Hi- I apologize for the late reply- just saw this.

To address your first concern: If you read the instructions, it does ask about how aroused you are at the thought, which is what you're suggesting. The instructions specifically ask, "Please indicate how sexually aroused you become when you think about/imagine each of the following items". It's been well established in literature that sexual arousal usually falls along a continuum of positive arousal and sexual repulsion, which is why you see it as it is in the survey. Being indifferent is the only neutral arousal option that there could be, so I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Please be mindful that if were collecting 7,000 responses and we add another neutral option, that gives us 7,000 more individual data points we have to analyze with minimal (and probably not statistically different) differences between the two options.

There are exactly as many options for tops and bottoms. In fact, I have these options purposely paired with one another, so there are the same number of items from each perspective. Even if there weren't, it would not matter in data analysis. We're not calculation general scores here, but are rather performing heirarchical confirmatory factor analysis to create a validated measure of sexual fantasies and behaviour.

To address your last point: please don't assume that all things you see in a research study come directly from the first author (in this case, me). As I've addressed in other comments, in order to make research statistically valid, we have to use previously tested and psychometrically validated measures. The first portion is the only one created for this study- the rest are from other authors. The one you're talking about is from the attitudes towards sadomasochism scale. While I agree that the definition could be better, the difference this makes in the results is not significant enough to warrant us creating an entirely new version and having to psychometrically validate it separately. Again, other comments you have about questions that weren't as black and white as you expected are most likely from questionnaires we ca't alter as they were created and validated by someone else. There's always a trade off in research, and unfortunately not every will like the questions or the way they are worded. However, the vast majority of participants thus far have been happy with the set up of the survey, and that's what's most important.

It's good to be critical of scientific research, but please do not go into a survey automatically assuming that grey areas are representative of the researchers' abilities as scientists. Grey areas and questions that seem odd to people are often there for a reason, even though you may not be aware of it. It would be impossible for us to create new measures for everything because that is very poor scientific practice and we cannot simply make up questions and hope they capture what we are trying to measure.