Do women with freeuse kinks have worse relationships?
Results from my fight with Mason
A while ago I got into a disagreement with Mason about the freeuse kink. She said:
“"Free use" is an attempt by young women to gain relationship security in a culture that valorizes sexual novelty, i.e. their continuous disposal by men, as sexual liberation”
In my studies of fetishes - from surveys of motivations to lengthy one-on-one interviews with people with obscure kinks, this seems blatantly untrue to me. It’s notoriously hard to pin down any sort of regular psychological motivation for a fetish, in the same way it’s hard to pin down a psychological motivation for why men like titties.
(You can read the full exchange here, which ended up decaying and then we blocked each other.)
But anyway - what’s the results? We both made our guesses, agreed on the wording of the questions. I made two prediction markets (though I added three questions):
To restate the context: my Big Kink Survey was a massive survey that went viral, and currently is sitting at 617,000 responses. It’s got great SEO, and is passively linked in a bunch of places with organic traffic, so I can add in additional questions and wait to get the data. Most of the people answering this are young (average age ~22), female (70%), liberal, and western. It’s the “young women online who like taking buzzfeed surveys with results they share with their friends” demographic.
The Results
So far 930 women have answered that they’re into freeuse (and many more said they weren’t) since I added in the Mason-approved additional three questions.
Question 1: Hookups
"In general, casual sexual hookups have been a ____ experience for me", with the answer options of "really bad" (-2) to "really good" (2).
Mason predicts women into freeuse have worse experience with hookups; I predict there won’t be a meaningful difference.
So basically: Women who said they were into freeuse, said they had better experiences with hookups. It’s not a huge difference, only 0.27 (out of a 5-point scale), but seems meaningful. Cohen’s d is .231, likelihood ratio 3.98×10^−8.
Question 2: Relationships
"I usually don't leave relationships unless there's a very serious violation", with the answer options of "Strongly disagree" (-2) to "Strongly agree" (2).
Mason predicts women with freeuse kink will agree with this statement more. I predict there’s no meaningful difference.
Women who are into freeuse, are very slightly less likely to stay in relationships unless there’s a serious violation. This difference is really small - cohen’s d = -.091, likelihood ratio 0.0678. It’s similar enough I’d consider it not really a meaningful difference.
Question 3: Breakups
"In general, when my romantic relationships end, who initiates the breakup?", with answer options of “The other person does” (-1) to “I do” (1)”
Mason predicts women with freeuse kinks are left more often than they leave. I predict there’s no meaningful difference.
Women who aren’t into freeuse, are very slightly more likely report the other person initiates the breakup (vs themselves). This difference again, though, is super small - cohen’s d is 0.067, LR is 0.2554, which I’d consider not a meaningful difference.
In summary
I think the data supports my claim here; I predicted “no meaningful change” and was correct 2/3 of the times (though I admit the threshold for meaningful is vague and I didn’t select a threshold beforehand).
The time my prediction was incorrect, I was incorrect in the direction opposite to Mason’s prediction; women with a freeuse kink report a better time with hookups. In hindsight this maybe seems pretty obvious; if you’re sexually aroused by casual, no-strings-attached sex, you’re probably gonna enjoy hookups more.
Out of all the women in my dataset, 18%, nearly 1/5 women, reported interest in a freeuse kink.
I calculated d and LR with chatgpt’s help; I’m happy to share raw data if anyone would like to doublecheck my numbers. Will have the data shared in my raw data page once I get the time to upload it.
Premise: I learned what freeuse is 10 minutes ago, and what seems to be the consensus is that it’s a kink/dynamic in a relationship in which sex can be initiated anywhere anytime without asking the partner for consent.
But then in your code snippets i see that you called the freeuse question “Freeuse (society where people casually have sex with anyone) _multiplepartners”.
The ”anyone” and “multiple partners” were unexpected to me. Apparently there is also the idea of “freeuse society”, which is what your code label is describing, but that’s a different thing from the kink.
So… how is the freeuse question formulated in your survey?
If we consider the definition of freeuse I gave in this comment, then I see why Mason has those opinions and i agree partially with her.
If we consider the anyone-multiplepartners definition then it looks to me like a completely different discussion, because we would be talking about poly people who have a bunch of casual sex, and that’s just a drastically different demographic.
Edit: I just saw the metadata of your survey in the twitter screenshots, so the people classified as having the “freeuse kink” are actually saying that they find erotic the idea of a freeuse society.
So… you needed to test for “freeuse kink”, but you actually tested for “freeuse society enjoyer”, which is a very different matter. Am I missing something?
I suspect there's a story something like this going on:
- The sexual revolution gave new freedoms to women
- Group A were basically fine/genuinely well-aligned with The Old Ways
- Group B genuinely struggled with The Old Ways
- Group C lean in the direction of Group A
- Group D lean in the direction of Group B
- C and D are adaptable and can tolerate differing levels of societal conditioning about their sex lives. Research could tell us the relative sizes of these groups and identify subgroups and totally different groups (like maybe asexual people are totally orthogonal to these groups)
- Political arguments are going to happen with the primary, passionately-motivated group.
My experience here is in dating across these group lines. I have dated women (females, but I don't want to sound like I'm wearing a fedora) who genuinely are Type A Sex Hobbiests all the way to nearly asexual women.
It's not uncommon for me to talk to women who are genuinely confused/upset that OTHER women have differing opinions on sexuality than they do. It's always in the anti-porn/anti-promiscuity direction (I believe I have a biased sample, because those are the women I'm going to disagree with most easily).
I'm pretty confident that at least some of the women I've dated genuinely liked porn, orgasms, masturbation, being promiscuous. I had to learn to have meaningful conversations about these things to suss out the kinds of women who actually enjoyed what we were doing together vs women who were just doing it because they thought it was what I wanted. If I didn't get the mischievous smile and bright-eyed look when talking about mutual interests, the tone of a connection were going to be pretty different.
So, back to the post and not humblebragging, I suspect that people struggle to untangle their own deep feelings about sex from how OTHERS experience sex and assume that all people who are like them feel the same.