artificial intelligence

Review: BeMoreKinky BDSM app for couples

Kate Sloan
idk why this one made me laugh so hard but it did, and now it’s the lead image in my review, lmao

What is the BeMoreKinky app?

Available for both iOS and Android, the BeMoreKinky app is designed by and for kinky couples. It’s meant to be a hub for sexual communication between you and your partner, via features like BDSM quizzes, scene planners, end-to-end encrypted chat, guided intimacy exercises, a habit tracker, and a punishment wheel.

You can use it solo to gain self-knowledge about your kinks and desires, but it works best when used with a partner. You can invite them via a special link or code, and you’ll be able to interact through the app, see each other’s list of kink activities you’re open to, and more.

Things I like about the BeMoreKinky app:

  • Conversation-starter: As someone who wrote an introductory book on kink that was meant to kickstart a dialogue between partners, I’ve heard from many readers about the value of an external kinky conversation-starter, especially early on in one’s sexual self-discovery. It can be hard to bring up the things you’re into, and playing with this app together is a low-stress way to raise these topics. You could narrate aloud while one of you does a quiz on your bondage preferences, for example, or discuss your favorite titles/honorifics as you fill out your profiles together – and then just see where the conversation takes you.
  • Lots of kink inspiration: Human sexuality is so vast that there’s always more to discover, and this app is crammed full of kinks, fetishes, and activities for you to peruse and discuss. If you feel like your sex life is in a rut, but you don’t know quite how to shake things up, this app could definitely inspire you in that regard. For instance, lately I’ve been pondering what femdom-y honorific I might like to be called by a new person I’m seeing, and it was interesting to scroll through BeMoreKinky’s list of suitable titles (mistress, goddess, empress, etc.) to see what struck me.
  • MojoUpgrade-style activity matching: Anyone else remember MojoUpgrade, the classic internet quiz that shows you only the activities that both you and your partner said you’d be up for? It’s a great communication tool, and one of the core features of BeMoreKinky is something similar – once you and your partner have both rated several kink activities (which admittedly can be a decent-sized time investment), the app shows you all the activities your partner rated highly, as well as the ones you both said you like. This is a helpful starting point for planning scenes together, particularly with newer partners whose sexuality you’re less familiar with and less comfortable directly asking about.
  • “In the mood” status indicator: In the app’s “profile” tab, there’s a slider where you can indicate to your partner whether you’re “in the mood” or not. This didn’t send me any kind of notification when my wife activated hers – I had to seek it out myself by looking at the “partner” tab – but still a potentially useful functionality for people who struggle with sexual communication.
  • Encrypted chat: The built-in chat feature is end-to-end encrypted, so you can rest assured that your kinky convos are safe and secure. Sure, the same may be true for whatever app(s) you currently use to text with your partner in everyday life, but some people may prefer having a separate digital space for sexy chats, especially if you’re doing some kind of roleplay that benefits from that type of digital compartmentalization. (Sexy tech-support agent roleplay, anyone?!)
  • Tracks habits & rewards: Lots of kinksters enjoy dynamics where one partner monitors the other’s progress in achieving certain goals, whether those are directly kinky (e.g. “shine Mistress’s leather boots once a month,” “edge yourself 3 times before coming”) or more quotidian in nature (e.g. “read a book per week,” “go for a walk every day”). BeMoreKinky has a feature that allows you to assign and track the completion of habitual tasks like these. There are other apps that can do this, sure, but how many of them are built right into the interface you’re already using for kink negotiation and sexy chat? It’s cool to be able to do it all in one place. This feature was admittedly somewhat buggy when I tested it out, but hopefully it’ll get ironed out in future releases.
  • Polyamory features (in beta): There’s a huge degree of overlap between the kink community and the consensual non-monogamy community, so I was glad to see that BeMoreKinky has a “multi-partner mode” in beta currently. You can switch between multiple partners (up to 5!) without any of them being able to see each other’s quiz answers. While this doesn’t cover every possible non-monogamy configuration, it nonetheless makes this app much more polyamory-friendly than most of the comparable apps/sites I’ve seen.
  • Sleek design: It’s a good-lookin’ app, I must say!

