What’s the ‘Free Use’ Fetish, and Why’s Everyone Talking About It?

TikTok, for all its prudishness around explicit content and adult words, is kinky. Since the app’s beginning, people have found clever workarounds to discussing their fetishes, detailing their BDSM, or otherwise suggesting sex in whatever form they like it. But one fetish that has recently begun to get more attention on the app doesn’t need these workarounds at all. It’s called, simply, “free use.”

A free use fetish is, broadly, the desire to be sexually “used” by a partner anytime, anywhere. Once considered niche, now there is more content about it than ever. Several NSFW subreddits are dedicated to the theme, one of which has 1.4 million members, and TikToks about the topic have garnered several million views. While these communities and clips might serve to normalize the kink and make it familiar to those who otherwise would have never stumbled upon it, it is not without controversy.

In practice, free use is an arrangement between two consenting adults. One partner has the liberty to initiate sex without asking and without foreplay, whether the other partner is occupied, asleep, or what have you. At a basic level, it’s an extension of the submission/domination roles present throughout many other BDSM-related kinks. At least in spirit, you’re relinquishing your autonomy to your partner, freeing you from the need to make decisions.

Like most other kinks, how exactly this arrangement plays out will depend on the interests and boundaries of those participating. While many might enjoy the fantasy of the “anytime, anywhere” concept, most ground the fetish in reality with some rules. As Isabelle Kohn reported for MEL in 2021, the free use fetish is often only explored within the confines of the home, and people who practice it often establish certain restrictions like not fucking while cooking or working. Moreover, both parties retain their right to deny the other for whatever reason.

This idea of agreeing to almost never say no—of being transformed into an object to be used however someone pleases—is what drives the kink for some. And precisely these same desires have bolstered the conversation about free use, and criticism of it, on social media.

Over the last two weeks, dozens of videos about free use have gone viral. With over two million views, one shows a young woman bobbing her head along to the music with the text, “me a few years ago, thinking I like it just a little bit more rough.” Then, as the rhythm changes, the words “free use” pop on the screen as if to describe the surprise of finding this kink laying beneath the surface of her other sexual interests. Another with 300,000 views features a woman with the text “when he says he loves sundress season, but he hasn’t free used me a single time this week,” lip-syncing to audio accusing someone of being a liar. “How did I end up on this side of TikTok this is like the 4th video in the past 30min,” the top comment reads.

With the popularity of these videos on TikTok, some of the discourse surrounding it has made its way to Twitter. “The yassification of rape. Ask yourself why you want this pls,” one tweet sharing screenshots of these videos says. It seems crucial to note that most free use participants would deny that there was any element of rape to it at all, or that even the fantasy of it comes into play. While some may see the kink as overlapping with that of “consensual non-consent,” which does incorporate themes of rape, this isn’t inherent to free use. On the subreddit r/FreeUse, for example, the majority of content is posted by the woman being “used” herself, appearing to be a happy participant. She may be playing her Nintendo Switch while having sex, but there is no indication that anything is happening non-consensually. Casually going from Animal Crossing to being railed without any flirting or pretense is the point. Rather than resistance or reluctance, a defining feature of free use seems almost to be boredom.

This isn’t to say the dynamic—and particularly, posting about it on TikTok—doesn’t warrant critique surrounding objectification, blurring the lines of consent and promotion of the kink on platforms populated by teenagers. One of the screenshots shared on Twitter features a woman saying, “I’ve had a lot of people ask me what ‘free use’ means. It means that legally I would always have to say yes to my future husband even if I’m not in the mood in order to prevent divorce.” It’s probably a joke (obviously, there are no legal binds to the free use kink), but one that doesn’t play well with the already-negative ideas people have of the fetish or the reality that marital rape is something that happens to between 10 and 14 percent of married women.

On TikTok, the fetish is discussed without almost any real discussion of the aforementioned boundaries of consent. Like any BDSM dynamic—like sex writ large—free use requires a level of communication not found in these brief clips glorifying it. Instead, they’re un-nuanced representations of its more scandalous aspects. In nearly every clip, the person sharing the content is doing so to quietly promote an OnlyFans, something done more easily through these kinds of quick, provocative videos.

As is so often the case, something personal and complicated has been distilled into a consumable trait. To share that you have a free use kink on TikTok is to make it your public personality. On the one hand, who cares if you like your boyfriend to walk up to you with a boner and expect an immediate blowjob? On the other, why is it something that needs to be shared on social media? The answer, of course, is for attention. But built into kinks like free use is a sense of transgression: It’s fun because it’s taboo, private, dirty. When it’s posted so publicly online, especially without any sort of broader explanation of its requirements and implications, it becomes purely a spectacle. That transgression is lost. Instead, these posts become fodder for Twitter debates—and there’s nothing hot about that.