There was a time not long ago that I felt there was a vibrant community of chastity players. New stuff coming out all the time and new people joining. Recently, all the sites I visit have become stagnant. No new stuff, community dying out and people all selling their devices. So, which is it. Is the fad over? Or, are people migrating to new ways of community around it.
If you filter out the fantasy nonsense and find the people who are doing this for real then I think you will find that there is a core of 'players' who take this seriously (even while having fun.) if you then engage with their posts you will help ensure that they stay and continue to be involved. The ones who are posting the nonsense tend to disappear rapidly when they find their fantasy is being ignored or isn't as fulfilling as they had hoped.
In my day there were no practical chastity devices so chastity was not a thing. I was denied orgasms by my wife and her girlfriend, but I was allowed to masturbate. I tried some of the leather ones but they were all made for a penis larger than mine. When we started chastity there was the CB6000, the Bon4M which I never see advertised anymore and the Holy Trainer. Not really any Chinese clones. Then as chastity became popular, more and more companies were producing chastity devices and I think they flooded the market. Chastity devices are usually a one time purchase and as I once read, 90% of those who buy a chastity device end up putting it away after the initial excitement wears off. I can believe that. I had been a member of those now defunct chastity forums and Fetlife. What I noticed was that more and more chastity players are single males with no key holder or guys living their fantasy life online, as we sometimes see here with new members whose posts read like what we see in porn. I think that I only recognize 3 names in this forum from 3 years ago. They come and go. Same with Fetlife. Chastity is not a big fetish. Most do not even know it exists. A good chastity device is expensive unlike BDSM where a ping pong paddle, clothespins, and some rope can do it for you. The idea of chastity appeals to men, but in their fantasies they do not feel the burning desire to orgasm or discomfort of wearing a cage all the time. When they try it for real, it is not like their fantasy. When the initial thrill wears off, they do not do it anymore. Then there are many men who cannot find a KH or get their wives/girlfriends to play chastity with them so they post their fantasy life online and when bored, go away. This all adds up to one time buyers for devices. It is not like BDSM for example, where one company makes many different BDSM toys to buy. Repeat business. With chastity, once you buy their product, they never see you again. That business model cannot sustain itself for very long when the interest in their product is small to begin with and subject to erratic swings in interest over time, as I have seen myself. The abundance of chastity devices can make chastity appear like it is getting more popular ,but perhaps all that is happening is exposing more people to chastity and not more people staying with chastity. There are more chastity devices on the market than guys into chastity. The Chinese have cloned the popular designs and taken a lot of revenue from the major manufacturers. Most into chastity on a 24/7 basis buy custom made chastity devices. They fit better and do not break from constant wear like the CB 6000 did 3 times with me. There are so many choices for chastity devices out there than there used to be just a few years ago. Too many. Let's face it, pure chastity is boring. Other than posting about being locked up and denied oragsms, there is really not much more that can be said without going into a larger fetish. There are very few places for those of us who are just into chastity play with no D/s relationship. Although my wife has complete control over our sex life, she does not dominate me. We do it by agreement. Nobody can be forced into chastity like some post about. This is the best site I found that presents chastity in a reality based relationship: https://malechastityjournal.com/caging-your-man/ It is a good primer for newcomers into real chastity and not the one where locking up your penis magically turns you into a sex slave and your wife into a dominatrix overnight. My major problem with fantasy posts and websites is that they set people up for failure because in real life it does not play out as they thought it would. That ends up with a lot of guys dropping out of chastity instead of increasing our numbers. We failed at chastity the first two times because I wrapped it up in D/s, domestic discipline and a FLR. My wife was overwhelmed because she does not have a dominant personality and she even cried because she did not want the responsibility of leading our marriage. She more readily accepted sharing me with her girlfriend and wife swapping than she did chastity so she is not afraid of fetish play. It is not wise to chose the person to lead a marriage based on a sexual fetish rather than who is more qualified to lead it. It was not until we stripped chastity to just teasing and denial under the honor system, that it set our path into long term chastity play. We took baby steps. So misleading and/or unrealistic expectations gained from the internet sets new chastity players up for failure so we cannot grow as much as BDSM did with those cute kits with plastic cuffs, a whip that does not hurt and a pink blindfold. BDSM is fairly mainstream because of how it appears in many movies and in porn. Never saw chastity portrayed in a movie.
