BERLIN—Adult streaming platform Clips4Sale has named "chastity," the orgasm denial fetish that has increasingly become a mainstream obsession, the 2025 Fetish of the Year.
Chastity play is infinite in its articulation, but its core principle is orgasm denial. Any gender can practice chastity and it requires no special equipment, but it most frequently involves one partner (usually a man) wearing a locked cage or harness to cover their genitals while another partner holds the key and decides when release can happen. Chastity play might last a few hours or days or extend weeks or longer, as it does during the month-long celebration of "Locktober" and its anti-sex counterpart, "No Nut November."
Chastity can be incorporated into other kink and fetish play and frequently incorporates elements of domination (the keyholder), submission (the caged), cuckolding, and humiliation.
Chastity has grown in the past few years, increasing 193 percent since 2020. But the biggest growth has occurred in the past year, with sales jumping 71 percent in 2024.
Celebrities like Katy Perry donned a chastity belt with her name on it and Lenny Kravitz revealed he’d gone celibate. Doctors fretted about the rise of the masturbation abstinence, feminists called for a global sex strike and Brooklynites went "boysober." Straight men on TikTok drove Google searches for Locktober to unprecedented heights, the National Rugby League considered caging randy players, and Slate explained how to get your cock cage through airport security. (Amazon has 87 pages of them for sale.)
Said Clips4Sale spokesperson Avery Martin, "On the platform and off, we’re seeing an interest in controlling pleasure. It’s a submissive position that, in many ways, expands naturally from the interest we saw in giantess fetish last year. With so much anxiety around sexuality, it can bring relief to have someone or something, whether a domme or a cage, that denies you the ability to get off. Of course, while it may seem counterintuitive to those outside the community, chastity fetishists are also embracing a notion of pleasure and satisfaction that doesn’t entirely reside in the genitals."
Martin points to a cultural embrace of chastity that extends beyond self-aware fetishists, such as the rise of the semen retention movement on platforms like TikTok, the NoFap anti-masturbation community on Reddit, and feminist calls for a global sex strike.
Martin added, "We may be in an anti-pleasure timeline, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be joyless or sexless. What I hope the fetish community can bring to the larger community is a sense of play and a focus on other avenues of gratification. There’s freedom in restraint, denial, and humiliation, so long as it's enjoyable, self-aware, and consensual."
The 2025 fetish runners-up are gooning and cuckold, are in many ways alternate sides of chastity. While chastity requires the negation of genital pleasure, gooning is a multiscreen masturbation session that can go on for hours or days, celebrating pleasure while simultaneously denying release until absolutely necessary.
The drive of the cuckold fetish in which one derives satisfaction from watching their partner have sex with another person comes through exclusion from the sexual act, rejection from the nexus pleasure. Both fetishes have grown exponentially in the past several years.
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