The data · 6 min read

What 970,000 People Said About Kink

The largest survey of sexual interests ever run is not a clinical study — it is a self-selected online sample. It is still the most useful picture we have of how ordinary having a kink actually is, and it lines up with what a sex therapist hears all day.

Written and clinically reviewed by Vanessa Cushing, LPC, NCC, MS — AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist, licensed in Virginia & Florida. The Cushing Counseling team covers Virginia, DC, Maryland & Florida.

What the survey is

Aella, an independent researcher who writes at Knowingless, built a long questionnaire about sexual interests and put it online. It went viral — largely through TikTok — and has since collected roughly 970,000 responses, which makes it the largest dataset of its kind that anyone has assembled.

In February 2026 she published a representative subsample of 15,503 responses as an open dataset on Zenodo, with a DOI so it can be cited. That is unusual and worth saying plainly: most people making claims about how common a sexual interest is will not show you their numbers.

• Approximately 970,000 total responses collected.
• 27 kink categories surveyed, alongside personality and demographic questions.
• A 15,503-response representative subsample published openly (Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18625249).
• Not peer-reviewed, and not a random sample of any country's population.

The headline numbers

Two figures from the published subsample do most of the work, and both point the same way.

What the data cannot tell you

This matters more than the percentages, and the researcher says it herself: the people who answered skewed young, female, liberal and non-cisgender. A self-selected online sample tells you about the people who selected themselves.

So the survey cannot give you a real prevalence rate for any specific interest in the general population, it cannot tell you what causes an interest, and it cannot tell you whether anything in it is healthy for a particular person. Nothing in a dataset settles a question about one life.

• No random sampling, so no valid national prevalence figures.
• Self-reported answers, with all the honesty and memory limits that carries.
• Correlations only — nothing in it establishes cause.
• It says nothing about consent, safety or context, which are the parts that actually matter clinically.

Why a sex therapist finds it useful anyway

Almost nobody arrives in therapy asking for statistics. They arrive asking a shame question wearing statistics as a costume: how common is this, how many people are like me, is this the strangest thing you have heard this week.

The honest clinical answer has always been that unusual-feeling interests are extremely common and that being into several things at once is typical. What this dataset adds is that the answer no longer has to rest on one clinician's caseload. Nearly a million people answered, and “only one kink” was the rare profile.

• It reframes the question from “is this normal” to the one that matters: is this consensual, and is it costing you something.
• It normalizes having many interests, which is what most clients quietly assume is the abnormal part.
• It gives partners a reference point that is not a search-engine horror story.

The question the numbers replace

In our sessions the useful line is not statistical. An interest is worth working on when it is non-consensual, when it involves someone who cannot consent, or when it has stopped feeling like a choice and is taking more of your life than you want to give it. Short of that, frequency is beside the point.

That is also why we do not spend sessions hunting for the event that “explains” a kink. Sometimes there is history worth understanding and sometimes there simply isn't. What we work on is shame, secrecy, disclosure and the cost of hiding — the parts that actually hurt.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

• Is ABDL Normal? — The question almost everyone arrives with, answered honestly.
• Kink-Affirming Therapy — How we work with kink, BDSM and fetish without pathologizing it.
• ABDL & Age Regression Therapy — The main page: what kink-affirming ABDL therapy looks like with us.
• What Does ABDL Mean? — Plain-language glossary: AB, DL, little space, age play, regression.
• My Partner Is Into ABDL — For partners who just found out and don’t know what to think.

Also on this site

• Sex Therapy — How sex therapy works and who it helps.
• Couples Therapy — For partners working out what they can share, hold and negotiate.
• LGBTQ+ Affirming Therapy — Queer- and trans-affirming care across our licensed states.
• Fees & Insurance — Rates, out-of-network reimbursement and what to expect.
• Book a free consultation — A short, private call to work out whether this is the right fit.
• Contact us — Questions about coverage, scheduling or fit.

Clinical resources this page draws on

• Big Kink Survey representative subsample (Zenodo) — The open dataset itself — 15,503 responses drawn from the roughly 970,000 collected, with a citable DOI.
• Aella — “Here's my Big Kink Survey dataset, raw” (Knowingless) — The researcher's own write-up of the dataset release, including sampling caveats.
• Aella — “Who took my Big Kink Survey?” — Demographic breakdown of respondents; useful for judging how far the findings generalize.
• AASECT — American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists — The certifying body for sex therapists in the United States.
• National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) — Advocacy and provider education on consensual kink, including its Kink Aware Professionals work.