Are you vanilla or kinky? Gentle or animalistic? Personality-style quizzes are coming for your sex life
So, one Cosmo writer tried them out.
Would I have a threesome? Do I prefer rough touch, or soft touch? What’s my sex philosophy? I’m sitting across from my girlfriend, our laptops open, and both of us are answering a series of questions about our sex lives, to find out what our individual ‘sexual profiles’ are. It’s like Myers Briggs… but for shagging.
We’re answering the 24 questions in sexologist Dr Tara Suwinyattichaiporn’s Sexual Profile quiz to discover whether we’re consistent or dynamic, traditional or kinky, monogamous or flexible, and gentle or animalistic — because, as it turns out, sex personality tests are in right now. Always one of the first when it comes to creating trends, three years ago, Gwyneth Paltrow showcased the Erotic Blueprint quiz on Goop, which asks 22 questions to decide whether you’re ‘kinky’ or ‘sensual’. And this year, Billie Quinlan and Anna Hushlak, the founders of Ferly, an app for women’s sexual self-care, published Turn Yourself On as a framework for women’s sexual pleasure through 24 science-informed, empowerment-oriented tools.
And it’s easy to see why they’ve taken off. It’s no secret that women can find it difficult to communicate their pleasure, if not explore it themselves at all. Over a third of women (35%) admit they aren’t reaching peak sexual pleasure in their current sex life, as per recent research by Ann Summers, while a third of all Brits wish they spoke more with their partners about what brings them pleasure. This lack of satisfaction between the sheets means that nearly a fifth of UK couples are completely sexless, according to research by libido supplement JOLT, while 51% report having mismatched libidos.
Coming up with the types
“Women have been shamed for so long regarding our sexuality,” says Tara. “Whether you love sex, you have a lot of it, or you’re asexual, you really can’t win. There’s so much stigma.” What’s more, not having the words to self-describe our pleasure and desire can contribute to feelings of shame and confusion when it comes to exploring sexuality. “Growing up, I always felt like I was different from the prescription of our society, which was heterosexual and monogamous,” adds Tara. “But I never really had the terms to understand my personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences. I wanted to create a language to help spark further conversation.”
So, while writing her book, she came up with 24 questions to assess people’s sexual profile, of which there are 16 possible combinations. “These dimensions give me productive labels to start a healthy conversation about sexual wellbeing and preferences, and help other women do the same,” Tara explains.
Having run Ferly, which helps guide women to have mindful sex, since 2019, founders Anna and Billie have also seen their fair share of women not being able to describe what’s going wrong in their sex life. And because “sex is never just physical… it’s something you feel”, as their website claims, Anna and Billie wanted to create a similar guide that provided language for the emotional, physical, and interpersonal factors contributing to women’s sex lives. “Most of us were taught everything about sex except how to actually feel good about it,” Billie tells Cosmopolitan UK. “We learnt how to please others, how to perform, how to avoid shame, but not how to connect to ourselves.”
In Turn Yourself On, the duo dedicate a chapter to each of the eight principles they say are behind women’s sexual pleasure (agency, power, self-confidence, intimacy, desire, health, pleasure, and communication). Through a series of questions at the end of every chapter, the book encourages readers to name what turns them on, and what in their lives is preventing their pleasure. “When a woman can finally name what she’s experiencing — whether that’s ‘responsive desire’, ‘sexual burnout’, or ‘body disconnection’ — something shifts,” Billie explains. “The moment she has language for it, she stops blaming herself.”
Finding a sexual language
As someone who’s not always felt sexually fulfilled, I can relate to not being able to describe what gets me going. While I consider myself to have a high sex drive, I’ll hold my hands up and say the majority of sex I’ve had has been more on my partner’s terms than mine. Often, I’ve entered sexual situations ‘for the plot’, or, being for real, because I was horny and didn’t care to be overly discerning about who scratched that itch. But that meant I found myself feeling disempowered and unable to communicate what I really wanted from sex (which, I learn from Turn Yourself On, is in part because I struggle to claim my own sexual agency and set boundaries).
So naturally, fleshing out my vocabulary around my desire appeals. Though I’ve explored plenty of ways of having sex — dabbling in various aspects of BDSM, non-monogamy, and sensual, breathwork-led sex — whenever someone asked me what I was into, I was like a deer caught in headlights. Perhaps identifying with a sexual type could help that, I thought. “If a label helps a woman articulate what helps her feel good, that’s useful,” psychosexual and relationship therapist Lucy Frank assures me. “A type can make something that feels vague suddenly feel knowable — and the ability to articulate in the ‘knowing’ can feel empowering.”
