Who's Into Sissification?

01The data

The survey. Aella's Big Kink Survey is a long, anonymous online questionnaire about sexual interests, with about 1.35 million cleaned responses, recruited by viral spread across the internet.

The measure. Respondents rate how arousing they find gender play. Those with any interest are then asked "Which of the following do you find erotic?" and shown a checklist. One option is "Sissification (degredation by feminization)." Throughout this report, into sissification means ticking that box. Everyone who said gender play doesn't arouse them counts as not into it.

The hardweight version. People who take a kink survey are kinkier than the public, so raw rates from this data run high. Hardweight is the version of the dataset built specifically to correct kink base rates. The method: find traits that go along with being kinkier, that the sample has too much of, and whose true population rates are known — then reweight until the sample matches those rates. It keeps respondents aged 14–50 from the US, Canada, the UK and Western Europe (527,931 people) and balances thirteen dimensions at once against census, CDC and polling benchmarks: sex, age, LGBTQ status, politics, ethnicity, BMI, childhood and adult sexual assault, religious upbringing, self-reported autism, ADHD and depression, and lifetime number of sexual partners. Because a few under-represented kinds of people carry a lot of weight, those 528k responses have the statistical power of about 42,000. Everything on this page uses hardweight unless it says otherwise.

TL;DRA submission kink for men, a dominance kink for women.

• It's mostly male, and it peaks among people in the middle of the attraction spectrum. Among cis men it runs from 4% of the fully straight to 38% of those attracted to both sexes equally, then back down to 6% of the fully gay.
• It's highest among trans and nonbinary people: 39% of AMAB nonbinary people and 35% of trans women, against 10% of cis men and 2% of cis women.
• Men and women mean opposite things by it. Men into sissification are far more submissive than other men and mostly picture themselves as the one being feminized. Women into it are more dominant than other women and picture doing it to someone else.
• It clusters with transformation and humiliation, not pain. Transformations, genderswapped bodies and humiliation are its closest neighbors; spanking, teasing and being worshipped run against it.
• Mental health differences vanish, except autism. Depression, anxiety, ADHD and childhood sexual assault are no different from equally kinky peers. Autism stays elevated, mainly in women.

02Who's into it

6.5% are into sissification (95% CI 6.3–6.8%): 10.4% of men and 2.4% of women, a ratio of more than four to one.

Orientation matters more than anything else on the demographic side. Bisexual men are at 38%, nearly four times straight men (10%), with gay men at 14%. Women follow the same order at lower levels: 11% of bisexual women, 7% of gay women, and under 2% of straight women.

The "male" bars above are by birth sex, so they include trans women. Restricting to cis people barely changes it: 36% of cis bisexual men, 12% of cis gay men, 10% of cis straight men. The survey's finer-grained attraction score shows the shape clearly. It's an inverted U, not a "likes men" effect:

Among cis men, 4% of the fully straight are into sissification, rising to 38% in the middle of the spectrum and falling back to 6% among the fully gay. Cis women show the same shape, from under half a percent of the fully straight to 8–10% in the middle.

By gender identity, the highest rates are among people assigned male who have moved toward femininity: 39% of AMAB nonbinary people and 35% of trans women. Trans men (19%) and AFAB nonbinary people (16%) come next, then cis men at 10% and cis women at 2%.

Trans and nonbinary respondents are kinkier in general, but that explains only a little of this. Compared with cis people of the same birth sex, age and kinkiness, trans women are still 19 points higher, AMAB nonbinary people 25 points, trans men 14 and AFAB nonbinary people 11.

Age works differently for men and women. Men are flat at 10–12% from 18 to 50, with teenage boys a little lower (8.5%). Women decline steadily, from 5% of teenage girls to about 1% of women in their forties.

03Where it sits within gender play

13.4% of people find gender play at least slightly arousing (18% of men, 8% of women). Among them, sissification is the second most commonly ticked element (49%), after crossdressing (61%). It's much more of a male interest than the others: 57% of men into gender play tick it, against 29% of women. Androgyny runs the other way (18% of men, 44% of women).

Asked to pick the single most erotic element, sissification comes first (30%), ahead of passable crossdressing (22%), transgenderism (17%) and androgyny (12%).

And the more someone is into gender play, the likelier sissification is part of it. Among men who find gender play only slightly arousing, 30% tick sissification; among those who find it extremely arousing, 78% do. For women it goes from 21% to 48%.

04Be the sissy, or make one?

The survey asks everyone into gender play: "I find it most erotic when the subject of my genderplay interest is: Me / The other person." Among those into sissification the answer depends heavily on who's answering:

• Cis women are the sissifiers. Only 17% say "me"; 83% want it done to the other person.
• Trans women and AMAB nonbinary people want to be the subject (68% and 70%).
• Cis men split down the middle (49% "me").

