For introverted kinksters, the dating world can sometimes be fraught with anxieties and awkwardness. It's hard enough, in jarring fleshy reality, to figure out if someone might be interested in you at all, let alone appreciate your enthusiasm for being slapped across the face or wearing a fluffy butt plug and meowing like a cat. Adding kinks into the mix only makes things more complicated. It can become a minefield of subtle hinting and what feels like huge emotional risk. I don't have a very good freak-radar, and often find out people are completely closed to trying new things only once it's too late and my heart is already committed. Where do you turn when, for whatever reason, you don't want to deal with guesswork, and get straight down to kinks? Scrolling through Tinder can be laborious if you have rare and demanding needs. There's FetLife, of course, and CollarSpace. Both useful and well-trodden websites, if you're at your desktop. The good thing about those two is that it's easy to fish-out genuine kinksters and experienced fetishists, rather than the simply horny and curious type of single guy that frequent most dating apps, hoping to meet sexually confident women. But neither are the swiping, kinky singleton-market of dreams.
At first glance, KinkD does feel like a sort of Tinder for fetishists, and that impression isn't totally misguided; however, KinkD is brand new and still a raw, slippery baby of an app, with inbox errors and a confusing layout. Absolutely anyone can send you a message, not only your matches, and setting up a profile is as anonymous as you want it to be, no Facebook login required. Get your blocking finger lubed-up, pals, if you want to try this app. It's difficult to exist as a woman online - to exist as a kinky woman is just that little bit harder. There's nothing fun, or flattering, about having to sift through threats to find the sparks of rapport and excitement. What I find most tiring though, strangely, is the relentless stream of approaches that are simply not right for me; a barrage of stabs in the dark from men who haven't read my profile, begging to be beaten, to be punched in their tiny dick, to be my loyal minion; the profiles with no avatar who send an intrepid "hey" four times in a row. Within 24 hours I received over 300 messages. There are so many ways to like, heart, wink, message, and match with people that it's difficult to bundle together your faves in one place, which means the good ones are easily lost. Some use cringe and hilarious usernames. "CumEaterBoy3000" (not to be confused with that imposter, CumEaterBoy4000), "Vindaloo", and "SlipperyFun4U" were some of my personal favourites. Not as people, I'm sure you understand.
So, did I find what I was looking for on KinkD? Yes, mostly. Due to technical errors, it was impossible to clear my inbox, and deleted conversations kept reappearing; I had to engage my intuition and be more ruthless about asking myself, "do I trust this person enough to share my blog or phone number?" which actually resulted in less time wasted. I have plans to meet one prospective Dom, which is very exciting, but I no longer actually use the app now that I've rinsed it of suited and bearded daddies. If KinkD can fix its messaging problems, and take a little more care to enhance the user-experience for women, then it may become a haven for kinky people. Until then, I think it's somewhere they can go, but not somewhere they can stay.
