I credit you with convincing me that "bdsmsexual" is a real thing.
Like, yes, of course I knew "kinks" existed, but not quite the degree to which "obligate BDSM-ers just aren't attracted to vanilla sex at all" was the most parsimonious explanation for people's behavior, as opposed to something like "they're performing an edgy/countercultural identity" or "they're processing trauma" or "they're adventurous and find enduring pain a fun challenge."
Like, when I read The Fountainhead, I read the (noncon) sex scene as "obviously this is a tragic scene that expresses how miserable the characters are at this point in their lives." I didn't realize until I started reading your blog that Dominique -- a beautiful, charming woman who has no interest in sex until she meets a man she admires who dominates/forces her -- is "basically wired like Aella." The book doesn't say she's an abuse victim; she explicitly had a loving father and a sheltered childhood. Sure, you could read into it (she's arguably fanfic of Nastasia Filipovna in *The Idiot*, who *was* canonically sexually abused as a child). But the simplest explanation that this was a straightforward depiction of a "bdsmsexual" woman. She's not traumatized, she's just "born this way." And I missed it, because that *seemed implausible*.
I had the opposite experience in which I realised tendersexual was real.
I've been reading a lot of romance/erotica lately and to me it seemed like the average woman is bdsmsexual. I'm sure I believed *some* of you were, but I didn't realise it was so many. (This would be a much worse mistake if I were not a sub).
(I loved the Fountainhead pretty much entirely for this scene.)
This was helpful to read! The way you described trying (and failing) to make a tendersexual relationship appealing as a bdsmsexual person resonated with me. Like you, I've found this preference towards bdsmsexuality to be similarly strong and similarly unchangeable to my gender-preference. Tendersexual romance feels like a chore, while bdsmsexual romance feels correct, and my efforts to change that (even for the sake of people I deeply care for) have never met any success.
In the past, I've conceptualized this as a problem with me, that I'm too attached to my preferences and not sufficiently capable of changing for my partners, or somehow too damaged to love them. But your framing of bdsmsexuality as a deeper unchangeable preference feels viscerally true to me.
I don't put a lot of stock in evolutionary-psychology as an explanation for modern behavior - it easily turns into a just-so story. But if I had to offer one for why this might be bi-modal, it seems natural that each sexuality is adaptive in a different way. If the leaders of your ape tribe are virtuous and choose to respect the preferences of others, tendersexuality allows you to reap the cultural benefits of cooperation. If the leaders of your tribe are unvirtuous, bdsmsexuality might become more adaptive and valuable.
A hypothesis regarding the bimodality, based on a previous relationship...
Girl I was dating was (in hindset) very subby and usually very much needed some physical dominance in order to get turned on, but was also quite neurotic and anxious and had near-zero pain tolerance. All the standard BDSM stuff made her low-key panic and lose any sexy headspace. So in practice she just didn't like sex that much. I could kinda tell what was going on - the same things which turned her on also made her low-key panic - but didn't have a solution for a long time.
(Your series on how to be good in bed actually helped a lot here, as it pointed directly at what the sexy-to-her part was, precisely enough to disentangle from specific BDSM-esque activities. I started domming her without any bonds or pain or the like, that worked great, suddenly she was way more horny.)
Now, a key point about anxiety is... it's self-reinforcing, which tends to make it bimodal. If someone who's turned on by being subby is comfortable with e.g. being flogged, they enjoy it, it gets positively reinforced. If that same person gets anxious and loses the sexy headspace when being flogged, they don't enjoy it, it gets negatively reinforced.
Thus, a hypothesis: the overwhelming majority of women are turned on by BDSM-y stuff, i.e. they're bdsmexual (excellent name, 10/10), but there's bimodality in whether they're comfortable with it vs panicked by it. And when the panic is present at all, it usually overwhelms the sexiness.
I don't know. Some women are *really* not into this stuff and find it horrifying. I've read quite a few conservative blogs and they are really into the tenderness and romanticism and the flowers and the long lingering looks, etc. I really wouldn't assume all women are kinky.
From the surveys I've seen, about a third don't like it at all, a third fantasize but don't want to do it, and a third fantasize and want to do it.
In the UK there seem to be lobby groups of liberal/leftist really non-kink people, mostly women, who are pushing for some BDSM activities and porn to be banned. I have a lot of sympathy for what they say they're fighting for like stopping rape, and anything that might encourage rape.
I'm just not sure that their methods will achieve their aims.
On the other hand, at a schoolteachers' get-together I've heard a lot about how it's a real problem that boys find it completely normal to choke girls and I would guess that porm is something to do with that.
"Really into the tenderness and romanticism and the flowers and the long lingering looks" sure sounds like a description of someone who's borderline-asexual, but still likes sex for the romantic aspects (in the standard ontology of sexual vs romantic vs intimate).
And "find it horrifying" sure sounds like exactly the sort of thing which would override the sexy response. If someone gets turned on mostly by things which they find horrifying, and the horror overwhelms the sexiness, then borderline-asexuality is exactly what that would look like. (And indeed, the girl I talked about at top of thread thought for a while that she was borderline-asexual, but still liked the romantic stuff.)
... so this all sounds totally compatible with the hypothesis, and in fact is exactly the sort of thing the hypothesis would predict. (Which is not to say the hypothesis is therefore true, but it sure does fit that evidence.)
Evidence *against* the hypothesis would look more like a large chunk of women who are super horny and sexual, and are *not* particularly horrified by BDSM, but nonetheless are very tendersexual themselves.
Using having a strong emotional reaction as evidence of it inherently being a turn on seems very wrong to me. You are talking about things associated with pain, humiliation, torture, and enslavement, which are all inherently negatively-charged bad things people try to avoid and comprise actual crimes and the topic of horror movies, if not for BDSM where suddenly they're associated with pleasure. We are not talking about just anything here (and women generally DON'T react the same way about something like a foot fetish, which they find equally unappealing and nonsexual but doesn't have the same negative emotional charge, it's just neutral). Of course people have negative emotional reactions of horror to things that are literally horrifying and meant to be avoided in every single other context. Assuming having an emotionally intense reaction means you're secretly turned on by it is like saying people who go on rollercoasters secretly want to be dropped off a cliff or people who scream at horror movies secretly want to be stabbed to death. No they do those things bc they're inherently horrifying and give an adrenaline jolt.
That was not at all what I was claiming, and I was not at all treating a strong emotional reaction as evidence of being turned on. The evidence of being turned on came from other things besides strong emotional reaction.
It seems like that is consistent with the hypothesis of negative and positive reinforcement. Better data to look at might be if people become more polarized as they get older.
You could probably get a good idea of what percentage might be into it under ideal circumstances by asking them about what they fantasise/read about in fiction by themselves but beyond that I wouldn't go around insisting that all or even almost all women secretly want to engage in BDSM especially masochistic/submissive stuff. At best it's annoying especially if you're dominant/sadistic to have someone insist you want to be submissive it's not only wrong it's the complete opposite (though there's never any conversation about that I find you're just kind of left to your own devices - at least if you're not a cisgender man - due to how rare that seems to be,) and at worst they might find it traumatising and pressured into doing things that freak them out. That kind of conversation is likely to turn a lot of people off sex entirely imo.
I think people find it difficult when they're into BDSM to understand how this might feel so imagine someone insisting that all men are gay and that they should learn to become more comfortable with being gay. Think about how most men react to that kind of conversation.
Yeah, "going around insisting that all or even almost all women secretly want to engage in BDSM" is clearly not the right move even insofar as the hypothesis is true, let alone insofar as it's false. Insisting to someone that they really want something which freaks them out is not particularly useful even when they do in fact really want it, let alone when they don't.
Wow, examining the dynamics of self understanding and expression sexual identity seems like a really cool generalization of noticing the potential cause of bimodal bdsm being from positive vs negative feedback loops.
But it seems like even just finding evidence supporting the feedback loop hypothesis would be difficult. Studying the dynamics in general would be cool, but daunting.
Commenting again, a couple thoughts about the data:
One detail that throws veracity into question is that the majority of men are on the low-interest end of 'teen.' This to me rings as obviously out of wack with the prominence of "18" across all porn (including gay), and some revealed-preference studies wherein men rate women's faces out of context and end up rating about 16 the highest - which they obviously never would if the faces were age-labelled. That's also not surprising, since 18 is the lowest you can go its prominence suggests the real most desired number is below that. If the age of consent was 25 (and people took it seriously), "25" would suddenly be the most popular porn number, but you'd be naive to think 25 was the actual peak of male desire.
I wonder then if the women are similarly under-reporting their BDSM preference, or perhaps similarly unaware of what their brain responds to sans cultural context. As quite a firm "tendersexual," having to be performatively vicious for women is by far the biggest recurring sexual splinter in my life, and I know this isn't an uncommon experience. The data aligns with my experience in that women want men to be rough to them far more than men themselves want to be rough, despite all the loud whining to the contrary, but 20% on the emphatic end subjectively sounds very low to me.
Does it skew with age? Perhaps being orders of magnitude more aware of political chaos and uncertainty has leaned women's preferences accordingly.
1. I think probably there is underreporting of attraction to teens due to social shame. I wouldn't be surprised if there's more underreporting of more taboo things across the board. Maybe this balances out the fact that my survey attracts more kinky people by default.
2. I suspect the underreporting isn't as big as you expect. For example, in my Big Kink survey I get almost identical rates of self-reported pedophilia as general official estimates.
3. Possibly some proportion of men doing the rating would find younger faces attractive, but nevertheless find the inexperience/youth of teenagerness to be less erotic.
4. The prominence of teens across porn also doesn't update me too much. Incest, milfs, etc. are also very popular across porn, and I think fewer men are into incest and milfs compared to teens. All it takes to make a feature of porn popular is to have a sizeable minority of people into it.
I forget where I read this, but apparently porn created for (that is, its content is shaped for) not most people who watch it, but for the people who *pay* for it, who tend to be more into extreme things (or maybe just more willing to pay for them). So the reason porn skews in all sorts of directions is that they're chasing not eyeballs but dollars. If they were aiming at the average viewer, porn would be more middle (so less extra young actresses, less incest, etc). This is understandable from an incentive point of view! But it explains ways in which porn seems unrepresentative of sexuality more broadly
There could be more to the under-reporting than self-censoring. I expect most men just don't have a good mental model of what a 16 year old would look like, nor be able to reliably label teens by age visually (not least because of the variance in maturity at those ages). People are ultra-reductive on this topic and men have a flighty mental block about it. There is also, I would argue, a difference in this and the label of pedophile.
One difference between this and other popular porn labels is that if an alien species had a readout of our biology and an understanding of darwinism they wouldn't perfectly predict an outsized interest in milfs and incest. As far as what goes viral, you know better than most that men's tastes are blunt and visual-heavy. I expect the thumbnail carries and the title is an afterthought. As far as I've seen the incest labels are usually irrelevant to the content, and milf often just means "not teen."
