Your BDSM test results, explained

What you're looking at

The test scores you on twenty-three roles at once and shows the ones that scored above thirty, strongest first, capped at eight. The top one is your headline result, and its page is where you landed. The rest are your mix. Most people come out as several roles at once, and that is the normal result, not a muddled one.

The bars are percentages against this test's own questions. Eighty on rigger means your answers pointed strongly toward rope and toward tying rather than being tied. It does not mean you are more of a rigger than eighty percent of people, and it does not mean anything about anyone else.

How a role wins

Each of the thirty-two questions moves a few roles up or down. Answering in the middle moves nothing, so a shrug is genuinely neutral. Each role's score is how far your answers pushed it from that midpoint, so a score of fifty means the questions about that role left you exactly where you started.

The highest score wins, with two exceptions described below. Ties go to the alphabet, which is a way of saying that two roles within a point of each other are the same result.

When you come out as a switch

Switch is not just another bar. The test looks at your strongest leading role and your strongest following role. If both are at least fifty-five and within fifteen points of each other, you are a switch, whatever else scored. That is what switching means: you are genuinely drawn to both sides, not weakly drawn to one.

If one side clearly outscores the other, you are not a switch on this test even if the switch bar looks tall. The bar tells you the leaning is there; the rule tells you it isn't balanced.

When you come out as vanilla

Vanilla wins only when nothing else got anywhere. If vanilla is your highest score but any other role reached fifty-five, that other role is your result instead, because one shrug at the end of the test should not cancel a sheet full of interest. Scoring vanilla is a real answer for about a fifth of people who take a test like this out of curiosity, and the page for it says so.

Why there is no compatibility percentage

Some tests give two people a number for how compatible they are. We won't, and our comparison tool is built so that it can't. A single figure gets taken far more seriously than a five-minute questionnaire deserves, and people make real decisions about real relationships off numbers like that.

What the comparison tool does instead is describe: where you lead and they follow, where you both want the same side of something and someone will need to offer, and what is worth a conversation. Two identical result sheets come out as "you both want the same side of everything", not as a match. Two people's sheets travel in the link itself, so nothing about either of you is stored anywhere.

What to do next

Read your top role's page properly, including the part about what it is not, because the most common mistake is reading a role as something adjacent to it. Then read the two guides it points to, and pick a munch in your city. A result is a starting point for a conversation with yourself and eventually with a partner. It is not a label and it will change as you learn more.

Your result is a plain link. Bookmark it or send it to someone; there is no account and nothing to retrieve, because we never had your answers in the first place.

Leading roles

• Dominant: You like holding the plan, and you take the responsibility that comes with it seriously.
• Rigger: You're drawn to rope as a craft, and you want to be genuinely good at it.
• Sadist: Giving someone a hard time, with their enthusiastic agreement, is the appeal.
• Brat Tamer: You enjoy the argument, and you enjoy winning it more.
• Degrader: Words are your instrument, and you use them precisely.
• Primal (Hunter): You'd rather it were instinctive than choreographed.
• Caregiver: Looking after someone properly is the part you'd keep if you could only keep one.
• Master / Mistress: You want structure that holds when nobody's watching, not just during a scene.
• Owner / Handler: You like the shape of caring for someone who takes an animal role.

Following roles

• Submissive: You find room to breathe in trusting someone else to steer.
• Rope Bunny: Being tied does something for you that very little else does.
• Masochist: Intensity gets you somewhere that comfort doesn't.
• Brat: You'd rather be caught than handed over, and the chase is most of the fun.
• Degradee: Words that would sting anywhere else land differently when you asked for them.
• Primal (Prey): Being chased switches something on that talking never does.
• Little: Being allowed to put the adult down for a while is the whole appeal.
• Slave: You want the structure to be real, and you want it to last.
• Pet: Dropping human for a while is a relief, and you're good at it.

Roles on either side

• Switch: Which side you're on depends on the person and the day, and that's the point.
• Exhibitionist: Being watched sharpens everything.
• Voyeur: You learn more from watching than from being told, and you enjoy it.
• Experimentalist: You'd rather try it and find out than read about it for another year.
• Vanilla: Not much here is calling to you, and that's a real answer.