Kinky

What is kinky?

Kinky is an adjective for a preference, act, or person that falls outside the usual sexual paths. Kinky says nothing about how far something goes and everything about the comparison with what counts as normal. So who or what is called kinky depends on the surroundings that speak the word.

When is something called kinky?

Kinky is a judgment, not a category, and that judgment shifts with the time and the company.

Look at how it plays out in practice. Someone says she likes to be held by her wrists. In one conversation the reply is “everybody does that,” in another a silence. The act is the same both times; only the yardstick differs.

What can be measured is how common such acts are. In a nationally representative sample of 2,021 American adults, Herbenick and colleagues mapped fifty sexual acts. At least 20% had tied someone up or been tied up at some point, at least 30% had given a spanking, and at least 22% had done role-play. Going to a BDSM party stayed under 8%. The researchers note right away that more people called an act appealing than had ever done it.

Hence the lopsided ratio this word runs on: what people call kinky, they often do themselves.

Where the word kinky comes from

From curly hair and from twisted rope, and only in 1959 from sex.

The Online Etymology Dictionary records kinky from 1844 in the literal sense: full of twists, curled, kinked. From 1859 “strange, eccentric, peculiar” is added. The sexual sense arrives only in 1959, which puts the adjective a good fourteen years ahead of the noun kink, which carries that charge only from 1973.

That explains right away why the word is so elastic. A twist in a line exists only in relation to the straight stretch beside it, and where that straight stretch lies is set not by the speaker but by their surroundings.

Am I kinky?

There is no honest yes or no to that question, and that is more freeing than it sounds.

The only serious attempt at a line comes from statistics. Joyal, Cossette, and Lapierre put 55 fantasies to 1,516 adults and published the result in The Journal of Sexual Medicine. They called a fantasy rare at 2.3% or less, unusual at 15.9% or less, common above 50%, and typical above 84.1%. The result: only two of the 55 fantasies were rare and nine unusual, while thirty turned out common for at least one of the sexes. Their conclusion is that caution is called for before you call a fantasy unusual, let alone deviant.

• For anyone wondering whether she is going too far, that is the most useful result of the whole field: the chance that your fantasy is statistically special is small.
• For a partner, it takes the charge off the word. Being called kinky is not a diagnosis and not a compliment either.
• For a couple, the conversation shifts from “how kinky are we” to “what do we want,” and that is the question you can actually do something with.

Statistically ordinary is not the same as sensible for you. There are acts many people do that still carry risks, and the number says nothing about that.

Misconceptions about kinky

“Kinky means BDSM.” No. Everything that is BDSM may be called kinky, but the word covers role-play, a preference for a certain material, or sex in an unusual place just as well. Kinky is a judgment about how common something is; BDSM is a description of what happens.

“You are kinky or you are not.” Kinky is not a personality type. Someone can enjoy one thing others find remarkable and have an otherwise completely ordinary sex life. That is more the rule than the exception.

“Kinky is the same as kink.” Kink is the noun for the concept itself: the collection of preferences off the beaten path. Kinky is the adjective you use to place something or someone within it. You have a kink; you, or something, is kinky.

“What is kinky is fixed.” The yardstick shifts. Acts that counted as perverse fifty years ago now sit in population-survey questionnaires, and the results show that a good part of the population knows them.

What I see of it myself

I am Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. “Am I kinky?” is a question I get a lot, and almost never as a request for information. It is a request for reassurance.

The direction is striking. Women usually ask it out of worry that they are going too far; when they tell me what it is about, nine times out of ten it turns out to be something I have already heard more than once that week. The estimate of how exceptional someone is rarely holds up.

And then the reverse case, which comes up less often but does exist: someone who thinks she is not kinky enough and believes something has to be added. That works out worst of all in practice. A preference that is not there cannot be learned.

What you can do yourself

• Replace the question “am I kinky” with “what do I want.” The first asks for someone else’s verdict, the second gives you something to work with.
• Look up the number before you declare yourself exceptional. For most fantasies it is known how common they are, and that is almost always more common than you think.
• Talk not about the label but about the act. “I like it when you hold my hands” lands differently than “I am rather kinky.”
• Do not let yourself be rushed by what you see online. Measuring yourself against the most visible corner of the scene always leaves you short, and that is a bad reason to do anything.
• Stop if something happens only for the label. Becoming kinky is not a goal; at most it is a word someone sticks on you afterward.

More reading on kinky

On this site kink covers the concept itself, with the Dutch figures and the question of how it relates to BDSM. The four letters are explained at BDSM, and fetish is about the preference aimed at one object or body part. Anyone who would rather fill in a questionnaire than read will find at the BDSM test what that test can and cannot do.

Beyond this site, the article by Joyal, Cossette, and Lapierre is the best answer to the question of what unusual actually means, and the research by Herbenick and colleagues is free to read and the most thorough on how often such acts really occur.

Where this fits on this site

If you doubt whether what you want is too much, that is usually not a question for a search engine but for a person who does not bat an eye. That conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. What an evening looks like and how we decide together where the line lies is at the BDSM date.

Sources

• What Exactly Is an Unusual Sexual Fantasy?. Joyal, Cossette & Lapierre, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 12(2), 328–340, 2015. Internet survey of 1,516 adults (799 women, 717 men) with 55 fantasies. Provides the four statistical classes. Rare at 2.3% or less, unusual at 15.9% or less, common above 50%, typical above 84.1%. The result that only two fantasies were rare and nine unusual while thirty turned out common for at least one sex and five typical, and the advice to be careful with the label unusual, let alone deviant.
• Sexual diversity in the United States: Results from a nationally representative probability sample of adult women and men. Herbenick, Bowling, Fu, Dodge, Guerra-Reyes & Sanders, PLOS ONE 12(7), e0181198, 2017. Nationally representative sample of 2,021 American adults (975 men, 1,046 women) from the GfK KnowledgePanel, with fifty sexual acts. Provides that at least 20% had ever tied someone up or been tied up, at least 30% had ever given or received a spanking, at least 22% had done role-play, that visiting BDSM parties stayed under 8%, and the observation that more Americans called acts appealing than had ever taken part in them.
• kinky. Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary. Provides kinky from 1844 in the sense full of twists, curled, or kinked, the sense strange or eccentric from 1859, and the sexual sense from 1959, against 1973 for the noun kink.

Related terms

• Kink. The noun kinky is the adjective of, with the figures and the origin.
• BDSM. The biggest part of what people call kinky, with the six words behind the four letters.
• Fetish. The preference fixed on one object or body part and rarely about power.
• BDSM test. The questionnaire people use to find their first words for what they want.
• Boundary. The concept that does say something about you, unlike the word kinky.
• Consent. The condition that decides whether something can happen, no matter how common or uncommon it is.
• Kinkster. The noun you use about yourself, where kinky is someone else’s verdict.
• Kinklist. The tool for anyone who wants to move from the label to the acts.
• Outing. What happens when someone else makes this label public for you.
• Vanilla. The opposite, with the false friend vanilla sex that means something different in Dutch.