Back when I watched porn the milf subreddit ended up predominantly featuring very young-looking women after the mods decided on the technicality that you qualify if you're a mother, as if that gets anyone off, rather than the broader understanding of milf as an attractive mature woman regardless of literal mother status. So it ended up being a bizarre teen-mother showcase and a different "mature milf" sub had to be spun off... to predominantly feature 30-somethings. The youth fixation might overlap with the other commenter's point about male domination: so common it just gets rolled into vanilla.
What passes for "vanilla" -- ie normative het sex as culturally centred -- is in fact maledom lite (or not so lite, even). This probably skews the answers.
Indeed, and this shows why trying to suppress all power dynamics winds up being so sex-negative in practice--equality just isn't very sexy for a lot of people!
Or maybe we don't have the cultural practices and sexual vocabulary for it. Eastern practices such as tantra and the teachings in the Kama Sutra are very egalitarian and back-and-forth, yin-and-yang. Practices taught within the Kama Sutra range from rough: physical fighting, scratching, crying, screaming, begging, biting, making bite necklaces on your partner; to tender: rituals around perfuming, love notes, eye contact, hand signals, coital alignment. But then again go farther East and you end up in Japan with shibari, which is also a very ritualistic, beautiful, sensual, deeply physical/spiritual form of bondage. I'm rambling now lol
Oh ramble away, that's where the interesting stuff comes out. I think you are right about the vocabulary thing. From what I read kinbaku showed up later; they used to tie up prisoners for transport but as a sex thing it appeared in the 20th century, making me wonder if it was a Western import.
Now tantra and the Kama Sutra are definitely indigenous to India. I remember reading it as a kid and it was surprisingly egalitarian and balanced. Even had three sizes for each genital! I definitely remember reading it talking about scratching and biting and figured "Oh, this is what S/M (this was the 90s) is in other cultures".
I think that "teen" isn´t very useful as a category because it covers too much ground. Seems to me the percentage of people attracted to 13 year olds is going to be very different than the percentage attracted to 19 year olds. These are really different groups.
I agree, it's also overly socially loaded and covers a huge amount of individual variance even at specific ages. There are girls at 16 who can pass as 25 while some women only hit menarche at 17 (more common in the past, granted) and may not hit their their prime until 30. Discussions get stupid when people mistake the pragmatic legal tool of the age of consent for some kind of hard biological fact. I also suspect men are simply worse at guessing women's ages than anyone realizes.
Could I see the citation for this? Because I remember the revealed preferences for female age being closer to 22. Maybe that was a different study. It's really hard to imagine it being 16.
Are you a man or woman? And what race? When men look at East Asian (and Latina and black, etc.) women, revealed preference very well may be 22 because East Asians (and Latina and blacks, etc.) do look more neotenous. But Caucasian women? Revealed preference being for 16 sounds about right. I don't know why you find it really hard to imagine. In most agricultural societies throughout most of human history, women tended to be married around 16.
I don't think average age of marriage has anything to do with age preferences. In most cultures, marriages were arranged by parents with both bride and groom having little to no say in who they got married to. The idea of two people being attracted to each other and getting married might be common nowadays, and might have been common in prehistoric times, but it certainly wasn't the norm for most agricultural societies. Also in most cultures, the sons stay with the family while the daughters were to "serve" the family of the husband, so people married off their daughters as early as possible to have one less mouth to feed.
I have never once heard that Caucasian women are less neotenous than other women. To be super frank, aren't Caucasian women technically more neotenous (having lighter skin and hair, smaller nose, bigger eyes), hence being the beauty standard in pretty much the entire world?
That's _definitely_ not my personal opinion (or the opinion of many Asian guys). OK, not counting southern European/Mediterraneans (who are very similar to Mediterraneans in the Levant/Northern ME and Northern African coast). Northern European women seem to age _very_ fast.
And Northern Europeans aren't exactly known for their small nose.
Having just finished reading this, I am in the process of accepting that I am highly tendersexual, and that I have had several failed relationships with bdsm-oriented women (I agree there has to be a better construction). Not all of them wanted full out roleplay per se, and many were more or less forthcoming about what they wanted, but I feel like I eventually intuited this concept that a substantial minority of women have some strong "theatrical" erotic concepts and preferences--that was my impression without exposure to this data and these concepts...that what turned them on was more of the idea of something than what I thought of as "intimacy." I don't think I was quite so normative as to be completely unaware that this also said something about me and what I liked, as though enjoying cuddling and a sense of contentment from just the presence of another body was an unquestionable default state, and I definitely wasn't so square that I felt morally superior for just wanting both of us to orgasm and then smile at each other's faces, but there was always a point where I would start to realize the other person wanted something specific (seemingly) related to some idea or experience--which they probably couldn't explain fully and I wouldn't have understood anyway--and when I realized this I would, the first several times anyway, because I liked the person and wanted to be willing to satisfy them, more or less ask for "instructions." And now it's obvious to me I should have understood already at that point something was incompatible between us. If I knew as much science at 19 as I do at 42 I also probably would have realized that a difference in preferences that strong and deep probably isn't explained by some coincidental event during childhood as well. But regardless, the more I tried to follow their instructions the more I felt like I was assembling furniture from IKEA while eating a bowl of plain oatmeal. And it didn't matter what the specifics were, at root it was the fact that I was performing some act when my brain associated intimacy with the complete opposite of anything performative. I was just going through motions that I neither enjoyed nor understood the point of because I wanted to please a person I liked, and it went about at well as you would expect sooner or later. Not that it matters now for me, but much unnecessary suffering and misunderstanding and emotional distress could have been avoided in my life if I had concepts like this available to provide explanations, and it's inconceivable that I am unique in this regard, so regardless of how much blowback you receive for the work you do, I hope you're confident that what you're doing will eventually provide an enormous amount of help to people and is incredibly worthwhile.
I love "the more I tried to follow their instructions the more I felt like I was assembling furniture from IKEA while eating a bowl of plain oatmeal" as an explanation of trying to engage with a sexuality orthogonal to your own.
Thank you for sharing. This was very interesting. When you say "women have some strong 'theatrical' erotic concepts and preferences," I understand that to mean women are not as in touch with their physical sexuality and their primal impulses and desires. I think that's probably patriarchal and Puritanical conditioning. Some of what role play and female submissiveness is, is finding a loophole around purity conditioning and separating ourselves from being the "bad girl" that we want to be, i.e. enjoying sex and our bodies and asking for and receiving orgasms. Because I don't think you can overestimate the extent to which girls are taught to be seen and not heard, be nice, be pretty, be accommodating, be nurturing, be patient, wait your turn, smile; suddenly finding yourself a grown woman in love and with a desire to be physical, to be selfish, to be primal is very confusing. This reminds me of Aella's pinned post, Turn Off Her Brain or whatever it's called.
In conclusion, if women don't want to be seen as bad girls, whores, or easy, then we need to find cunning and complex ways to get the sex we want while the man is still seen as "taking" it from us. I think that's a common mindset among straight women and straight men. I wonder if any of your experiences relate to that?
I should say that the "theatrical" qualifier was my impression when I was younger and didn't have any better descriptors and, specifically, without any appreciation for what I learned from this article. Having absorbed what Aella is presenting here, I would be inclined to say that it probably wasn't that they were any less in touch with their sexuality. I think even on a "primal," i.e. biological level, that's just what their sexuality was like. It appeared to me as theatrical because I didn't think about sex as anyone being "bad" or "good" or any other role, it just isn't coded into my brain as something you do to escape from or defy social expectations. Probably because as a (passing) cis-het white man I have the immense privilege of going through life insensitive to those expectations (though I have often been told that it isn't that no one places them on me, just that I ignore them and no one has been able to make me pay much attention to them lol).
It seems like you might be failing to make a distinction between strategies to get what you want through social roles and interaction VS social roles and interactions that you find fun to engage in for their own sake.
My understanding is that BDSM is the latter. Consenting adults who do not feel the normal pleasure from sex, but instead need to enact "theatrical scenes" with each other that often involve violence and physical domination.
On the other hand, people behaving within certain roles because they want to be forced into sex without being seen as wanting sex just seems like very poor communication norms, which as you say could be a response to patriarchal and Puritanical conditioning, but the focus and desire is on the sex, not the theatrics. The theatrics are just a strategy used to try to get sex.
I think this is an important distinction, so I'll risk repeating myself. Some women might seem to be into BDSM because they want sex but believe that wanting sex, or being seen wanting sex, is shameful, but this is not actual bdsexuality, it is regular sexuality with problematic complications. Women with actual bdsexuality on the other hand could heal all their trauma and find a kind community with healthy communication norms and social roles and they would STILL want to enact "theatrical scenes" because for them, that is the thing that is enjoyable, not the sex.
Very interesting. I have never been convinced by popular arguments that porn leads people to extremes.
I have viewed it for decades and being accidentally exposed to stuff outside my interests has done nothing to budge the boundaries of what I am actually interested in seeing - which is purely vanilla solo nudity.
What I think is the actual problem is that young men seem not to realize that it is fake in the way that I realized it as a young man. Woman do not orgasm instantly from penetration and they don’t all like to be slapped and degraded. Men are doing what they think women want, based on bad assumptions.
Say what you will about the kink community, at least they get you used to asking what people like. I know they often lie to themselves about what they're attracted to, but if people in general were more comfortable talking about what they liked in bed I think it would save everyone a bunch of trouble. Christians could make it part of marital counseling (and I think it is in certain denominations). Even if you think sex should be within marriage, at least talk about it then--it'll help keep the marriage together!
Possible explanation for the bimodality is the role of negative arousal in sexuality.
Basically (and I'm sure you know this--I'm just expositing to cover the full explanation for anyone interested) the systems of arousal underlying sexuality are really the same fight/flight/fuck system acting in different configurations. A lot of what we think of as "kinks" are basically ways of co-opting one form of arousal that is usually not applied to sex, and applying it to sex.
So, for example, you might say that BDSM involves stimulation of the "fear" and "pain" part of the fight/flight system, as well as the part related to shame/humiliation. Some of the nastier fetishes probably leverage the parts of the system related to disgust. More violent fetishes leverage the system related to anger and dominance, including emotions like pride and triumph.
Some of those emotion systems--especially the ones related to shame, fear, and disgust--are really unpleasant to think about. So I think your u-shaped curve comes from a general reaction to imagining stimuli that trigger negative emotions.
Some people are going to have the capacity for being aroused by emotions like humiliation, in which case, imagining humiliating situations will be really stimulating. High ratings. Some people are going to have the opposite capacity, for being deeply turned off by the same emotions. Hence, low ratings.
Your bipolar scales might have to do, then, with something like reactivity to the mental imagery. In the middle you have people who can't really feel one way or another about the fetish. On the edges you have people who react strongly to the thought of it, either positive or negative.
