Methodology
How the index is built
KINKSpec places every human sexual and non-sexual interest on one honest, comparable scale. This is how each entry is defined, classified and scored — in plain terms, with the research it rests on.
- 389
- Entries catalogued
- 11
- Categories
- 264
- Subcategories
- 0–100
- Popularity index
What we catalogue
A broad, encyclopedic view of human interests — named by the everyday word people actually use, with the clinical term kept alongside it.
Fetish
A strong, reliable erotic interest in a specific body part, object, material, act, role or scenario.
Paraphilia
The clinical umbrella term. A paraphilia is not a disorder in itself — it only becomes one when it causes real distress or harm.
Non-sexual fixation
Everyday, non-erotic fixations too — collecting, sensory interests, material obsessions — for the fuller picture.
Every entry sits in exactly one of 11 categories, from Body Parts & Partialism to Clinical Paraphilias, and is written as a neutral, clinical article — never explicit, never instructional.
The 0–100 popularity index
A single headline number per entry — how prominent an interest is across the world, not a measure of worth.
Real-world prevalence is wildly uneven. A handful of interests are held by tens of percent of people; the long tail by well under one in a hundred. Numbers that span so many orders of magnitude pile up near zero on a normal scale — so we measure prevalence on a logarithmic scale. On that scale, prevalence forms a clean bell curve, and the index spreads evenly across the full 0–100 range.
The base-10 logarithm of an interest's prevalence is normally distributed — a bell curve.
index 0–10
24 entries · 6%
index 10–20
30 entries · 8%
index 20–30
61 entries · 16%
index 30–40
71 entries · 18%
index 40–50
85 entries · 22%
index 50–60
72 entries · 19%
index 60–70
29 entries · 7%
index 70–80
11 entries · 3%
index 80–90
4 entries · 1%
index 90–100
2 entries · 1%
A clean, slightly right-leaning spread — mean 40, ranging 2–92. The log scale doing its job.
From prevalence to points
Prevalence is stretched across the index between two anchors — one person in ten thousand at the floor, three in five at the ceiling — so the rarest and most common interests both have room to breathe.
If an interest is held by…
- 0.1%26
- 1%45
- 5%71
- 14%83
- 50%98
Five signals behind every score
Prevalence anchors the index, but four more signals shape it — so a score reflects real-world presence from every angle.
Prevalence
How much of the adult population holds the interest
40%Search interest
Online search and adult-content demand
20%Community size
Size of dedicated communities and forums
18%Cultural visibility
Mainstream and pop-culture awareness
12%Research attention
Volume of academic and clinical study
10%
The five signals are combined with a geometric mean, not a simple average. That choice matters: an interest can't reach the top on one spike alone — it has to score across the board. Something prevalent but invisible in research lands in the middle, where it belongs.
Prevalence tiers
A plain-language band for each entry, from near-universal to vanishingly rare — with how many entries fall in each.
- Ultra-common≥ 20%20 · 5%0
- Very common8 – 20%33 · 8%1
- Common2 – 8%130 · 33%2
- Uncommon0.5 – 2%104 · 27%3
- Rare0.05 – 0.5%76 · 20%4
- Very rare< 0.05%26 · 7%5
Grounded in research
Figures aren't guesses. Every estimate is anchored to published prevalence studies and clinical literature, then kept consistent across the whole catalog.
~50%
of adults report interest in at least one paraphilia.
Feet
are the single most common body-part focus by a wide margin.
4–7%
of people have never had a single BDSM-themed fantasy.
2
fantasies are statistically rare — and both involve a party who cannot consent.
How sure we are
Prevalence research is thin and uneven — so every figure carries a confidence level, and we say so plainly.
- High
- Multiple converging surveys or community datasets agree.
- Medium
- One solid dataset, or several strong indirect proxies.
- Low
- Anecdotal or proxy-only — read it as an order-of-magnitude estimate.
Ethics & care
A reference about human sexuality has to be handled with care. Here's the line we hold.
Clinical and non-explicit
Every entry is written in neutral, encyclopedic language. No pornographic detail, no how-to — descriptions, not depictions.
Completeness, never endorsement
A small number of clinically-recognized paraphilias are inherently harmful or illegal because they require a non-consenting party. These 22 entries appear for completeness only, behind a clear content notice, with harm and legal context — never as endorsement or instruction.
Symbolic illustration
Each entry is illustrated with a single graphite still-life — an object or metaphor that stands in for the idea. Never a person, never an act.
Reference, not advice
KINKSpec is educational. It documents what interests exist and how common they are — it does not give medical, psychological or legal advice.
Limitations
What this index is — and isn't. We'd rather state the caveats than imply false precision.
- Prevalence figures are directional estimates synthesized from heterogeneous sources — clinical surveys, community sizes, search data — not census counts.
- Online and search-based signals over-represent Western, English-speaking people with internet access.
- The catalog aims for breadth over exhaustiveness. New entries are added and the whole index re-scored as better evidence arrives.