One of the most common sources of factual debate within BDSM discussions is the relative breakdown of tops and bottoms, men and women, gay, straight, and bisexual kinky people. Unfortunately, in the past no single study of kink combined the broad survey methods needed to answer these questions with the question sets themselves. Moreover, the role of transgendered and genderqueer persons in kink does not seem to have been a focus of surveys to date.
First Attempt: Combining Previous Studies
What follows is a very provisional “best guess” at these ratios. It begins with the gender ratios found by Brame (2000) and then confirmed by Richters et al (2008). I've then overlaid the statistics for kink roles and sexual orientation from a number of other studies, relying heavily on Bienvenu and Jacques (1999). Since there are no consensus figures here, this is a very imprecise, unscientific process. Nevertheless, it seemed useful to include it here since it is the closest approximation at present to a widely sought-after result.
Imagine one hundred randomly selected kinky people, placed on a five-point scale of bottom-to-top-ness, and a seven-point Kinsey scale. We get a breakdown roughly as follows. The first number in each cell represents women, the second men.
| Bottom | Switch | Top | |||
| Heterosexual | 2/5 | 3/7 | 2/6 | 1/4 | 2/6 |
| 2/2 | 4/3 | 3/3 | 2/2 | 3/2 | |
| 1/0 | 2/0 | 2/0 | 1/0 | 1/0 | |
| Bisexual | 0/0 | 1/0 | 1/0 | 1/0 | 1/0 |
| 0/0 | 0/0 | 0/0 | 0/0 | 0/0 | |
| 0/1 | 1/1 | 1/1 | 1/1 | 1/1 | |
| Homosexual | 0/2 | 1/3 | 1/3 | 0/2 | 1/3 |
Some observations, which obviously need to be treated very skeptically, emerge from these numbers.
The modal person involved in kink is a straight male who mainly identifies as a bottom, followed by straight male switches and heterosexual male tops.
Straight men who always or mainly bottom outnumber their choice of partner (straight women who always or mainly top) by more than three to one.
The same is not true for straight women. Straight men who always or mainly top outnumber straight women who always or mainly bottom by two to one.
It follows that—all else being equal—women should have a relatively easy time finding an M/f relationship, while men should have a relatively difficult time finding an F/m relationship. This seems to be consistent with most narratives by kinky people.
There are a number of gay or largely gay kinky men, and a number of largely straight kinky men who have some attraction to other men. However, the mid-range of bisexuality for kinky males is almost unoccupied.
The numbers for lesbians are so scarce, and so confusing, that we really can't draw any conclusions.
There is "bisexual valley" at Kinsey 5. Almost no one seems to identify as just-a-little-gayer-than-bi.
There is "bisexual valley" at Kinsey 5. Almost no one seems to identify as just-a-little-gayer-than-bi.
I have one particular issue with the method here.
ReplyDeleteYou say, "Imagine one hundred randomly selected kinky people, placed on a five-point scale of bottom-to-top-ness, and a seven-point Kinsey scale."
But 100 is far too small a population to draw meaningful conclusions; you have a set up where you have 70 gender/orientation/kink combinations (2 genders * 7 orientation levels * 5 kink levels) which means that if these were evenly distributed, you would find just 1.4 people per category. The error margin is just too great to be sustainable, especially given the admission that the process is quite weak.
I agree.
ReplyDeleteI spent a lot of time deliberating whether or not to even present this chart. What convinced me, in light of other instances on the internet, was that if I don't do this (with access to the raw data and some degree of meticulousness), other people will try to do it based on the condensed data that I am providing elsewhere on this site.
There is such a strong demand for some version of these numbers that bloggers (and authors like Farley) routinely make them up from whole cloth. I would rather provide something based on the extant data, however tentative it may be.
This weblog is awesome. Brett Kahr has also done a survey of 19,000 people on all kinds of sexuality and for sub/Dom its 33%/27%. His book is "sex and the psyche".
ReplyDelete