flexibeast.space - quotes
Aella's “The Other Sexual Orientation”(2025)
“The Other Sexual Orientation"
When it comes to solid BDSM, you start to see a similar bimodal distribution of interest. The most common relationship people have towards BDSM is either completely uninterested, or extremely interested; there’s not as much in the middle.
In fact, in my data, someone’s BDSM interest explains more structured variation in their sexuality than whether they’re gay or straight.
The sexual interest spectrum of “into men vs women” is not very different from other types of sexual interests. It’s just more visible. The category of gender as a sexual interest is a public thing heavily ritualized by culture. This makes sense, since males and females having fetishes for each other’s bodies results in reproduction, and thus has gotten real popular and become a wholesome cornerstone of civilization and media and identity. You can swap out just the type of body that goes through the ritual (marriage). And so, we get the concept of sexual orientation as distinct from other types of sexual interests. There’s no ‘marriage’ concept for other fetishes.
BDSM is a sexual orientation in the same way being gay is, just minus the ritual visibility
I was in denial for many years, and my first sexual relationship was vanilla. After the initial novelty with my boyfriend wore off, so did our sex life entirely. I thought I simply had a low sex drive. Sex seemed like a chore. I figured that’s just the way sex was for everyone. Women weren’t supposed to like sex that much, right?
But it turns out - actually no, it wasn’t that I didn’t like sex, it was that I didn’t like vanilla sex. Once I started engaging in kink relationships, surprise - I suddenly had a vivacious sex drive. Sex became bonding, transcendent, and wonderful. The way everyone else had been talking about sex finally made sense. Nowadays I engage exclusively in kink relationships.
I’m going to refer to people with innate BDSM preference as bdsmexual (pronounced bee-dee-smexual), and people without as tendersexual. I apologize for the cheesiness, inventing words is my dump stat.
[M]any tendersexual feminists are very upset about how ‘degrading’ porn is. Women are spit on, slapped around, choked! How bad and offensive!
This does look pretty bad if you’re tendersexual! Gay people looked pretty bad and offensive to heterosexual people for a lot of history. But I think they fail to realize that there’s a large minority of women who are bdsmexual - for whom BDSM is just as deep a part of their sexuality as lesbianism is to lesbians.
And this is more of a female (or submissive?) thing than male! Men’s sexuality is more responsive to general sluttiness, while women are overwhelmingly at least a little into power dynamics.
Roughly 80% of women in my data are sexually submissive, which you could say is default female sexuality.
About 20% of women (and 15% of men) in my data are bdsmexual (innately and deeply oriented towards bdsm). As my data has slightly inflated kink rates, I’d estimate something closer to 15% of women and 10% of men are bdsmexual in the genpop. Men tend to be slightly less polarized than women; you could say they have higher rates of bdsm-bisexuality (switchiness).
In general, women prefer more violent porn than men do, and prefer rougher sex than men think they’d like. This holds in my data whether I’m measuring my own followers or anonymous paid survey respondents.
So I think what we’re seeing is: Very tendersexual women hear about videos of women getting abused. They assume this is rampant - most anti-porn feminists I hear talk about this reference how it’s ‘everywhere’ - despite there not being any good data to support this claim (go check the front page of pornhub and count how many of the videos feature women who are showing distress). They assume that it’s ‘teaching men’ to be more violent, and that women don’t want this. They are not aware that a substantial minority of women - moreso than men - are actually bdsmexual. Bdsmexual women are weirder, more stigmatized, and often stay quiet about their sexual preferences, while tendersexual women share the culturally dominant view of female sexuality, and enjoy a lot of uncontroversial backing when they frame their own sexual orientation as a moral good that everyone else should follow.
Some insist that bdsmexuals cannot find it good and fulfilling, that they must necessarily be broken or traumatized in some way. While it’s true that in my data, bdsmexuals are more likely to have experienced rough childhoods than tendersexuals, a majority of both groups still report happy, non-abusive childhoods.
You might see an analogy to this in gay people, who historically were viewed as disordered, with homosexuality caused by exposure to gay people or bad parenting. Coincidentally, they also report higher rates of bad childhoods than straight people, though also the majority of both gays and straights had non-abusive childhoods.
The big puzzle to me is why it’s bimodal. Is this a cultural artifact? If bdsmexuality is linked to sexual success in our ancestors, why do we have a substantial fraction of women who are tendersexual? Why is there such huge variance in the type of power dynamics that bdsmexuals prefer?
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