A range of variables might explain reactivity. One could simply be the capacity to visualize it in the first place--I'm aphantasic and have trouble picturing things, so thoughts of sex for me have always been a bit muted in their effect. A second possibility might just be investment in the feeling itself--just like some people might be really into feeling ashamed, others might be really repulsed by it.
More broadly, this seems to be an extension of the basic idea that strong emotion is polarizing; it produces action, and the direction the action goes depends on factors such as interpretation of the situation.
In terms of how this would show up in your data, my guess is that fetishes which involve the imagining of fear or pain would produce the purest bimodal curves. Fetishes which trigger disgust would probably skew strongly in favor of the 'nope' with a minor uptick towards the 'yup' at the end--not bimodal, but clearly starting to curve just slightly at the yes end. Fetishes which involve imagining shame, probably another good u-curve on those.
I'm aware that fetishes themselves don't necessarily involve the imagination--they can be acted out in the real world. But also, you're conducting a survey, and answering the question itself involves an act of imagination, so the rules of imagination apply to the answers you'll get.
Regarding the armchair evolutionary psychology - you're assuming our evolution stopped at the savannah but it has accelerated post-agriculture. Adultery and hypergamy are also obviously beneficial in straight-forward darwinism, yet monogamy was successfully harsly enforced and thus a propensity toward it was selected-for.
"Tendersexual" is obviously far more condusive to maintaining a big, stable societal system with at least enough egalitarianism to not incentivise killing the in-group. But "bdsmsexual" won't go away when it has obvious trade-offs and it's the propensity for variation itself rather than any specific trait that fuels darwinism.
This is also very close to r/K selection theory to the point where I wonder how closely the venn diagrams would overlap. A primer for those unfamiliar: animals exist on a spectrum from "live fast, die young, produce a lot of offspring and don't invest in them," and "produce few offspring with extremely high and drawn-out investment" as in elephants. This spectrum probably exists within a species too. We are extremely K-selective compared to other animals, but some humans are obviously extremely r-selective relative to other humans.
This seems like an important finding. I've heard that males overcoming resistance is a fitness test across the tree of life, but this misses the human cultural component. The analogy of how tendersexuals and bdsmexuals view each other's practices compared to how straights and gays view each other is very instructive. Tendersexual is a great word, bdsmexual not so much. Maybe roughsexual, brutsexual, or powersexual? I hope the academic world of gender and sexual studies pays attention to this!
Thinking about my own preferences, I prefer BDSM but also enjoy tendersex. If bdsmexual/powersexual is going to become a new sexual orientation, then we need words analogous to bisexual/pansexual too. I don't like switchsexual, since I'm not a switch in BDSM. Flexisexual? Accomosexual?
I wonder if "any bdsm" vs "tender" is a dimension or whether it's d-tender-s.
On the one hand I can do egalitarian as well as d, and cannot -- physically a mental boner killer of a high degree -- do s roles. So I'm flexible from 100% to equal. I'd much rather tender than sub.
But on the other hand my observation of other kinky people is that they tend to prefer any bdsm to vanilla, and would rather switch than remove power play from sex entirely.
My guess is that tendersexuals might also have their own version of powerplay: it is a kink that focuses on soft emotional intimacy, meaning you have tendersub, who need to let go of there psychological barriers to let other people into their lives; and tenderdoms who have to overcome their nervousness about trangressing other peoples barriers (,,i don‘t want to hurt you.)
That's actually become a major thing in kink ecosystems, cf a rise of "gentle domme" or "pleasure dom" identifications. Imo (but I'm old and suspicious of therapeutic/emo vulnerability/affirmation narratives) it's a reframing of perfectly vanilla, often kinda neurotic dynamics as kink, so I agree with you.
On the other hand I think what's super undercounted is largely fetish free d/s. My longest ever relationship was with a man who was hopelessly vanilla in a fetish/SM sense, but in which I largely "run the fuck", and it was very sexually satisfying. Sure it'd have been even better if he let me hurt him a bit at least, but it worked without it because I was in control in the act, even if within narrow limits of permitted acts (very little pain, sadly). I'm not sure it was "soft" d/s. It was fairly straightforward, hot AF, and not particularly coddling or super sensitive (tho often tender if not "tender").
Interesting perspective, akin to soft power versus hard power. I thought hardsexual might be a contender, but "hard" already has another meaning in sex.
Your posts are fascinating. There's a lot to wonder about here: a spectrum or a "range of d-tender-s"... I understand how you feel because I do feel similarly but opposite. Hmmm...
Yes I most definitely identify as bdsmexual, thanks for giving it a name! Interestingly, I settled down with a tendersexual and had the only two orgasms I've ever had from penile penetration when we conceived our two babies.
"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."
I think this is just the classic bonobo vs. chimp logic. "Tendersexuality" is connected to parenting, building stable pair bonds (or multi-partner bonds), and self-preservation. BDSMexuality is connected to strength in hierarchical or competitive societies.
For women partner preference, it's a clear trade-off: you want "alpha", high reproductive fitness genes, and high resource acquisition potential. But being "dom" and sexually violent also correlates quite strongly with an inability to maintain group relations in egalitarian societies, parental instability, frequent switching of partners, and killing you and your children (especially if you have children by another male) in a fit of jealousy. I think this is mirrored in partner choice dilemmas today.
For guys, being non-dominant is probably more a mixed strategy to maintain stable partnerships in a community. But their partner preference might lead more towards wanting to mate with a "tender-sexual, loving mother" character who is likely to protect their offspring. Of course, it's not always a deal breaker- men can mate with multiple women, but they might not prefer to form stable pair bonds with the kind of woman who's just really into being ravaged by other men.
Also, I actually think you're overstating the "bimodal" case here; yes, your results are technically bimodal on the Likert, but it’s really more “heavy left tail with a mild right bump” for most traits, except for "being sub", which has a clear heavy right tail. The "somewhat + moderate" category usually outweighs the extremes, and the distributions are actually surprisingly flat, if anything.
I'm open to this being connected to parenting differences, but I don't think so. As another commentor mentioned, neither chimps nor bonobos feature strong bonds; the difference between their sexualities, in my opinion, is downstream of abundance of resources. Abundant resources means you don't have to go as far to find food, and regularly being in smaller numbers or isolation puts females at a significant disadvantage compared to being regularly clustered together in larger numbers.
I also don't think bdsmexuality is obviously not connected to pair bonding? A big aspect of bdsmexuality (though not for everyone) is intense ownership. A lot of the rough violence simulation is tightly connected to the sub being something like 'property', and also defending the sub from other potential mates. You could argue this is connected to a costly signal that the dom/male is actually *more* invested in its partner and offspring, more willing to fight for it.
Yeah, I think I was probably a bit off with the bonobo “tender + parenting” point actually. I had in mind the general theme of nice, squishy, low-conflict bonding in bonobos, and rejection/ostracising of violent males. There's plausibly some mechanism where communal, non-violent sexual activity (often food-linked) triggers bonding hormones and contributes to group cohesion, which overlaps with parenting-related behaviour and mate choice, but I’m not sure that’s central here.
The resource factor is probably correct, but they've entered significantly different equilibrium states, and would likely keep current patterns in the absence of resource scarcity (but it would be super interesting if they didn't).
On the BDSM-pair-bonding thing; I don't understand the community/preference enough to know these dynamics, but the examples you gave: "rapeplay", "master-slave", "choking", seem a lot more about callous male brutality than intense ownership. I wonder if there are distinct categories there...
I would love to talk more about the chimps and bonobos. What you're describing as mate preferences here is what Ryan and Jethá call "the standard narrative," and they wrote a whole book on why it's incorrect. Both chimps and bonobs practice multimale-multifemale mating, which indicates humans do too, and communal child-rearing. So the idea that one male would seek one "tender" female doesn't hold water; the babies are raised by a social group of females. You acknowledge that men can mate with multiple women, but the truth is historically women also mate with multiple men. Finally, as for infanticide which you mention, bonobos do not practice it, and chimps only rarely.
So in a social, egalitarian society where children are raised in a village and females are multi-orgasmic, taking multiple male partners, why would males be sexually dominant? Why would females prefer to be sexually submissive? I've always thought BDSM interests were culturally learned, but I have no idea.
"Sex at Dawn" is not actually broadly accepted as correct.
Popular books written for the public rarely reflect scientific consensus, which usually isn't very compelling and full of caveats. You get more reads by selling a different narrative which is not necessarily correct. I did not find it convincing they were right and everyone else in the field was wrong.
Hmm, I haven't read Sex at Dawn but a few slightly rambling thoughts...
Multi-male mating in chimps is sometimes more like "gang-rape of lone females" than "free-love", which suggests why being an aggressive alpha male can be a successful strategy, one that female chimps naturally had... complex feelings towards. As I understand it, chimp culture is characterised by significant instability between often violent males in a fragile hierarchy. And infanticide is often the leading cause of death for baby chimps. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6971177/). Females sleeping with multiple males seems to be a strategy for avoiding infanticide - you don't want to kill a baby chimp that could be yours!
My sense is that human societies have built up a huge range of norms to better control our "chimp" emotions around sexual jealousy/control, and it seems likely that monogam-ish/pair-bonding systems developed very early in our history, mainly on a social level, but maybe with a little genetics, to mitigate these same risks.
Unsure about "tender-sexual/parenting" in humans, but even in societies with very shared parenting (most hunter-gatherers), the mother's role is typically central, particularly in infancy (breastfeeding, etc.). e.g. Hewlett & Lamb (2005) found babies in trad communities spent 50-60% of total time in the company of the mother on average, so we diverge from our primate cousins here. I'd suspect there's a genetic story where attraction to positive parenting traits plays a role in mate selection: the appeal of boobs and protruding/child-carrying bums feels very innate!
I have to correct you on the "gang rape" idea. Those ideas are outdated, just as chimp violence has been overstated or misinterpreted. Female chimps/bonobos/humans are naturally multi-orgasmic, (and males are not) and this is why it seems they are suited for multimale mating. Physically, once a female (and male allegedly) have come, she is ready to go again, the male is not. The female chimp/bonobo/human vocalizes during sex and during orgasm to advertise herself as being horny and ready to go again. So she takes another male, and another, for her pleasure. That is the alternate narrative and the evidence is all available out there for you to find. In conclusion, women should have multiple lovers, and the best threesome is MFM with men chosen by the F. Have a great night 😁
Haha, I'm glad that I don't derive a belief of what human sexual behaviour *should" look like from my understanding of chimp mating patterns! e.g. "teenage men should beat adult women with biting, branches and fists until women become sexually submissive." "Despite sustaining significant physical injuries, women should still preferentially approach violent and coercive males for copulation when they are most fertile."
