As anyone in the BDSM community knows, communication is touted as essential to good BDSM. Aside from consent, there is perhaps nothing that kinksters value more. And now science is acknowledging the benefits of communication in BDSM. An April 2024 study confirms that communication is in fact directly responsible for sexual satisfaction among BDSM participants. Here’s what you need to know about the study.
What was the study?
The study authors hypothesized that BDSM practitioners communicate more directly about sex than vanilla people, which, in turn, increases sexual satisfaction. To test this hypothesis, they recruited 376 participants to take a survey between May and June 2023 that included questions about demographics, indirectness of communication, sexual satisfaction, and BDSM participation. Of the participants, 100 did not engage in BDSM, and the remaining 276 did. The majority of the participants lived in the United Kingdom or the U.S. and were recruited via social media and online communities as well as through ads at in-person BDSM events.
What were the findings?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study proved the hypothesis correct: BDSM practitioners reported engaging in more direct communication about sex than non-BDSMers, which is strongly correlated with improved sexual satisfaction. The more interesting finding is that when controlling for other factors, the directness of communication was shown to be responsible for the positive link between BDSM participation and sexual satisfaction. Before this study, there were indications that kinksters were more sexually satisfied than vanilla folk, but it was unclear what part communication played in that.
The study authors posit that one explanation for these findings is that the BDSM community “actively deviates from traditional sexual scripts, rewriting their own ‘kink’ scripts through extensive interaction and communication, taking control of their sexuality and owning it.” Another explanation is that because the community values communication so highly and models it via messaging and education, kinksters feel less shame or anxiety about direct communication. This theory is borne out in other studies showing that people who engage in BDSM outside of the community have subpar communication practices compared to kinksters who are associated with the community.
What are the study’s shortcomings?
The main limitation of this study is the sample size of 376 participants, which is fairly small for a study like this. Ideally, this type of study would involve a minimum of 400 people and could go as high as 20,000 people. Finding that many participants for a study related to BDSM is difficult, however, and there were also time and budget constraints for this particular project. The vast majority of participants were from the U.K. or the U.S., so further study is needed in other cultures where communication norms may be different.
Another limitation is that BDSMers in this study were identified via self-report rather than through their actual behavior. This may mean that participants under-reported their involvement in BDSM if they didn’t deem their behavior to be kinky. Future studies would need to assess participants’ behavior to get a more reliable sense of who is kinky.
What’s the main takeaway?
While kinksters have known for some time that communication is key in BDSM, this is the first study to find that communication about sex is directly responsible for sexual satisfaction in BDSM. The study authors note that this may have “implications for the general population, and applications to healthcare settings, therapeutic practice, and broader social systems.”
Much has been written about the benefits of communication and negotiation in BDSM and how these same principles could do wonders for vanilla people’s sex lives as well. Now, there’s some scientific evidence to show that communication is as important as kinky people have been claiming all along. The question is how to get the vanilla world to agree.
Interested in learning more about BDSM research? Check out our other Research Recaps!