Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author s and the source are credited. Unconventional sensual, erotic, and sexual behaviors herein referred to as kink behaviors investigated by academia are based largely on clinical and criminal cases, and most published, peer-reviewed, quantitative research on these behaviors is based almost exclusively on male participants.
For this study, information was collected and analyzed from female participants recruited from the kink community, using a non-clinical and non-criminal sample. We explored and described the preferences and diversity of more than sensual, erotic, and sexual behaviors found among these participants, along with recommendations for continued research. Gaining a better understanding of the breadth and depth of activities engaged in by female kink practitioners could benefit educators, counselors, therapists, medical doctors, and other professionals when interacting with members of the kink community.
Almost all of these clinical case studies were based on male clients. Early sexologists, such as von Krafft-Ebing and Freud, contended that masochism was the natural state for women; therefore, it was impossible to study female sexual masochism von Krafft-Ebing, By the s, organizations based on erotic preferences such as sadomasochism were sufficiently developed for sex researchers to acknowledge their existence and to begin to study them Queen, It has since been established in scientific literature that community-based empirical studies outside of clinical and criminal contexts are necessary.
For example, in the Breslow et al. Thus, a total of 40 women were examined. In order to compare their data with the Breslow study, researchers Levitt et al. From their original subsample of 47 women, 2 surveys were illegible and 11 were assumed by the researchers to be SM prostitutes. Thus, the subsample for analysis consisted of 34 non-prostitute, sadomasochistically-oriented women Levitt et al. In part due to these small sample sizes, it was conjectured that few women participated in kink and those who did participate did so only at the request of a male partner or for financial gain Breslow et al.
Kink was believed to be a male-only phenomenon with little to no intrinsic interest for women. These assumptions do not leave room for the idea that women enjoy these activities for their own sensual or erotic pleasure nor does it explain the existence of women-only kink events or organizations.
