Photo: Andrey Zvyagintsev on Unsplash
OkCupid's survey of over 400,000 users is quite eye-opening.
By Arianna Jeret — Written on Aug 12, 2019
It's been a good while since I was on popular dating site OkCupid (aka OkC), but when I was, one of the reasons I truly loved the experience there so much was the extent of amazing research they do.
I find human beings of all genders and sexual orientations to be absolutely fascinating, and their dating habits and relationship dynamics are particularly exciting to explore (in my own, somewhat geeky mind, I suppose).
Given the fact that, as of July 2019, OkC is still the fourth largest dating sites in the U.S., with a reported 10,150,000 estimated unique monthly visitors, their sample size for studies is, in technical terms, ginormous — which means the results of data they gather can be considered pretty gosh darn reliable.
Now the site has unveiled its latest findings about what women want in bed, and the results may very shock you ... if you are neither a woman nor a person who has had sex with a woman in the last, let's say ... well ... ever.
According to an article in MensHealth, it turns out that, "After polling more than 400,000 OkCupid members, the dating website found that 62 percent of women enjoy rough sex ... Of members we asked the question 'Do you prefer sex rough or gentle,' 75% of men and 62% of women replied either 'rough' or 'I enjoy both equally.' The rest said they preferred gentle or skipped the question."
At least, I would have thought that these results would be unsurprising, but surprisingly, it turns out that I'm wrong.
Before releasing the results of the survey on the OkCupid blog, the people at OkC asked the people of Twitter:
The results show that only 15 percent of respondents expected the percentage of users who say they're into bondage to be higher than 50 percent.
Well, think again guys and gals.
"When we asked about 'Would you rather ... 64% of men and 51% of women said they either wanted to 'be tied up during sex,' 'do the tying,' or 'sometimes be tied up, sometimes do the tying.' The rest said 'avoid bondage altogether' or skipped the question."
The best news of all is that when OkC broke the results of their research down further by specific preferences, gender, and orientation, heterosexual men and women seem to have well-aligned sexual preferences when it comes to how they like their kink and BDSM served (or how they like to be of service).
As stated by OkC:
"On the whole, men and women’s sex preferences were more similar than we expected, but we still noticed something of an asymmetry. Men were more likely to say they were into BDSM/pain/rough sex than women, and we wanted to know why. So we broke the numbers down further still, this time by ideology. How, we wondered, would political beliefs and religion affect what people want in bed?...
When we look at liberals of both genders, for example, men and women report a similar interest in bondage ... But for conservatives, this discrepancy doubles: conservative women are 17 percent less likely to report an interest in bondage than conservative men. Men and women also report similar views on bondage when they’re not religious ... but we see a larger difference between the two when they are religious ... When we look at liberal, non-religious daters, on the other hand, we see that men and women are actually pretty similar in the sack."
So the best bedroom-related news, it seems, is for the liberal men and women out.
And if that means good news for you — game on!
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Deputy Editor Arianna Jeret, MA/MSW, has been featured in Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, Yahoo Style, MSN, Fox News, Bustle, Parents and more. Find her on Twitter and Instagram for more.