The "gang rape" thing is relatively uncommon, but clearly happens (I recently read a book about conflict which used examples of this happening in war). But sexual coercion and violence towards females is universal among all chimpanzee communities. Studies often analyse 1000s of examples of this behaviour in relatively small groups: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8376763/
Female chimps have strategies to optimise their mate choice and offspring survival (e.g. having very vocal sex with lots of males to confuse paternity). This makes it very messy in terms of their consent, their "agency", or what they're into. But reading more into this definitely supports the "evolutionary BDSMexuality" logic that Aella first mentions!
I'm so confused as to your comment. In my specific response, I was correcting you about primate (bonono/chimp/human) mutimale / mutifemale mating tendencies. In that response, I used an emoji when saying what anyone *should* or *shouldn't* do to make their own behavior look like that. A bit tongue in cheeck, but not literally, obviously as a feminist I would NEVER tell women what they should do. No more than you did originally by falsely describing this behavior as "gang rape of lone females." For sure, by saying that, you weren't normalizing it for humans! I assume you were saying it to try to prop up some vague motions of natural manly "dominance" and womanly "submissions." Not literally, of course. Feel free to clarify.
But anytime a woman wants multiple lovers, I will always support her, to reach her full muti-orgasmic potential. And anytime a women wants a threesome, I will explain to her why MFM is her best bet ;)
ETA: Your last paragraph is good food for thought. It makes sense to me that the reason these specific primates have very vocal sex with lots of males is.... because those males aren't violent, they are in community together, and they take care of all babies together. Sounds like peace, love, and happiness *to me.* Agency is a very interesting and messy concept to depict among the other mammals and smaller brained primates, for sure.
Yeah, that's the standard narrative. A lot of evidence is calling all of that into question, I'm sure you can read more if you're interested. Search Christopher Ryan, even Jane Gooddall. A lot of the behavior she documented from chimps was because of how humans were interfering with their natural order, introducing food deliveries in one place, creating extra competition.
I don't understand the relevance of your point about babies being in mother's presence? How does that relate to what I wrote? The human baby in hunter gatherer societies spends 100% of it's time being held and spoiled, by humans. Mother included.
Another facet here might be sneak vs stud reproductive strategies. Basically, pretending to be non-threatening to dominant males and impregnating females in secret is a strategy notably different from just trying to be a dominant male and also impregnating females in secret. So as well as having the "competition vs cooperation" dynamic, we also have the "show primary survival characteristics vs show social parasitic survival characteristics".
You are letting your emotions colour the words "sneak" and "parasite". But yes, in general I view pretending a child belongs to one man so he will care for it as a form of non-consensual relationship. I like consent. The flip side is of course dominant males trying to control who can mate with who which creates an environment requiring secret impregnation. This is also non-consensual.
Very interesting stats. Ultimately, people should have the right to be who they want to be. As long as no one is being harmed (without consent), every and all sexual acts are consensual and legal then people can, and should, be and do what they want to get their sexual gratification (for want of a better word) in the privacy of their own homes/sex clubs/dungeons. There is something to be said for public sex being a bit of a no-no - I know some people find it a turn on, but those who may see you may not, and you have to respect their right to be who they wish to be as well. Just my opinion of course.
I am grateful for your tolerant perspective, but feel a twinge of anxiety around the phrase "people should have the right to be who they want to be", because the value of having words for things like "tendersexual vs bdsmexual" is that by default, people don't know who they want to be, and so what people need isn't just "the right to be who they are" but instead "help to understand who they are".
Still, with so much hate in the world, it really is valuable to repeat that people should have the right to be who they are, isn't it?
Point taken. The help wouldn't be available if the right to be who you want to be isn't present. I doubt in countries where strict religious doctrine is followed that any such help is available. There has to be tolerance for such help to be made available to those needing it?
Agreed. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. If you want people to have flying cars it is not enough to give people the right to a flying car, you also need a provider able to supply people with flying cars. Oh, but obviously there shouldn't be any obligation for people with no interest in flying cars to try to solve the provider problem, it seems fair that people are only obligated not to oppose the rights of others.
Reading about the prevalance of BDSM-oriented desires, especially among women, is personally validating. I am a heterosexual male who used to think I was asexual because I hadn't yet enjoyed any of my normal, nice sexual encounters. As it turns out, I was trying too hard to be nice. It is reassuring to know that there are plenty of women out there who would be happy to enact abusive fantasies in a controlled manner.
I believe that increasing awareness of "bdsmexuality" must be a good thing. We can turn our evil desires into positive experiences. Surely there's less reason to real-rape when there are plenty of willing partners to fantasy-rape.
I kind of wonder if the whole kink thing depends too much on the ethics of the dominating party to really gain wider appeal, though. The really sociopathic ones are going to get much more of a thrill from violating someone's real boundaries--your ethical dom is basically someone who gets turned on by doing bad stuff but has an intact moral code. Which exists, obviously, but may not be as exciting as someone who's actually abusive.
I've always had the suspicion you see so many geeks into kink is because they're (a) intelligent and (b) restrained (hah) enough to negotiate out all the dynamics that turn into abuse everywhere else. (and, of course, sometimes it still goes wrong.)
I think "wider appeal" might be the wrong way to think about this... it's more of an "awareness" thing afaik. I don't want people who have no natural drive towards BDSM to try it to see if they like it, I want people who experience sexual attraction to BDSM instead of sex to be aware that this is a sexuality, and it to be ok for them to seek compatible partners without social taboo.
More object level though, I agree with you. I think "reputation" in kink communities is actually pretty good at reducing the issues you mention. People can ask about potential partners. New doms in the community are not initially trusted and doms that have broken consent are at least ostracized.
How about exousexual? "εξουσία" means authority or power. Kyriosexual would be similar but a bit more pronounceable and more people could guess the meaning.
Oh. I thought you had meant to include all the other stuff. Far that reason I think "bdsmexual" and "paraphilia" are probably better terms than "kinksexual" since it is unclear when you say "kinksexual" whether you mean to include other paraphilias or just bdsm.
Could I ask the context from which you gathered connotations for the word kink? I bet it's different from me, which would explain our misunderstanding.
Paraphilia has more of a psychiatric 'these are all the bad desires' valence, I think. I think 'bdsmexual' doesn't really roll off the tongue well--it's really BDSMexual, which is 7 syllables (even 'heterosexual' is only 6) and if you don't capitalize you've got 4 consonants next to each other, which doesn't happen in English. It's like 'Latinx'.
I thought kink was assumed to be roughly the same as BDSM, whereas paraphilia is voyeurism and pedophilia and so on.
Yeah, that's fair, "paraphilia" has fallen out of common use, but I think it is in the DSM as "Paraphilic Disorders". I think of it like, having a personality is fine, but having a personality disorder is something you should be concerned about. Likewise, a paraphilia is fine, but a paraphilic disorder is something to be concerned about.
gives me the impression that it means the same thing that paraphilia, which would indicate it is not the same as BDSM but is instead an umbrella that includes BDSM.
It seems to me we have 2 definitions we are in need of a word for, and there are problems with the proposed words.
Definition 1:
I'm most interested in a word for "has a non-standard sexuality that does not fit easily into the currently existing dating and sexual norms". This definition has the problem of fuzzy boundaries, but is good enough for now. The reason this is more important than just BDSM is that the goal is to emphasize to people that sexuality is complicated, the way they experience it is not the way that everyone experiences it, and it is important to find people who are compatible with your sexuality if you want to have a successful relationship with them. Many people only understand "likes men" and "likes women" as the possible sexualities, and while introducing BDSM as a sexuality would be an improvement, probably most people would not generalize to "oh, there could be a bunch of sexualities", and the amount that people "get interested in kink" or use "kinky" as a description for promiscuous behaviour that has no paraphilic element indicates that people really don't understand that paraphilias can be completely orthogonal to conventional sexuality, not just something you do to make regular sexuality more interesting.
Definition 2:
The other definition is what we are currently calling "bdsmexual", that is, needing BDSM style power dynamics and interaction in order to feel sexually aroused. I imagine this is a spectrum from BDSM being irrelevant or a turn off through liking BDSM for "spicing up" regular sex to the other end of the spectrum where regular sex feels irrelevant or a turn off and only BDSM provides sexual stimulation. At this end of the spectrum, bdsmexuals also fall under definition 1, but not all people fitting definition 1 would be bdsmexuals. For examples, you can see this list:
So I have 2 definitions, are these also what you were thinking of? I think all of the terms we have so far have problems:
"bdsmexual" -- Many people dislike this term based on it's spelling and phonetics. I like it for refering to definition 2, I pronounce it "bee-dee-sexual" since people I discussed this irl did not like the way "smexual" sounds. I think the way "smexual" sounds is one of the benefits, but alas. Perhaps using the term "bdsexual" would be better.
"paraphilia" -- This pretty much literally does describe definition 1, but as you have pointed out, it probably evokes thoughts of "paraphilic disorder" from the DSM. I think this is fine since many paraphilias are disorders and promoting representation and acceptance of people with paraphilic disorders is kinda the point. Just because your sexuality is awful and you can't change it doesn't mean you are awful. It's how you choose to act as a person that matters. The focus on safety and consent in all the BDSM communities I have had contact with should serve as an inspiration to the frequently problematic behaviour of people with ordinary sexuality.
"kinksexual" -- I think it is unclear whether "kinksexual" should refer to definition 1 or definition 2. For this reason, it seems like choosing this term to refer to either would lead to confusion.
What other terms might we use? Well, what we're trying to point out that "BDSM" is a sexuality, we could just keep the term "BDSM" and try to talk about how it is a sexuality without creating a new term about it. Or, since the counter "tendersexual" hasn't generated as much pushback, we could take inspiration there and use "roughsexual" to refer to definition 2. I think this creates some confusion since many people interested in BDSM are focused on power dynamics, not on roughness, and "tendersexual" sex can also be rough (though not to the same extremes). Another possibility is "powersexual", but this just sounds silly to me and I don't think would cause people to think the right thing at all.
Really, all the terms seem to have problems. Do you have any other ideas?
I credit you with convincing me that "bdsmsexual" is a real thing.
Like, yes, of course I knew "kinks" existed, but not quite the degree to which "obligate BDSM-ers just aren't attracted to vanilla sex at all" was the most parsimonious explanation for people's behavior, as opposed to something like "they're performing an edgy/countercultural identity" or "they're processing trauma" or "they're adventurous and find enduring pain a fun challenge."
Like, when I read The Fountainhead, I read the (noncon) sex scene as "obviously this is a tragic scene that expresses how miserable the characters are at this point in their lives." I didn't realize until I started reading your blog that Dominique -- a beautiful, charming woman who has no interest in sex until she meets a man she admires who dominates/forces her -- is "basically wired like Aella." The book doesn't say she's an abuse victim; she explicitly had a loving father and a sheltered childhood. Sure, you could read into it (she's arguably fanfic of Nastasia Filipovna in *The Idiot*, who *was* canonically sexually abused as a child). But the simplest explanation that this was a straightforward depiction of a "bdsmsexual" woman. She's not traumatized, she's just "born this way." And I missed it, because that *seemed implausible*.
