248,025 Kink Archetypes

5 Surprising Takeaways from the Anonymous Data

Note: This article was previously published at 18,266 results. The most interesting change was that with a larger population, the sub/switch/dom(me) divide is less equal and more skewed sub/switch.

I’ve always loved online quizzes. Buzzfeed told me which Disney Princess I am, and whether I’m Team Edward or Team Jacob (obviously Team Edward). I wanted to work on a prediction algorithm to tell you not whether you’re more of a vampire or werewolf, but about your kinky profile.

Several tweets about my BDSM archetype quiz hit over 2.5 million views and sent hundreds of thousands of people to the survey to discover their own kink profiles. After I fixed an early bug in data collection, I had 248,025 anonymous profiles to analyze.

The data told me some fascinating things about how we see ourselves and, more importantly, what gets us all off. Here are five things I found after looking into the minds of all these people.

The Setup

Before the quiz starts, I ask you to predict your top two traits out of twenty. You pick from categories like sadist, masochist, brat, rope bunny, puppeteer — whatever you think defines you. Then you answer 70 questions on a scale from “Not at all” to “Completely.”

Brat was the single most popular self-prediction. About 1 in 4 people (21.2%) chose it as one of their top two traits. But only 13.9% actually scored brat in their top two. Of the 52,566 people who predicted brat, only 35% were right.

“Brat” in the BDSM sense means something very specific: a submissive who deliberately breaks rules or puts up a fight to provoke correction. The whole point is that someone overpowers you in the end. There are specific questions about rule-breaking, provoking consequences, and wanting to be corrected.

Most self-described brats don’t score high on those questions. They score higher on traits associated with little and prey. The desire to surrender is there, but not the resistance.

Charli XCX’s Brat album turned the word into Collins Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year, defined as someone with a “confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude.” That’s not what the quiz is measuring. In kink, brat isn’t a vibe. It’s a specific behavioral pattern: you fight so someone makes you stop fighting.

Most People Want a Partner Who Feels What They Feel

For every question in the quiz, you answer twice: once for yourself and once for your ideal partner. Across all 17,359,860 answer pairs, I looked at how often people gave the same response for both. 43.9% of the time, the answers were identical. Another 11.2% weren’t identical but still on the same side of the scale. Only 24.3% were true complements, with one person high, the other low.

My assumed model was complementary. The sadist seeks their masochist, the dominant seeks their submissive. But the data says the average person isn’t looking for a polarized dynamic. They’re looking for a shared experience. Someone who gets it because they feel it too.

Most People Lean Submissive, but Not Extremely So

The mirrored interests make sense when you learn that the survey does not break neatly into three equal groups. It leans submissive. When I classify people by whether their trait scores lean dominant, submissive, or balanced, the breakdown is 39.8% submissive, 34.4% switch, 25.8% dominant.

Submissive is the largest category, but no category holds a majority, and more than a third of the sample is still essentially balanced. When I look at raw trait scores, 65.7% of all respondents scored above 50% on at least one complementary pair: sadist and masochist, hunter and prey, rigger and rope bunny. The average person scores above 50% on 8.5 out of 20 traits.

The average polarization score, which is how far someone’s scores lean dom vs sub, on a scale from 0 (perfectly balanced) to 1 (fully one-sided) is 0.30. That’s a real lean, but not an extreme one.

One of Four Want to Hurt Someone and Hold Them After

25.1% of respondents scored 60% or higher on both sadist and nurturer. That’s 62,199 people. This is something many people don’t understand about sadism. They hear “I like to hurt people” and imagine someone cold, who gets off on damage and walks away.

I’m one of those 62,199 people. I’m as sadistic as they come, but I sure do love my aftercare. That’s not a contradiction any more than a surgeon who cuts you open and stitches you back together is a contradiction. The pain is intimate. I want to take you apart because I want to be the one who puts you back together. You can’t separate them.

Those Best Able to Predict Own Traits Had Fewer Overall Strong Traits

Before starting the quiz, everyone predicts their top two traits. 8.1% of people got both right. 46.9% got neither. The difference between the two groups is focused vs. scattered responses. People who got both right scored above 50% on an average of 7.1 traits. People who got both wrong scored above 50% on 8.2.

The people who most correctly predicted their traits have more concentrated profiles. They score high on a few things and low on the rest.

The people who couldn’t predict themselves aren’t wrong about who they are. They just have a lot of ‘selves.’ If you’re drawn to 8 different things roughly equally, picking your top two is a coin flip.

What the Data Says About All of Us

Half of you surprised yourselves. More than half want a partner who mirrors them, not one who completes them. A third of you don’t lean dom or sub at all. A quarter of you want to hurt someone and hold them after. And the people who could predict their results aren’t the ones with the most experience — they’re the ones with the fewest competing interests.

248,025 people told me who they think they are. The algorithm told them something different. The gap between those two things is the most interesting place in all of kink psychology, because that’s where the parts of yourself you’re getting to know finally get a name.

In conclusion, I have not yet deployed an algorithm for predicting whether you’re Team Edward or Team Jacob based on these answers. But know that this is the ultimate goal.

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