I guess it's about time I addressed the elephant in the room.
Why do weirdos like me get turned on by BDSM[1]?
The simple answer is, “Because it’s fun!”
However, I can understand that many people could find the idea of
getting restrained, punished, and ordered around to be horrifying. They could
also perhaps perceive the person doing the restraining and hurting as not just
‘un-fun’ but somewhat sociopathically deranged.
While I can’t speak for everyone out there, my experience has been
that that good consensual kink and genuine abuse are as separate from each
other as oil and water. In fact the communication and empowerment fostered by
the former should help people recognise and call out the later, though
unfortunately that is not always how it goes.
It might also be worth pointing out ‘for the record’ that, since I
started exploring my dominant side, I have not felt the slightest bit inclined
towards actually assaulting anybody. For me, a girl’s consent to tie her up and
cause her pain is the lynchpin that makes any given scenario erotic. There is
something in the exchange of power and trust involved that is crucial to the
eroticism of BDSM, at least for me. When it comes to taking charge I get
aroused by how a partner responds to me doing twisted things to them, not by
the violent acts themselves. I often imagine myself in a partner’s position as
I’m ‘abusing’ them, and, since I know I would enjoy being on the receiving end myself,
empathy allows me to enjoy both sides of the coin at the same time.
I think the critical thing to appreciate is that BDSM is a game, it’s
not meant to be ‘real’. Though it’s possible that the more realistic the game
seems, the better it can be. (Just like the best films and TV shows are often
the ones that are the most believable). Watching horror films is considered a
socially acceptable, mainstream activity, but in these films viewers are
bombarded with unpleasant visual and auditory stimuli. Yet millions of us still
pay to see films like this, perhaps because we get to explore these extreme
situations while remaining safe in the knowledge that they’re not really
happening to us. BDSM on the other hand provides a more immersive experience,
with physical sensations thrown in as well.
While I think of BDSM as exploring a fantasy rather than living out a
reality, from what I’ve seen on the interwebs it can sometimes be hard to see
where the boundary lies. Also, depending on who you play the game with, it
could be a lot more dangerous than going to the cinema.
I have heard a number of psychological theories that frame kinky
interests as some kind of learned deficit. For example; an interest in bondage
might come from not being wrapped tightly enough as a child, or that getting
excited by pain and degradation might be a result of childhood sexual abuse, or
even that people who explore kink may be compensating for perceived sexual
inadequacy. However, most of these theories seem to be based on little more
than the tendencies of certain psychiatrists to make up stuff because they
think it sounds good[2]. In fact,
a recent study suggested that people who practice BDSM in either dominant or
submissive role may be more mentally stable than the average member of the
general population[3]. Some of
the more up to date literature suggests that many psychologists are now
ascribing the attraction people have towards dominance and submission as being
based on sexual arousal by hierarchical status[4];
the idea being that our evolutionary ancestors evolved to pursue sex with more
dominant individuals who could secure the best food, protect them from
predators, etc etc. This idea sounds like it could have some merit, but it’s an
idea that still makes me a tad uncomfortable as a card carrying lefty who
thinks social hierarchies are generally a bad thing, even if I’m happy to play
sex games based around them.
I definitely don’t think this hierarchy idea tells the whole story
either, so as scientist who likes BDSM I am qualifying myself to make up my own
bullshit hypotheses on the subject. They run along these lines:
BDSM practices are not ‘learned dysfunctions’ but are nuanced
expressions of the powerful dichotomy of fear and excitement that lies at the
heart of almost all human sexuality. Perhaps the sexualisation of specific BDSM
practices are due to classical Pavlovian conditioning[5],
or a case of ‘Monkey see monkey do’. I know my tastes have evolved with
exposure to different images and situations, and when I first used to search
for bondage porn on the internet, the more sadomasochistic elements sometimes
seriously put me off[6]. However,
as I became desensitised to the ‘grossness’, I also began to get turned on by
the more hard-core fantasies as well.
Apparently the seeds of our sexual interests are planted during
childhood. The idea that early sexual abuse conditions people to like BDSM is
an extreme version of this conditioning idea, and to some extent it makes sense
that a victim of abuse could learn to associate feelings of helplessness etc
with arousal. However, I personally have no memory of being sexually abused,
(despite going to a primary school run by catholic nuns[7]),
and out of all the kinky people I’ve talked about this with none have described
any specific abuse they can trace their sexual ideas back to.
I’ve also talked to many people who have told me that they only
recently got interested in BDSM because it sounded like a fun thing to try out.
Apparently it wasn’t something they fantasized about at all during adolescence.
I suspect that even the most minor childhood experiences of power exchange can
sow the seeds of kink that may then sprout later in life. Thinking back to my
own childhood, vague memories surface of playing a game when we got hold of
some rope and tied some girls to a tree. After we pretended to hold them
hostage for a little while they got bored, escaped and did the same to us (I
think we let them, because fair is fair!) I think we also got told off for
playing this game by some adult authority figure, which probably only served to
heighten the illicit thrill. Perhaps a mildly violent subtext to cute childhood
games is all BDSM fantasies need to take root.
