The Other Sexual Orientation

step aside, gays

Here’s interest in blowjobs, split by gender:

This is from my Mini Kink survey, which has around 80k respondents after cleaning. Most respondents got redirected from my Big Kink Survey, which means much of the demographics are quite similar, and most respondents don’t know who I am, as the survey went viral across social media and currently gets most of its traffic from SEO. The sample is 56% women, 44% men, and skews young, with mean age 23. I didn’t measure political leaning, but is probably weighted liberal, as is the case with my Big Kink Survey. Overall, it seems likely that total kinkiness across the board is skewed upwards a bit compared to the general US population, but comparisons within the dataset are likely more reliable.

Let’s take a look at a few more distributions and see if you notice a pattern.

Got a theory?

These fetishes all show mostly clear trendlines. Most females really like erotica, and the least amount of females don’t. Most people said they’re not sexually attracted to teens, but those who did had a roughly even response rate. Men really like blowjobs - the line goes obviously from low to high.

This is contrasted to something like ‘femininity’, which has upticks on finding it unappealing and very appealing, correlated with (but not the same as!) gay/straight orientation:

You can see that men - and a lot of women - find femininity extremely erotic, but there’s a small uptick in the ‘not erotic’, which is probably gay men. We can see the heavy bisexual trend in women here, with smaller upticks at both ends, indicating more ‘lesbian’ vs ‘straight’ inclinations.

This graph is bimodal, which means that there’s peaks on both the “ew gross” and “super hot” ends.

Some of the other charts are bimodal, too. Let’s’ see if you can notice a theme here:

When it comes to solid BDSM, you start to see a similar bimodal distribution of interest. The most common relationship people have towards BDSM is either completely uninterested, or extremely interested; there’s not as much in the middle.

In fact, in my data, someone’s BDSM interest explains more structured variation in their sexuality than whether they’re gay or straight.

This is NOT popularity! It’s only strength of variance; basically how ‘distinct’ sexual interest in each cluster is.

The above graph is a result of factor analysis – basically a process that finds natural clusters in the data. For example, the classic Big 5 personality test was built off factor analysis: basically, they asked people a bunch of questions, and then noticed that questions like ‘are you the life of the party’ were really predictive of answers to a bunch of other questions (like ‘i like adventure’ or ‘i enjoy chatting with strangers’). Thus, if you know someone is the ‘life of the party’, you can make much better guesses about other parts of them, in a way that is less true for questions like ‘they like cake more than pie’.

If we apply the same process to a bunch of questions about ‘what arouses you’, someone’s attitudes towards BDSM emerge as the most distinct and defining cluster. People who like it and people who dislike it are very distinct and different from each other, more so than along any other axis.

For those who know what scree plots are, here’s the scree plot:

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Our current conception of sexual orientation is a misleading artifact of modern culture

Lots of people ask me ‘what is a kink? Is [thing] a kink?”

Our culture seems to draw the boundary of ‘kink’ starting at around a 1 on the taboo rating scale, but this is pretty arbitrary. In reality, there’s a smooth transition of popularity and tabooness across all sexual interests. Some tend to be more obligatory, some less. Some are hard to enact in real life, some aren’t.

I call the entire set of things that arouse people ‘sexual interests’. Bondage, armpits, romance, sounding, and blowjobs are all sexual interests, just with varying degrees of popularity.

Sexual interests vary along different axis! Some people’s arousal is very visceral and sensory - is there the right sensation going on the genitals or not? They don’t care if there’s a teacher-student roleplay going on as long as they’re getting stroked at exactly the right speed. Their girlfriend, meanwhile, might be fixated on teacher-student roleplay, as it’s representative of some kind of taboo social interaction, and that’s what’s hot for her. It might not matter too much the appearance of the person a roleplay is with, as long as the roleplay is getting done.

And similarly, some people care a lot about what people look like. Most people are sexually aroused by bodies with boobs, some aroused by bodies with penises. Some are aroused by bodies in the shape of monsters, others by bodies in the shape of animals.

Often, but not always, people form intimate connections with the things that sexually arouse them. Zoophiles report falling in love with the animals they’re sexually attracted to. Erika Eiffel fell in love and got married to the Eiffel tower. Straight men tend to fall in love with pretty girls. But emotional intimacy isn’t necessary to sexual orientation - if you put the mind of a pretty girl into the body of a man, very few straight men would fall in love with her, no matter how feminine her soul. And you wouldn’t call a gay man straight no matter how soulless his buttsex might be.

