The Happiest Perverts on the Internet

The line between normal and perverse has always been less a line and more a smear—something you only notice you’ve crossed when someone else is watching. FetLife, the social network for the BDSM and fetish communities, sits well past wherever most people draw that smear. It’s where horny students, bored housewives, and burnt-out managers go to slip into horse costumes, leather harnesses, and military uniforms, then ride, rub, and penetrate each other in apartments, basements, and hotel rooms across the world. The population is larger and more ordinary-looking than the fantasy would have it.

Journalist Manuel Möglich went inside all of this for the documentary series Rabiat, embedding himself among the practitioners and asking the questions you’d expect—and a few you wouldn’t. What he found was less shocking than the premise implies. These aren’t people crouched in shame. They’re running community events, organizing workshops, maintaining social structures that look, from a slight distance, remarkably like any other subculture’s, except with more rope and explicit consent paperwork.

The question Möglich keeps circling is whether people who actually live out their kinks—rather than just browsing for them at 2 a.m. and slamming the laptop shut—are, in some measurable way, happier than everyone else. It sounds absurd right up until it doesn’t. There’s something worth sitting with there, and Rabiat at least has the nerve to ask it without blinking.