  Online Social Networks (OSNs) provide a venue for virtual interactions and
relationships between individuals. In some communities, OSNs also facilitate
arranging online meetings and relationships. FetLife, the worlds largest
anonymous social network for the BDSM, fetish and kink communities, provides a
unique example of an OSN that serves as an interaction space, community
organizing tool, and sexual market. In this paper, we present a first look at
the characteristics of European members of Fetlife, comprising 504,416
individual nodes with 1,912,196 connections. We looked at user characteristics
in terms of gender, sexual orientation, and preferred role. We further examined
the topological and structural properties of groups, as well as the type of
interactions and relations between their members. Our results suggest there are
important differences between the FetLife community and conventional OSNs. The
network can be characterised by complex gender based interactions both from a
sexual market and platonic viewpoint which point to a truly fascinating social
network.