The sexual interest spectrum of “into men vs women” is not very different from other types of sexual interests. It’s just more visible. The category of gender as a sexual interest is a public thing heavily ritualized by culture. This makes sense, since males and females having fetishes for each other’s bodies results in reproduction, and thus has gotten real popular and become a wholesome cornerstone of civilization and media and identity. You can swap out just the type of body that goes through the ritual (marriage). And so, we get the concept of sexual orientation as distinct from other types of sexual interests. There’s no ‘marriage’ concept for other fetishes.

You might say that gender-sexual orientation is distinct for reasons besides social ritual, such as “it wholly defines who you can have satisfying sexual relationships with”. This is obvious from accounts of gay people who didn’t know they were gay, trying to make straight relationships work:

“Anything physical felt forced. Like a was an actor playing a role. I never understood why people liked kissing or sex. For me it was uncomfortable at best. Painful at worst. I was never attracted to men. I was just with them because it was expected” -reddit

But you can find near-identical accounts from people with other types of sexual orientations too!

BDSM is a sexual orientation in the same way being gay is, just minus the ritual visibility

“I thought there was something off about my sexuality in high school because I didn't get turned on when hooking up with partners. I thought maybe I was gay but it was the same with the girl I dated - I was attracted to her and enjoyed physical contact with her but couldn't get turned on the way I did when I was fantasizing about dark things alone in my bed. I did get turned on in a few in person situations (a girl holding me down and kissing me, a guy fingering me on the dance floor while I squirmed away) and eventually realized what I was into. Once I got comfortable enough telling people what I was into (took a while!) I started having good sex. I am not disgusted by vanilla sex but it has a similar vibe to cuddling for me and can be awkward because I'm simply not turned on by even the hottest person imaginable gently going down on me.” - chesed

“I occasionally have vanilla sex with people I really love, but I still don't get turned on by it. Either I make the sex purely about connecting, with no eroticism, or I think kinky thoughts and get turned on that way.” - anon friend

If you swapped out kink stuff for gay stuff, this would be indistinguishable from accounts of gay people trying to navigate life before they figured out what they were.

I’m one of these tales. I’ve been into BDSM-type stuff as long as I can remember - some of my earliest memories at 4 or 5 years old were proto-sexual fascinations with bondage, well before I had any exposure to anything sexual whatsoever. I was in denial for many years, and my first sexual relationship was vanilla. After the initial novelty with my boyfriend wore off, so did our sex life entirely. I thought I simply had a low sex drive. Sex seemed like a chore. I figured that’s just the way sex was for everyone. Women weren’t supposed to like sex that much, right?

But it turns out - actually no, it wasn’t that I didn’t like sex, it was that I didn’t like vanilla sex. Once I started engaging in kink relationships, surprise - I suddenly had a vivacious sex drive. Sex became bonding, transcendent, and wonderful. The way everyone else had been talking about sex finally made sense. Nowadays I engage exclusively in kink relationships.

For most fetishes in my data, the earlier the age of onset of a fetish, the more extreme the fetish tends to be. People who reported BDSM-related fetishes starting at the age of 5 or earlier, were the most into it. This is usually well before exposure to porn, or likely anything sexual at all! This is good evidence, I think, for BDSM (and sexual orientations in general, not just gender-based ones) being either innate or otherwise set quite early.

For something so innate, resistant to attempts to change, and for something that so radically affects the types of relationships that work, it’s odd that we don’t have a term for this type of sexuality.

So I’m going to refer to people with innate BDSM preference as bdsmexual (pronounced bee-dee-smexual), and people without as tendersexual. I apologize for the cheesiness, inventing words is my dump stat.

Is This Why The Porn Debate Is So Stupid

In the sex wars, (which I’m increasingly viewing as the successor to the woke wars), many tendersexual feminists are very upset about how ‘degrading’ porn is. Women are spit on, slapped around, choked! How bad and offensive!

This does look pretty bad if you’re tendersexual! Gay people looked pretty bad and offensive to heterosexual people for a lot of history. But I think they fail to realize that there’s a large minority of women who are bdsmexual - for whom BDSM is just as deep a part of their sexuality as lesbianism is to lesbians.

