The Kink List Project, Part 2: Population Description and General Trends

Photo by Mickael Gresset on Unsplash

This is part two of a series. To go back to the beginning, click here

The sample contains roughly 50% more men than women, with a small number of people describing themselves as transgender without specifying a gender or not identifying their gender at all.

Table 2.1: self-reported gender in the population

Based on the degree of openness to same-sex interaction (see note 1 below), we can approximate the sexual orientation of the population as follows:

Table 2.2: Inferred orientation of women¹

Table 2.3: Inferred orientation of men¹

Gay men are slightly under-represented (1.33% in this sample vs 3.9% in the general population²), and gay women are slightly over-represented (5.98% in this sample vs 5.1% in the general (U.S.) population²). The vast majority (90%) of women have some sort of same-sex fantasies, while a significant proportion (44%) of men do. It is important to note that these designations do not necessarily reflect how people self-identify, simply whether or not they’re willing to engage in same-sex fantasies.

The average age of the total population is 26 (27 for men and 24 for women)

Figure 2.1: Male and Female age distributions, superimposed

Figure 2.2: Female (left) and Male (right) age distribuitions

The oldest man is 60 and the oldest woman is 45. The youngest age is 18, which is the lowest age this is allowed by policy to post on the scraped subreddits.

What are the most popular fantasies? Table 2.4 ranks the ten most popular (highest average score) interests for the entire population, as well as for men and women individually. Many of these are obvious (such as men receiving a blowjob, or women receiving cunnilingus or using a vibrator on themselves), but others are more interesting, for example the number one most popular interest among women is being submissive (which we will return to in detail in a subsequent section), and that giving cunnilingus ranks highly as a fantasy for men.

Table 2.4: Most popular kinks for the entire population, and split by men and women

Likewise, we can list the ten least popular (lowest average score) interests, and again there are no real surprises here. Most peoples “hard limits” (scat, blood, necrophilia, extreme pain) are found in Table 2.5.

Table 2.5: Least popular kinks for the entire population, and split by men and women

We can see which kinks are disproportionately popular with men or women (for example, very popular with women but very unpopular with men) by finding the interests with the largest distance between the average score for men and for women (Table 2.6).

Again, there are no real surprises here. “Self and one man” is very popular with women, but very unpopular among men (as evidenced by the orientation breakdown above). Likewise, “Impregnation” is, for obvious reasons, mostly popular among women and “impregnating partner” more with men. We also see this split in “wearing stockings/heels/lingerie” popular with women and “partner wearing stockings/heels/lingerie” among men. We will return to this in a later section. Notably, while “self and one man” is disproportionately popular with women, “self and one woman” doesn’t appear in the top ten for men, again reflecting the increased openness of women to fantasizing about a female partner.

Table 2.6: Kinks most disproportionate popular with women and men

We can get a sense of what kinks are disproportionately popular with men or women by plotting the average values for men and women against each other in a scatter plot. Kinks that are equally interesting to both men and women lie along the dashed horizontal line. Kinks that are more popular with women like above that line and those more popular with men lie below that line.

Figure 2.3: Average score for each kink, plotted for men against women

And we can color-code these by type to get a sense of which classes of kinks are more popular among men or women (Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4: Average score per kink, color coded by category

As we can see (and will be discussed further below), the increased number of points above the line shows that women are, in general, open to a wider variety of kinks than men. Does this mean that women are kinkier? Not necessarily, as there are several highly gendered categories. For example, the orange cluster at the top-left (disproportionately popular among women) represents women wearing stockings/heels/lingerie themselves, which is unpopular among men for obvious reasons. The corresponding orange points on the male side of the line represent interest in having one’s partner wear stockings/heels/lingerie etc. Women are generally more open to their partners wearing such attire (perhaps having in mind a female partner), and so while these are more popular among men, they are not so disproportionately popular.

More generally, we can assign each user a “kink score” by averaging their responses across all kinks. When we do this, we see that, again, women tend to have a higher kink score, at least partially due to the reasons noted above. Although I have not performed an analysis specifically excluding the gendered kinks, I have noticed anecdotally during this analysis that women tend to have slightly higher interest in a slightly broader range of kinks than men do.

Figure 2.5: Raw kink score distribution (left) and raw data with mean and standard deviation plotted for men and women

Finally, for those users in which we have age information, can we say anything about how one’s kinkiness changes with age? We can plot kink index against age and see that there is no strong relationship between these variables for either men or women, although we are severely lacking in data for older people.

Figure 2.6: Raw kink score for men (blue) and women (pink) plotted against age

In the next section, we will look into general physical characteristics, multi-partner sex, and gender fantasies.

(1) We assume purely gay men and women (as opposed to bisexual men and women) are those with a “No” response to a single opposite-sex partner, and purely straight men and women those with a “No” response to a single same-sex partner. Everyone in between we classify as bisexual (at least some interest in same-sex encounters).

(2) Proportion of gay men and women in the general population from Gallup, 2017 for the US, https://news.gallup.com/poll/203513/vermont-leads-states-lgbt-identification.aspx