For comparison, among people into gender play but not sissification, only about a quarter of either sex say "me." Sissification pulls men toward wanting it for themselves.

The same split shows up in how dominant or submissive people are. Men into sissification are far more submissive than other men: 86% agree "I am aroused by being submissive in sexual interactions," against 55% of other men. Women into it are more dominant than other women: 65% agree they're aroused by being dominant, against 45%.

Among men who describe themselves as totally submissive, 41% are into sissification. Among dominant men it's 4–5%. For women the line runs the other way, from about 2% of submissive women to 5–6% of dominant ones. It's one word for two different fantasies.

05What's unique, vs just "being kinky"?

The profile of people into sissification against everyone else:

They're much kinkier overall, so the chart below shows each difference twice: unadjusted (hollow), and against people of the same age and kinkiness (solid). Everything is done within sex, since the group is four-fifths male and many traits differ by sex.

Depression, anxiety, ADHD and childhood sexual assault: nothing. All are at zero in both sexes once kinkiness is held constant. A taste for violent porn also disappears entirely, which fits a kink that's about humiliation and not pain. What survives:

• Shame (d≈0.59 men, 0.36 women). 81% of men into sissification agree "I am ashamed or embarrassed about at least some of what arouses me," against 53% of other men. For women it's 73% against 48%.
• Lower heterosexuality (−0.46 men, −0.92 women).
• Fewer sexual partners (−0.20 men, −0.26 women) than equally kinky peers.
• More porn (0.21 men, 0.30 women). Women into it also started porn and masturbation earlier (about −0.2); men didn't.
• Autism, mostly in women (d≈0.35 women, 0.09 men). 13% of women into sissification report autism against 4% of other women; for men it's 7% against 4%.

Autism is also more common among trans and nonbinary people, who are heavily over-represented here, so the autism result was re-run on cis people only. It shrinks but holds for women (7.7% against 3.3%) and is small for men (5.9% against 4.1%).

06The kink signature: transformation and humiliation

Which other kinks does sissification travel with, beyond what general kinkiness predicts? Partial correlations, controlling each person's mean arousal across the other kinks:

• Transformations, genderswapped body parts and humiliation are the three closest neighbors in both sexes, followed by mental alteration.
• The mainstream kinks run against it: teasing, spanking, light bondage, primal play.
• The sexes split on who's in charge. For men it goes with begging others and against being worshipped, having others beg, and giving pain. For women those are neutral or reversed.

Futanari is left off this chart because it was only asked of people into gender play. Within that group it isn't distinctive: about 62% of men into sissification find futanari moderately or more arousing, against 66% of men into other kinds of gender play.

07Country and ethnicity

Ethnicity shows a real pattern, and it runs in opposite directions for men and women:

• White men are the highest male group (12.5%). Black, Hispanic and non-East Asian men are all around 7–8%.
• White women are the lowest female group (3.0%). Black (5.2%) and Native American (5.5%) women are highest.

So the sex gap is four to one among White respondents and less than one and a half to one among Black respondents. Both halves of this appear in all three versions of the data (raw, softweight and hardweight), and matching on kinkiness doesn't change them.

Country shows much less. Men in every country fall between about 10% and 13%, with Italy lowest and France and Spain highest. Women range from 2% to 4%, with the US, Canada and southern Europe a little above the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. None of the country differences hold up consistently across the three versions of the data, so the safest reading is that where someone lives doesn't much matter.

08Personality

The survey measures each Big Five trait with two agree/disagree statements, so these are coarse. The two clearest results:

• Introversion (d≈−0.22 men, −0.24 women).
• Lower self-rated attractiveness (d≈−0.20 men, −0.26 women), from "Compared to other people of your same gender and age range, you are…"

Women into sissification are also noticeably less conscientious (−0.20); men barely differ. Neuroticism is slightly higher in both sexes (about 0.09), and so is feeling powerless. Agreeableness and openness show nothing.

As plain rates: 12.7% of the most introverted men are into sissification against 7.8% of the most extroverted, and 13.6% of men who rate themselves significantly less attractive than their peers against 6.3% of those who rate themselves significantly more attractive.

09Roles, porn and relationships

A screen of every other question in the survey turned up these:

• Attraction to trans and nonbinary people is the largest difference in the whole survey (d≈1.0 in both sexes, barely touched by the kinkiness adjustment). Among cis straight men, 28% of those into sissification say they're equally or more attracted to trans and nonbinary people, against 5% of the rest.
• Submission and dominance, as above: men into it are more submissive (0.72) and less dominant (−0.60); women are more dominant (0.43) and less submissive (−0.39).
• Animated porn (0.35 men, 0.46 women) and porn-induced fetishes (0.30 men, 0.21 women). Men also lean toward written erotica (0.30).
• Women only: more polyamorous (0.41) and much likelier to be aroused by two men together (0.63). Neither shows up in men.
• Men only: they were spanked less often as children (−0.19).