Things I don’t like about the BeMoreKinky app:

  • Buggy: I unfortunately encountered a lot of bugs while trying to use this app – chat messages would randomly vanish, new habits didn’t appear until I’d closed/restarted the app, sometimes the app would randomly switch to a different tab without me selecting that, etc. My wife is a software developer so I sympathize with the struggles involved in making an app like this, but these types of issues are particularly frustrating when you’re trying to get into a sexy/kinky mood and would rather focus on flirting than troubleshooting!
  • A.I. integration: There is A.I.-generated stuff all over this app – some of it disclosed, some seemingly not – and it’s characteristically mediocre. Granted, I’m biased ‘n’ bitter, as a human being who writes about kink professionally and has been (shoddily) replaced with A.I. by some of my past clients – but I still find it sad to see A.I. being used for things like kink scene planning. Half the fun of kink is communicating about it – the negotiation, the flirtation, the mutual discovery – and if you use an A.I. tool to do that stuff, you’re denying yourself and your partner the opportunity to get to know yourselves and each other better, and all the delicious intimacy and vulnerability involved in that process. Naturally, I’m also against the usage of A.I. for art/writing/etc. because it takes away work/pay from skilled human creators who could’ve done a better job.
  • Poorly written quizzes: Probably related to the above point, I found many of the quizzes in this app to be confusingly written, repetitive, at least partially inaccurate, and ultimately not all that illuminating. For example, a quiz titled “Are you a giver or receiver?” mostly asked about dominance and submission – a separate concept from giving vs. receiving, as most kink educators could tell you – while a different quiz on impact play essentially just told me that I’m into impact play, which I already knew, rather than offering any insight on how I might explore that further or what specifically draws me to impact.
  • Overwhelming/excessive at times: This app is packed full of so many features that I think it could easily scare off some nervous newbies. I know from working in sex shops that BDSM beginners often feel overwhelmed as-is, because they’ve already battled through layers of shame and stigma just to be able to admit they might be kinky. The sheer number of features in this app could make them feel out of their depth, instead of encouraging them to dip a toe into kinky waters. It also annoyed me that the app only saves the activities you rate if you rate an entire category of activities (e.g. the “strict femdom” category contains 40 activities), so if you have to stop midway through, none of the activities you’ve rated to that point will be saved. This makes the app even more intimidating, because you can’t “microdose” it by just rating a few activities here and there when you have time – you have to commit to going through a long list of them before they’ll save.
  • Not good for trans people: Upon downloading the app, my wife filled out her basic profile, including indicating that she only wanted to be referred to with feminine terms. Shortly thereafter, we tested out the A.I. scene planning feature, and it immediately misgendered her(!!) and made erroneous assumptions about our sexual anatomy. As-is, I would recommend that trans and nonbinary people avoid this app for the time being. I hope better guardrails are put into place in the future, because (needless to say) this type of unnecessary technological misstep could ruin someone’s scene/night.

Final thoughts

I think the BeMoreKinky app is an admirable effort to make kink more accessible to the masses – not everyone is as comfortable yapping about their deepest sexual desires as I am(!), and sometimes an external resource, like an app or a book, can be immensely useful in jumpstarting these conversations.

That being said, I worry about the perils of bringing A.I. into the bedroom with us. Even setting aside more extreme or existential concerns like A.I.-induced psychosis and environmental impact, outsourcing your scene-planning to a robot robs you of the opportunity to practice thinking (and kinking) for yourself. It distances you from your partner in an intimate arena that can otherwise feel soul-affirmingly connective. It introduces the possibility of boner-killing awkward errors, like misgendering your sweetheart or yourself due to a coding oversight. And in this case, it does all this without adding much value that couldn’t be equally gleaned by just having the guts to talk to your partner about sex.

I feel similarly about BeMoreKinky as I did about the Fifty Shades series, which is to say: I’m concerned about damage it may do and misconceptions it may propagate, but at the same time, I’m happy for the people it may help to discover themselves and their sexualities, and I deeply hope that the good ultimately outweighs the bad. Sometimes we have to make such trade-offs in our continuing efforts to, uh, be more kinky.

 

This post was sponsored, meaning I was paid to write a fair and honest review of the app. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

5 reasons why YOU (not an A.I.!) should write your own online dating messages

Kate Sloan
Photo by mb

Sometimes people are surprised to hear I’ve been writing about sex and relationships for over a decade, as though there can’t possibly be that much to say on those subjects (this blog’s 1.4-million total word count would beg to differ!). What I always tell them is that sexuality and romance are endlessly fascinating – not only because they contain infinite variations, but because technological and cultural progression constantly pushes them to evolve. Sometimes these evolutions are slow, and sometimes they’re rather sudden – such as, for example, the way language models like ChatGPT are affecting dating online.

I won’t go too deep into the common criticisms of this type of A.I., since you’ve probably heard them already: the creative theft, the ecological impacts, and so on and so forth. All of that stuff is important and has been written about at length by people who know more about it than I – but another thing that troubles me about A.I., personally, is the way it might affect our relationships.