Ayn Rand as a sub makes an awful lot of sense.
The fact she was anything but in the rest of her life is funny but not that unusual.
I had the opposite experience in which I realised tendersexual was real.
I've been reading a lot of romance/erotica lately and to me it seemed like the average woman is bdsmsexual. I'm sure I believed *some* of you were, but I didn't realise it was so many. (This would be a much worse mistake if I were not a sub).
(I loved the Fountainhead pretty much entirely for this scene.)
"Dominique -- a beautiful, charming woman"
Charming? — more like cold, or haughty.
This was helpful to read! The way you described trying (and failing) to make a tendersexual relationship appealing as a bdsmsexual person resonated with me. Like you, I've found this preference towards bdsmsexuality to be similarly strong and similarly unchangeable to my gender-preference. Tendersexual romance feels like a chore, while bdsmsexual romance feels correct, and my efforts to change that (even for the sake of people I deeply care for) have never met any success.
In the past, I've conceptualized this as a problem with me, that I'm too attached to my preferences and not sufficiently capable of changing for my partners, or somehow too damaged to love them. But your framing of bdsmsexuality as a deeper unchangeable preference feels viscerally true to me.
I don't put a lot of stock in evolutionary-psychology as an explanation for modern behavior - it easily turns into a just-so story. But if I had to offer one for why this might be bi-modal, it seems natural that each sexuality is adaptive in a different way. If the leaders of your ape tribe are virtuous and choose to respect the preferences of others, tendersexuality allows you to reap the cultural benefits of cooperation. If the leaders of your tribe are unvirtuous, bdsmsexuality might become more adaptive and valuable.
A hypothesis regarding the bimodality, based on a previous relationship...
Girl I was dating was (in hindset) very subby and usually very much needed some physical dominance in order to get turned on, but was also quite neurotic and anxious and had near-zero pain tolerance. All the standard BDSM stuff made her low-key panic and lose any sexy headspace. So in practice she just didn't like sex that much. I could kinda tell what was going on - the same things which turned her on also made her low-key panic - but didn't have a solution for a long time.
(Your series on how to be good in bed actually helped a lot here, as it pointed directly at what the sexy-to-her part was, precisely enough to disentangle from specific BDSM-esque activities. I started domming her without any bonds or pain or the like, that worked great, suddenly she was way more horny.)
Now, a key point about anxiety is... it's self-reinforcing, which tends to make it bimodal. If someone who's turned on by being subby is comfortable with e.g. being flogged, they enjoy it, it gets positively reinforced. If that same person gets anxious and loses the sexy headspace when being flogged, they don't enjoy it, it gets negatively reinforced.
Thus, a hypothesis: the overwhelming majority of women are turned on by BDSM-y stuff, i.e. they're bdsmexual (excellent name, 10/10), but there's bimodality in whether they're comfortable with it vs panicked by it. And when the panic is present at all, it usually overwhelms the sexiness.
I don't know. Some women are *really* not into this stuff and find it horrifying. I've read quite a few conservative blogs and they are really into the tenderness and romanticism and the flowers and the long lingering looks, etc. I really wouldn't assume all women are kinky.
From the surveys I've seen, about a third don't like it at all, a third fantasize but don't want to do it, and a third fantasize and want to do it.
In the UK there seem to be lobby groups of liberal/leftist really non-kink people, mostly women, who are pushing for some BDSM activities and porn to be banned. I have a lot of sympathy for what they say they're fighting for like stopping rape, and anything that might encourage rape.
I'm just not sure that their methods will achieve their aims.
On the other hand, at a schoolteachers' get-together I've heard a lot about how it's a real problem that boys find it completely normal to choke girls and I would guess that porm is something to do with that.
"Really into the tenderness and romanticism and the flowers and the long lingering looks" sure sounds like a description of someone who's borderline-asexual, but still likes sex for the romantic aspects (in the standard ontology of sexual vs romantic vs intimate).
And "find it horrifying" sure sounds like exactly the sort of thing which would override the sexy response. If someone gets turned on mostly by things which they find horrifying, and the horror overwhelms the sexiness, then borderline-asexuality is exactly what that would look like. (And indeed, the girl I talked about at top of thread thought for a while that she was borderline-asexual, but still liked the romantic stuff.)
... so this all sounds totally compatible with the hypothesis, and in fact is exactly the sort of thing the hypothesis would predict. (Which is not to say the hypothesis is therefore true, but it sure does fit that evidence.)
Evidence *against* the hypothesis would look more like a large chunk of women who are super horny and sexual, and are *not* particularly horrified by BDSM, but nonetheless are very tendersexual themselves.
Using having a strong emotional reaction as evidence of it inherently being a turn on seems very wrong to me. You are talking about things associated with pain, humiliation, torture, and enslavement, which are all inherently negatively-charged bad things people try to avoid and comprise actual crimes and the topic of horror movies, if not for BDSM where suddenly they're associated with pleasure. We are not talking about just anything here (and women generally DON'T react the same way about something like a foot fetish, which they find equally unappealing and nonsexual but doesn't have the same negative emotional charge, it's just neutral). Of course people have negative emotional reactions of horror to things that are literally horrifying and meant to be avoided in every single other context. Assuming having an emotionally intense reaction means you're secretly turned on by it is like saying people who go on rollercoasters secretly want to be dropped off a cliff or people who scream at horror movies secretly want to be stabbed to death. No they do those things bc they're inherently horrifying and give an adrenaline jolt.
That was not at all what I was claiming, and I was not at all treating a strong emotional reaction as evidence of being turned on. The evidence of being turned on came from other things besides strong emotional reaction.
It seems like that is consistent with the hypothesis of negative and positive reinforcement. Better data to look at might be if people become more polarized as they get older.
You could probably get a good idea of what percentage might be into it under ideal circumstances by asking them about what they fantasise/read about in fiction by themselves but beyond that I wouldn't go around insisting that all or even almost all women secretly want to engage in BDSM especially masochistic/submissive stuff. At best it's annoying especially if you're dominant/sadistic to have someone insist you want to be submissive it's not only wrong it's the complete opposite (though there's never any conversation about that I find you're just kind of left to your own devices - at least if you're not a cisgender man - due to how rare that seems to be,) and at worst they might find it traumatising and pressured into doing things that freak them out. That kind of conversation is likely to turn a lot of people off sex entirely imo.
I think people find it difficult when they're into BDSM to understand how this might feel so imagine someone insisting that all men are gay and that they should learn to become more comfortable with being gay. Think about how most men react to that kind of conversation.
Yeah, "going around insisting that all or even almost all women secretly want to engage in BDSM" is clearly not the right move even insofar as the hypothesis is true, let alone insofar as it's false. Insisting to someone that they really want something which freaks them out is not particularly useful even when they do in fact really want it, let alone when they don't.
Wow, examining the dynamics of self understanding and expression sexual identity seems like a really cool generalization of noticing the potential cause of bimodal bdsm being from positive vs negative feedback loops.
But it seems like even just finding evidence supporting the feedback loop hypothesis would be difficult. Studying the dynamics in general would be cool, but daunting.
I once read an interview with a woman who had a West End (London) show about something to do with sex. In the interview she said:
"I am not aroused by people. I am aroused by situations."
(or words to that effect)
I did wonder why I had never heard it expressed as succinctly as that before. It is probably true for a huge number of people.
very nice insight
I skeeted this 2 years ago! Receipt : https://bsky.app/profile/teliamana.ingroup.social/post/3jzkcogwd6k2z )
Though I framed it as a gender thing. I do really think there's a gender split here though it's not really captured by these data.
Commenting again, a couple thoughts about the data:
One detail that throws veracity into question is that the majority of men are on the low-interest end of 'teen.' This to me rings as obviously out of wack with the prominence of "18" across all porn (including gay), and some revealed-preference studies wherein men rate women's faces out of context and end up rating about 16 the highest - which they obviously never would if the faces were age-labelled. That's also not surprising, since 18 is the lowest you can go its prominence suggests the real most desired number is below that. If the age of consent was 25 (and people took it seriously), "25" would suddenly be the most popular porn number, but you'd be naive to think 25 was the actual peak of male desire.
I wonder then if the women are similarly under-reporting their BDSM preference, or perhaps similarly unaware of what their brain responds to sans cultural context. As quite a firm "tendersexual," having to be performatively vicious for women is by far the biggest recurring sexual splinter in my life, and I know this isn't an uncommon experience. The data aligns with my experience in that women want men to be rough to them far more than men themselves want to be rough, despite all the loud whining to the contrary, but 20% on the emphatic end subjectively sounds very low to me.
Does it skew with age? Perhaps being orders of magnitude more aware of political chaos and uncertainty has leaned women's preferences accordingly.
1. I think probably there is underreporting of attraction to teens due to social shame. I wouldn't be surprised if there's more underreporting of more taboo things across the board. Maybe this balances out the fact that my survey attracts more kinky people by default.
2. I suspect the underreporting isn't as big as you expect. For example, in my Big Kink survey I get almost identical rates of self-reported pedophilia as general official estimates.
3. Possibly some proportion of men doing the rating would find younger faces attractive, but nevertheless find the inexperience/youth of teenagerness to be less erotic.
4. The prominence of teens across porn also doesn't update me too much. Incest, milfs, etc. are also very popular across porn, and I think fewer men are into incest and milfs compared to teens. All it takes to make a feature of porn popular is to have a sizeable minority of people into it.
I forget where I read this, but apparently porn created for (that is, its content is shaped for) not most people who watch it, but for the people who *pay* for it, who tend to be more into extreme things (or maybe just more willing to pay for them). So the reason porn skews in all sorts of directions is that they're chasing not eyeballs but dollars. If they were aiming at the average viewer, porn would be more middle (so less extra young actresses, less incest, etc). This is understandable from an incentive point of view! But it explains ways in which porn seems unrepresentative of sexuality more broadly
There could be more to the under-reporting than self-censoring. I expect most men just don't have a good mental model of what a 16 year old would look like, nor be able to reliably label teens by age visually (not least because of the variance in maturity at those ages). People are ultra-reductive on this topic and men have a flighty mental block about it. There is also, I would argue, a difference in this and the label of pedophile.
One difference between this and other popular porn labels is that if an alien species had a readout of our biology and an understanding of darwinism they wouldn't perfectly predict an outsized interest in milfs and incest. As far as what goes viral, you know better than most that men's tastes are blunt and visual-heavy. I expect the thumbnail carries and the title is an afterthought. As far as I've seen the incest labels are usually irrelevant to the content, and milf often just means "not teen."
Back when I watched porn the milf subreddit ended up predominantly featuring very young-looking women after the mods decided on the technicality that you qualify if you're a mother, as if that gets anyone off, rather than the broader understanding of milf as an attractive mature woman regardless of literal mother status. So it ended up being a bizarre teen-mother showcase and a different "mature milf" sub had to be spun off... to predominantly feature 30-somethings. The youth fixation might overlap with the other commenter's point about male domination: so common it just gets rolled into vanilla.
