Kink

What is kink?

Kink is the umbrella term for sexual preferences, fantasies, and forms of play that fall outside the ordinary. Kink is broader than BDSM: everything that is BDSM falls under it, but far from every kink is about power or pain.

What kink looks like in practice

Kink is not a single act but a collection, and the members of that collection often barely resemble each other.

Take two cases that both fall under the word. The first: a woman who likes to be held by her wrists during sex and needs nothing more. No rope and no agreed scene. That is kink, and it is at the same time its most common form.

The second lies far from it: a couple who spend a whole evening pretending they have never met, including all the fuss of a first date. No power comes into that evening and no pain, and yet this is just as much kink. What the two cases share is that they let go of the standard script, and beyond that almost nothing.

That is exactly why “do you do kink?” is a bad question. The word is useful for researchers, care providers, and glossaries; in a conversation between two people you get further with “so what actually gets you going.”

Where the word kink comes from

From Dutch, and originally from ship’s rope.

The Online Etymology Dictionary records the English kink in the 1670s, as a sailor’s term for a knotlike twist or short turn in a rope, borrowed from the Dutch kink: a twist in a line. The figurative sense, an odd quirk or whim, shows up in 1803 in American English, in the writings of Thomas Jefferson.

The sexual meaning is much younger. According to the same source, kink is only recorded from 1973 in the sense of a sexual preference or fetish. That is nearly fifteen years later than the adjective kinky, which has carried that charge since 1959. The image underneath has stayed the same the whole time: a bend in something that otherwise runs straight.

There is a nice loop in that. A word that left the Dutch language as a twist in a line came back four centuries later as the most used word in the scene.

Why people do kink

Because there is something in it that ordinary sex does not deliver, and that something is different for each person.

The common denominator is usually not the act but the intensity. Something happens that demands full attention, and for many people that attention has become rarer than sex itself. On top of that, a kink gives a direction: you know what works, and that saves guessing.

• For the person with the kink, the searching falls away. There is something you know works, even on a day that otherwise went badly.
• For a partner, a stated kink turns the guesswork into a cue you can actually do something with.
• For a couple, the gain rarely lies in the act and almost always in the conversation that had to come first.

There is also research that knocks down the opposite expectation. Ten Brink, Coppens, Huys, and Morrens compared, for Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 771 BDSM practitioners with 518 people from the general population. Practitioners turned out to have a secure attachment style more often, and on child abuse or unwanted sexual experiences the researchers found no significant difference.

One thing kink is not: a fix for something else. Anyone hoping to replace a stalled conversation with it is in for a letdown, because it actually brings more talking. And anyone who notices that nothing else gets going outside that one kink no longer has a preference but a narrowing.

How people deal with their kink

Most people find out by accident and then do nothing with it for years.

The usual course: you notice from a book, a film, or a remark that something sticks. After that usually comes a long stretch of only reading. Only when there is someone to tell does anything happen, and that conversation is almost always the hardest step, not the play.

How people relate to it after that varies, and it has been studied. Sprott and Williams set out, in Current Sexual Health Reports, two ways scientists understand kink side by side: as a kind of sexual orientation, and as a form of serious leisure. Both turned out to be well founded. The orientation approach fits a relatively small group of heavily involved practitioners; the leisure approach covers the much broader group who do it now and then. For most people the second holds.

In practice, then, kink rarely takes the form of a scene night. It is an evening at home where something goes differently than usual, with what is and is not allowed agreed beforehand, and afterward a conversation about how it was.

Misconceptions about kink

“Kink is the same as BDSM.” Kink is the wider circle. All BDSM is kink, but a diaper fetish, foodplay, or arousal from a certain material falls outside those four letters and is still kink. The other way around, it is even possible to do kink for years without ever doing anything about power or pain.

“Kink comes from a trauma.” That is the oldest assumption in this field, and it does not hold up. Brown, Barker, and Rahman went through sixty studies for The Journal of Sex Research and found little support for psychopathological or psychoanalytic explanations. In the samples studied, practitioners had no higher rates of mental health complaints or relationship problems than anyone else.

“Kink is rare” and “everyone does it” are both true, depending on how you ask. The same review notes that 40 to 70 percent of men and women alike have a BDSM-tinged fantasy at some point, while about 20 percent also do something with it. The Dutch figures are lower, because the question is put differently: in the Sexual Health Monitor 2023 from Rutgers, 10 percent of men and 7 percent of women say they occasionally desire BDSM, and 6 and 4 percent respectively acted on it. Having a fantasy and acting on it are two different measurements.

“Kink is a condition.” Rutgers classifies BDSM and fetish under the paraphilias, and describes those as atypical sexual interests or preferences, not as illness. Psychiatry speaks of a disorder only when someone suffers from it or when there is harm; exactly where that line runs is on the page about fetish.

What I see of it myself

I am Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. I rarely hear the word kink in my work. People use it only once they have been reading for a while.

The kink itself is almost never complicated. What is complicated is the estimate someone makes in advance of what another person will think of it. That estimate almost always turns out too gloomy, and it is sometimes ten years old.

