Do men and women have different kinks, and by how much

The popular picture has men with the kinks and women going along. The surveys find a smaller gap, confined to a few interests. Petersen and Hyde's 2010 meta-analysis pooled 834 samples and seven national data sets on 30 sexual behaviours and attitudes. Most gender differences came out small. Four reached a medium size: masturbation, pornography use, casual sex and attitudes toward casual sex, with men reporting more of each.

Kink follows the same pattern. Men report interests involving new or additional partners about three times as often as women. On restraint, impact and role play the sexes answer within a few points of each other, and on being dominated or taking pain women report more.

Every study below sorted its respondents into men and women and reported nothing on anyone else. The numbers describe those two groups as each survey defined them.

Where men and women answer alike

The largest US data set on kink appeal finds bondage, spanking, whipping and role play about equally attractive to both sexes.

Herbenick and colleagues surveyed a nationally representative probability sample of 2,021 adults in 2015 (975 men, 1,046 women) and asked how appealing each of more than 50 behaviours was. The table combines the survey's two appealing answers. The researchers marked a sex difference where a chi-squared test reached p below .001, and none of these rows met it.

Behaviour	Men who found it appealing	Women who found it appealing
Tying up or being tied up	29.5%	29.2%
Spanking or being spanked	26.0%	30.6%
Playful whipping	20.7%	20.0%
Blindfolding or being blindfolded	36.0%	34.0%
Role play with a partner	40.1%	35.0%

For the core practices of BDSM, the survey found no reliable difference between the sexes. Rough sex (42.1 against 40.0 percent) and playful biting (44.5 against 43.2) sit in the same band. Bondage, spanking and roleplay all rank in the catalog's top ten, and the index estimates their prevalence at 16, 22 and 30 percent of adults.

Appeal ran ahead of practice for both sexes. More people rated each behaviour appealing than had ever tried it, and the people who found a behaviour appealing had higher odds of having done it.

Where the gap is wide

The large differences cluster around extra partners, strangers and watching, and men lead on all of them.

In the Herbenick data, a threesome appealed to 34.1 percent of men and 11.1 percent of women, and group sex to 25.6 against 8.4. Sex with a stranger appealed to 39.3 percent of men and 12.0 percent of women. Watching others do sexual things appealed to 49.7 percent of men and 30.5 percent of women. Each of those differences reached p below .001. Behaviour followed: 18 percent of men and 10 percent of women reported a threesome in their lifetime.

Joyal and Carpentier's 2017 survey of 1,040 Quebec adults, weighted to match the province, found the same gap for voyeurism. Sixty percent of men and 34.7 percent of women reported an interest in voyeurism as the survey defined it from the DSM criteria. The voyeurism article separates that desire from the crime.

Two reversals run the other way. Wearing lingerie or sexy underwear appealed to 79.7 percent of women and 38.2 percent of men, and experiencing pain as part of sex to 14.2 percent of women and 8.5 percent of men. Both differences reached p below .001.

Dominance and submission by sex

Both sexes fantasise about both roles, and the sexes lean in opposite directions.

Joyal, Cossette and Lapierre asked 1,516 adults in 2015 (799 women, 717 men) to rate 55 fantasies. Their percentages:

Fantasy	Women	Men
Being dominated sexually	64.6%	53.3%
Dominating someone sexually	46.7%	59.6%
Being tied up for sexual pleasure	52.1%	46.2%
Tying someone up for sexual pleasure	41.7%	48.4%

A majority of men fantasised about being dominated, and nearly half of women about dominating. The authors found submission and domination themes common in both sexes and correlated with each other, and a single submissive fantasy predicted the total fantasy score for men and women alike. A person who reports one role tends to report the other, which is the pattern the switching entry describes.

Holvoet and colleagues reached the same conclusion from a sample of 1,027 adults representative of Belgium in 2017. Interest in dominant and submissive activities was comparable and highly intercorrelated. Men scored higher than women on BDSM interest and on fetish interest, measured across 54 activities and 14 fetishes.

In the catalog, dominance and submission leads the index at an estimated 45 percent of adults. Submission alone sits second at 45 percent, and dominance fourth at 25.

The clinical categories and the fetish gap

When surveys ask about the paraphilias the DSM names, men report more of most of them, and the exceptions are masochism and, in some samples, fetishism.

Joyal and Carpentier found no statistically reliable sex difference in interest in fetishism or masochism, and masochism went with higher satisfaction with one's sex life. Voyeurism and frotteurism were reported more by men. Castellini and colleagues surveyed 775 Italian university students in 2018 and found men ahead on voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism and frotteurism, and women ahead on fetishism and masochism.

The largest sample finds a wider gap. Bártová and colleagues questioned an online representative sample of 10,044 Czech adults in 2021 (5,023 men and 5,021 women). Of the men, 31.3 percent reported at least one paraphilic preference; of the women, 13.6 percent. Men also reported acting on almost every paraphilic pattern more often. The two exceptions were beating or torture, and humiliation or submission.

The samples disagree because they measure different things. Joyal and Carpentier asked whether a person had ever been sexually aroused by a described scenario, which casts a wide net. Bártová asked about sexual preference, the stronger claim, across five separate dimensions. The word fetish also carries two senses, the everyday and the clinical, which the kink versus fetish article separates. In the clinical sense, arousal that depends on an object, the case series skew almost entirely male, as the article on why people have kinks sets out.

Practice shows the smallest numbers. In Richters and colleagues' Australian telephone survey of 19,307 people, 2.2 percent of sexually active men and 1.3 percent of women had engaged in BDSM in the previous year.

What the measurement adds to the gap

Part of every gap comes from how the question was asked, and one study accounted for the whole of it with a single variable.

Dawson, Bannerman and Lalumière surveyed 305 men and 710 women online in 2016. Men reported more arousal, or less repulsion, toward most paraphilic acts. The authors tested neurodevelopmental stress, mating effort, impulsivity, masculinity and femininity, and socially desirable responding as explanations. One variable mattered: sex drive fully mediated the difference, and once it was accounted for, the gap between the sexes disappeared.

Survey mode moves the numbers too. Joyal and Carpentier ran their survey both by landline telephone and online, and the online mode produced more acknowledgment of paraphilic interest. If men and women differ in how much they hold back from an interviewer, that difference shows up in the survey as a difference in interest.

Self-report and the body also agree less for women. Chivers and colleagues' 2010 meta-analysis of 132 laboratory studies found a correlation of .66 between what men said aroused them and what a genital measure recorded, and .26 for women. An earlier Chivers study in 2004 found that women's genital arousal responded to both male and female stimuli regardless of orientation, where men's tracked the sex they preferred.

What the catalog index shows

The catalog estimates one prevalence per interest across adults of both sexes, and the gap stays invisible in that number.

Voyeurism sits seventh on the index at an estimated 46 percent, a figure between the 60 percent of men and 34.7 percent of women in the Quebec survey. The threesome and group sex entries each carry an estimated 30 percent, a blend of a one-in-three male figure and a one-in-ten female one. Bondage at 16 percent and spanking at 22 describe the two sexes about equally well, because the underlying surveys found them close.

Where a survey shows the sexes within a few points, the index estimate describes either sex; where it shows a gap of two or three times, the estimate falls between the two figures and matches neither. The most common kinks article reads the ranking in full, and the methodology page explains how each estimate is built from its sources.