WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Following a year of collecting data from its members, adult social media platform PleazeMe.com has published what it calls “striking data for the marketing and sexual wellness industry.”
Among the data points highlighted by the platform in a statement released Tuesday was one indicating that “over 52% of people were identified as belonging to neither the vanilla nor the BDSM world categories.”
“For marketing and sexual wellness providers, this is revolutionary, as current pop-culture labels have been grossly missing the mark,” PleazeMe said in its statement, adding that the term “kinky” is another word “widely used to describe a type of sexual preference, but rarely can people clearly define or agree on what it means to be kinky.”
“One of our primary focuses is to develop the platform in a way that will help us to better understand the nature and complexity of sexual pleasure, while highlighting the emerging science and innovations that are already being applied to solve the physical and emotional barriers to pleasure and intimacy,” said PleazeMe CTO Corey Kubber. “My background in engineering and my time at MIT have instilled in me a love of data.”
The company said it has collected data from members all over the world, with an estimated 95% of those members being in the U.S. and Canada. In terms of gender identity, the PleazeMe respondent base self-reported as “65% female, 32% male, 1.2% nonbinary, and 1.8% transgender men and women,” the company said.
Of that sample, PleazeMe said “only 11% were placed into our category for what is most widely accepted as ‘vanilla’ and 18.5% identified as having characteristics of a BDSM lifestyle.”
In its statement, PleazeMe said that for years “people have been using sexual labels putting people in boxes in order to understand or identify with them” and further noted that “different fractions of sexuality even have different uses for the same term.”
Heather Montgomery, CEO of PleazeMe said she’s excited to share the information to give society a better idea on what is taking place in the world and social media landscapes.
“Corey and I spent many years working with healthcare data and have a deep understanding of the value anecdotal data provides to the medical and marketing community,” Montgomery said. “It is one of the most difficult data points to accurately collect especially over larger demographic areas. We are excited to have a tool that we can utilize to help provide better solutions to overcome this information gap especially in an area that has historically been taboo—a hurdle that anonymity helps us traverse. We will be working with researchers, medical professionals, and scholars to best utilize the de-identified data and the multifaceted data sets around relationships, sex and sexual wellness.”
Montgomery added that she feels the term ‘vanilla’ needs to be reevaluated.
“People in the BDSM lifestyle often use ‘vanilla’ to describe people who aren’t interested in what they would call ‘kink,’” Montgomery said. “Similarly, people who aren’t interested in BDSM often call people ‘kinky’ who are in fact interested in BDSM. We have been asking ourselves the question, where is the line between kinky and vanilla drawn? As we have dug deeper into our research, our analysis has brought even more confusion to the mix. Unsurprisingly, it turns out people have different definitions of where the line should be drawn.”
Montgomery added that in designing the PleazeMe platform “we threw convention to the wind and instead designed a spectrum of sexual preferences allowing people to identify with what they currently enjoyed, rather than attempting to fit them into these two overly broad conventional categories.”
“Our findings were not shocking to me, as I was one of those people who didn’t identify with either,” Montgomery said. “It was gratifying to see that the hard work we did in crafting the spectrum not only worked, but had a success rate of over 99%, with far fewer than 1% of members stating they feel like they may be in the wrong World.”
In its statement, PleazeMe also noted the platform has “had less than 5% of members request to delete their profile.”
“Since we have launched the website and analysis, we have placed thousands of members into their prospective worlds,” Montgomery said. “Meanwhile, we have designed tools to assist members in utilizing this data for identifying potential suitors and understanding a partner’s intimate needs and deepest desires. In the future, we plan on expanding the tools to take new learnings into consideration that will allow members to move into different worlds if their interests change over time.”
For more information on PleazeMe and its analysis the data provided by its user base, visit PleazeMe.com and the PleazeMe blog.
