I’ve been trying to look around the web even for approximate data of prevalence of various paraphilias in males and females. I realize such statistics are inherently inaccurate generally due to indirect data (self-reporting, etc. ), but I can’t even find orders of magnitude. Has this never been seriously studied or does nobody bother with statistics? Has nobody asked what, even approximate, percentage of people are into balloons, smoking, children, animals, shoes? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to try to corrolate such data… with something?
Sorry if this seems like a bizarre question but I’m trying to settle a small argument here.
I have seen data on paedophilia, bestiality, and foot fetishes. I don’t know where they are now and that type of data is terribly inaccurate because of self-reporting bias against that type of thing.
Your greater point is very much flawed however. When you say that we should “correlate” the data, I assume that you must mean that we should try and find if bestiality is more common in Midwestern farm boys who had a lesbian mother. Research does not usually work that way. There are many problems with that approach. #1 is getting a big enough sample to tell you that #2 is being lucky enough to collect the right data that you can’t necessarily predict in advance and #3 is that correlation <> causation.
All of this means that most good researchers wouldn’t bother doing many studies like this because they don’t happen to show anything. They are simply a “Statistic of the Day” that someone could put on a web site.
I meant correlating the data with itself, i.e. if there are some things that are more likely to occur together, say heterosexual behavior and pedophilia. Where would I find these stats?