But I also had a complicated history with labels for my relationship type and sexual orientation. I came out as bisexual at 16, but after a few too many bad dates and disappointing sexual experiences with men, when I was 22 I took a step back from sex altogether (okay, celibacy era!) for a year and a half. During that time I began to question whether I wanted to share those parts of myself with men. I’ve since started identifying as ‘queer’, because I realised that focusing on putting a label on my orientation (for myself and for others) had come at the detriment of exploring connections I wanted to pursue.
When I heard about these sexual profiles, I worried that I’d feel boxed in by one ‘type’ in the way I did with my sexual and relationship orientation. Although I’d heard most of these terms before (e.g. kinky, sensual, animalistic, monogamous), I’ve never felt like I could fully identify with any of them, because I’m still trying to understand what each of them means for me. This is something to be wary of when labelling our sex lives, according to Dr Justin Lehmiller, senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and host of the Sex and Psychology Podcast. While labels can be helpful, they often don’t tell the whole story. “Some of these terms might mean very different things to different people, such as the word ‘kinky’,” he says. “Kink can mean so many different things; what’s kinky to one person might seem quite vanilla to the next. So we need to be very clear and specific with a partner when talking about something like this.”
And, although I found these quizzes, guides, and blueprints helped to put language to my preferences and feelings around sex and help me talk to my partner about our similarities and differences, for others labels can be surrounded by stigma, which can contribute to our individual shame. “There may be stigmatising assumptions made around certain labels,” says Ryan Scoats, senior lecturer in sociology at Birmingham City University. “If someone says they are consensually non-monogamous, it’s likely others will make assumptions about many other facets of that person, and with the case of stigmatised labels those assumptions are likely to be negative.” Similarly, some women might be wary of calling themselves ‘kinky’ and enjoying rough sex for fears of being ‘anti-feminist’ or navigating tricky conversations around consent, while non-monogamy is still equated with being sex-crazed and avoiding commitment (not true!).
Knowing what these labels mean for you, and how to communicate that, could be the key to better pleasure, though. “Women absolutely need more permission to prioritise their own pleasure — it’s been sidelined for long enough,” notes Frank.
Labels are fluid
It’s important that assigning more language to our sex lives doesn’t box us in and risk closing us off from new and different sexual experiences that come our way. “Many people understand ‘types’ to mean a rigid, unchanging thing,” adds Lehmiller. “However, our sexuality can be quite fluid and flexible over time. For example, who we are as a sexual person in our 20s might be very different in our 40s, so we do need to be mindful of the fact our ‘type’ (and our partner’s ‘type’) can change over time.”
Not only that, but how we engage in sex can change depending on the person we’re sleeping with or our mood. “Labels can turn into a performance — people feeling they need to ‘act like their type’,” says Frank. “They can feed a negative approach to dating, where partners get written off for not matching a profile. We’re already seeing women opt out of dating entirely based on height or prestige; rigid labels risk reinforcing that further. There’s also the subtle way labels can offer protection. If you declare, ‘This is my type’, it can feel like a shield — a way to avoid vulnerability or disappointment. Helpful sometimes, but limiting if it stops people from experiencing unexpected connection or growth.”
While my girlfriend and I got the exact same sexual profile in Dr Tara’s quiz (CKMA, if you must know) I experience a brief moment of anxiety when the Erotic Blueprint tells us she’s more ‘sensual’, and I’m more ‘kinky’. But those concerns soon dissolve when we discuss what we’ve learnt from these frameworks: she’s happy to have sex where we incorporate more power play, while I’m never going to complain about connecting with our bodies and senses. I’m even relieved to learn that I’m consistent — writing about sex all the time can sometimes make me feel like I need to be switching it up to crazy positions on the reg. In reality, ‘good’ sex is a safe place for me, where I can unwind, switch my mind off, and feel connected with my body.
That’s the thing about labels: they’re supposed to be a jumping-off point for continuous growth and conversation. “It doesn’t end with the sexual profile, it’s just the start,” Tara says. It could even be fun to revisit the quiz every year with your partner, she suggests, as a check-in on your sex life.
With the dating crisis becoming increasingly prevalent, causing some women to swear off sex and dating with men altogether, anything that asks us to rethink our approach could help us identify where we’ve gone wrong — or at least weed out what we don’t want from a sexual partner. It certainly did for me.
Whether you’re in pursuit of good sex or not interested in finding a partner at all, these sexual profiles can prompt you to revisit to see if the result is still true for you — like asking a friend for advice when you’ve subconsciously made up your mind about what you want to do. “I see these labels as a way to locate yourself on the map, not the destination itself,” Billie reflects. “Once you know where you are, you can start exploring with more awareness, curiosity, and compassion.”
And, Tara notes, if anyone makes you feel you’re not allowed to change, remember: “Through exploration, you learn something new about yourself.” No one can tell you what feels like the ‘right’ label for you: not your partner, society, or even these quizzes. But if adding more language to your sexual vocabulary helps you and your partner meet in the middle — or connect with yourself — it can’t hurt.
Credit: Cosmopolitan