The Kink List Project, Part 5: Clothing, Toys and Manual Manipulation
This is part five of a series. To go back to the beginning, click here
Clothing is a uniquely gendered category, with items like “heels” and “lingerie” generally (although not exclusively) being woman-specific. The clothing category defines six preferences: Clothed sex, lingerie, stockings, heels, leather and latex. Several of these, notably stockings and lingerie, are among the most popular interests of all.
Comparing the relevant distributions, we see very little difference between what women want to wear (above) and what men want their partners to wear (below). Leather and Latex are the least popular, with lingerie, stockings, heels and clothed sex being popular among both men and women. Lingerie and Stockings are the two most popular by a decent margin among both men and women, although there is significant overlap in those categories.
Women are also equally interested in wearing a costume during sex, as well as having their partner wear a costume.
Men, on the other hand, are more interested in their partner wearing a costume than themselves.
Lastly in the clothing section, we consider cross-dressing, which is of course more about gender roles and play than about clothing per se. We find that cross-dressing is not particularly popular among either women or men, and that men and women are slightly more interested in their partners cross-dressing than themselves.
The use of toys is another reasonably gendered category. Two of the three toys listed (dildos and plugs) are insertion toys, and as we saw in the previous section, men are not particularly interested in using such toys. The third, vibrators, for obvious reasons might be more appealing to women than men. We see this reflected in the data, where women are generally very interested in using all three types of toy (figure 5.7) while men are less interested in using all three (figure 5.8), although in the latter case there is some interest among men. Interestingly, there is not a large difference in the types of toys men are interested in using. One might have expected a difference between vibrators and insertional toys, however this doesn’t appear in the data.
Perhaps the more interesting question is how interested men and women are in using toys on their partners. Again, we run into the same problem as before: among women, we can’t be sure whether women in this case are thinking about using toys on a male or female partner when they respond to this question. In general, women are reasonably open to using toys on a partner, however, they are interestingly much more open to using toys on themselves than on a partner. Men, on the other hand, are very interested in using toys on a partner, with very few men saying “no” to this. We don’t see much evidence in this dataset of men being jealous or frustrated that their partners are using toys, as may have been expected.
Both men and women seem to have mixed feeling about fisting, with many women and men saying “no”, but significant numbers of men and women being interested. Women are slightly more likely to be interested in receiving fisting than men are in giving, but this difference is very small.
Both men and women are interested in the same proportions — that is to say very interested — in manual genital manipulations (handjobs and fingering). For both men and women there is no difference in the desire to give or receive, nor is there any significant difference between men and women in either category.