Well, I guess it depends on what you decide constitutes chastity. I'm sure all those Chinese manufacturers who are advertising hundreds if not thousands of low-cost devices on DHGate and the like are not doing that to capture a handful of sales at what must be modest profit-margins - they could expend the effort on any number of other products with much more visible and obvious customer bases. And in the 8 or so years we have dabbled with chastity play the mainstream sex toy outlets like Lovehoney have started to offer a range of devices presumably because they sell enough to justify having the inventory in the warehouse. Some will undoubtedly say that the customers for these devices are not 'serious' about chastity and I'm sure that many couples explore chastity with these and drop the idea for good after a spell. I don't see that as a problem - quite the reverse - they have enjoyed a brief spell of diversity in their sex lives and have moved on. Perhaps the experience does no more than encourage them to explore other minority kinks. If so that's good in its own right. I don't see our personal usage (where we play chastity at weekends for a few months and then not for a few months) any less legitimate than a couple who play 24/7 for years - it's just less devoted. I don't see the flood of cheap Chinese devices as being bad for the high-end custom manufacturers. There are new outfits joining the custom device market all the time which suggests an increasing customer base that, I would argue, would not be there if people who wouldn't have even considered trying the kink if the starting price were £100 and upwards gave chastity a try with a cheap device. I think chastity is where pegging was a decade ago - something far more people have tried than would openly admit it. But pegging has now become something featured in TV shows and you would need to be living under a rock somewhere not to have seen something about it at some point. Chastity has had a couple of TV outings (Californication, for example) so maybe it will gradually become almost mainstream as pegging has done.
I believe some people's participation ebbs and flows with the reality and participation of a keyholder. I myself joined here back in 2009. I was going to ask my wife at the time about doing this. I decided not to ask her, and I stopped by here less and less. It was still apart of me but without someone locking me up, I didn't feel I had anything to contribute and just read threads. Even that became sporadic over time. I only rejoined and became active again because I found someone to share this with. As far as its popularity, yes of course it is stronger than ever. I don't say that because of the millions of devices sold, but I gauge it on its availability. Yes they sell lots, but as others have said, many I'm sure are in a drawer, but I'm not sure about you guys, but I have over a dozen just trying to get the right one. I believe there is a lot of repeat business, mostly because it's not something you can try on or feel ok to send back. We guess at sizes and hope for the best...repeat. It's availability has changed 200% from when I first started liking this. A search on the internet would get you mostly 17th century contraptions for maidens in a tower. I had not seen one video clip/porn or anything before, now you look it up and not only are you whisked away to as many devices as you can imagine, but also there are countless porn sites with images and vids of it. I once started a thread here wondering where people go so suddenly without any word, especially when so active, and was informed that most were still into it but no need to share or participate any longer. Who knows, in a few more years, this might be so routine that I will have no need to vent or share my experiences anymore. I think chastity is almost at its peak as far as kinks go. The only thing really left is for more people to know that they still get used and what a key n a necklace is for, in a more unified way. It will never be mainstream enough that people will openly discuss whether they are wearing one because heck its still about sex and last I checked, is still not something to be openly discussed.
Though we have only been living this lifestyle for a few months, we have committed to it and it's obviously more personal than just a kink or fad for us anyways. I'm locked 24/7 now and it has really transformed our marriage. I know that she's told a close friend and her friend wants to lock up her man. Not on the account of it being a kink or fad, but she can see how it's helped our marriage. We wonder while we are out in public if anyone else is doing what we are doing and we both come to conclusion that it's probably a very small percentage of people that do it. Like someone said about pegging, its mainstream and it's been on TV and movies. Chastity may be there in a few years.