This Bay Area sex researcher made an online survey. 1 million people answered

13 April 2026

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this bay area sex researcher made an online survey. 1 million people answered

Aella has built an empire based on her sex research

In a library deep within an academic compound off Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley called Lighthaven, Aella curls up on the couch, opens her HP laptop and navigates to BigKinkSurvey.com. She built the website herself (using Claude Code, of course), training it to display raw data from a 40-minute survey she designed — and which more than 1 million people have taken. Drop-down menus allow users to explore correlations between everything from emotional traits like narcissism to sexual fetishes as obscure as interest in “orcs/ogres/golems.”

Aella is not your typical academic, but the 34-year-old sex worker-turned-sex researcher may very well have created the largest dataset on human sexuality in history. For an audience of 139,000 Substack followers, she uses the data to explore ideas as far ranging as the demographics of child sexual abuse and how “body count,” a derogatory term for the number of sexual partners someone has had, impacts relationships. The data also informs her most popular content: sex advice stories. It also fuels social media posts to her 245,000 X followers that take antagonistic and offensive stances on issues like child pornography and systemic racism.

The large, raw dataset makes for a voyeuristic experience and provides a peek into sexual realities that are otherwise kept under wraps, but like the work of previous trailblazing sexologists such as Shere Hite, its scientific value is up for debate.

Regardless, the data is useful for at least one thing: fine-tuning Aella’s approach to throwing orgies, which she operates out of a house in Berkeley that she lives in with five other people.

^{Aella, a Bay Area sex worker and researcher who has conducted a survey of more than 1 million people about their sexual kinks, poses at Lighthaven, a rationalist event center in Berkeley, Calif., on April 1, 2026. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE}

Becoming Aella

Aella chooses not to use her given name so that strangers don’t send her porn clips to her father. Homeschooled in Idaho by conservative Christian parents, Aella’s first job was on a factory floor, and her second job was doing sex work as a cam girl. It didn’t take long for her account to go viral thanks to an innate understanding of Reddit.

“I saw places where girls were posting nudes of themselves, and they were all kind of boring … I just was like, what would be fun?” Aella said during an interview at Lighthaven, for which she dressed in a conservative, ankle-length skirt and mismatched socks.“It’s like a guiding light in my life. What would be fun to do, and would be interesting?”

The result was a 2013 self-shot photo series in which a group of lawn gnomes pulls her naked body off camera. It helped grow her following such that she earned more than $100,000 in a month via OnlyFans. She then began working as a high-end escort, which she describes as her favorite type of sex work (she now considers it more of a “hobby”).

“It just feels good to sit down with a person and look into them, in the eyes, and have a conversation and touch their bodies. Something about it feels healthy,” Aella said, speaking in a rapid-fire cadence. “Online, the men are reduced to numbers, and I’m reduced to one woman out of 1,000 that you can easily switch between. It’s like, ‘Are you maximizing the funnel stream?’ It just feels like I’m stripped down into an algorithm.”

For most of her adult life, she’s been a nomad, bouncing around between locales, living in Australia; Portland, Oregon; Boston; New York; Berkeley; Hawaii; Seattle; and, most recently, Austin, Texas, for two and a half years — her longest stretch anywhere before she returned to Berkeley in 2025. She moved to Austin partially because she’d heard there was a large community of people who practice Circling, a style of interpersonal meditation she enjoys.

Aella also considers herself a practitioner of “rationalism,” a loosely defined intellectual movement based around unflinchingly logical debate. The movement’s “anti-woke” tendencies often arise on Aella’s social media posts and Substack, where she has been criticized for anti-trans, antisemitic and racist sentiments. In her most controversial post, she advocated for artificial intelligence-created child pornography, which she doubled down on in a 4,000-word Substack post citing data from her survey.

Unlike at Lighthaven, a welcoming rationalist compound run out of an old hotel space in Berkeley where she co-works, the rationalist communities in Austin weren’t tolerant of her status as a sex worker and ostracized her to the point she felt she wanted to leave the city.

“I was having trouble in Austin because it was too right wing,” she said. “I feel very politically homeless. I just want reasonable discourse with people who disagree without getting mad.”

Not that California is much better in her eyes.

“I love the people here, but I hate California itself. It’s terrible governance. Basically, you can’t build here. Taxes are extremely high compared to the benefits that you get. I find it pretty atrocious, and I am resentful that I have to continue living here.”