Separately, men were asked "When I picture myself as having a nude female body, I find this:" on the usual arousal scale. 65% of men into sissification say moderately arousing or more, against 27% of other men.

Four of these as simple rates:

Among men attracted only to cis people, 5% are into sissification. Among men equally attracted to both, or leaning slightly toward trans and nonbinary people, it's 39–42%. Among men who watch only live-action porn it's 6%, against 21% of those who watch mostly drawn porn.

10Onset, where they came from, and what doesn't matter

Onset is unremarkable. People into sissification date their first interest in gender play to about the same age as other gender-play people (a mean of 17 for men in both groups). It peaks in the mid-teens, but a lot of it starts in adulthood: 38% of men and 31% of women into sissification say the interest began at 19 or later.

Politics matters at one end only. 17% of very liberal men are into sissification, against 9–10% of men everywhere else on the spectrum, from liberal to very conservative. Women show the same thing: 6% of the very liberal against 1–3% of everyone else.

How people found the survey predicts it too. Respondents from FetLife and Tumblr are both at 14%, Discord at 11%, against 6% of those who arrived some other way. Matching on kinkiness, Tumblr arrivals are still 5 points higher and FetLife 3.

Things that turned out not to matter:

• Religious upbringing. 10.4% of men raised Christian against 11.5% raised without religion.
• Body weight. Men at every BMI category fall between 9.6% and 11.3%.
• An absent father. 10.1% against 10.4%.
• Birth order and number of siblings. Nothing.
• Depression, anxiety, ADHD, childhood sexual assault. As above: nothing once kinkiness is matched.

Attachment style shows a small effect: securely attached people are the lowest group in both sexes (9% of men, against 11–12.5% for the other styles).

11Methodology & limitations

Source & measures

Aella's Big Kink Survey (GuidedTrack), about 1.35 million responses after cleaning. Gender play is gated: respondents first tick whether the category arouses them at all, then rate it, then see the checklist of elements. Anyone who didn't reach the checklist is counted as not into sissification. The "me or the other person" question, age of onset and futanari were asked only of people into gender play. The arousal scale is coded non-linearly (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8) and is recoded here to ordinal 0–5.

Weighting

Hardweight exists to correct kink base rates: its margins are traits that correlate with kinkiness and have known population rates, so balancing them pulls the sample's inflated kink levels toward the population's. It covers ages 14–50 in the US, Canada, UK and Western Europe and rakes to thirteen margins: sex × age × LGBTQ status; sex × politics; LGBTQ × politics; age × politics; age × ethnicity; age × BMI; childhood sexual abuse by sex; adult sexual assault by sex; religious upbringing; self-reported autism, ADHD and depression; and lifetime partner count by sex and age. Weights are capped at 30. All confidence intervals are 95% and use the effective sample size of the specific group shown (Kish approximation).

Models

General kinkiness is the mean arousal across 59 other kink items, excluding gender play itself and futanari. Kink-adjusted differences are weighted least-squares coefficients on standardized outcomes, with kinkiness and age (each with a squared term) as covariates, fit separately by sex, with robust standard errors. The kink-signature chart uses weighted partial correlations controlling a leave-one-out version of the same composite. Because that composite is dominated by the common kinks, some negative correlation with them is built in; the ordering is more meaningful than the exact values.

Limitations

• Fantasy, not behavior. No question asks about actual practice.
• Weighting corrects for the known correlates of kink, not the unknown ones. Hardweight removes the inflation that comes from thirteen measurable traits, but whatever else makes someone likelier to take a kink survey is still in there. 6.5% is the best estimate this data supports, and the true rate is plausibly lower.
• One section is softweight. Country and ethnicity use softweight (ages 14–36, effective n≈169,000), because hardweight is calibrated for the whole population rather than within each group.
• Small groups of women. Only 2.4% of women are into sissification, so results for women rest on an effective sample of about 780 and have wide error bars.
• Many comparisons. Sections 8–10 come from screening a couple of hundred survey questions for differences. The large effects are far outside what chance would produce, but anything under about d=0.1 should be held loosely.
• Coarse personality measures. Each Big Five trait is two survey items, not a full inventory.
• Cross-sectional. None of this says what causes what.

Analysis pipeline: R (DuckDB, data.table, ggplot2); scripts and full results tables available on request.