And this is more of a female (or submissive?) thing than male! Men’s sexuality is more responsive to general sluttiness, while women are overwhelmingly at least a little into power dynamics.

You don’t need my graphs to know this; look at the overwhelming popularity of books like 50 Shades of Grey, or the raunchy rough dominance common in the most popular women’s erotica.

Roughly 80% of women in my data are sexually submissive, which you could say is default female sexuality.

About 20% of women (and 15% of men) in my data are bdsmexual (innately and deeply oriented towards bdsm). As my data has slightly inflated kink rates, I’d estimate something closer to 15% of women and 10% of men are bdsmexual in the genpop. Men tend to be slightly less polarized than women; you could say they have higher rates of bdsm-bisexuality (switchiness).

In general, women prefer more violent porn than men do, and prefer rougher sex than men think they’d like. This holds in my data whether I’m measuring my own followers or anonymous paid survey respondents.

Violent porn with distressed women is actually not that popular overall compared to porn with very eager, slutty women. I’m currently working on a porn database of the most popular pornhub videos, and I definitely have my issues with how sex is being presented to people en masse, but so far violence is rare. I hope to publish more data about this soon!

So I think what we’re seeing is: Very tendersexual women hear about videos of women getting abused. They assume this is rampant - most anti-porn feminists I hear talk about this reference how it’s ‘everywhere’ - despite there not being any good data to support this claim (go check the front page of pornhub and count how many of the videos feature women who are showing distress). They assume that it’s ‘teaching men’ to be more violent, and that women don’t want this. They are not aware that a substantial minority of women - moreso than men - are actually bdsmexual. Bdsmexual women are weirder, more stigmatized, and often stay quiet about their sexual preferences, while tendersexual women share the culturally dominant view of female sexuality, and enjoy a lot of uncontroversial backing when they frame their own sexual orientation as a moral good that everyone else should follow.

To tendersexual women, exposure to bdsmexuality can be jarring.

“She was increasingly opening into her bdsm preferences and really wanted me to be very dominant and forceful. And as it turned out, she was into knifeplay and wax stuff, stuff that left her with bruises. She eventually sought this out outside of the relationship… But it really freaked me out, seeing her with bruises and burns. I felt very confused and sad. It was weird that this was a thing she wanted, because I was happy to try to give her things she wanted but I didn’t want to hurt her.”

- a tendersexual friend talking about her experience dating a bdsmexual

I sympathize with this! If violence, power, sadism, etc - are all things that you’ve experienced in really terrible contexts (like things villains do to heroes in movies), it can be confusing to think that some people want this, and furthermore that they can find it good and fulfilling. Some insist that bdsmexuals cannot find it good and fulfilling, that they must necessarily be broken or traumatized in some way. While it’s true that in my data, bdsmexuals are more likely to have experienced rough childhoods than tendersexuals, a majority of both groups still report happy, non-abusive childhoods.

You might see an analogy to this in gay people, who historically were viewed as disordered, with homosexuality caused by exposure to gay people or bad parenting. Coincidentally, they also report higher rates of bad childhoods than straight people, though also the majority of both gays and straights had non-abusive childhoods.

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So a tendersexual might ask: why are some people bdsmexual, if they’re not traumatized? As one of my tendersexual friend says, “call me weird, but I like sex where the people act like they like each other.”

This is a whole other set of blog posts, maybe even a book’s worth of material - but basically, if you look at evolution and apes and a whole lot of history, it’s actually kind of weird that bdsmexuality isn’t the default. Power, ownership, dominance, jealousy, harassment, and yes - even full out rape - are integral parts of all of our closest relatives (minus the bonobos, mostly). Sexual violence has been among the biggest factors that shaped which of our ancestors got to reproduce and which didn’t. For example, one theory is that the females that were attracted to sexually aggressive males, were more likely to have sexually aggressive (and thus more sexually successful) sons.

The big puzzle to me is why it’s bimodal. Is this a cultural artifact? If bdsmexuality is linked to sexual success in our ancestors, why do we have a substantial fraction of women who are tendersexual? Why is there such huge variance in the type of power dynamics that bdsmexuals prefer? This is one of the big questions of my research and I hope to explore it more in upcoming posts.