirely anonymous).

Please follow this link to participate:https://portsmouthpsych.eu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_a04Xa7G7HRxzM3P

Thank you very much for your time!

[Notte stellata]

This study has been approved for posting by the Project Team.

starrynight
Project Team

[paperwishes]

I did it. I was disgusted by almost all of the things so I guess that means there's correlation :P

[Skycaptain]

done the survey, thanks.

[Jamesasaur]

Done.

[vervain]

Done. I would be interested to read more about disgust sensitivity.

(Spoiler contains comments about the study)

I was disgusted by most of the things too, but in very different ways (some were physical revulsion that I just felt, some were intellectual disapproval that I had to think about). I found these hard to evaluate on a single scale, a bit like trying to compare taste with colour in percentages.

[Iggy]

Done

[Cimmerian]

I agree with Vervain I assumed physical disgust versus intellectual disapproval or "disgust" rates much differently with me and it was hard to rate them on a single scale then.

[scarletlatitude]

Did it. :) I'm from the USA so you have a range of data now.

[WhenSummersGone]

Done!

[TarinSai80]

Done :)

[Kellam]

Dee Ewe Ehn...dun!

[Moon Ace]

Done

[mori child]

Done

[Unwitnessed]

Done.

[Certified Cake Decorator]

Done! I'm curios to know who wins the money?!

Im in America so i can't but i want to know who does :)

[Iyck]

Done and I'd like to see how this turns out.

[Jockey]

It's really hard to think about disgust for these different things on the same scale. I guess maybe aversion and disgust aren't the same? I dunno. I tried.

[I'd rather be in band.]

I completed the survey, however the moral disgust questions were somewhat difficult for me to complete because some of those situations have exceptions in which they would not be as unacceptable. However, that's just my opinion..

[Jump]

Done! Hope the study shows some interesting things!

[marki]

Done

[dash]

Hi,

My name is Alex and I am a final year student at the University of Portsmouth, UK. I am currently working on my dissertation which looks at people's attitudes towards situations which may evoke disgust reactions and the relationship with sexuality. My main focus is on asexuality in comparison to other sexual orientations and I would really appreciate it if you could spare a few moments to complete my questionnaire.

My study is completely confidential and anonymous and it takes around 10 minutes to complete. All situations given are verbal only so you won't have to look at any pictures/ videos etc.

Also, if you choose there is a prize draw to win a £10 Tesco voucher available for you to enter once you have submitted your responses all you need to do is enter an email address (this is completed on a separate page and cannot be connected to your data so is still entirely anonymous).

Please follow this link to participate:https://portsmouthpsych.eu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_a04Xa7G7HRxzM3P

Thank you very much for your time!

As some other people have said, morality and disgust are very different things.

I don't know why one would assume that asexual people may differ from sexual people on how likely we are to lie and cheat and steal, for example, or how upset we would be at others doing so.

"Deceiving a friend" is totally devoid of context, and I couldn't leave it blank. For those of us who have had to hide our sexual orientation and/or gender identity (or another stigmatized identity one needs to be private about), and thus "deceive" friends (and others), well, lumping this together with all other deceptions can really sting. Context matters.

My other criticism? For all of those "how gross is doing this sexual thing" questions, there would be NO NUMBER HIGH ENOUGH to express the grossness. I can say yeah, stepping in dog poop, that's pretty gross. That's not like "this is so incredibly horrifyingly gross I am not CAPABLE OF consenting to it and if this ever happened to me I would be in therapy for the rest of my life because of the sheer trauma this would cause me" kind of horrible. "If this ever happened to me I would have to be hospitalized because I would be injuring myself" kind of horrible. "If forced to do this (since that is the only way this could happen) I would no longer be able to function in human society, possibly for a long time, because of the trauma."

One can't compare "gross" and "rape," and for sex-averse asexuals like myself, the only way I could ever be in some of those contexts would be rape.

Seeing porn, that can be compared to stepping in dog poop. Doing sex acts myself, or having them done to me? Oh no, that's orders of magnitude off.

[dash]

SEX AVERSION, CLEARING SOME THINGS UP

Sex aversion isn't necessarily simply "I find the doing [or the notion of doing] sex/these sex acts gross."

(The survey explicitly asked about the grossness of my personally doing these things, so I will leave aside for the moment the separate issue of finding (or not finding) others doing so gross, in real life or in fantasy.)

