BDSM

• Delving into KinkD's signups throughout 2023, the app identifies the top 10 cities in the United States with the most people seeking kinky relationships.
• These cities are Los Angeles, New York City, Houston, San Antonio, Chicago, Chula Vista, Phoenix, Seattle, Las Vegas and Austin.
• Taking a global perspective, KinkD's findings extend to the top 10 countries with the most people seeking kinky relationships.
• The top 10 U.S. cities, U.S. states, and countries identified underscore the growing acceptance and interest in alternative lifestyles.

• “Many of the discussions around … the putrid effects of porn on real-world sex … come back to teaching about sex and consent and starting that teaching young”.
• Read more:
  Big W has withdrawn Welcome to Sex from its stores to protect staff – but teen sex education can keep young people safe

Modern pornography

• That’s resulted in an explosion in the variety of pornography you can consume.
• There still exists – although less – expensive glossy mainstream pornography.
• To answer this question I worked with a team, including Welcome to Sex author Melissa Kang, to establish an expert panel of sexual health experts, adolescent health experts, sex educators, pornography researchers and pornography producers.

A different kind of pornography

• The experts identified four explicit websites that potentially supported healthy sexual development, all of which feature a slightly different kind of pornography.
• PinkLabel.TV favours queer indie materials which are often slightly punk in their orientation, with a range of different sexualities, genders and body types, presenting their sex in unashamed ways.
• Both of these points match well with non-expert critiques of pornography.

Diversity and realism

• This is an interesting finding because unlike the first two it doesn’t match up so well with non-expert critiques.
• A lot of discussions about “porn literacy” at the moment critique pornography for being “unrealistic” – and when you dig down into the details often they mean pornography shows too much variety in sex – group sex, anal sex, kinky sex – rather than vanilla, monogamous loving sex.

Negotiation of consent

• A fourth criterion on which the experts agreed was the value of showing the negotiation of consent on screen.
• This is also an interesting one because most pornography doesn’t show the negotiation of consent.
• However it doesn’t often show negotiation of consent – pornography is set in a world of fantasy where everybody enjoys everything they do sexually, all the time.

Navigating pornography

• In this world where so many different kinds of people are producing different kinds of pornography, don’t assume it’s all the same.
• If you want to find healthy pornography - or you want to advise young adults in your life about how to find healthy pornography - then here are some of the questions you should be asking.

• To even out the playing field, PinkCherry's map bases its rankings on the most sex toy sales per person for the Top 10 Sexiest Cities on populations over 300k and their Top 10 Sexiest Towns with populations below that threshold.
• The sexiest cities are ranked in Canada according to consumer purchases and behaviours from January 1st, 2022, to December 31st, 2022.
• Following closely behind, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Ottawa make up Canada's Top 5 Sexiest Cities.
• PinkCherry encourages Canadians to explore the map and see how other cities and towns compare to theirs.

• A recent survey conducted by kinky dating app KinkD reveals some key statistics about transgender people in the kink community.
• According to the app's database, there are more than 1.9 million registered users on KinkD, among which 21,328 identify themselves as trans, meaning that 1.08% of the app's kinksters are transgender.
• The app also exposes the top 10 states with the largest number of transgender kinksters in the U.S..
• Together with 5,535 from other states, this brings the total to 11,667 U.S. trans kinksters registered on the app.