The Other Sexual Orientation

Abstract

Interest in BDSM is bimodally distributed — people cluster at “completely uninterested” or “extremely interested” with little middle ground — and factor analysis of sexual-interest survey data finds that BDSM attitudes form the most distinct and defining cluster in someone’s sexuality, more so than gay/straight orientation. The author argues that innate BDSM preference is therefore a sexual orientation in the same sense homosexuality is, differing only in that it lacks the cultural ritual and visibility that gender-based orientation has accumulated.

The data source

• Findings come from the author’s Mini Kink Survey, ~80,000 respondents after cleaning.
• Most respondents were redirected from the Big Kink Survey, so demographics are similar; most don’t know who the author is, as the survey went viral and now draws most traffic from SEO.
• Sample composition: 56% women, 44% men, skewing young (mean age 23), probably weighted liberal.
• Stated caveat: total kinkiness is likely skewed upward relative to the general US population, but within-dataset comparisons are more reliable.

Unimodal vs bimodal distributions

• Most sexual interests produce clear trendlines — e.g. women’s interest in erotica rises steadily; men’s interest in blowjobs runs low to high.
• Femininity is different: mostly very high interest, but with a small uptick at the “unappealing” end (likely gay men), and upticks at both ends for women, reflecting a heavier bisexual trend.
• BDSM items are consistently bimodal — the most common relationships people have with BDSM are total disinterest or intense interest, with comparatively few in between.

The factor analysis result

• Factor analysis identifies natural clusters in data; the author cites the Big 5 personality model as the familiar precedent (e.g. “life of the party” predicts many other answers, unlike “likes cake more than pie”).
• Applied to arousal questions, attitude towards BDSM emerges as the most distinct and defining cluster in the dataset.
• The chart measures strength of variance, not popularity — how distinct each cluster of sexual interest is.
• Conclusion drawn: BDSM interest explains more structured variation in sexuality than gay/straight orientation does.

Why “kink” is an arbitrary category

• The culture draws the boundary of “kink” at roughly a 1 on the taboo rating scale, which the author treats as arbitrary.
• There is a smooth gradient of popularity and tabooness across all sexual interests; the author prefers the umbrella term “sexual interests” for the whole set — bondage, armpits, romance, sounding, blowjobs alike.
• Sexual interests vary along different axes: some people’s arousal is visceral/sensory (the right physical sensation), others’ is representational (a taboo social dynamic such as teacher–student roleplay), others’ is driven by appearance/body type.
• Intimate attachment often follows arousal but isn’t definitional — zoophiles report falling in love with animals, Erika Eiffel married the Eiffel Tower — yet a straight man wouldn’t fall for a “feminine soul” in a male body, and a gay man isn’t straight regardless of emotional content.

Why gender-orientation became the visible one

• Attraction to men vs women is not structurally different from other sexual interests; it is simply more visible.
• Gender-as-sexual-interest is heavily ritualised by culture because male/female mutual attraction produces reproduction, making it a cornerstone of media, identity and institutions.
• Marriage is a ritual that permits swapping only the body type, which is why “sexual orientation” emerged as a category distinct from other sexual interests — no other fetish has a marriage concept attached.

The parallel with coming out

• The counterargument that gender-orientation is special because it “wholly defines who you can have satisfying sexual relationships with” is addressed by showing near-identical testimony from BDSM-oriented people.
• Quoted accounts describe: not getting turned on with partners of either sex, wondering if they were gay, finding vanilla sex “like cuddling” and unarousing “even with the hottest person imaginable,” and only functioning sexually once kink was involved.
• The author’s own account: proto-sexual fascination with bondage at ages 4–5, before any sexual exposure; years of denial; a vanilla first relationship where the sex life died and she assumed she had a low sex drive; then a “vivacious” sex drive once she moved to kink relationships, which she now engages in exclusively.

Age of onset evidence

• Across most fetishes in the dataset, the earlier the age of onset, the more extreme the interest.
• Respondents reporting BDSM interests beginning at age 5 or earlier were the most into it — typically well before exposure to porn or anything sexual.
• Offered as evidence that BDSM orientation (and sexual orientations generally) are innate or set very early.

The proposed terms

• Bdsmexual (pronounced “bee-dee-smexual”): innate, deep BDSM orientation.
• Tendersexual: those without it.
• Rationale: something this innate, change-resistant, and consequential for which relationships work deserves a term.

Prevalence figures

• ~80% of women in the data are sexually submissive — described as arguably default female sexuality.
• ~20% of women and ~15% of men in the data are bdsmexual; adjusting for the sample’s inflated kink rates, the author estimates ~15% of women and ~10% of men in the general population.
• Men are less polarised — higher rates of “bdsm-bisexuality” (switchiness).

Application to the porn debate

• Anti-porn feminist objections to “degrading” content (spitting, slapping, choking) are framed as a tendersexual reaction, analogous to how homosexuality historically looked offensive to heterosexuals.
• Cited counter-evidence for female interest in power dynamics: the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey and rough dominance in mainstream women’s erotica; women in the data prefer more violent porn than men and rougher sex than men expect, holding across both the author’s own followers and anonymous paid survey respondents.
• The author claims violent porn with distressed women is not actually that popular relative to porn with eager, enthusiastic performers, citing in-progress work on a database of top Pornhub videos, and invites readers to count distressed performers on the site’s front page.
• Proposed dynamic: tendersexual women assume such content is “everywhere” and is teaching men violence, unaware that a substantial minority of women are bdsmexual. Bdsmexual women are more stigmatised and stay quiet; tendersexual women hold the culturally dominant view and can frame their own orientation as a moral good others should follow.
• A quoted tendersexual friend describes distress at a partner’s escalating interest in knifeplay and wax, bruises and burns — “I was happy to try to give her things she wanted but I didn’t want to hurt her.”

The trauma objection

• Some hold that bdsmexuals must be broken or traumatised to find this fulfilling.
• In the data, bdsmexuals are more likely to report rough childhoods than tendersexuals, but a majority of both groups report happy, non-abusive childhoods.
• Parallel drawn to gay people, historically viewed as disordered and attributed to bad parenting, who also report higher rates of bad childhoods while a majority in both groups had non-abusive ones.

Open questions raised

• Evolutionary framing: given that power, ownership, dominance, jealousy, harassment and sexual coercion feature heavily in our closest primate relatives (bonobos excepted) and in human history, the author suggests it is odd that bdsmexuality isn’t the default — citing one theory that females attracted to sexually aggressive males had more sexually successful sons.
• The bimodality itself is the central puzzle: is it a cultural artifact? Why a substantial tendersexual fraction if bdsmexuality tracked ancestral reproductive success? Why such variance in the type of power dynamic bdsmexuals prefer?
• Flagged as the direction of upcoming posts.