F-List Census - Gender and Orientation
"Orientation! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that sexually consistent orientations can be shown to exist today. ...Ploonitary pride has no need of the delirium of orientation."
-Fenito Listolini
Consistently Inconsistent
F-List has 8 gender options and 9 orientation options, so the confusing selections and inconsistencies are reasonable. Who are gay cuntboys supposed to pair with? What about straight herms? I'm not here to answer the shoulds, but I'll look at what people do pick. In particular, here are some questions I hope to answer, and figures I want to find:
- What are the most and least common genders and orientations?
- What genders are the most and least desired?
- What do the orientation selections mean for the different genders?
First, let's look at how many profiles there are for each gender and each orientation as a whole. Further down the page are orientation numbers per gender.
Gender and Orientation Numbers
Click the column headers to sort in ascending or descending order.
The (All Dates) columns include all profiles that fit the selected gender, and the (1 mo.) columns only includes those that have been online in the last month.
| Gender | # of Profiles (All Dates) | % (All Dates) | # of Profiles (1 mo.) | % (1 mo.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Any | 1,250,970 | 71.4% | 690,630 | 88.4% |
| Female | 557,070 | 31.8% | 321,200 | 41.1% |
| Unselected | 500,070 | 28.6% | 90,780 | 11.6% |
| Male | 479,410 | 27.4% | 239,170 | 30.6% |
| Shemale | 93,980 | 5.4% | 67,100 | 8.6% |
| Herm | 46,500 | 2.7% | 23,840 | 3.1% |
| Transgender | 33,440 | 1.9% | 19,050 | 2.4% |
| None | 22,870 | 1.3% | 11,110 | 1.4% |
| Cunt-boy | 10,840 | 0.6% | 5,720 | 0.7% |
| Male-herm | 6,880 | 0.4% | 3,480 | 0.4% |
The first thing you should note is the difference between None and Unselected.
None is an explicit choice, while Unselected means the user didn't pick anything. Any is just a sum of all the selections (everything but Unselected).
Unselected has the greatest change between the lifetime count and those online in the last month, but even with over 400,000 profiles tied to inactive accounts, it is still the third most common gender "selection", trailing Male by quite a bit. Why so many? And where'd they all go? Here are my ideas:
- Some people give up on a profile quickly. There are a good number of incomplete but not totally blank profiles where the creation/last edit date are the same day. Some of these are a name, some of these are partial character info or kink lists that just never got around to selecting a gender before abandoning it.
- Intentional choice: there is no perfect option for hubs, multi-character profiles, scenario-driven or GM/DM profiles, or other similar cases.
- Burners, lurkers, kink lists with no character attached, image storage, profiles used for testing inlines or formatting, and some other cases, are examples of profiles that aren't really a character and don't have much reason for a set gender.
- Eicons didn't always exist, so to have your spammable unfunny .png (no .gif, even!) you needed to have a profile with its avatar set to what you wanted to send.
- While we can't see how many Unselected profiles were deleted around the change, it makes sense that at least some of them were just used for this purpose by users that haven't returned since, and the profiles never got cleaned up or had their names freed.
Shortcomings and Limitations
These numbers probably don't represent anything of practical use, so, at best, should be interpreted as "this is how many public profiles on F-List have this kink selected." and not "this is what percent of profiles feel this way about a kink."
Some things to consider when looking at this data:
- What differentiates a real profile and a fake one?
- F-List character search doesn't allow me to filter out profiles without an avatar, or else I would have done it. Having a set gender and at least 1 kink in the list was the next best option.
- What to do with long-dead profiles? I just included everything, but character search does allow you to filter by creation age and last online date.
- "Last Online" applies to the account, not the profile. So a burner account you have never logged into will show up as recently online if you use other characters.
- Banned accounts, both permanent and temporary, still have their profiles show up in character search. There's no way to filter them out.
- Getting profile count by multiplying the page count by 10 is inaccurate, but it's a very minor discrepancy. At most, any kink will have 9 more entries than it should.
- Most profiles don't fill out their kink list with every single option. My own anectodal observation is that many profiles focus more on what they are interested in and less on what they are not.
- The numbers back this up too. The column sums from the table are; Faves: 5,100,792; Yes: 7,124,018; Maybe: 3,429,004; No: 3,904,932
- In general, specific kinks that overlap with a more general one don't get selected as often, especially in the No category. There's no reason to put "Hyper Something" in No if you already have "Something" in there.
- Some kinks overlap with options in the profile info tab, so if a user only uses that but not the default kink (or makes a custom for it), it isn't represented.
- Sexual orientation in particular is a big one. I'll be making a page just to look at this soon.
- Alphabetical sorting is a little bit different between F-List and Excel; Excel puts two-word entries at the bottom of lists but F-List doesn't always.
- e.g. F-List gender options are sorted as
Trans Females, Transgender, Trans Malesbut Excel sorts them asTrans Females, Trans Males, Transgender.
Observations and Cool Details
words here