In the beginning there was nothing. The internet was without form and void, and darkness was upon the screen. Then the spirit of sex, porn, kink, dating, and fetish websites moved over the face of the web.
To find sexual community online is to join a proud history that stretches back almost as early as the internet itself. When you’re looking for a fetish site, know this: Sex drove some of the internet’s earliest colonizers. “In the 1980s, the internet was frequented by three types of people: government officials, university scholars, and porn seekers,” an article in The Guardian explained in 1990. Now we all live online, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find the high quality fetish sites amidst pop up ads for HOT MILFS NEAR YOU.
Plenty of sweet, wholesome sweater wearers in your life could easily teach a course on navigating sex sites. They practiced in their teen years, trawling chat rooms and video sites, and then perfected the art as adults, making inconspicuous desktop files marked “taxes” and a library of various bookmarked smut. But some of us spent our youths looking at fully dressed pictures of pop stars and flexing our new knowledge of abbreviations on AOL Instant Messenger. So let’s start with the basics.
“A kink is defined as a sexual activity that falls outside of sex that society traditionally considers ‘acceptable.’ That can include everything from role playing to bondage to whips,” Angie Jones wrote in Glamour in 2018. “A fetish technically refers to an attraction to an inanimate object, although this includes body parts, such as feet (like a foot fetish). So a fetish is a type of kink.” Kink is the umbrella term, fetish is a subset. But when people talk about “fetish websites” they often mean something more general—sex sites that offer something outside of the middle-of-the-road, vanilla, traditionally accepted sexuality.
If you have a kink or a fetish, you are not, contrary to cultural messaging, a member of a filthy little minority; you’re fairly normal. A study published in The Journal of Sexual Research in 2016 asked a representative sample of people from Quebec about their sexual interests and found that more than 40% experienced “desire” around fetishism, and more than a quarter had acted on it. The next year, a study of a representative group of Belgian adults found that “46.8% of the total sample had ever performed at least one BDSM-related activity and an additional 22% indicated having (had) fantasies about it.”
Fetishes are not shameful secrets (unless that’s your fetish), and they are not sicknesses (unless that’s hot to you!). They’re a fun quirk of your sexuality, one of many ways to orgasm, and the thing that will allow you to have a decades-long relationship with sex that goes beyond dead-eyed, three-minute intercourse. No need to Google “porn but the kind that I would like.” Let’s take a look at the best fetish sites and sex apps.