In the "you personally doing X" case, grossness is part of it for me, and it may be the whole story for some sex-averse people, but it's not the whole story for me.

Stepping in dog poop, that's not an issue of consent. It's something that happens by accident. Smelling someone's body odor just happens, and so maybe one tries to leave the room. Finding moldy food in the fridge just happens.

Oral sex, anal sex, penetrative sex, these don't just happen. There has to be consent, otherwise this is rape.

And I don't just find these things "gross" -- I cannot, full stop, under any circumstances in the universe, "consent."

My sex aversion is orientational and not just a matter of preferences or specific aversions.

(Yes I know there are in-between cases for some folks, as in a straight person who considers any sort of anal contact during sex completely off-limits, but who doesn't necessarily think of this in terms of "orientation" because as that term is currently used, it refers only to the genders of one's preferred sex partners, not to the type of sex. This is a problem with the term "orientation" itself -- it's used too narrowly, and there is no term I am aware of for the broader concept.)

Orientation, in this broader meaning, is more than the set of people one experiences attraction toward, or the set of sexual preferences. Experiences like kink and poly also fall under "orientation" for some people. And orientational aversions also exist -- things that one could never personally, under any circumstances, consent to. (Even if one fully supports and even champions the rights of consenting adults to do so.)

It's about consent.

Orientational aversions shouldn't be an unusual concept. Many people have them. In a very benign example, straight people often say they would never be able to consent to gay sex. This doesn't mean they don't champion the rights of others to do so -- it means as a matter of their orientation, they could not consent to that. Even people who are open to sex with people of all genders may also have specific things that they cannot consent to.

So the survey compares very unlike things (and not just in the morality questions). Sex for me is not simply gross, like stepping in dog poop, a thing that just happens sometimes even when I try to avoid it. For me, "how do you rate the grossness for you of performing, or having done to you [oral sex/anal sex/penetrative sex of some kind]" is not answerable because it is a matter of orientational aversion -- it could never "just happen." I am not CAPABLE of consent to that, whatever the legal system assumes because of my age and mental capacity. It would have to be rape.

"Sex-averse" is a misleading term in the community because it makes it sound like the issue is "grossness," rather than (at least in my case, and I know in the cases of some other people), "this is not something that I have the CAPACITY to consent to." I am not withholding consent, consent is NOT POSSIBLE.

I think many people find it difficult to understand that there are some adults, who are legally mentally competent, who are actually incapable of consenting to sex. Not just "to this gender," but much broader -- and for some, to sex as a whole.

As a secondary matter, to return to my point above, orientational aversion may even be orthogonal to finding sex "gross" -- for example, there are people who cannot consent to sex themselves, who nonetheless enjoy watching porn/reading erotica, etc. How does one say "I don't find this 'gross' at all, I even find it fun and fascinating to read about, but if it were me doing this/having this done to me, it would be rape"? Enjoying the fantasy of something does not mean one would, or even could, consent to it in "real life." These things are also separate.

The over-simplistic term "sex-averse" doesn't cover this distinction well.

[SunlightOnTheGarden]

Filled this in.

An interesting survey, but I can't help but feel that there's two things missing - first, there's a lot of different types of disgust, so I'm not sure everything is totally comparable? Discomfort isn't really disgust of any degree. And second, there should be an obvious ambivalent option - there's a lot of stuff here that I really don't care about either which way; so other people having anal sex doesn't disgust me because I simply can't conceptualise it, but similarly I can't really say I'm comfortable with it, because I can't really imagine it. If that makes any sense at all?!

[Tortitude]

Done. Didn't submit email address for Tesco card drawing. It sounds like something not around here.

[AceOfWords]

Done.

[kelico]

There you go! I agree with others about moral/sexual disgust differing though. But I was as accurate as I could be. : ) Best wishes!

[Ficulnean]

Finished.

[little_bird]

Done. Some of the 'sexual' questions were kind of difficult to answer. Since I wouldn't exactly be disgusted by them happening to me personally (consensually, you know, if that could be the case, which I doubt to be honest) I'd just be like - ugh stop it what are you doing.

Do you know what I mean? Not disgust, just 'meh, not feeling this in any way'.

Also, a lot of it, I don't give a fuck what other people do, I just don't want those things done to myself. If you know what I mean.

[SweetieBot]

I completed it too. Wish I went to that university for the extra credit. :P