Neckbeard from the other question. I am posting here because I think it may help answer the question (and support your thesis).
Yeah, I can confirm. I had a bunch of friends who were, and existed at the periphery of a few kink scenes for a while. Lots of Xennial geeks into polyamory, BDSM, and other stuff. It gets to the point there's actually jokes about it in those scenes--I think I've seen 'polyamory is when you get your boyfriends together to play D&D' somewhere on Twitter. I think there's a bunch of things:
1. All the rules in kink and polyamory help with people who aren't great at reading facial expressions and body language.
2. They're more likely to learn about this stuff from reading a book, and those will list all possibilities.
3. It's just another role-playing game, after all. Is it that big a leap from 'fighter' and 'cleric' to 'master and servant'?
4. After a while all these subcultures play into each other and you have Star Wars geeks learning about sex from their kinkster friends and so on. There's even a paper you can find somewhere with someone trying to do a principal component analysis on which type of geeks cluster together.
5. This sounds meanspirited, but I'll say it as it may be a useful avenue of investigation: if your partner isn't that attractive, kink etc. may be a useful way to put them 'over the top' enough to find them attractive. I.E. if you're both attractive, you might not need the additional stimulus of kink to make sex possible, but if you're both nerds, well...
I had a similar trajectory in that I had sex in high school, but was more of a nerd at heart and could dip in and out of my normie (but not hot or popular) friend groups and my nerdy friend groups. In college, I hung out with a nerdy friend group and over the course of 4 years I went from being like one of 3 people who had sex in high school to one of 3 people who didn't talk about kink or bdsm stuff on the reg. Same thing with drinking too.
Neckbeard from the other question. I am posting here because I think it may help answer the question (and support your thesis).
Yeah, I can confirm. I had a bunch of friends who were, and existed at the periphery of a few kink scenes for a while. Lots of Xennial geeks into polyamory, BDSM, and other stuff. It gets to the point there's actually jokes about it in those scenes--I think I've seen 'polyamory is when you get your boyfriends together to play D&D' somewhere on Twitter. I think there's a bunch of things:
1. All the rules in kink and polyamory help with people who aren't great at reading facial expressions and body language.
2. They're more likely to learn about this stuff from reading a book, and those will list all possibilities.
3. It's just another role-playing game, after all. Is it that big a leap from 'fighter' and 'cleric' to 'master and servant'?
4. After a while all these subcultures play into each other and you have Star Wars geeks learning about sex from their kinkster friends and so on. There's even a paper you can find somewhere with someone trying to do a principal component analysis on which type of geeks cluster together.
5. This sounds meanspirited, but I'll say it as it may be a useful avenue of investigation: if your partner isn't that attractive, kink etc. may be a useful way to put them 'over the top' enough to find them attractive. I.E. if you're both attractive, you might not need the additional stimulus of kink to make sex possible, but if you're both nerds, well...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTsdKycVZZ4
I had a similar trajectory in that I had sex in high school, but was more of a nerd at heart and could dip in and out of my normie (but not hot or popular) friend groups and my nerdy friend groups. In college, I hung out with a nerdy friend group and over the course of 4 years I went from being like one of 3 people who had sex in high school to one of 3 people who didn't talk about kink or bdsm stuff on the reg. Same thing with drinking too.