Keeping my promise to you that I’d revisit the polls I’ve run on this site, I decided to take a close up look at 3 of the 10 BDSM Polls featured here in April in case you haven’t had a chance to keep up with the stats coming in.
First, an interesting background note: over 1000 people peeked at the BDSM polls, but less than 150 people actually took them. What does that mean? Probably that some people didn’t find it relevant and moved on. But it also means that a lot of people who are curious about BDSM either didn’t have the experience to provide answers to the questions or were concerned about privacy issues and feared somehow their identities would be revealed. I respect those concerns in our paranoid, leaky world, and am just happy we have a small sample of BDSMers to give us some juicy results to ponder.
WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT BDSM
I was very curious to know whether other kinksters’ experience mirrored my clinical and personal experience of BDSM. From clients, I have learned that nothing gives them a satisfying orgasm the way some type of BDSM or kinky play does. In my own BDSM journey, I was hooked from the first time I had a fully consensual, openly BDSM relationship (as opposed to relationships where I snuck in a few BDSM things or got a reluctant partner to play along). So my own experience bolsters my it for me: I began having singularly spectacular orgasms and an even higher libido once I got involved in BDSM. It was everything and more than I’d hoped for in terms of orgasmic pleasure.
Fresh scientific studies into the way the human body processes orgasms helped enormously to shape my clinical approach, along with the volume of anecdotal information clients provided on how important BDSM was to them in maintaining interest in sex. It’s become pretty clear to me that BDSM/fetish people get an extra bump of pleasure when they act on their needs. Kinky people NEED kink to be fully sexually happy! That is why we see so many people cheating on primary relationships by visiting prodoms and/or establishing consensual relationships outside their primary partnerships.
Still, I wasn’t expecting a whopping 72% of you to agree that BDSM/fetish gives you the greatest orgasmic joy — with another 14% who opted for the light-hearted response possibly also in agreement with us. Remarkably, only 15 people out of 111 say that they haven’t noticed any difference between the types of orgasms they get from vanilla v. BDSM.
Possible reasons that may explain these numbers.
1 One theory is that BDSM/fetish people are wired differently. Their brains literally only get the orgasm they need when they are having the kind of sex they were born to have. This makes a lot of sense to me clinically because I see people all the time who cannot get off without BDSM/fetish in their sex life. We don’t have the science to answer the big question here: is a BDSM orgasm roughly as good to a kinky person as a vanilla one is to a non-kinky person? For example, do BDSMers go through life missing out on the true and complete joy of orgasm if they only do vanilla sex? Also, is that why non-kinky people prefer non-kinky sex — because they cannot get the same satisfaction from kink than they do from MOVA (manual stim, oral, vaginal or anal) sex? I kind of felt that way when I first started doing BDSM — it was a million times hotter than anything I’d ever experienced from MOVA. Since then I’ve worked with hundreds of people who feel the same way: my conclusion is that, yes, BDSM/fetish people are likely genetically wired for an expectation of rougher and more primal sex than other people, and unless we fulfill our desires, our orgasms will not be powerful enough to deliver the pleasure we innately need. This seems especially valid in light of previous research I did for Different Loving Two which showed that most BDSM/kink people think they were “born this way” and can remember having kink fantasies as young as early childhood.
2 Another theory on why BDSM/fetish people get a different or higher high from BDSM could be that the physical intensity and sensations of kinky acts, coupled with the raw intimacy of many BDSM/fetish acts, triggers an all-new high. We already know from studies of how pleasure-seeking behaviors and addictions work in the brain that most human want to repeat an activity that triggers their pleasure center, whether it’s eating ice cream, taking drugs, or having epic sex and may develop a compulsive or addictive pattern of pleasure-seeking behavior. So it’s possible BDSM/fetish acts set up a pleasure-seeking cycle in our brains as we now change course and begin to seek out the “better high” you can get from a BDSM encounter than a vanilla one. If this is true, it would mean that if we hadn’t bitten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, we’d still be having vanilla sex and assuming it was the best sex we can have. This theory can’t be dismissed until scientists do a whole lot more research on sex and the brain but I find it improbable because that would mean that open minded non-kinky hedonists could be “converted” to BDSM by their play — and I have never seen any evidence of that. What I have seen, instead, is people finally connecting to the person that was inside them all along. But, as I said, more science would help flesh out this theory.
3 If 14% of us don’t get that higher high, that could mean this group is not wired for BDSM but enjoys it for other factors: maybe their partner is the one who’s really into it; maybe they mainly use it as spice but still prefer vanilla penetration above all; perhaps their BDSM experiences were complicated by anxiety, intimacy problems, shame, or health issues that did not give them the same high the majority feel. One of my mantras is that stress is the antithesis of sexiness: if you’re coping with stress for any reason, chances are your orgasms, in general, may not be as satisfying as you need them to be. That has a clear biological explanation too: your sex chemistry changes for the worse when your body is battling with stress chemicals.
I can’t say I’m shocked that scat was the single most dreaded or disliked kind of BDSM/kink play, but I was surprised at just how many people — a whopping 96 percent of you — made it their number one answer. So I guess that tells us that people are super uptight about poop, including free-wheeling hedonists like us. But…is it true? This is something I wonder about.
