WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.—Adult social media platform PleazeMe has released the result of a new sex survey of its members, revealing that over 52 percent of people were identified as belonging to neither the vanilla nor the BDSM categories.
In its announcement, the company said that the results for marketing and sexual wellness providers are “revolutionary,” noting that while the term “kinky” is a word widely used to describe a type of sexual preference, rarely can people clearly define or agree on what it means to be kinky.
“One of our primary focuses is to develop the platform in a way that will help us to better understand the nature and complexity of sexual pleasure, while highlighting the emerging science and innovations that are already being applied to solve the physical and emotional barriers to pleasure and intimacy,” said Corey Kubber, CTO for PleazeMe. “My background in engineering and my time at MIT have instilled in me a love of data.”
The company has collected the data of members from all over the world, with an estimated 95 percent being in the U.S. and Canada. The gender identity breakdown of this data is 65 percent female, 32 percent male, 1.2 percent nonbinary, and 1.8 percent transgender men and women. PleazeMe’s members range in age from 21 to over 65.
The mixed sampling showed that only 11 percent were placed into a category for what is most widely accepted as “vanilla” and 18.5 percent identified as having characteristics of a BDSM lifestyle.
“Corey and I spent many years working with healthcare data and have a deep understanding of the value anecdotal data provides to the medical and marketing community,” said Heather Montgomery, CEO of PleazeMe. “It is one of the most difficult data points to accurately collect especially over larger demographic areas. We are excited to have a tool that we can utilize to help provide better solutions to overcome this information gap especially in an area that has historically been taboo—a hurdle that anonymity helps us traverse.”
She added: “We will be working with researchers, medical professionals and scholars to best utilize the de-identified data and the multifaceted data sets around relationships, sex and sexual wellness.”
Montgomery feels the term “vanilla” really needs to be re-evaluated: “People in the BDSM lifestyle often use ‘vanilla’ to describe people who aren’t interested in what they would call ‘kink.’ Similarly, people who aren’t interested in BDSM often call people ‘kinky’ who are in fact interested in BDSM. We have been asking ourselves the question, where is the line between kinky and vanilla drawn? As we have dug deeper into our research, our analysis has brought even more confusion to the mix. Unsurprisingly, it turns out people have different definitions of where the line should be drawn.”
Montgomery said that the PleazeMe platform was designed to allow users to identify with what they currently enjoy rather than have their interests fit into two broad categories.
“Our findings were not shocking to me, as I was one of those people who didn’t identify with either. It was gratifying to see that the hard work we did in crafting the spectrum not only worked, but had a success rate of over 99 percent with far fewer than 1 percent of members stating they feel like they may be in the wrong World,” she said.
An infographic that gives the breakdown of the membership by world and gender identity has been created. Take the analysis to learn more about the worlds within PleazeMe or visit the blog to read the article, “The Spectrum of Sex,” available here.
“Since we have launched the website and analysis, we have placed thousands of members into their prospective worlds,” says Montgomery. “Meanwhile, we have designed tools to assist members in utilizing this data for identifying potential suitors and understanding a partner’s intimate needs and deepest desires. In the future, we plan on expanding the tools to take new learnings into consideration that will allow members to move into different worlds if their interests change over time.”
PleazeMe’s marketing and R&D tools are designed to help companies, brands and educators utilize this data to craft solutions and campaigns to get them to interested end users.
For more information, visit PleazeMe.com.