What passes for "vanilla" -- ie normative het sex as culturally centred -- is in fact maledom lite (or not so lite, even). This probably skews the answers.
Indeed, and this shows why trying to suppress all power dynamics winds up being so sex-negative in practice--equality just isn't very sexy for a lot of people!
Or maybe we don't have the cultural practices and sexual vocabulary for it. Eastern practices such as tantra and the teachings in the Kama Sutra are very egalitarian and back-and-forth, yin-and-yang. Practices taught within the Kama Sutra range from rough: physical fighting, scratching, crying, screaming, begging, biting, making bite necklaces on your partner; to tender: rituals around perfuming, love notes, eye contact, hand signals, coital alignment. But then again go farther East and you end up in Japan with shibari, which is also a very ritualistic, beautiful, sensual, deeply physical/spiritual form of bondage. I'm rambling now lol
Oh ramble away, that's where the interesting stuff comes out. I think you are right about the vocabulary thing. From what I read kinbaku showed up later; they used to tie up prisoners for transport but as a sex thing it appeared in the 20th century, making me wonder if it was a Western import.
Now tantra and the Kama Sutra are definitely indigenous to India. I remember reading it as a kid and it was surprisingly egalitarian and balanced. Even had three sizes for each genital! I definitely remember reading it talking about scratching and biting and figured "Oh, this is what S/M (this was the 90s) is in other cultures".
I think that "teen" isn´t very useful as a category because it covers too much ground. Seems to me the percentage of people attracted to 13 year olds is going to be very different than the percentage attracted to 19 year olds. These are really different groups.
I agree, it's also overly socially loaded and covers a huge amount of individual variance even at specific ages. There are girls at 16 who can pass as 25 while some women only hit menarche at 17 (more common in the past, granted) and may not hit their their prime until 30. Discussions get stupid when people mistake the pragmatic legal tool of the age of consent for some kind of hard biological fact. I also suspect men are simply worse at guessing women's ages than anyone realizes.
well there is the pedophilia / hebephilia / ephebophilia distinction.
Could I see the citation for this? Because I remember the revealed preferences for female age being closer to 22. Maybe that was a different study. It's really hard to imagine it being 16.
Are you a man or woman? And what race? When men look at East Asian (and Latina and black, etc.) women, revealed preference very well may be 22 because East Asians (and Latina and blacks, etc.) do look more neotenous. But Caucasian women? Revealed preference being for 16 sounds about right. I don't know why you find it really hard to imagine. In most agricultural societies throughout most of human history, women tended to be married around 16.
I don't think average age of marriage has anything to do with age preferences. In most cultures, marriages were arranged by parents with both bride and groom having little to no say in who they got married to. The idea of two people being attracted to each other and getting married might be common nowadays, and might have been common in prehistoric times, but it certainly wasn't the norm for most agricultural societies. Also in most cultures, the sons stay with the family while the daughters were to "serve" the family of the husband, so people married off their daughters as early as possible to have one less mouth to feed.
I have never once heard that Caucasian women are less neotenous than other women. To be super frank, aren't Caucasian women technically more neotenous (having lighter skin and hair, smaller nose, bigger eyes), hence being the beauty standard in pretty much the entire world?
That's _definitely_ not my personal opinion (or the opinion of many Asian guys). OK, not counting southern European/Mediterraneans (who are very similar to Mediterraneans in the Levant/Northern ME and Northern African coast). Northern European women seem to age _very_ fast.
And Northern Europeans aren't exactly known for their small nose.
Having just finished reading this, I am in the process of accepting that I am highly tendersexual, and that I have had several failed relationships with bdsm-oriented women (I agree there has to be a better construction). Not all of them wanted full out roleplay per se, and many were more or less forthcoming about what they wanted, but I feel like I eventually intuited this concept that a substantial minority of women have some strong "theatrical" erotic concepts and preferences--that was my impression without exposure to this data and these concepts...that what turned them on was more of the idea of something than what I thought of as "intimacy." I don't think I was quite so normative as to be completely unaware that this also said something about me and what I liked, as though enjoying cuddling and a sense of contentment from just the presence of another body was an unquestionable default state, and I definitely wasn't so square that I felt morally superior for just wanting both of us to orgasm and then smile at each other's faces, but there was always a point where I would start to realize the other person wanted something specific (seemingly) related to some idea or experience--which they probably couldn't explain fully and I wouldn't have understood anyway--and when I realized this I would, the first several times anyway, because I liked the person and wanted to be willing to satisfy them, more or less ask for "instructions." And now it's obvious to me I should have understood already at that point something was incompatible between us. If I knew as much science at 19 as I do at 42 I also probably would have realized that a difference in preferences that strong and deep probably isn't explained by some coincidental event during childhood as well. But regardless, the more I tried to follow their instructions the more I felt like I was assembling furniture from IKEA while eating a bowl of plain oatmeal. And it didn't matter what the specifics were, at root it was the fact that I was performing some act when my brain associated intimacy with the complete opposite of anything performative. I was just going through motions that I neither enjoyed nor understood the point of because I wanted to please a person I liked, and it went about at well as you would expect sooner or later. Not that it matters now for me, but much unnecessary suffering and misunderstanding and emotional distress could have been avoided in my life if I had concepts like this available to provide explanations, and it's inconceivable that I am unique in this regard, so regardless of how much blowback you receive for the work you do, I hope you're confident that what you're doing will eventually provide an enormous amount of help to people and is incredibly worthwhile.
I love "the more I tried to follow their instructions the more I felt like I was assembling furniture from IKEA while eating a bowl of plain oatmeal" as an explanation of trying to engage with a sexuality orthogonal to your own.
Thank you for sharing. This was very interesting. When you say "women have some strong 'theatrical' erotic concepts and preferences," I understand that to mean women are not as in touch with their physical sexuality and their primal impulses and desires. I think that's probably patriarchal and Puritanical conditioning. Some of what role play and female submissiveness is, is finding a loophole around purity conditioning and separating ourselves from being the "bad girl" that we want to be, i.e. enjoying sex and our bodies and asking for and receiving orgasms. Because I don't think you can overestimate the extent to which girls are taught to be seen and not heard, be nice, be pretty, be accommodating, be nurturing, be patient, wait your turn, smile; suddenly finding yourself a grown woman in love and with a desire to be physical, to be selfish, to be primal is very confusing. This reminds me of Aella's pinned post, Turn Off Her Brain or whatever it's called.
In conclusion, if women don't want to be seen as bad girls, whores, or easy, then we need to find cunning and complex ways to get the sex we want while the man is still seen as "taking" it from us. I think that's a common mindset among straight women and straight men. I wonder if any of your experiences relate to that?
I should say that the "theatrical" qualifier was my impression when I was younger and didn't have any better descriptors and, specifically, without any appreciation for what I learned from this article. Having absorbed what Aella is presenting here, I would be inclined to say that it probably wasn't that they were any less in touch with their sexuality. I think even on a "primal," i.e. biological level, that's just what their sexuality was like. It appeared to me as theatrical because I didn't think about sex as anyone being "bad" or "good" or any other role, it just isn't coded into my brain as something you do to escape from or defy social expectations. Probably because as a (passing) cis-het white man I have the immense privilege of going through life insensitive to those expectations (though I have often been told that it isn't that no one places them on me, just that I ignore them and no one has been able to make me pay much attention to them lol).
No, you fit the “suit” you were expected to wear
It seems like you might be failing to make a distinction between strategies to get what you want through social roles and interaction VS social roles and interactions that you find fun to engage in for their own sake.
My understanding is that BDSM is the latter. Consenting adults who do not feel the normal pleasure from sex, but instead need to enact "theatrical scenes" with each other that often involve violence and physical domination.
On the other hand, people behaving within certain roles because they want to be forced into sex without being seen as wanting sex just seems like very poor communication norms, which as you say could be a response to patriarchal and Puritanical conditioning, but the focus and desire is on the sex, not the theatrics. The theatrics are just a strategy used to try to get sex.
I think this is an important distinction, so I'll risk repeating myself. Some women might seem to be into BDSM because they want sex but believe that wanting sex, or being seen wanting sex, is shameful, but this is not actual bdsexuality, it is regular sexuality with problematic complications. Women with actual bdsexuality on the other hand could heal all their trauma and find a kind community with healthy communication norms and social roles and they would STILL want to enact "theatrical scenes" because for them, that is the thing that is enjoyable, not the sex.
Usually people just say "kinky" and "vanilla"
Very interesting. I have never been convinced by popular arguments that porn leads people to extremes.
I have viewed it for decades and being accidentally exposed to stuff outside my interests has done nothing to budge the boundaries of what I am actually interested in seeing - which is purely vanilla solo nudity.
What I think is the actual problem is that young men seem not to realize that it is fake in the way that I realized it as a young man. Woman do not orgasm instantly from penetration and they don’t all like to be slapped and degraded. Men are doing what they think women want, based on bad assumptions.
Say what you will about the kink community, at least they get you used to asking what people like. I know they often lie to themselves about what they're attracted to, but if people in general were more comfortable talking about what they liked in bed I think it would save everyone a bunch of trouble. Christians could make it part of marital counseling (and I think it is in certain denominations). Even if you think sex should be within marriage, at least talk about it then--it'll help keep the marriage together!
Possible explanation for the bimodality is the role of negative arousal in sexuality.
Basically (and I'm sure you know this--I'm just expositing to cover the full explanation for anyone interested) the systems of arousal underlying sexuality are really the same fight/flight/fuck system acting in different configurations. A lot of what we think of as "kinks" are basically ways of co-opting one form of arousal that is usually not applied to sex, and applying it to sex.
So, for example, you might say that BDSM involves stimulation of the "fear" and "pain" part of the fight/flight system, as well as the part related to shame/humiliation. Some of the nastier fetishes probably leverage the parts of the system related to disgust. More violent fetishes leverage the system related to anger and dominance, including emotions like pride and triumph.
Some of those emotion systems--especially the ones related to shame, fear, and disgust--are really unpleasant to think about. So I think your u-shaped curve comes from a general reaction to imagining stimuli that trigger negative emotions.
Some people are going to have the capacity for being aroused by emotions like humiliation, in which case, imagining humiliating situations will be really stimulating. High ratings. Some people are going to have the opposite capacity, for being deeply turned off by the same emotions. Hence, low ratings.
Your bipolar scales might have to do, then, with something like reactivity to the mental imagery. In the middle you have people who can't really feel one way or another about the fetish. On the edges you have people who react strongly to the thought of it, either positive or negative.
A range of variables might explain reactivity. One could simply be the capacity to visualize it in the first place--I'm aphantasic and have trouble picturing things, so thoughts of sex for me have always been a bit muted in their effect. A second possibility might just be investment in the feeling itself--just like some people might be really into feeling ashamed, others might be really repulsed by it.
More broadly, this seems to be an extension of the basic idea that strong emotion is polarizing; it produces action, and the direction the action goes depends on factors such as interpretation of the situation.
In terms of how this would show up in your data, my guess is that fetishes which involve the imagining of fear or pain would produce the purest bimodal curves. Fetishes which trigger disgust would probably skew strongly in favor of the 'nope' with a minor uptick towards the 'yup' at the end--not bimodal, but clearly starting to curve just slightly at the yes end. Fetishes which involve imagining shame, probably another good u-curve on those.
I'm aware that fetishes themselves don't necessarily involve the imagination--they can be acted out in the real world. But also, you're conducting a survey, and answering the question itself involves an act of imagination, so the rules of imagination apply to the answers you'll get.
Regarding the armchair evolutionary psychology - you're assuming our evolution stopped at the savannah but it has accelerated post-agriculture. Adultery and hypergamy are also obviously beneficial in straight-forward darwinism, yet monogamy was successfully harsly enforced and thus a propensity toward it was selected-for.
"Tendersexual" is obviously far more condusive to maintaining a big, stable societal system with at least enough egalitarianism to not incentivise killing the in-group. But "bdsmsexual" won't go away when it has obvious trade-offs and it's the propensity for variation itself rather than any specific trait that fuels darwinism.
This is also very close to r/K selection theory to the point where I wonder how closely the venn diagrams would overlap. A primer for those unfamiliar: animals exist on a spectrum from "live fast, die young, produce a lot of offspring and don't invest in them," and "produce few offspring with extremely high and drawn-out investment" as in elephants. This spectrum probably exists within a species too. We are extremely K-selective compared to other animals, but some humans are obviously extremely r-selective relative to other humans.
Yeah, I'd be willing to bet numbers for bdsmsexual and tendersexual vary across groups...but how much more trouble do you want poor Aella to get into?
This seems like an important finding. I've heard that males overcoming resistance is a fitness test across the tree of life, but this misses the human cultural component. The analogy of how tendersexuals and bdsmexuals view each other's practices compared to how straights and gays view each other is very instructive. Tendersexual is a great word, bdsmexual not so much. Maybe roughsexual, brutsexual, or powersexual? I hope the academic world of gender and sexual studies pays attention to this!
Thinking about my own preferences, I prefer BDSM but also enjoy tendersex. If bdsmexual/powersexual is going to become a new sexual orientation, then we need words analogous to bisexual/pansexual too. I don't like switchsexual, since I'm not a switch in BDSM. Flexisexual? Accomosexual?
I wonder if "any bdsm" vs "tender" is a dimension or whether it's d-tender-s.
On the one hand I can do egalitarian as well as d, and cannot -- physically a mental boner killer of a high degree -- do s roles. So I'm flexible from 100% to equal. I'd much rather tender than sub.
But on the other hand my observation of other kinky people is that they tend to prefer any bdsm to vanilla, and would rather switch than remove power play from sex entirely.
So two possible models exist here.
I think you're right that power play is the key characteristic. Maybe that makes powersexual the best term to oppose tendersexual.
My guess is that tendersexuals might also have their own version of powerplay: it is a kink that focuses on soft emotional intimacy, meaning you have tendersub, who need to let go of there psychological barriers to let other people into their lives; and tenderdoms who have to overcome their nervousness about trangressing other peoples barriers (,,i don‘t want to hurt you.)
That's actually become a major thing in kink ecosystems, cf a rise of "gentle domme" or "pleasure dom" identifications. Imo (but I'm old and suspicious of therapeutic/emo vulnerability/affirmation narratives) it's a reframing of perfectly vanilla, often kinda neurotic dynamics as kink, so I agree with you.
On the other hand I think what's super undercounted is largely fetish free d/s. My longest ever relationship was with a man who was hopelessly vanilla in a fetish/SM sense, but in which I largely "run the fuck", and it was very sexually satisfying. Sure it'd have been even better if he let me hurt him a bit at least, but it worked without it because I was in control in the act, even if within narrow limits of permitted acts (very little pain, sadly). I'm not sure it was "soft" d/s. It was fairly straightforward, hot AF, and not particularly coddling or super sensitive (tho often tender if not "tender").
Interesting perspective, akin to soft power versus hard power. I thought hardsexual might be a contender, but "hard" already has another meaning in sex.
Your posts are fascinating. There's a lot to wonder about here: a spectrum or a "range of d-tender-s"... I understand how you feel because I do feel similarly but opposite. Hmmm...
I like roughsexual; it indicates a spectrum tender/rough equivalent to Homo/Hetero/Bi.
Totally agree to the notion that there must be some kind of pendant to bisexuals to this
I'm liking powersexual more and more. Maybe an analog to bisexual could be bipowersexual or ambidynasexual.
Yes I most definitely identify as bdsmexual, thanks for giving it a name! Interestingly, I settled down with a tendersexual and had the only two orgasms I've ever had from penile penetration when we conceived our two babies.
"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."
I think this is just the classic bonobo vs. chimp logic. "Tendersexuality" is connected to parenting, building stable pair bonds (or multi-partner bonds), and self-preservation. BDSMexuality is connected to strength in hierarchical or competitive societies.
For women partner preference, it's a clear trade-off: you want "alpha", high reproductive fitness genes, and high resource acquisition potential. But being "dom" and sexually violent also correlates quite strongly with an inability to maintain group relations in egalitarian societies, parental instability, frequent switching of partners, and killing you and your children (especially if you have children by another male) in a fit of jealousy. I think this is mirrored in partner choice dilemmas today.
For guys, being non-dominant is probably more a mixed strategy to maintain stable partnerships in a community. But their partner preference might lead more towards wanting to mate with a "tender-sexual, loving mother" character who is likely to protect their offspring. Of course, it's not always a deal breaker- men can mate with multiple women, but they might not prefer to form stable pair bonds with the kind of woman who's just really into being ravaged by other men.
Also, I actually think you're overstating the "bimodal" case here; yes, your results are technically bimodal on the Likert, but it’s really more “heavy left tail with a mild right bump” for most traits, except for "being sub", which has a clear heavy right tail. The "somewhat + moderate" category usually outweighs the extremes, and the distributions are actually surprisingly flat, if anything.
I'm open to this being connected to parenting differences, but I don't think so. As another commentor mentioned, neither chimps nor bonobos feature strong bonds; the difference between their sexualities, in my opinion, is downstream of abundance of resources. Abundant resources means you don't have to go as far to find food, and regularly being in smaller numbers or isolation puts females at a significant disadvantage compared to being regularly clustered together in larger numbers.
I also don't think bdsmexuality is obviously not connected to pair bonding? A big aspect of bdsmexuality (though not for everyone) is intense ownership. A lot of the rough violence simulation is tightly connected to the sub being something like 'property', and also defending the sub from other potential mates. You could argue this is connected to a costly signal that the dom/male is actually *more* invested in its partner and offspring, more willing to fight for it.
Yeah, I think I was probably a bit off with the bonobo “tender + parenting” point actually. I had in mind the general theme of nice, squishy, low-conflict bonding in bonobos, and rejection/ostracising of violent males. There's plausibly some mechanism where communal, non-violent sexual activity (often food-linked) triggers bonding hormones and contributes to group cohesion, which overlaps with parenting-related behaviour and mate choice, but I’m not sure that’s central here.
The resource factor is probably correct, but they've entered significantly different equilibrium states, and would likely keep current patterns in the absence of resource scarcity (but it would be super interesting if they didn't).
On the BDSM-pair-bonding thing; I don't understand the community/preference enough to know these dynamics, but the examples you gave: "rapeplay", "master-slave", "choking", seem a lot more about callous male brutality than intense ownership. I wonder if there are distinct categories there...
I would love to talk more about the chimps and bonobos. What you're describing as mate preferences here is what Ryan and Jethá call "the standard narrative," and they wrote a whole book on why it's incorrect. Both chimps and bonobs practice multimale-multifemale mating, which indicates humans do too, and communal child-rearing. So the idea that one male would seek one "tender" female doesn't hold water; the babies are raised by a social group of females. You acknowledge that men can mate with multiple women, but the truth is historically women also mate with multiple men. Finally, as for infanticide which you mention, bonobos do not practice it, and chimps only rarely.
So in a social, egalitarian society where children are raised in a village and females are multi-orgasmic, taking multiple male partners, why would males be sexually dominant? Why would females prefer to be sexually submissive? I've always thought BDSM interests were culturally learned, but I have no idea.
"Sex at Dawn" is not actually broadly accepted as correct.
Popular books written for the public rarely reflect scientific consensus, which usually isn't very compelling and full of caveats. You get more reads by selling a different narrative which is not necessarily correct. I did not find it convincing they were right and everyone else in the field was wrong.
Hmm, I haven't read Sex at Dawn but a few slightly rambling thoughts...
Multi-male mating in chimps is sometimes more like "gang-rape of lone females" than "free-love", which suggests why being an aggressive alpha male can be a successful strategy, one that female chimps naturally had... complex feelings towards. As I understand it, chimp culture is characterised by significant instability between often violent males in a fragile hierarchy. And infanticide is often the leading cause of death for baby chimps. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6971177/). Females sleeping with multiple males seems to be a strategy for avoiding infanticide - you don't want to kill a baby chimp that could be yours!
My sense is that human societies have built up a huge range of norms to better control our "chimp" emotions around sexual jealousy/control, and it seems likely that monogam-ish/pair-bonding systems developed very early in our history, mainly on a social level, but maybe with a little genetics, to mitigate these same risks.
Unsure about "tender-sexual/parenting" in humans, but even in societies with very shared parenting (most hunter-gatherers), the mother's role is typically central, particularly in infancy (breastfeeding, etc.). e.g. Hewlett & Lamb (2005) found babies in trad communities spent 50-60% of total time in the company of the mother on average, so we diverge from our primate cousins here. I'd suspect there's a genetic story where attraction to positive parenting traits plays a role in mate selection: the appeal of boobs and protruding/child-carrying bums feels very innate!
I have to correct you on the "gang rape" idea. Those ideas are outdated, just as chimp violence has been overstated or misinterpreted. Female chimps/bonobos/humans are naturally multi-orgasmic, (and males are not) and this is why it seems they are suited for multimale mating. Physically, once a female (and male allegedly) have come, she is ready to go again, the male is not. The female chimp/bonobo/human vocalizes during sex and during orgasm to advertise herself as being horny and ready to go again. So she takes another male, and another, for her pleasure. That is the alternate narrative and the evidence is all available out there for you to find. In conclusion, women should have multiple lovers, and the best threesome is MFM with men chosen by the F. Have a great night 😁
Haha, I'm glad that I don't derive a belief of what human sexual behaviour *should" look like from my understanding of chimp mating patterns! e.g. "teenage men should beat adult women with biting, branches and fists until women become sexually submissive." "Despite sustaining significant physical injuries, women should still preferentially approach violent and coercive males for copulation when they are most fertile."