It already is affecting them, in fact. I know several people (myself included) who’ve been surprised and hurt when a friend or partner sent a text that seemed to be ChatGPT-generated, as if personal connection is something that can be delegated to a digital assistant. Similarly, several news outlets have reported on the phenomenon of people using A.I. for online dating – either to help them craft their profile, or (worse, in my opinion) to write messages for them.

I very much understand the impulse, as a socially anxious person myself – but today I want to make the case for why you absolutely should not do this, even if you really want to.  You’ll be shortchanging your potential partners, but most of all, you’ll be shortchanging yourself. Here’s why:

1. A.I.-generated messages are bad. Like, embarrassingly bad.

Seriously. And they’re easy to spot, especially by people who’ve used these LLMs and are familiar with their cadence. Do you really want someone’s first impression of you to be “this person is intellectually lazy, socially unskilled, and totally disinterested in authentic human connection”?

I promise, even if you think you’re a bad writer, you’ll be ahead of the curve if you just write a specific compliment about the person’s profile followed by an open-ended and interesting question their profile inspired in you. And it’ll sound like you, not like a soulless collage of stolen excerpts. On that note…

2. You (not the A.I.) need to figure out what interests you about the person you’re messaging.

Sometimes people ask me, “What should I say in a first online dating message?” After telling them about Girl on the Net’s ‘compliment + question + connect’ formula, I’ll usually add: What caught your eye about the person’s profile? What made you swipe right (or whatever’s the equivalent on your app/site of choice)? Surely it’s something a little more specific and interesting than just “They looked hot in their photo.” Ponder the answer(s) to that question and you’ll have some good starting points for initial messages.

Sure, you could screenshot someone’s profile and feed it into an A.I. to generate a list of potential questions and talking points – but then you’re messaging them about what the robot finds notable. By contrast, the things that you find notable about someone’s profile are hugely useful clues – they can help you come up with conversation topics, sure, but more importantly, they help you assess whether this is someone you want to go out with/could be attracted to/might be compatible with. When you entrust that discernment task to a robot, you’re robbing yourself of the opportunity to get more in touch with your desires and to connect authentically with people who could fulfill them.

3. You only get better at socializing by doing more of it.

As I mentioned, I’m socially anxious myself – so I sympathize with folks who find it soothing to navigate social interactions with ChatGPT, I really do… but the thing about taking the easy way out is, you never learn to take the harder route, and so that route remains unfamiliar and foreboding. That can be a massive bummer when that route happens to lead to somewhere cool – like deep, fulfilling intimacy with another human being. Dating is a numbers game, and it ends up being a social-skills training ground for all kinds of people, not just socially anxious ones – so try not to feel bad about being unskilled at it; we all have to start somewhere.

Further, not to sound like an alarmist luddite, but some burgeoning science has shown that ChatGPT usage may make you more intellectually lazy and unengaged over time… which doesn’t bode well for its effects on relationships, an area where mental disengagement can be very noticeable, hurtful, and destructive. (Ever tried to tell a vulnerable personal story to a partner or close friend who was very obviously not listening? It fucking sucks!!)

4. When you meet IRL, your A.I. messages will be soooo obvious in retrospect.

Seriously, no one talks the way ChatGPT writes – and if they did, they’d sound strange! – so your date will probably realize pretty quickly that the texts you exchanged were a sham, which (again) is mighty embarrassing for you, and makes it hard for the other person to feel that their connection with you is genuine.

You’re putting them in an awkward position, too, since they might have their suspicions about A.I. involvement but likely don’t want to sound accusatory or insane by bringing it up. However, they’ll probably wonder about it distractingly for the entire duration of the date, which brings me to my fifth and final point…

5. You can’t outsource intimacy and vulnerability.

This is really the big one, huh?

When I say ‘intimacy,’ I mean the emotional kind (I don’t use it as a euphemism for sex). This type of intimacy is impossible to build without some measure of mutual vulnerability. And if all (or even some) of your messages are written by ChatGPT, you are sidestepping vulnerability, and you are therefore sidestepping intimacy itself.

I can’t let someone in unless I feel that they are letting me in, too. I can’t trust someone with my softness, my heart, or my body if they hold me at arm’s length emotionally. And if ChatGPT is writing their texts for them, well, they might as well show up to a date wearing a printed jpeg of someone else’s face pasted over their own – it’d be just as connective, just as sexy, and would get them just as laid.

 

What do you think about all this, dear readers? Feel free to sound off in the comments…

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.