Based on my clinical experience, it’s the rare client who talks about shit, but maybe not as rare as you might think. I’ve worked with a couple of scat fetishists and learned a lot from them about the nature of the fetish — which, as you’d expect, as dear to them, as sacred, and as exciting as a shoe is to a shoe fetishist. There are far more people willing to talk about an interest in enema play and bathroom control — either watching a partner on the toilet, serving them in some way while they are on the toilet or using enemas in their BDSM play. having a fetish for enemas.
As an old-timer, it’s kind of interesting to me how much less enema/scat play porn you see today than you did back in the 1980s and 1990s when enemas were one of many taboo fetishes that got a lot of attention in BDSM magazines. There was a great book, Enema as an Erotic Art, first published in 1984 and still considered a classic in the genre. I haven’t visited a prodom’s house in 20 years plus but in the years when some of my friends were in the biz, there was always enema equipment on the wall. I wonder if that has changed, with fewer people requesting or offering the service. Or maybe enemas are still popular in private but people associate Scat uniquely with the German porn oddity, Scheisse porn, where people play with poop as if it was tasty mud.
If the science is behind on most things sex, it’s virtually non-existent when it comes to the erotic interest in poop and whether it is an innate drive to be offended by poop, or whether the majority opinion is the direct result of toilet-training when we were tots.
In fact, the only thing that surprised me was seeing that cross-dressers have achieved a way better perception in the BDSM/kink communities. Just as we were more Scat-accepting 30 years ago, cross-dressers were once the most likely to feel rejected at Community events and clubs. Het men avoided them and equipment/play spaces did not accommodate them well either, completely lacking in any kind of dressing areas suitable for that fetish.
Personally, in small groups, there was more acceptance, especially among like-minded femdoms. Fantasies of dominatrices forcing slaves into a different gender role are still pretty common fodder for BDSM/kink fiction, with many, if not, most hetero Mistress/slave relationships exploring feminization to one degree or another. (I had this pink tutu for special friends…..) In real life, though, my cross-dressing friends were chronically disappointed at the lack of interested partners and routinely patronized pro-dommes who were provided a safe and accepting space for them to explore femininity. But 2017 is a different sociological animal. People are learning now about gender differentials and rejecting the unrealistic binary point of view. Only 1 out of 124 people who answered this poll considered cross-dressing undesirable in a partner. Awesome.
You don’t choose your fetish. Your fetish chooses you.
I also wasn’t surprised to see that diaper fetishes took second place. Infantilism was one of the first fetishes I learned about when I started my BDSM journey. During my tenure on Compuserve in the 80s, I struck up a friendship with a nice Jewish guy who hosted a section devoted to Adult Babies. I learned a whole lot about what it was like to have a fetish other people think is sick from them. Since then, I’ve heard thousands of stories about the discrimination and hatred they face, their deep-seated (and often justified) fear of being rejected by partners and publicly humiliated for having their fetish. I’ve worked with many AB/diaper fetishists in my practice, most typically guys with wives who didn’t understand or like the fetish and who had reached a place of crisis in their relationship because of the misunderstandings that surround this fetish.
In my experience, there are two key reasons people are prejudiced against the AB/Little/diaper/infantilism fetish.
1 They confuse it with pedophilia. They think adults who want to get into erotic role as young toddlers or infants want to have sex with actual babies in real life. So wrong! There is a deep social fear projected onto the fetish that prejudices otherwise reasonable people and makes a majority of them continue to believe that somehow, in some way, grown-ups who get off on diapers will abuse children one day. This is the most destructive myth of all. While people who can’t handle it shouldn’t be forced to be around it, they are direly mistaken if they believe that fetishists don’t understand the difference between right and wrong. I’ve often said that it’s usually the opposite: people with age fetishes tend to be more protective of children and more sensitive to their rights and their vulnerabilities as tiny humans. It’s the people who lack empathy for children (i.e., classic pedophiles) that are the true dangers to them.
2 The idea of an adult acting like a baby triggers an almost visceral distaste in many people. They feel something is not right with an adult who wants to wear diapers, that somehow it speaks to mental problems or antisocial behavior. It may also be connected in their minds to scat, as they imagine all ABs poop their diapers (not true). Perhaps this disgust is in-born or perhaps it develops as we are trained to reject the babies we were and to assume roles as responsible adults. I won’t turn this piece into advocacy for this most misunderstood sexual minority. I’ll just say, hey, this is a fetish, people. You don’t choose your fetish. Your fetish chooses you.
I’ll end on a more jocular note with the poll about sex toys. I was delighted to see how many of you seriously invest in your passions!
So over a quarter of respondents have over 100 toys! *let’s all pause and gasp in admiration*. Well, good, glad to know I’m not the only obsessive collector of delightful erotic curiosities and sophisticated sensation enhancers. (I think that’s the most social-media-sensitive description of dildos, whips, and cock cages I’ve ever written.) Another 50% of you claim to have 10 or more, which is definitely enough to light fires wherever you and your toy bag go too.
The remaining quarter of you has not yet jumped on the toy bandwagon. No judgment. Just a gentle suggestion that maybe you could be having a lot more fun with a few more sex toys!
If you want to have more of a dialogue or give me feedback, please visit my official FaceBook fan page and post questions there. I’ll do my best to reply to all your comments, constructive criticisms, and questions about the polls there.
Do you want to add your voice to the polls? Check out the full list of quizzes and polls I’ve been running.
