By Isabella Massey

Adam knew he was into kink long before he had the language for it.

Growing up in Czechia, the now 28-year-old remembers being fascinated by “assertive women” on television when he was around nine years old.

“There were many hot women or characters on TV,” he says, “but the femme-fatale always stayed in my mind.”

At the time, it did not feel sexual. Looking back, though, Adam sees those early fixations as the beginning of the dominant-submissive dynamics that would later shape his fantasies, relationships, and erotic writing under the alias Nick Carraway.

His experience is far from unusual. Emerging research into kink identity suggests that many people involved in BDSM and fetish play report recognising certain attractions or fascinations long before adulthood, often before they fully understand sex itself. 

Researchers stress that this is not about children experiencing adult sexual desire, but about people later recognising early emotional or psychological interests in things like power, restraint, authority, or vulnerability.

For a long time, kink has been treated as something people suddenly discover later in life. A hook-up with a stranger, an experimental ex, a holiday you’d rather forget. There is still a tendency to assume fetishes must come from somewhere dramatic. 

Samuel Hughes, a psychological researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has looked more closely at how kink identities develop. Surveying 292 people recruited through FetLife, one of the world’s largest social networking sites for BDSM and kink communities, Hughes outlined what he describes as the five stages of kink identity development. 

The first stage, “Early Encounters”, often takes place before the age of ten. Hughes describes it as a period where “kinky people experience an attraction, draw, or fascination without the words or concepts to understand it, and often – he stresses –  without sexual arousal.”

Adam says the description immediately resonated with him.

“It always felt natural,” he says. “Like it had always been there.”

As he got older, though, those feelings became more complicated.

“I was really scared to be into pegging because it was ‘gay’,” he says. “But that became my main kink as I entered adulthood. A few more years on, I became more comfortable that I am bi.” 

Adam also believes there is both a biological and social element to kink development. Around the same time he was becoming sexually aware, he was also being bullied at school.

“All the girls were taller than me,” he says. “Coincidence? I think not.” 

Rather than seeing kink as something directly caused by trauma, though, he describes it more as a way people sometimes process experiences psychologically.

“There’s a level of gaining control over trauma via kinks by playing with it sociosexually,” he says.

That link between psychology, environment, and sexuality comes up constantly in conversations around BDSM. While some researchers argue that certain erotic preferences may partly stem from innate personality traits, many people involved in kink communities describe later experiences as helping them understand desires that already existed rather than creating entirely new ones.

For Lucciano, a touring dancer for the Ukrainian boy band Kazaky, escort work helped contextualise desires he had struggled to define for years.

Working as an escort in Bogotá under the name Domiano also reshaped his relationship with dominance and submission. 

“At first I was submissive and passive,” he says. “Now leading the sexual scene is my thing, discovering, penetrating and enjoying the pleasurable pain.”

These experiences were important for him, not in creating new desires, but by giving existing desires a language and a way to form.

Like many people involved in BDSM, Lucciano describes a gradual process of self-recognition rather than sudden transformation. Hughes’ research similarly suggests that people often move through periods of evaluation and internal conflict before eventually finding confidence and connection within kink spaces.

That process can be complicated by the stigma that still surrounds BDSM, even as conversations around sexuality become more open online. Kink is still widely misunderstood, particularly when discussions around dominance, submission, pain, or fetish are reduced to shock value or pathology.

Adam says that discovering online kink communities to share discussions with, alongside experienced and knowledgeable partners, helped him realise his fantasies were neither rare nor shameful.

“It always felt natural,” he says. “Like it had always been there.”

That sense of recognition appears central to many people’s experiences with kink. Rather than discovering something entirely new, they simply describe finally finding the vocabulary for feelings they had struggled to explain for years.

For people like Adam and Lucciano, kink was never a sudden transformation brought on by one dramatic experience. The relationships and encounters that shaped their sex lives mattered, but mostly because they helped make sense of feelings that had already been sitting there for years.