The most common kinks, ranked by what the surveys found

Ask a room which kink is the most common and the answers will be exotic, because the question is heard as "which one is the strangest thing a lot of people do". The surveys answer a different question, and their answer is dull: the most common kinks are the ones you would think of first, they are common enough to be a majority interest, and the list falls off a cliff after the first two dozen.

The KINKSpec index ranks 486 interests on a single 0 to 100 scale, built from an estimated prevalence for each entry, anchored to the population surveys, and four behavioural signals. Below, the ranking runs from the top down, then across the tiers, then by family, with the study behind each number; where the index and the popular picture disagree, the survey is quoted.

The top of the index

The top of the index is a short list of dynamics and acts, with one fetish among them.

Rank	Entry	Estimated prevalence	Index
1	Dominance and submission	45%	92
2	Submission	45%	90
3	Bondage	16%	86
4	Dominance	25%	85
5	Foot fetish	14%	83

The next five are roleplay at 81, voyeurism, group sex and spanking tied at 78, and choking kink, also 78. Only 21 of the 474 entries reach an index of 70; the median entry sits at 40.

Prevalence and index are not the same column. Bondage ranks third on an estimated 16 percent, below dominance's 25 percent, because the index also counts search interest, community size, cultural visibility and research attention, and bondage is searched, organised, depicted and studied more than almost anything else in the catalog. Voyeurism, the single most prevalent interest at an estimated 46 percent, ranks seventh for the opposite reason: common in surveys, and quiet everywhere else. The methodology gives the weights; prevalence carries the most, and the four signals can lift or hold an entry by a band.

The numbers come from three surveys. Dominance and submission sit at the top on the strength of Lehmiller's 2018 survey of 4,175 American adults, reported in Tell Me What You Want, in which only 4 to 7 percent of respondents had never had a BDSM fantasy and interest in power exchange was close to a majority finding. Foot fetish sits at fifth on the Scorolli 2007 study of 381 online fetish groups, where feet were the single most common target, and on Lehmiller's figure of roughly one adult in seven. Voyeurism and masochism carry the Joyal and Carpentier 2017 provincial survey of 1,040 Quebec adults, in which both drew interest from well above the 15.9 percent threshold the authors set for a fantasy to count as statistically unusual.

What the surveys measured

Three studies anchor most of the top of the index, and they did not measure the same thing.

Joyal and Carpentier interviewed 1,040 adults weighted to match Quebec on age, sex, education, ethnicity, religion and residence, and asked about desire for and experience of the eight paraphilic categories the DSM names. Nearly half expressed interest in at least one category and about a third had acted on one at least once. Voyeurism, fetishism, frotteurism and masochism each cleared the 15.9 percent line for both men and women, and the authors closed by questioning whether paraphilic can still mean anomalous when the anomalies are this widely shared. The online arm of the survey drew more admissions than the telephone arm, which is a reminder that every prevalence figure in this field is a floor.

Lehmiller asked 4,175 American adults 350 questions about fantasy, not behaviour. Fantasy rates run higher than interest rates, which run higher than behaviour rates, and the catalog's prevalence estimates are pitched at "at least mild interest", between the two. That is why dominance and submission carry 45 percent rather than the 90-plus percent who have ever had the fantasy.

Scorolli and colleagues measured neither fantasy nor interest but participation: the number of groups, members and messages across 381 online fetish communities. It is the only one of the three that ranks fetishes against each other, and its ordering, body parts first at 33 percent, objects associated with the body second at 30 percent, objects unrelated to the body last at 5 percent, is the reason foot fetish outranks every material fetish in the catalog.

The catalog does not pretend these three are one dataset. Each entry's confidence field records how well its estimate is anchored, and the entries near the top are the ones with the most survey behind them.

The tiers

Read across the whole index, the distribution has a shape.

Tier	Prevalence band	Entries
Ultra-common	20% or more	26
Very common	8 to 20%	47
Common	2 to 8%	148
Uncommon	0.5 to 2%	123
Rare and very rare	under 0.5%	130

Seventy-three entries, 15 percent of the catalog, are common enough that at least one adult in twelve reports interest. The middle band, 2 to 8 percent, is the largest single tier and holds most of the named material and body-part fetishes, from leather at an estimated 6 percent to latex at 4. Below that, 253 entries, more than half the catalog, are interests reported by fewer than one adult in fifty, and 130 of them by fewer than one in two hundred. The floor of the index is 2, shared by entries with an estimated prevalence of one adult in ten thousand.

This is a long tail, and on a log scale it is close to a normal curve: the catalog's own statistics put the skewness of log prevalence at about minus 0.6, which is the distribution the methodology assumed and a check that the estimates are at least internally coherent. A short list of interests is shared by a large minority or a majority of adults; a long list is shared by almost nobody; and the exotic examples that come to mind when the question is asked are almost all on the long list.

Common is not the same as popular

The index and the prevalence column disagree most where an interest is widely reported and nobody wants to talk about it.

Frotteurism is the sharpest case. Joyal and Carpentier found it above the 15.9 percent threshold, and the catalog carries an estimated prevalence of 26 percent, which places it in the ultra-common tier. Its index is 43 and its rank 199, because the interest is a paraphilic disorder in both manuals, acting on it is an offence, there is no community and no visibility, and research attention is clinical, not cultural.

Masochism shows the same gap from the other side. At an estimated 23 percent it is ultra-common, and it ranks 22nd with an index of 69, in the same band as impact play and spanking, which describe much of the same behaviour in vernacular words. The clinical name lowers the search interest and raises the research attention, and the two roughly cancel.

The reverse case is an entry whose signals outrun its prevalence. Choking kink carries an estimated 14 percent and an index of 78, tenth overall, because the behaviour has become a subject of public-health research and press attention among young adults in the 2020s. The index is recording that the interest is visible, searched and studied out of proportion to how many people report it, which is the kind of thing a ranking should show and a prevalence figure cannot.

Reading by family

The eleven category families sort the same 486 entries by what the interest is about, and the families do not share a shape.

Acts and Activities, 62 entries, has the highest mean index in the catalog at 51, because it holds the ordinary majority interests: voyeurism, group sex, exhibitionism, oral sex. Power, Roles and Scenarios, 66 entries, is next at 48, carried by the dominance and submission cluster at the top. Clinical Paraphilias, 43 entries, has the lowest mean at 19: it holds the interests defined by their place in the DSM-5-TR and ICD-11, most of which are rare, and the few that are common, masochism and fetishism among them, are common in their non-disordered form.

Non-Sexual Fetishism, 48 entries with a mean of 46, is the third highest and the family readers ask about. Foodie culture ranks twelfth in the whole catalog and ASMR twenty-third. They are there because the word fetish has a non-sexual sense, an ardent attachment to a thing or a practice, that the catalog documents on the same index with the same method, with every page and card marked non-sexual and the entry's first line saying the interest is not erotic. Fifty-five of the 474 entries are non-sexual.

What the ranking is for

A list of the most common kinks is useful for calibration. A reader who arrives at the catalog with one interest and no sense of where it sits can find it, read its prevalence, and see the 473 other entries above and below it. For most readers the interest they came for is in the common or very common tier, shared by somewhere between one adult in fifty and one in five. That is the answer the surveys give, and the ranking exists so that it can be given per entry, with the number, the tier and the study behind it, rather than as a reassurance.

The list will move as entries land and new surveys revise the estimates, and the changelog records every change to the index. The shape will stay: a few dozen interests shared by a large minority of adults, and a long tail of everything else.