The Kink List Project, Part 3: Physical Attributes and Multi-Partner Sex
This is part three of a series. To go back to the beginning, click here
Physical Attributes
The physical characteristics of our sexual partners are obviously important, but unfortunately, we have limited data along these axes in this dataset. This is presumably due to the fact that these kinklists are designed around online interactions where physical attributes are, understandably, less important.
One question we can ask is whether men or women are more into skinny or chubby partners (see note below for how to read these graphs).
It turns out that while people are generally more into skinny (below) than chubby (above) partners, there is no difference between men and women in their propensity to like skinny vs chubby partners.
When it comes to breast size, men have only a very slight preference to large over small breasts. It turns out, guys just like breasts, big or small. The same, incidentally, holds for women as well.
When it comes to women and penis size, however, there is a clear preference for larger penises over smaller.
Here, however, recall that we’re considering only what people fantasize about, not necessarily their preferences toward a real partner.
Women are significantly more likely to fantasize about a same-sex encounter than men are. While there is a small population of men who fantasize about an encounter with another single man, the vast majority of men are a “No” on this. As we will see in the next section, this has consequences for the types of multi-partner sex men and women are respectively interested in.
There is some openness to transgender partners in the general population, although a significant number of people are not interested. There is a slight preference for MtF transgender partners, as opposed to FtM.
Women are generally open to both MtF and FtM partners, with preferences distributed relatively evenly across the spectrum (albeit with a significant dropout in the “favorite” category. There is no consistent preference for MtF or FtM partners.
Men, on the other hand, are not particularly open to either MtF or FtM transgender partners, although to the extent that there is a preference, is it for FtM partners.
Multi-Partner Sex
We can consider several configurations of group sex, MMM, FFF, MMF, FFM, and the more general “Orgy”(some configuration consisting of more than those combinations)
Women are generally open to all threesome configurations, with a slight preference to MMF (themselves with two men), followed by MFF (themselves and a man and a woman) and FFF (themselves and two women) in roughly equal proportions.
Men, on the other hand, have far more clear preferences. There is a strong preference to MFF (themselves and two women). This is followed by MMF (themselves and another woman and a man), which is significantly less favored. Lastly, very few men fantasize about MMM (themselves and two men).
When we compare across men and women, we see that in fact, unfortunately for women, while the number of women who fantasize about MMF threesomes is high, men have decidedly more mixed feelings about participating in one.
Meanwhile, men are much better off, with women being more likely to be interesting in MFF threesomes than men are about MMF threesomes.
When it comes to the same-sex groupings, there is an even starker comparison. Women fantasize about a FFF grouping at far higher rates than men do about an MMM
We can summarize the interest in threesome in the following way
Women: MMF > MFF = FFF
Men: MFF >> MFM >> MMM
Interestingly, while women show more interest in a double-penetration scenario than men (consistent with their higher preference for MMF scenarios than men) the difference is less than might be expected given the earlier disparity. Women are slightly less likely to be interested in double penetration than in MMF, while men are slightly more interested in double penetration (perhaps having in mind toys or digits) than they are in MMF threesomes.
Both men and women are interested to the same degree in the generic group sex “orgy”, although women tend to fantasize about this option slightly more than men do.
Lastly, we consider the “Gangbang” scenario (a single man or woman having sex with many men (or women))
Women tend to fantasize about being the subject of a gangbang far more than men do, although there are significantly more men open to this than are open to MMM threesomes. It may be that these men code the question as “one man having sex with a lot of women”, rather than “one man having sex with a lot of men”. This is supported by the general propensity of men to not fantasize about multiple partner encounters involving only men.
Interestingly, women are more likely to fantasize about being the subject of a gangbang than men are about participating (not as the subject) in one.
Adjacent to multi-partner sex is Exhibitionism and Voyeurism, which necessarily involves multiple people (although it is possible for this to involve watching/being watched by a single person).
Both men and women are interested in both exhibitionism and voyeurism in approximately equal measure, and both kinks are relatively popular, with the majority of people ranking this kink either “like” or “favorite”. Among both men and women, exhibitionism is slightly preferred over voyeurism. Of note, there are very few men or women who consider this a “no”, suggesting that, to some extent, many people are at least interested in exploring these kinks.
In the next part, we’ll take a look at oral and anal sex.
A note on how to read these graphs
Most of the data presented here will be in form of the means and distributions of the scores either between men and women, or among men and women separately. Several will contrast multiple scores in a single plot, however the underlying concept is the same for all. On the right, we have the histogram of raw scores. This is the how many people answer 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 in the total population, or split between men and women. However, it is important to know that this is not normalized for population size, and that there is a roughly ~50% larger population of men in this sample. Therefore, equal bar heights between men and women does not represent equal interest, because an equal bar height in the histogram means a significantly higher proportion of the female population in that bin. Nevertheless, these graphs represent the raw data most closely.
To circumvent this problem, on the left we present kernel density estimates (KDE plots). You can think of these as an estimate of what the population underlying the histograms might look like, if we had infinite data and were not restricting ourselves to five bin sizes as we are on the right. As you can see, they roughly match the distributions on the right, but are also normalized for population, so the distorting effects of the different sample sizes are removed. The two dotted colored lines show the mean (average) value for men and women, in this case showing that there is not much difference between men and women in this metric. For those interested, I used python, pandas and seaborn for this analysis, and tests of statistical significance were done using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test (actual statisticians, if you have opinions, please contact me at kinklistanalysis@gmail.com).
