The privilege of perversities: race, class and education among polyamorists and kinksters

This article focuses on kinksters – people involved in ‘kinky’ or ‘perverted’ sexual acts and relationships frequently involving bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and/or sadism/masochism (also referred to as sadomasochism), and polyamorists – people who engage in openly conducted, multiple partner, romantic and/or sexual relationships. Being accused of being a pervert can have detrimental consequences, and although everyone involved in ‘perverted’ sex risks social censure, people unprotected by social advantages are more vulnerable to the discriminatory impacts of this sexual stigma than are those shielded by racial and/or class privileges. Our objectives in this article are multi-fold, and we document the affiliation between polyamory and bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and/or sadism/masochism; demonstrate through a meta-analysis of extant literature the ways in which research on alternative sexual communities has often (unwittingly) reinforced and (re)constituted a homogenous image of these non-conformist subcultures; support and augment this analysis with our own empirical data; and provide recommendations to improve research methods. By highlighting the race and class privileges that operate throughout these processes, we aim to foster dialogue about the ways in which we as sexuality researchers can mitigate this privilege and its potential impact on our collective research. In so doing, we first explain polyamorous and kinky people and their relationships and review relevant literatures. Second, we detail the aggregated results of 36 studies of polys and kinksters and discuss the factors that shape these two communities. These factors operate at the social and methodological levels, yielding samples that are overwhelmingly white, with relatively high socio-economic status. Third, we examine the ways in which researchers build samples and collect data, and suggest strategies to increase sample diversity. We conclude with an examination of the implications of these findings for the varied sexual and relational identities that comprise kinky and poly subcultures.