Wondering if you should reveal your kinks and fetishes in your dating profile?
As a woman who’s been in and out of the online dating scene for many years, I feel like I’ve seen it all.
A great deal of the crazy stories I’ve amassed came completely out of the blue. They snuck up on me while I was out on coffee dates, or even while I was in the process of becoming intimate with men I thought were totally vanilla. And why did their kinky leanings come as a shock to me?
Simple: their online profiles said things like “easy going, laid back and adventurous”.
How was I to know that was actually code for “dominant, sadomasochistic slave-driver?” In short, I think it’s very important to reveal your kinky desires in your online dating profile, or at the very least get them out in the open before you arrange a first date, and here’s why…
Why You Should Expose Your Kinks in Your Profile
Consent Is at the Heart of Kink
Those of you who consider yourselves kink enthusiasts are probably well educated about the importance of consent when it comes to role-playing or any other form of sexual exploration.
I’m sure you know that without consent, sex of any kind is not okay, and that springing something kinky on an unsuspecting partner actually amounts to non-consensual activity. That said, I do realize there’s a big difference between misrepresenting yourself in an online dating profile and say… choking your partner without permission.
If you don’t want to reveal that much of yourself over the internet, fine. But you should at least be willing to discuss your desires early on before you and your partner invest any real time or energy in things.
The bottom line is that conflicting ideas about what you’re comfortable with in the sack is a deal breaker, so why waste everybody’s time?
You Don’t Want to Come Across as Creepy
My friend and I once had a discussion about what makes a guy creepy. The number one thing we could agree on is that creepiness is the by-product of deception and insincerity.
If you’re meeting a lady for the first time and she has no idea that you would like to tie her up and feed her bananas while your roommate jacks you off with a handful of the discarded peels, YOU my friend are going to come across as creepy. I can guarantee she’ll notice your furtive glance as you try to calculate the number of bananas you might be able to shove into her mouth at once, and it will make her skin crawl.
Why not be totally upfront about it? If you’re a decent guy, what have you got to lose? Own that kinky part of yourself and express it with pride.
If You Ask for It, You just Might Get It
Maybe you’re thinking that I’m full of shit, that no seemingly decent guy would even consider asking for the ole frosted banana parfait (or whatever you kids are calling it these days.)
But what if you took a chance and put it all out there into the vast universe of the internet, only to discover that there’s a whole community of parfait enthusiasts who would love nothing more than to fulfil your every last banana-jamming fantasy? Wouldn’t you just love to get a piece of that? Wouldn’t you honestly prefer to find the right people and get your needs met, rather than try, time and time again to fit your banana-round peg into the square mouth of some poor, unsuspecting stranger? Of course you would. Because you’re not an asshole!
Be up front about your kinky desires right from the start and you’ll be happier for it.
Read: Tips for Attracting More Messages
Get Specific about Fetishes and Kinks in Your Profile
If you have very specific kinds of fetishes and kinks, or if your sex life and romantic relationships depend on those kinks, it’s important to find potential lovers who are compatible.
Adventurous people might get away with just posting a generic profile on a kinky dating site, happy to give anyone’s fetish a go; but if you have specific needs, don’t shy away from putting it all out there.
Not being specific is probably the number one problem in all dating profiles, whether kinky or vanilla, whether a marriage-minded site or a hookup app!
Here’s what you should know about getting specific.
Specificity helps you AVOID wasting time.
Understandably, people don’t want to leave out any possibilities of attraction, so they write stuff like “spiritual person who loves pets and sports.”
It feels like you’re keeping your options open, but you’re not really saying much about yourself. You’ll waste a lot of time politely declining dog enthusiasts and baseball fans if you’re looking for folks who want to take up line dancing with you and enjoy collecting saltwater fish.
You might want a nice kinky Hindu girl you can bring home to Mom and Dad and share your culture with, but now you’ve got all kinds of Jewish babes with sheepdogs!
Don’t be afraid that “lifelong student of Buddhism, vegan animal activist with four cat rescues, daily jogger, and political news junkie” is too specific. The mistake is in thinking that your interests will mean only people with exactly those interests will respond. Not true.
Read: How to Write a BDSM Profile
Being specific about your kinks helps people get a sense of you in and out of bed.
Consider this kinky profile description: “Leather-wearing kinky vegan—I can’t eat them, don’t mind if you do. Water sports—top and bottom. Love role playing, sensation play, and a good spanking. Curious about erotic rope bondage. Curious about many things, but no Mommy or Daddy issues.”
Here, you show your contradictions and complexity. You let people know right away that they don’t have to be vegetarian (if you can’t date a carnivore, you can say so too!) This means less time wasted for both parties. You show that your kinks are varied, but also state your boundaries.
Specific boundaries are just as helpful as specific kinks.
Make it very clear whether or not you expect respondents to share your kink or just be open to them. If you want someone really experienced in rope bondage, for example, say so. If you don’t need to enact something but want someone who accepts that kink, say so. “Love water sports, top or bottom, if you do. If not, lots of other fantasies and fetishes turn me on.”
When something is totally off limits to you, include that in your kinky profile to make sure you don’t get a deluge of requests from incompatible partners.
If you are on a mainstream site like OKcupid and fell uncomfortable sharing your fetish or sexual proclivities, think about joining a niche site, where everyone is kinky!
Read: Best Kinky Dating Sites
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