Am I normal?

People do not really ask this because they want a statistic. They ask because they want someone to tell them there is nothing wrong with them, and being told that by a stranger never quite works. So here is the evidence instead, including the parts that are weaker than you would like.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

People ask me some version of this question regularly, usually after a long run-up and with apologies attached. And the answer people want is not a percentage, because the real question underneath is whether they are broken.

I cannot fix that with reassurance. Nobody can be talked out of a suspicion about themselves by a stranger on a website saying "of course you are fine". What I can do is show you what the evidence says and be straight about how good the evidence is.

The word is doing two jobs

Normal means two unrelated things and people slide between them without noticing.

One is statistical. How many other people are like this. The other is clinical. Whether this counts as a disorder. Left-handedness is uncommon and perfectly healthy. Back pain is extremely common and still a problem. So finding out that plenty of other people want to be spanked would be soothing for about a day, and it would not answer what you actually asked. Finding out that hardly anyone did would not convict you either.

The clinical question is the one with a real answer, so start there.

What the DSM-5 actually says

The diagnostic manual American psychiatry works from lists sexual masochism disorder, and if you go looking you will find it and feel worse. The word that matters is the last one.

The manual draws a line between having the interest and having the interest plus clinically significant distress or impairment in your ability to function. Only the second is a diagnosis. The fourth edition already required distress or impairment. The fifth made the split between the interest and the disorder explicit, so that consenting adults with unusual but functional sex lives were not classified as ill by default.

There is a detail around that which almost nobody mentions and which I think is the single most useful line on this page. The manual's general definition of mental disorder says a conflict mainly between a person and society is not, by itself, a disorder.

Distress that comes from other people disapproving, or from your own fear of being judged, is that kind of conflict far more than it is the interest doing you harm. If you are miserable because you believe you are a freak, the misery is being produced by the belief.

The study everyone quotes, and what it does not show

In 2013 Andreas Wismeijer and Marcel van Assen published a comparison in the Journal of Sexual Medicine of around 900 BDSM practitioners against a control group, using standard personality and wellbeing instruments. The BDSM group came out equal or better on most measures: less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to experience, more conscientious, less sensitive to rejection, and reporting higher subjective wellbeing. The one measure that went the other way was agreeableness, which I find rather funny and entirely plausible.

That result gets waved around a lot, so let me be honest about its limits.

The practitioners were recruited through a BDSM community website. That means the sample is made of people settled enough about this to be in a community talking about it. The person reading this page at two in the morning, who has told nobody, is precisely the person who would never have been in that sample. It is also a snapshot rather than anything that could show cause. And it is one study, in the Netherlands, with self-report throughout.

What it can do is falsify a claim. If kink were reliably a marker of damage, a group of nine hundred practitioners should have looked worse than controls on something. They did not.

Something must have happened to you

This is the assumption you will meet, sometimes gently, from people who consider themselves supportive. It survives because it is a satisfying story. It gives the interest a cause, files it as damage, and lets the listener feel sympathetic rather than uncomfortable.

The research has never found the link. Not that it has been searched for carelessly. Adversity is common enough across the whole population that any group of a few hundred people will contain a decent number of difficult histories, and pointing at that overlap and calling it a cause is bad reasoning that gets published anyway.

From my own experience rather than any evidence: I have met a great many people in this with entirely unremarkable pasts, and a fair number of people with genuinely awful histories who find the whole idea repellent. If the theory worked, neither group should be as large as it is.

And if something did happen to you, that does not make what you want a symptom to be decoded. Plenty of people do the work, understand their own history properly, and come out the other side wanting exactly the same things they wanted before.

Why I will not give you a percentage

You have probably seen a figure. You may have seen several that contradict each other. There is a reason for that, and it is not that one source is lying.

Prevalence estimates for kink move enormously depending on how the question is put. Ask whether someone has ever had a fantasy about being spanked and you get one number. Ask whether they have ever done it and you get a smaller one. Ask whether they identify as into BDSM and you get a much smaller one again. Ask whether they have a paraphilic interest and the number collapses, because the word sounds like an accusation.

On top of that, the answers shift with whether the survey is anonymous, which word was used, what else was on the questionnaire, and who agreed to take part at all. Sex surveys have a permanent self-selection problem, and it does not push in a single direction. Some people overstate. A great many understate.

So the honest range across the literature runs from a couple of percent to well over half, and both ends were arrived at in good faith. I have decided not to quote one, because whichever I picked would be doing persuasion rather than information, and you have had enough of being persuaded.

The numbers that do exist, and what they are worth

Having said all that, refusing to show you anything is its own kind of persuasion, so here are the two studies people are usually reaching for, with what they actually measured.

Joyal, Cossette and Lapierre asked 1,516 adults in Quebec to rate 55 sexual fantasies, and published the results in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in 2015. Being spanked or whipped came out as a fantasy for roughly a third of the women and a little under a third of the men.

Doing the spanking was fantasised about by roughly a quarter of the women and by over four in ten of the men. Their whole argument was that a fantasy has to be rare to count as unusual, and on their numbers this one is nowhere near rare.

Herbenick and colleagues did something methodologically stronger in 2017: a nationally representative probability sample of 2,021 American adults, published in PLOS ONE. Spanking turned up among the common lifetime behaviours rather than the exotic ones, with something in the region of three in ten people reporting having done it.

Now the caveats, which matter as much as the figures. The first study was an internet sample of volunteers in one Canadian province, and volunteers for a sex survey are not a random slice of anybody. The second is a much better sample but it is American, and it counted a behaviour without asking how hard, how often, or whether it meant anything to the people involved.

Neither of them is measuring the thing this site is about, which is a deliberate arrangement with a structure around it. A slap during sex and a negotiated Sunday evening both count as one tick in the same box.

So take from them the only claim they can properly support, which happens to be the one you came for. Whatever else is true, this is not rare. It shows up in every large survey that bothers to ask, in numbers that run to tens of millions of people, and the researchers keep having to point out that the word unusual does not fit.

What I would check instead

If normal is the wrong question, these are better ones, and you can answer them yourself.

Where is the distress coming from?

From the wanting, or from imagining being found out? Those need completely different responses and only one of them is about the kink.

Does it involve another adult who has agreed?

Consensual interest in another consenting adult is a different category from anything that requires someone who cannot agree. That line is not negotiable and it is the only one that genuinely matters.

Could you go without it?

Not happily. Just at all. A preference you would miss is ordinary. A compulsion that overrides your judgement about safety, money or people is worth talking to someone about.

Is your life getting smaller?

If this is quietly eating your sleep, your work and your other relationships, the problem is the proportion rather than the interest.

The version I actually believe

Most people who ask me this are not unwell. They are embarrassed, and they have been carrying it privately for years, and they have mistaken the loneliness for evidence. The interest was never the thing making them miserable. Having nobody to say it to was.