Beyond that, I see how small it usually is. People expect to turn up with something exceptional and it turns out to be a hand in the hair, or being held down. With the people who do come with something unusual, the conversation about it is not harder but easier, because they have had to explain it more often.

What you can do yourself

• Name one thing, not your whole list. One sentence about what appeals to you opens the conversation; a list asks for a verdict on the whole.
• Say straight away how much it weighs. Something that makes you curious calls for a different answer than something your sex life turns on, and your partner cannot hear that difference if you do not say it.
• Agree on what will not happen before you agree on what will. Naming a limit is easier than naming a wish, and it makes the wish smaller to speak afterward.
• Tell your doctor if your kink does something physical. Waldura and colleagues surveyed 115 kink practitioners about their experiences in health care: fewer than half were open with their own provider, and expected stigma was the most cited reason to stay quiet. A doctor who does not know where bruises come from is looking in the wrong direction.
• Cut your kink up and take the smallest piece. A quarter of an hour with just that one element already tells you whether the fantasy survives outside your head too.
• Go to a professional as soon as your kink starts getting in your way, or as soon as it touches people who cannot consent to it. That is where a preference ends and something else begins.

More reading on kink

On this site the big parts are worked out separately: BDSM for everything about power and pain, fetish for the preference that fixes on one thing, consent for the condition it all rests on, and the BDSM test for anyone who first wants to know roughly where they stand. The article BDSM for beginners is the practical way in.

Beyond this site, the review article by Brown, Barker, and Rahman gives the best picture of what has actually been researched about kink, and the Sexual Health Monitor from Rutgers provides the only representative Dutch figures, free to read.

Where this fits on this site

There is a difference between knowing what your kink is and experiencing it once, and for most people the threshold sits in that first conversation. I have that conversation every day, and nothing has to come of it. What happens during an evening, and what we agree on beforehand, is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Sexual Health Monitor 2023. Rutgers, in cooperation with RIVM and Statistics Netherlands (CBS), 2024. National monitor for which 15,638 adults aged 18 and over completed the full questionnaire, with a sample drawn by CBS from the Personal Records Database and fieldwork between September 27, 2022 and February 28, 2023. Provides section 8.4 on the paraphilias, described as atypical sexual interests or preferences, and table 8.4.1 among 7,187 people aged 25 and over: 10 percent of men and 7 percent of women occasionally desire BDSM, 6 and 4 percent respectively act on it.
• A Systematic Scoping Review of the Prevalence, Etiological, Psychological, and Interpersonal Factors Associated with BDSM. Brown, Barker & Rahman, The Journal of Sex Research 57(6), 781–811, 2020. Systematic review of sixty studies; provides that BDSM-related fantasies occur in 40 to 70 percent of both men and women while about 20 percent also practice it, that there is little support for psychopathological or psychoanalytic explanatory models, and that practitioners in the samples studied show no higher rates of mental health complaints or relationship problems.
• The Psychology of Kink: a Survey Study into the Relationships of Trauma and Attachment Style with BDSM Interests. Ten Brink, Coppens, Huys & Morrens, Sexuality Research and Social Policy 18(1), 1–12, 2021. Questionnaire study from 2017 among 771 BDSM practitioners and 518 non-practitioners; provides that no significant difference was found for childhood abuse or unwanted sexual experiences, that practitioners more often had both a secure and an anxious-preoccupied attachment style, and the conclusion that the findings do not support the hypothesis of BDSM as a poorly working coping strategy.
• Fifty Shades of Stigma: Exploring the Health Care Experiences of Kink-Oriented Patients. Waldura, Arora, Randall, Farala & Sprott, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 13(12), 1918–1929, 2016. Qualitative study among 115 kink practitioners in the San Francisco area; provides that most would want to be open with their provider but that fewer than half were with their current provider, with expected stigma as the most cited reason, and the worry that doctors mistake their practice for intimate partner violence.
• Is BDSM a Sexual Orientation or Serious Leisure?. Sprott & Williams, Current Sexual Health Reports 11(2), 75–79, 2019. Review article; provides that there is strong support for both views, that the orientation approach focuses on a relatively narrow segment of heavily involved participants, and that the leisure approach covers the broad range of participation and experience.
• kink. Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary. Provides the English kink from the 1670s as a sailor’s term for a twist in a rope, borrowed from the Dutch kink, the figurative sense of a quirk or whim from 1803 in Thomas Jefferson, and the sexual sense from 1973 against 1959 for kinky.

Related terms

• BDSM. The biggest part of kink, with the six words behind the four letters.
• Kinky. The same word as an adjective, and the question of when something earns that name.
• Fetish. The kink that fixes on one object, material, or body part.
• Consent. The condition that separates kink from abuse, with the layers consent is made of.
• BDSM test. The online questionnaire many people use to find their first words for their kink.
• Edgeplay. The corner of kink where the risk cannot be removed.
• FetLife. The network where people put their kink as a list on a profile.
• Kinkster. The person who counts themselves as into kink, and what that label does and does not say about someone.
• Kinklist. The list where you fill in yes, maybe, or no per act before you talk about it.
• Vanilla. The opposite, and the word the scene uses for everything that is not kink.