The big survey

While living in Hawaii in 2021, armed with an online audience in the hundreds of thousands that she’d built up over the years, Aella let her curiosity drive her to a career as an independent sex researcher. Her first surveys were admittedly clumsy; eventually, she refined them to mostly follow a seven-point Likert scale, from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

^{Aella, a Bay Area sex worker and researcher, talks about her survey on sexual kinks at Lighthaven, a rationalist event center, in Berkeley, Calif., on April 1, 2026. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE}

“I made a slightly better survey, discovered more errors in the data, and then I just kept doing that over and over again until I accidentally made the world’s largest sex survey dataset,” she said. “And now I have that.”

One might question how someone could get 1 million strangers to take a 40-minute survey, and the answer comes down to a simple reward: At the end, participants receive a rank on their level of kinkiness, as associated with 80 fictitious characters (Deadpool and Willy Wonka rank high, Captain America and Bambi on the vanilla side). It’s the appeal of the BuzzFeed quiz but for your sex life. People began posting their results on TikTok, and the survey went viral, quickly racking up 400,000 participants. At this point, it passively attracts roughly 20,000 takers every month.

But Michelle Marzullo, chair of the human sexuality department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, says it shouldn’t be relied on.

“I wouldn’t call it a survey, or even a scientifically valid or generalizable study at all. I think it’s a participatory internet project, and it’s something that really could be used as interesting and fun for people but not at all scientifically valid,” she said.

^{Aella, a Bay Area sex worker and researcher, talks about her survey on sexual kinks at Lighthaven, a rationalist event center, in Berkeley, Calif., on April 1, 2026. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE}

Marzullo cited a list of issues with the data beyond just a skewed sample set, since it’s self-selected by people who find it online (Aella admits that this audience leans young, female and liberal). Concerns range from formalities like the lack of peer or institutional review to the legality of including minors in the study. Use of artificial intelligence to parse the data, inappropriate statistical weighting, compromised data and potential for causing unintended trauma are other red flags. She noted that not many studies have been done on niche sexual kinks because of the difficulty and expense of finding participants who are willing to take part in a panel interview. Marzullo cited a study she conducted on LGBTQ individuals in higher education at UCLA; $150,000 of its overall cost went just to finding subjects.

“I don’t want to be harsh about this, because I know she’s a novice researcher and I think it’s a fun thing, but what I’m afraid of is that it could mislead people into thinking that this is a large representative survey,” Marzullo said.

Aella’s quick to admit that her methods aren’t perfect, and that her sample is skewed by the type of people who follow her, but she sees advantages to working outside traditional academia, where funding is often inadequate and attention isn’t a commodity in high supply.

“I just happen to come from a sex work background, which has taught me how to work with social media and attention really well,” Aella said. “And a lot of academics are not trained with that sort of thing.”

Playing with the data

Weekly posts on Aella’s Substack dig into some of the data from both the Big Kink Survey and smaller targeted surveys. A survey specifically about “body count” drew 40,000 respondents. As one might expect, a person with fewer lifetime sexual partners is more likely to have a hard time imagining being happy without their current relationship, and it’s more likely that their partner takes priority over everything else in their life. A person with more lifetime sexual partners is likely to have had more sex with their current partner over the past six months but have lower sexual satisfaction. However, she also approaches much more controversial topics, presenting data that she claims shows correlations between sexual assault and rape fetishes.

Reading Aella’s blog findings like these is challenging, but the explorer also gives visitors the opportunity to comb through the data themselves. Although Marzullo was highly critical of drawing any scientific conclusions, she noted that it’s something of a “data playground” that could be treated as a game or fun conversation piece.

Using the BKS Data Explorer is as simple as choosing two categories to compare. For instance, the homepage defaults to the number of sexual partners a person has had, depending on their political leanings (perhaps surprisingly, conservatives are more promiscuous). Another graphs the most erotic body part based on one’s biological sex. One easy click creates a simple graph with each category on the X and Y axes, showing that women are much more interested in hands, shoulders, arms and teeth, while men’s interests weigh more heavily on areolas, buttocks, armpits and feet. That’s a particularly safe-for-work example, but since this is a kink survey, the rabbit holes of data get as granular as to gauge what type of creature those who are into bestiality are most fond of — women most prefer octopi, whereas men are heavily into rodents. However, given the potential for joke answers alone, these findings probably shouldn’t be used to throw a sex party.

