How many kinky people exist? Are there multitudes of us? The data support an emphatic YES. So do historic records. Yet, somehow kink seemed at once rare and profoundly dangerous. Culture labeled fetishists and kinky folks as abnormal, perverted, and pathological.
The First Hint that Kink Was Not Rare
The first time I logged onto a BDSM site, well, it wasn’t called BDSM! In New York City, we called it SM, B&D, and sometimes D&S. When I joined LoveLine, a pre-Internet NYC Bulletin Board System (BBS), there were dozens of members posting. Through the magic of Bulletin Board software, LoveLine connected to other adult-oriented boards in Denver, Atlanta, Sunnyvale (CA), and a few other cities around the U.S. I was astonished.
Was it possible there were other people who shared my fantasies? I thought my kink/fetish desires were unique to me, the freaky girl on the block.
Kink Contains Multitudes
Until that moment, I didn’t think there was anyone just like me! My fantasies fell into the realm of fetishes for leather, bondage, and power exchange. I also fantasized about being captured by men who worshipped me like a goddess. I never told a soul, except in college when I first experimented IRL with a boyfriend who turned out to like bondage as much as I did. After that, I tried to get a couple of boyfriends to explore it with me, but both were kink-negative, so back into the closet I went.
When I got online, I created a bottom handle and a top handle. Little by little, the bottom vanished. My inner dominatrix raged to life, in the grip of a roaring libido. I found my people! A community of people like me. And, indeed, most of the people on the Board were very pervy. They may have had different elements to their fantasies, but it seemed almost everyone liked bondage, leather, and power exchange.
How Many Kink Kin Were There?
I had never dreamed there were so many of us. Adding up the connected boards, I guessed there had to be dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of us around the U.S. Was it possible that there actually might be more? It seemed too good to be true. But I reasoned that if there were hundreds, then there was hope I would find one to date and perhaps love one day.
I was so wrong about the numbers.
In 1987, I left the BBS world and began exploring CompuServe. I typed two search words. First, literature. Second, sex. The Literary Forum was what I expected, but the Human Sexuality Forum was a revelation. Mistress Angelique, as I was known there, was off on a whole new hormonal spike! A few months later, the success of a guest spot I hosted in the Human Sexuality Forum turned into an offer for me to run my own BDSM Board in the Forum.
Not long after, I founded the group and was delighted when about 40 people applied to join in the first few weeks. The software was head and shoulders above all the other places I’d visited, including Prodigy.
Statistical Shock
In 1990, observing how active the group had become, with scores of people posting, I asked my boss to share the numbers on who visited my group. That was when I knew in my heart that kink and fetish drew a far larger audience than anyone had documented. No one at the time had even guessed at the real number. The computer printout my boss sent me, old-style, messy-typed info on perforated computer paper, said that 75,000 people had visited my group. I sat with that for a while.
75,000 in 1990, on a largely hidden, application-required, never-advertised subsection of the vast Human Sexuality Forum. I didn’t realize that many people were even online at the time. Affordable home computers were still new, and print media loved publishing articles predicting their doom. Instead, print media today are dying, and the Internet is now a fixture of modern life in most countries.
The Internet Now Stands as the Most Comprehensive Kink Census
It is impossible to know how many of us are out there. Even when we know that clubs exist around the world, we can’t know all the less visible clubs or groups that deliberately stay off the radar. And most likely the single biggest group of kinksters and fetishists are the ones who never tell anyone except, perhaps, a spouse, a partner, or a sex worker.
A few years ago, a couple living in a strictly Muslim country reached out to me for tips on keeping their Femdom/malesub dynamic healthy. Obviously, they could not tell a soul about the lifestyle they loved. They had read up on BDSM, consent issues, contracts, all of it. I saw a very healthy, caring relationship.
After my session with them ended, I was so touched by their journey together, masking their authentic selves and yet growing even closer through the bonds of an incredible mutual trust.
The Internet Is Our Lifeline
I would never have met them if not for the Internet, of course, and that is part of the bigger story. The Internet has connected BDSMers around the globe. Today we know we’re not alone. And if we keep up with the data, the complete picture shows that we contain an uncountable multitude of adults, everyday people leading everyday lives everywhere except in their private spaces.
NOTE: This blog is abridged from Chapter 9 of my upcoming book, Fetish Uncensored, an in-depth guide to the reality and the science of fetishism. It’s the kind of writing that gets me in trouble on social media; only books allow me freedom of speech these days. I’m hoping to get it finished in the next month. You can look forward to more tantalizing excerpts on the blog in the weeks ahead.
Photo credit: Pratyeka / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
