Narratives of the Origins of Kinky Sexual Desire Held by Users of a Kink-Oriented Social Networking Website

ABSTRACT

Empirical research on the origins of kinky erotic desires (e.g., sadomasochism, bondage, domination/submission, roleplaying, sexual fetishism, etc.) has been limited and rarely rooted in the narratives of kinky people themselves. Among a sample of 260 self-identified kinky users of a kink-oriented social networking website living in 21 countries, we examined self-reported narratives of the origins of kink desires. An inductive coding process by four independent coders yielded 20 categories of responses, organized into five broad discourses about the origins of kinky desires: identity (e.g., personality, personal taste, and role exploration; 72.7% of responses), nurture (e.g., both traumatic and non-traumatic life experiences; 38.1% of responses), negation (e.g., disavowing or doubting a particular idea about the origins of their kink interests; 24.6% of responses), nature (e.g., biology and genetics; 22.7% of responses), and uncertainty (e.g., not being able to identify an origin of kinky desires; 10.4% of responses). Fewer than 19% of participants mentioned any kind of trauma in their responses. We discuss implications for scientific understandings of kinky sexual desire within the umbrella of sexual diversity.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the research assistance of Mikaela Marcos, Raia Cherednikov, and Kiana Namaki, for their work coding the qualitative data; David Pletta, Erin Toolis, Richard Clark, and Elliot Cohen, for their collective advice on data analysis; and Eileen Zurbriggen, for her comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this article was supported by the Chancellor’s Fellowship and funding from the Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz. The article was completed in part while the second author was supported by a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.