However, we find ourselves with a chicken and egg scenario: was I
tying girls to a tree because I was excited by it? Or by doing the tying did I
learn to associate that activity with proto-sexual excitement? I don’t really
know anything about how kids develop sexual thoughts. Some parenting sites tell
me it starts surprisingly early… but, to be honest, I don’t want to think about
that too much. However, why should tying a girl to a tree cultivate my erotic
development while doing something like homework with a girl do nothing? Kids do
homework with each other all the time but I feel safe saying that BDSM
interests are a lot more prevalent than homework fetishes.
This brings me to my core idea; where the roots of BDSM interests tap
into the molten heart of what makes our sexuality function. Sex is kind of
scary, especially when you’ve not done it before. Even without all of the
complex social stigma and bizarre rules that various human cultures have
invented to confuse the situation and generally discourage sex as a practice, sex
can still be fucking scary. Both parties are exposing themselves to another
conscious entity over whom they have no direct control. Also, for coordination
purposes, it often falls to one party to lead. This makes trust and power
exchange a key part of any consensual sex, even if the sex is gentle and
tender, and you don’t bite their nipples even once.
When first thinking about exploring sex with another individual,
nervous fear and erotic excitement are likely intertwined, perhaps along with
more complex ideas of surrender or taking control. It seems quite natural that
we can learn to associate arousal with these abstractions, and when the idea of
sex in of itself becomes more mundane, BDSM may help to reconnect with this
sense or erotic trepidation.
It would seem possible that the human neuronal wiring for sexual
arousal could be somehow linked with our ‘fight or flight’ circuitry on a
genetic level. Social behaviour in mammals is far from universal but sex has to
be, otherwise that particular species of mammal won’t be around for long. Back
when our solitary ancestor encountered our other solitary ancestor in a dark
forest, its brain’s first two thoughts were probably; ‘Do I run away from it?’ or ‘Do
I fight it?’... Thankfully for us, this creature then thought; ‘I don’t think I need to run away from it...
or fight it... perhaps I should have sex with it?’ Our DNA has been through
millions of generations of these nervous animal encounters. It might make sense
for the ‘Fight?/Flight?/Sex?’
decision processes to be linked on a biochemical level. Those animals that
thought “Fight?-no, Flight?-no… meh
whatever,” missed a lot of opportunities to make offspring, and the horny
critters that kept considering “Sex? Sex?
Sex?” in the absence of a fight or flight stimulus might have wasted a lot
of time humping inanimate objects.
It would seem unsurprising then if the childhood games that most feed
our sexual development often involve a careful balance of fear, aggression and
excitement[8]. More
complex fantasies might then evolve out of these games, no doubt fed by all the
crude and bizarre sexualisation we encounter in advertising and elsewhere. Thus
it is easy to end up as one kinky adult.
Also if you’re aggressively told as a kid that doing certain things is
really bad, or you find your sexual feelings stigmatised, that probably feeds
into it as well. However, I’m not really sure how to fit this thought into the
rest of my vague theory, so I’m just going to tack it on the end here and leave
you with a conclusion! (You can tell it’s a conclusion because I’m underlining
‘conclusion’ at the top, like we do in real science sometimes.)
Conclusion
BDSM is a fun game. At least it is fun for many people who have learnt
to find it fun somehow. There may be a lot of non-traumatic ways one can learn
to find it fun. I’ve even put forward some muddled reasoning as to how the
simplistic blueprints may be in our very DNA. DNA may also have nothing to do
with it, but this wouldn’t change the fact that BDSM is fun[9].
Maybe you should try it sometime! (Or don’t. That’s fine too.)
[1]And from my highly biased sample of
the New York dating population there seems to be quite a lot of weirdos like
me.
[2] Someone let Freud get away with it once, and look what happened.
[3] Of course there are always going to be significant selection biases to
contend with when surveying people about stigmatized sexual behaviour. I don’t
claim that this study is correct, just that it exists. Reference is: Wismeijer & Van Assen, “Psychological
Characteristics of BDSM Practitioners” - The Journal of Sexual Medicine (2013) Volume
10, Issue
8, pages 1943–1952
[4]
Jozifkova, E. “Consensual Sadomasochistic Sex (BDSM): The Roots, the Risks, and
the Distinctions Between BDSM and Violence” Current Psychiatry Reports (2013) 15:392
[5] In Pavlov’s most famous experiment he would ring a bell every time he
gave a dog food and eventually the dog would reflexively salivate at the sound
of the bell even when there was no food around.
[6] To begin with, I would fantasise more
about being tied up myself. I just preferred looking at attractive girls
getting tied up and dominated by other girls (and so keep weird looking male
genitalia out of it!).
[7] I’ve noticed a lot of kinky Catholics
out there though. Just sayin!
[8] Maybe the upfront kids who just play
‘Doctor’s and Nurses’ (i.e. poking bits of each other’s anatomy to see what
happens) go on to develop vanilla tastes, while the more shy kids who disguise
their interests behind power games and tying other kids to trees turn into
kinksters.
[9]
Regardless of this many people
may find the very idea of BDSM offensive for potentially legitimate reasons,
but if you are one of those people maybe you shouldn’t have opened this book?
Actually it BDSM can be seen in the mating behavior of cats and ducks. Quite violent in fact.
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