BeMoreKinky research
How popular is consensual non-consent?
Consensual non-consent was the most popular option in our app's taboo-roleplay list, with a clear majority saying yes to it.
Very popular as a fantasy. Consensual non-consent (CNC) was the most popular choice in our app's taboo-roleplay list, and a clear majority of the people who rated it said yes. The app called it "ravishment". Both names describe the same basic erotic idea: everyone has agreed to a roleplay in which resistance or force is part of the story.
That story might be a chase, being pinned and taken, or a longer scene built around the feeling that one partner cannot stop what is happening. The premise is intense. The interest in it was anything but obscure.
From the data
CNC was the most popular taboo roleplay
How often people who rated each idea said yes
Among people who rated each idea in the BeMoreKinky taboo-roleplay list, 71% said yes to consensual non-consent (ravishment), 57% said yes to a 24-hour slave day, and 12% said yes to evil clown and victim.
CNC was more popular than any other taboo roleplay
CNC came top when people considered the taboo roleplays in our app. It was the option people wanted most often, so within this list it was nowhere near the fringe.
Joyal, Cossette and Lapierre's general-population study found that fantasies of domination and submission were not rare, and that the two often travelled together. CNC takes those desires and puts them into a particularly concentrated story. One person resists, another insists, and power becomes the action instead of something quietly understood in the background.
That is part of why the fantasy can land so quickly. There is very little ambiguity about who has control inside the scene. The struggle makes authority visible. So does the moment resistance stops working.
For somebody drawn to submission, CNC can heighten the feeling that surrender is inevitable. For somebody drawn to dominance, it can make taking control feel active and complete. Both people may be after the same thing from opposite sides: a scene with no polite gaps in its authority.
CNC gives both roles something unusually definite to play. Refusal has weight, and authority has to answer it.
CNC makes resistance part of the fantasy
In plenty of submissive fantasies, the submissive person still has to choose each next step inside the story. CNC takes that job away. The scene says the decision has already left their hands. Resistance becomes part of what makes the surrender feel forced, final and wonderfully inescapable. The refusal is not a pause in the fantasy. It is the engine of it. Every attempt to get away gives the dominant person another chance to make the outcome feel unavoidable.
That can be freeing in a way that is difficult to reproduce with a string of cheerful yeses. The fantasy gives somebody permission to want an experience without having to act eager for it. They can fight, swear, bargain or try to get away. None of that breaks the submissive role. It deepens it.
On the dominant side, the appeal can be just as direct. A CNC scene leaves room for pursuit, capture and the pleasure of refusing to be deflected. The dominant partner does not merely receive obedience. They overcome resistance and make it happen within the story.
"Ravishment" belongs on the cover of a torn-bodice novel. It efficiently names the fantasy of being carried past the point of choice. CNC is the colder, more technical term for the same erotic idea across different moods.
Some scenes feel darkly predatory; others are playfully theatrical. Some people want a fierce physical struggle. Others care more about helpless language, the chase or the sense that the outcome was settled before the scene began. The label tells you where the power goes. It does not tell you the exact flavour.
Enjoying CNC does not mean wanting to act it out
CNC can live in someone's reading, their dirty talk, a story shared with a partner or the occasional roleplay. For somebody else, it may be one of the main ways they understand their kink. A fantasy does not have to become a regular scene before it matters.
Holvoet and colleagues studied fantasy, activity and identity separately, rather than treating one as proof of the others. Saying yes to ravishment tells us the premise works for somebody. It does not write their next Saturday night.
For some people, staged resistance becomes a scene. For others, the fantasy itself is plenty.
Two people can both want CNC and be imagining rather different nights. One wants the chase and physical struggle. Another wants to be claimed, or the relief of no longer having to perform eagerness. A third is there for the moment refusal meets an authority that will not yield.
The three letters name the door. Behind it might be a torn-bodice melodrama, a dark capture fantasy or a gleefully theatrical wrestling match across the duvet. That range helps explain the result: inevitability can wear so many costumes.