“Some people are like, ‘Oh, the data is false,’” Aella said. “No, data isn’t false. How you interpret it can be false, right? Data is just data. It’s useful regardless.”

^{Aella, a Bay Area sex worker and researcher, talks about her survey on sexual kinks at Lighthaven, a rationalist event center, in Berkeley, Calif., on April 1, 2026. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE}

Data-driven approach to sex parties

Data nerds may get turned on by such deep statistical dives, but Aella’s Substack isn’t just armchair information science — there are also diary-like entries about “the pain and the glory of nonmonogamy,” and sex advice columns like “How to Be Good at Sex: Starve Her Brain,” which inspire most of Aella’s paid subscriptions. She shared that around 3% of her subscribers pay for a $9-per-month subscription, which amounts to nearly $450,000 per year.

The most popular article — which is behind a paywall, of course — is titled “My Birthday Gangbang,” a 2024 post that documents the day Aella organized an event where she had sex with 42 different men (for their services, they received a commemorative bathrobe), which she recounted in a viral article in the Atlantic. The attention to detail that marks her surveys also applied here: Participants were filtered from a larger pool of 1,604 applicants, and close data was kept on the outcome (of the 42, 37 penetrated Aella and 15 didn’t finish). One man, who said he was a virgin, even wore his own heartbeat monitor and shared how his heart rate changed through various points of the experience.

Another popular post is “A Girl’s Guide to a Data-Driven Orgy,” which features a 20-minute video of a TED-esque talk laying out the theory behind her “Red Means No” orgies. Through, you guessed it, a survey, Aella found that the average number of sexual partners people had at orgies was actually less than one, and the majority of the sex that occurred was with preexisting partners.

“We call it an orgy in name only. But it’s mostly like a sexually charged meetup, or speed dating for slutty people,” she said in the presentation. “Where you can go and occasionally see some people f—king, and feel really cool that you’re present while people are f—king.”

Part of this stems from most orgies requiring clear consent before all physical interactions, which is great for making women feel safe but not always for making them feel sexy, Aella says. Her data reinforces this dynamic, with the most popular female fetishes involving some type of power dynamics or nonconsent, whereas the No. 1 fetish reported by men is clothing, followed by roleplay, exhibitionist, genderplay and incest — “a nice, cute variety,” Aella says.

“On the women side, you may see a theme — it’s basically ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’” she adds.

Here’s how the Red Means No orgies work: They’re CNC themed, which stands for “consensual nonconsent.” You attend either as a “predator” or as “prey.” A colored wristband system makes it clear what genders and experiences you’re open to, and black tape is used to indicate any body parts that are off limits. The code word “red” means stop. This cuts out unsexy consent chit-chat, better serves female fetishes and thus attracts more women to the events, which is harder to do, according to Aella.

“I went to an orgy once, and I was just like, ‘I just want someone to grab me and f—k me,’” Aella said. “I don’t want to have to do the game where I go up to somebody and then flirt with them, and then they say, ‘Can I have sex with you?’ I just hate that.”

She’s now thrown 11 of the Red Means No parties, attracting between 30 and 60 people, who pay around $150 for the experience.

If Red Means No events are an extension of the data-centric side of Aella’s Substack, then Slutcon is the real-world version of the “how to be good at sex stuff.” The three-day conference — with tickets starting around $1,000 — includes a variety of workshops, practice and play. There are sessions with both sex therapists and researchers, but the most popular element are sessions where men can practice flirting with women and receive immediate feedback. Early tickets for this year’s event have already sold out.

It all plays into Aella’s mission: working toward a better understanding of how people think about sex and sharing that information with the masses. In its own right, the act of taking her Big Kink Survey is an enlightening experience, both in terms of introspection and realization of how far the fetish rabbit hole goes. The findings may raise more questions than they answer, but they’re questions that most sex researchers are bound from asking. Ultimately, the proof is in the real-world application, with a better understanding of sexuality simply resulting in better sex.

“Good sex benefits everybody. And if we could just figure out how to learn about ourselves, and other people, then we’re more likely to have good sex. It’s just gonna be better.”

By Dan Gentile, Senior Culture Editor

Foto Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE

https://www.sfgate.com