Kinky Sex Is Easier to Find Than Ever, and That May Not Be a Good Thing

The kink community isn’t thrilled about the deluge of new apps that lower the bar for entry.

VICE

ByMARK HAYandLARRY FITZMAURICE

inkD is an app promising to help users “fulfill their golden shower fantasies.” Essentially Tinder for kinky folk, the app’s developers see their creation as an innovative platform for people looking to find niche sexual co-conspirators, or to easily explore their erotic desires. But KinkD isn’t quite as novel as it might seem.

The last two years have seen the launch of a number of kinky Tinder parallels—like Kinkstr, KNKI, and Whiplr, which Gawker called “Tinder in leather chaps.” Whiplr hit a million downloads earlier this year, but spokespeople from KNKI and KinkD tell me they have tens of thousands of regular users and are logging thousands more every month. Openly riding on kink’s pop exposure in the post-Fifty Shades era, these apps all seem to believe they’re doing something good for the kinky community—and humanity—by facilitating some casual S&M exploration.

“Everyone has the potential to be kinky, and most people have a reserved desire to be,” said KinkD co-founder Jeffrey Cheung, who found domination via porn relatively recently and used it to rekindle his married sex life. “Dating apps will help the kink community expand quickly.”

But to some in kink society, these apps aren’t such a simple good. For many, kink is more than just a set of acts. It involves community and education, helping kinksters and the curious alike explore their boundaries, meet others, and learn and adopt the norms of safe and consensual best kinky practice. “Fundamentally, what makes [it] a subculture is that it is social,” said Michal Daveed of The Eulenspiegel Society (TES), America’s oldest fetish education and community group. “It’s always been part of how we grow as individuals and a community, share skills, strengthen our values of communication, and care for one another. There’s a degree of safety to this, as well as an established behavioral etiquette.” Such social spaces are major venues for kinksters to meet one another, but also for newbies to learn vital ropes—sometimes literally.

These new apps paint kink as an identity or regular practice, similar to how people in the scene depict themselves, and they try to match people on anything from simple acts (like pegging) to fairly intense fetishes (like breath play). Yet while some apps nod to community and education, they cannot ensure it, or police norms, as effectively as old-school kink spaces. Still, no one’s out to kill these apps. “It’s great to have increased opportunities for kink practitioners, or the curious, to meet each other,” said Daveed. But he and others believe apps ought to do a little more soul searching about how to encourage safe, sane, and consensual kink rather than just provide a new meat market on which anyone, even non-initiates, can wander blindly into any sort of kinkiness.

Traditional kink spaces take on diverse forms, ideally making them welcoming to any level of fetish knowledge or mode of social being. Sure, many people think of kink events or spaces in terms of sex dungeons or play parties, in which people enact or watch fetish tableaus. But there are also formal or informal educational events, and “munches,” meetings in public spaces to socialize—an especially welcoming environment for newcomers. These venues aren’t perfect; abusers can still infiltrate them, and novices can still wind up in some odd situations. However, they are welcoming and well-crafted spaces made to connect and educate all sorts of folks. …