The "gang rape" thing is relatively uncommon, but clearly happens (I recently read a book about conflict which used examples of this happening in war). But sexual coercion and violence towards females is universal among all chimpanzee communities. Studies often analyse 1000s of examples of this behaviour in relatively small groups: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8376763/
Female chimps have strategies to optimise their mate choice and offspring survival (e.g. having very vocal sex with lots of males to confuse paternity). This makes it very messy in terms of their consent, their "agency", or what they're into. But reading more into this definitely supports the "evolutionary BDSMexuality" logic that Aella first mentions!
I'm so confused as to your comment. In my specific response, I was correcting you about primate (bonono/chimp/human) mutimale / mutifemale mating tendencies. In that response, I used an emoji when saying what anyone *should* or *shouldn't* do to make their own behavior look like that. A bit tongue in cheeck, but not literally, obviously as a feminist I would NEVER tell women what they should do. No more than you did originally by falsely describing this behavior as "gang rape of lone females." For sure, by saying that, you weren't normalizing it for humans! I assume you were saying it to try to prop up some vague motions of natural manly "dominance" and womanly "submissions." Not literally, of course. Feel free to clarify.
But anytime a woman wants multiple lovers, I will always support her, to reach her full muti-orgasmic potential. And anytime a women wants a threesome, I will explain to her why MFM is her best bet ;)
ETA: Your last paragraph is good food for thought. It makes sense to me that the reason these specific primates have very vocal sex with lots of males is.... because those males aren't violent, they are in community together, and they take care of all babies together. Sounds like peace, love, and happiness *to me.* Agency is a very interesting and messy concept to depict among the other mammals and smaller brained primates, for sure.
Yeah, that's the standard narrative. A lot of evidence is calling all of that into question, I'm sure you can read more if you're interested. Search Christopher Ryan, even Jane Gooddall. A lot of the behavior she documented from chimps was because of how humans were interfering with their natural order, introducing food deliveries in one place, creating extra competition.
I don't understand the relevance of your point about babies being in mother's presence? How does that relate to what I wrote? The human baby in hunter gatherer societies spends 100% of it's time being held and spoiled, by humans. Mother included.
The huge number of tradeoffs probably explain why mixed strategies are so common; a wide variety of genes are useful in at least one situation.
Another facet here might be sneak vs stud reproductive strategies. Basically, pretending to be non-threatening to dominant males and impregnating females in secret is a strategy notably different from just trying to be a dominant male and also impregnating females in secret. So as well as having the "competition vs cooperation" dynamic, we also have the "show primary survival characteristics vs show social parasitic survival characteristics".
https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3610-1
There's probably a bunch of other things like that I'd bet.
"Sneak", "Social Parasitic"...
You're being very harsh to those of us who pretend to be non-threatening to dominant males and impregnate females in secret.
You are letting your emotions colour the words "sneak" and "parasite". But yes, in general I view pretending a child belongs to one man so he will care for it as a form of non-consensual relationship. I like consent. The flip side is of course dominant males trying to control who can mate with who which creates an environment requiring secret impregnation. This is also non-consensual.
Very interesting stats. Ultimately, people should have the right to be who they want to be. As long as no one is being harmed (without consent), every and all sexual acts are consensual and legal then people can, and should, be and do what they want to get their sexual gratification (for want of a better word) in the privacy of their own homes/sex clubs/dungeons. There is something to be said for public sex being a bit of a no-no - I know some people find it a turn on, but those who may see you may not, and you have to respect their right to be who they wish to be as well. Just my opinion of course.
I am grateful for your tolerant perspective, but feel a twinge of anxiety around the phrase "people should have the right to be who they want to be", because the value of having words for things like "tendersexual vs bdsmexual" is that by default, people don't know who they want to be, and so what people need isn't just "the right to be who they are" but instead "help to understand who they are".
Still, with so much hate in the world, it really is valuable to repeat that people should have the right to be who they are, isn't it?
Point taken. The help wouldn't be available if the right to be who you want to be isn't present. I doubt in countries where strict religious doctrine is followed that any such help is available. There has to be tolerance for such help to be made available to those needing it?
Agreed. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. If you want people to have flying cars it is not enough to give people the right to a flying car, you also need a provider able to supply people with flying cars. Oh, but obviously there shouldn't be any obligation for people with no interest in flying cars to try to solve the provider problem, it seems fair that people are only obligated not to oppose the rights of others.
Reading about the prevalance of BDSM-oriented desires, especially among women, is personally validating. I am a heterosexual male who used to think I was asexual because I hadn't yet enjoyed any of my normal, nice sexual encounters. As it turns out, I was trying too hard to be nice. It is reassuring to know that there are plenty of women out there who would be happy to enact abusive fantasies in a controlled manner.
I believe that increasing awareness of "bdsmexuality" must be a good thing. We can turn our evil desires into positive experiences. Surely there's less reason to real-rape when there are plenty of willing partners to fantasy-rape.
I kind of wonder if the whole kink thing depends too much on the ethics of the dominating party to really gain wider appeal, though. The really sociopathic ones are going to get much more of a thrill from violating someone's real boundaries--your ethical dom is basically someone who gets turned on by doing bad stuff but has an intact moral code. Which exists, obviously, but may not be as exciting as someone who's actually abusive.
I've always had the suspicion you see so many geeks into kink is because they're (a) intelligent and (b) restrained (hah) enough to negotiate out all the dynamics that turn into abuse everywhere else. (and, of course, sometimes it still goes wrong.)
I think "wider appeal" might be the wrong way to think about this... it's more of an "awareness" thing afaik. I don't want people who have no natural drive towards BDSM to try it to see if they like it, I want people who experience sexual attraction to BDSM instead of sex to be aware that this is a sexuality, and it to be ok for them to seek compatible partners without social taboo.
More object level though, I agree with you. I think "reputation" in kink communities is actually pretty good at reducing the issues you mention. People can ask about potential partners. New doms in the community are not initially trusted and doms that have broken consent are at least ostracized.
How about exousexual? "εξουσία" means authority or power. Kyriosexual would be similar but a bit more pronounceable and more people could guess the meaning.
I'm really hoping the term bdsmexual catches on and gets widespread use. Great insights and article!
I think they'll go further with kinksexual, but I agree!
I prefer "paraphilia" which afaik means the same as what you would want "kinksexual" to mean.
Too general, though. That covers all the other stuff.
Oh. I thought you had meant to include all the other stuff. Far that reason I think "bdsmexual" and "paraphilia" are probably better terms than "kinksexual" since it is unclear when you say "kinksexual" whether you mean to include other paraphilias or just bdsm.
Could I ask the context from which you gathered connotations for the word kink? I bet it's different from me, which would explain our misunderstanding.
Paraphilia has more of a psychiatric 'these are all the bad desires' valence, I think. I think 'bdsmexual' doesn't really roll off the tongue well--it's really BDSMexual, which is 7 syllables (even 'heterosexual' is only 6) and if you don't capitalize you've got 4 consonants next to each other, which doesn't happen in English. It's like 'Latinx'.
I thought kink was assumed to be roughly the same as BDSM, whereas paraphilia is voyeurism and pedophilia and so on.
Yeah, that's fair, "paraphilia" has fallen out of common use, but I think it is in the DSM as "Paraphilic Disorders". I think of it like, having a personality is fine, but having a personality disorder is something you should be concerned about. Likewise, a paraphilia is fine, but a paraphilic disorder is something to be concerned about.
The wikipedia for "kink"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kink_(sexuality)
gives me the impression that it means the same thing that paraphilia, which would indicate it is not the same as BDSM but is instead an umbrella that includes BDSM.
It seems to me we have 2 definitions we are in need of a word for, and there are problems with the proposed words.
Definition 1:
I'm most interested in a word for "has a non-standard sexuality that does not fit easily into the currently existing dating and sexual norms". This definition has the problem of fuzzy boundaries, but is good enough for now. The reason this is more important than just BDSM is that the goal is to emphasize to people that sexuality is complicated, the way they experience it is not the way that everyone experiences it, and it is important to find people who are compatible with your sexuality if you want to have a successful relationship with them. Many people only understand "likes men" and "likes women" as the possible sexualities, and while introducing BDSM as a sexuality would be an improvement, probably most people would not generalize to "oh, there could be a bunch of sexualities", and the amount that people "get interested in kink" or use "kinky" as a description for promiscuous behaviour that has no paraphilic element indicates that people really don't understand that paraphilias can be completely orthogonal to conventional sexuality, not just something you do to make regular sexuality more interesting.
Definition 2:
The other definition is what we are currently calling "bdsmexual", that is, needing BDSM style power dynamics and interaction in order to feel sexually aroused. I imagine this is a spectrum from BDSM being irrelevant or a turn off through liking BDSM for "spicing up" regular sex to the other end of the spectrum where regular sex feels irrelevant or a turn off and only BDSM provides sexual stimulation. At this end of the spectrum, bdsmexuals also fall under definition 1, but not all people fitting definition 1 would be bdsmexuals. For examples, you can see this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paraphilias
So I have 2 definitions, are these also what you were thinking of? I think all of the terms we have so far have problems:
"bdsmexual" -- Many people dislike this term based on it's spelling and phonetics. I like it for refering to definition 2, I pronounce it "bee-dee-sexual" since people I discussed this irl did not like the way "smexual" sounds. I think the way "smexual" sounds is one of the benefits, but alas. Perhaps using the term "bdsexual" would be better.
"paraphilia" -- This pretty much literally does describe definition 1, but as you have pointed out, it probably evokes thoughts of "paraphilic disorder" from the DSM. I think this is fine since many paraphilias are disorders and promoting representation and acceptance of people with paraphilic disorders is kinda the point. Just because your sexuality is awful and you can't change it doesn't mean you are awful. It's how you choose to act as a person that matters. The focus on safety and consent in all the BDSM communities I have had contact with should serve as an inspiration to the frequently problematic behaviour of people with ordinary sexuality.
"kinksexual" -- I think it is unclear whether "kinksexual" should refer to definition 1 or definition 2. For this reason, it seems like choosing this term to refer to either would lead to confusion.
What other terms might we use? Well, what we're trying to point out that "BDSM" is a sexuality, we could just keep the term "BDSM" and try to talk about how it is a sexuality without creating a new term about it. Or, since the counter "tendersexual" hasn't generated as much pushback, we could take inspiration there and use "roughsexual" to refer to definition 2. I think this creates some confusion since many people interested in BDSM are focused on power dynamics, not on roughness, and "tendersexual" sex can also be rough (though not to the same extremes). Another possibility is "powersexual", but this just sounds silly to me and I don't think would cause people to think the right thing at all.
Really, all the terms seem to have problems. Do you have any other ideas?