My Week On A Kinky Sex App

Dubbed “Tinder in leather chaps”,a new app serves up S&M at a swipe. Self-confessed “vanilla” dater Gabrielle Fernie straps herself in for the ride

- Gabrielle Fernie

I had, until recently, led what you might consider a pretty “vanilla” sex life. I’d never been handcuffed, I’d never been choked. I “made love” with the lights off and didn’t own one piece of “kinky” clothing. True story: when an actor friend once flirtatiously asked me if I was “into BDSM”, I honestly mistook this for the British Drama Society of Musicals and replied, “No, when are the auditions?” I was absolutely clueless. So, when my seemingly straight (and by this I mean conventional) friend Millie told me that she had joined the app Whiplr, aimed at the ever-growing kink and fetish community, I was pretty curious.

Whiplr has more than two million users worldwide and boasts a range of appealing features, including private and public group chats, an event calendar and “easy blocking”, where any media you’ve shared with a user will vanish from their inbox. “The whole thing was mind-blowing,” confided Millie one evening, describing her first hook-up with a “dominant” man, in which she was slapped and caned. “I didn’t think I would, but I loved being told what to do. It probably sounds clichéd, but I’m constantly having to take so much control in every aspect of my life that, when someone took that away from me, it was strangely liberating – empowering.”