— Whether You’re Just Looking or In Deep
To find sexual community online is to embrace the true spirit of the internet! Here are the best options.
By Jenny Singer
In the beginning there was nothing. The internet was without form and void, and darkness was upon the screen. Then the spirit of sex, porn, kink, dating, and fetish websites moved over the face of the web.
To find sexual community online is to join a proud history that stretches back almost as early as the internet itself. When you’re looking for a fetish site, know this: Sex drove some of the internet’s earliest colonizers. “In the 1980s, the internet was frequented by three types of people: government officials, university scholars, and porn seekers,” an article in The Guardian explained in 1990. Now we all live online, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find the high quality fetish sites amidst pop up ads for HOT MILFS NEAR YOU.
Plenty of sweet, wholesome sweater wearers in your life could easily teach a course on navigating sex sites. They practiced in their teen years, trawling chat rooms and video sites, and then perfected the art as adults, making inconspicuous desktop files marked “taxes” and a library of various bookmarked smut. But some of us spent our youths looking at fully dressed pictures of pop stars and flexing our new knowledge of abbreviations on AOL Instant Messenger. So let’s start with the basics.
“A kink is defined as a sexual activity that falls outside of sex that society traditionally considers ‘acceptable.’ That can include everything from role playing to bondage to whips,” Angie Jones wrote in Glamour in 2018. “A fetish technically refers to an attraction to an inanimate object, although this includes body parts, such as feet (like a foot fetish). So a fetish is a type of kink.” Kink is the umbrella term, fetish is a subset. But when people talk about “fetish websites” they often mean something more general—sex sites that offer something outside of the middle-of-the-road, vanilla, traditionally accepted sexuality.
If you have a kink or a fetish, you are not, contrary to cultural messaging, a member of a filthy little minority; you’re fairly normal. A study published in The Journal of Sexual Research in 2016 asked a representative sample of people from Quebec about their sexual interests and found that more than 40% experienced “desire” around fetishism, and more than a quarter had acted on it. The next year, a study of a representative group of Belgian adults found that “46.8% of the total sample had ever performed at least one BDSM-related activity and an additional 22% indicated having (had) fantasies about it.”
Fetishes are not shameful secrets (unless that’s your fetish), and they are not sicknesses (unless that’s hot to you!). They’re a fun quirk of your sexuality, one of many ways to orgasm, and the thing that will allow you to have a decades-long relationship with sex that goes beyond dead-eyed, three-minute intercourse. No need to Google “porn but the kind that I would like.” Let’s take a look at the best fetish sites and sex apps.
Fetlife is the internet’s town square for kinks and fetishes, a super-popular social network that’s often compared to Facebook, though with a fairly obvious twist. It’s not a dating site—it’s designed more broadly to form communities in a culture that maintains stigma around kinky sex, including facilitating meeting up for sexual purposes. FetLife also has a porn component—some free, some that you’ll have to pay for.
“Strap yourself in,” the cheeky copy on Fetish.com greets new readers. The website bills itself as a “kink-positive BDSM community for fetish dating.” There is a dating-app component, but the site also stands out as educational and community driven, featuring bloggy explainers, as well as Reddit-style discussion forums on popular fetishes. A recent search of the latter showed an ongoing conversation about how to successfully incorporate hair-pulling in sex, another about how to use a strap-on. Several conversations involved kink-themed meetups in various cities, and one, which garnered 100 replies, was titled simply, “So be honest what am I doing wrong?”
The old-ish dictum “there’s a Reddit for that” rings especially true when it comes to sexual fetishes. Start with this masterlist of sub (ha) Reddits, which gets as specific as “r/womenincapes,” “r/scatporn,” and “r/smalldicks.” At press time, there were exactly 69 comments on the first pinned conversation in the “Ageplay and Diaper Fetish” subreddit. Sometimes life is beautiful!
Feeld is a dating app that bills itself as “a positive space for humans looking to explore dating beyond the norm.” To that end, Feeld allows daters to create profiles and chat as individuals, couples, or more complex poly-assortments, and encourages cheerful sexual specificity, including around kinks. Sexual orientations and gender are also not limited to just a few options the way they are on most apps. While platforms like Fetlife tend to a pornier, classic sex-shop vibe, Feeld is courting millennials hard with a clean, friendly aesthetic. The ethos of the app emphasizes communication, openness, and consent, as all dating and hookup apps should.
Be not afraid, curious adventurers, of the sinister-sounding phrase HumanSexMap.com. The interactive sex map, created by sex writer Franklin Veaux, is a friendly thing, the kind you might hang on the wall in a sex-positive home. The site is a simply drawn but intricately labeled map of kinks and fetishes. Navigate from “Islands of the Imaginary” (vampire erotica, tentacle sex, ghosts) to the mountains that have group sex to their south and graveyards to their north. Using different-colored digital pins you can mark fetishes by “Tried and liked,” “Tried, didn’t like,” “Want to try,” and “Strictly fantasy only,” and save your map for the future.
Like Feeld, #Open is a dating app attempting to stake a claim for poly and kinky people in a world of “hahahaha I love tacos!”–style vanilla dating apps. “Polyamorous, ethically nonmonogamous, or open? Check. Kinky? Check. LGBTQIA+? Check! You’ll find others who accept and respect your identities and desires,” #Open promises. If you’ve never heard of the app, that might be because last year Google scrubbed it from the App Store, particularly because it contained the keywords kinky dates, as well as words like threesomes. It’s a sad example of kink being needlessly stigmatized in the mainstream.
Think of OnlyFans as Etsy, but for porn. If you somehow missed multiple newscycles about OnlyFans, which launched in 2016 but blew up during the most social-distancing-heavy periods of the pandemic, it’s a digital sexual marketplace. Sex workers market and sell various subscriptions—to erotic photos, videos, and cam sessions, sometimes customizable.
The huge number of sex-content creators gathering in one place and competing for viewers leads to diversity of content. “Some favorite fetishes are: ass, twerking, butt crush, facesitting, cosplay, yoga leggings, feet, soles, keyholing, dick rating, latex, leather, femdom…,” writes creator Peyton Kinsly, whose subscriber count exceeds 4 million. Foot fetish content is especially popular. “Crossing and uncrossing my ankles as I wrinkle and relax my soles,” Brandy Elliott captioned one photo of her popular feet.
In a recent discussion thread on The Cage, one poster asks for advice on how to do a series of exhibitionist activities including “eating fruit salad out of my panties.” A commenter quickly responded, “I think one thing to consider with this, and apologies if you already have, is consent. Not just between yourself and your partner but those that may stumble across you.” The original poster responded with thanks, and a discussion ensued. So goes a good interaction on a fetish site! In addition to being a discussion forum, The Cage is a venue for sharing one’s own kink and fetish writing, personal ads, kink event posts, and recommendations for fetish- and BDSM-themed podcasts.
The review site Mr. Porn Geek summed up the appeal of the BDSM site Fetster: “There is shit loads of stuff all about every category of BDSM sex that you have ever heard of! As a novice in BDSM, this really helped me understand what the fuck I was signing up for!” Fetster looks like it was created by a web designer on day two of a coding boot camp, but what it lacks in visual appeal, it makes up for as a totally free one-stop fetish shop, with sections for photos, videos, classified postings, groups, discussion pages, and a big, juicy glossary.
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