I already started analyzing the SSC survey data on fetishes, but I wanted to move on to look at dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism.

Why might this be interesting? For one thing, some people have fetishes for things that seem, well…bad. Getting hurt. Letting other people control and abuse them. As if they have a drive toward weakness and unhappiness. This is kind of reminiscent of the self-sabotage and bad decisions some people make throughout their lives (for example, marrying a spouse who treats them the same way as an abusive parent). Sometimes I conceptualize this as them having a set point of low self-esteem and degradation that they try to enforce, regardless of its cost to their well-being. If this had the same roots as sexual masochism, that would be worth studying.

But I didn't find anything interesting like that in the data.

BDSM preferences were heavily gendered. Of people who expressed a preference, 71% of cis men preferred the dominant role, compared to only 16% of cis women (18% of trans women; insufficient sample size of trans men). This was such a big difference that gender swamped every other effect, so I limited the analysis to cis men from this point on, since they made up most of the sample.

80% of straight men preferred the dominant role, compared to only 34% of gay men. This was such a big difference that orientation swamped every other effect, so I limited the analysis to straight cis men from this point on.

In order of importance, here are some factors that made the men in this sample more likely to be dominant, rather than submissive. All of these are self-rated: