Dogma dominates studies of kink

Here is an article I discovered regarding BDSM and American College education. I don't think in the UK, we're anywhere near discussing it in our universities.

Scholars in Bondage

Dogma dominates studies of kink

By Camille Paglia 

Once confined to the murky shadows of the sexual underworld, sadomasochism and its recreational correlate, bondage and domination, have emerged into startling visibility and mainstream acceptance in books, movies, and merchandising. Two years ago, E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey, a British trilogy that began as a reworking of the popular Twilight series of vampire novels and films, became a worldwide best seller that addicted its mostly women readers to graphic fantasies of erotic masochism. Last December, Harvard University granted official campus status to an undergraduate bondage and domination club. In January, Kink, a documentary produced by the actor James Franco about a successful San Francisco-based company specializing in online "fetish entertainment," premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Three books from university presses dramatize the degree to which once taboo sexual subjects have gained academic legitimacy. Margot Weiss'sTechniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011) and Staci Newmahr's Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (Indiana University Press, 2011) record first-person ethnographic explorations of BDSM communities in two large American cities. (The relatively new abbreviation BDSM incorporates bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadomasochism.) Danielle J. Lindemann's Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism, and Control in the Dungeon (University of Chicago Press, 2012) documents the world of professional dominatrixes in New York and San Francisco.

These books embody the dramatic changes in American academe over the past 40 years, propelled by social movements such as the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and gay liberation. It seems like centuries ago that, as a graduate student in 1970, I was vainly searching for a faculty sponsor for my doctoral dissertation, later titled Sexual Personae, which was—hard to imagine now—the only project on sex being proposed or pursued at the Yale Graduate School. (Rescue finally came in the deus ex machina of Harold Bloom, whose classes I had never taken. Summoning me to his office, Bloom announced, "My dear, I am the only one who can direct that dissertation!") Finding a teaching job in that repressive climate proved even more difficult. By the mid- to late-1970s, however, the gold rush was on, as women's studies programs mushroomed nationwide, partly as a quick-fix administrative strategy to increase the number of women faculty on embarrassingly male-heavy campuses.

Today's market for sex topics is wide open. Major university presses balk at little these days, short of apologias for paedophilia or bestiality, and even those may be looming. However, despite the refreshing candour displayed by the three books under review, a startling prudery remains in the way their provocative subjects have been buried in a sludge of opaque theorizing, which will inevitably prevent these books from reaching a wider audience. Weiss, Newmahr, and Lindemann come through as smart, lively women, but their natural voices have been squelched by the dreary protocols of gender studies.

It is unclear whether the grave problems with these books stemmed from the authors' wary job manoeuvring in a depressed market or were imposed by an authoritarian academic apparatus of politically correct advisers and outside readers. But the result is a deplorable waste. What could and should have been enduring contributions to both scholarship and cultural criticism have been deeply damaged by the authors' rote recitation of theoretical clichés.

Margot Weiss, a product of the department of cultural anthropology and the women's studies program at Duke University, is an assistant professor of American studies and anthropology at Wesleyan University. In her absorbing portrait of San Francisco as "a queer Sodom by the sea," Weiss surveys the gradual transformation of BDSM from the "more outlaw" era of gay leathermen in Folsom Street bars of the pre-AIDS era to today's largely heterosexual scene in affluent Silicon Valley, where high-tech workers congregate at private parties or convivial "munches" at chain restaurants with convenient parking lots. During her three-year fieldwork, Weiss became an archivist for the Society of Janus, which was founded in San Francisco in 1974 as America's second BDSM-support group. (The first was the Eulenspiegel Society, founded three years earlier in New York.) She also enrolled in "Dungeon Monitor" training, where she learned safety guidelines for "play parties," including proper use of whips and floggers and the adoption of a "safe word" to terminate scenes.

Weiss's colourful cast of characters includes Lady Thendara and her husband, Latex Mustang, who spend virtually all their spare time and considerable income on an elaborate BDSM lifestyle. Mustang insists, "It's no different than owning a boat." We meet "Francesca, a white, bisexual pain slut bottom in her late 40s," and "heteroflexible" Lily, age 29, who "identifies as a bottom/sub." Uncle Abdul, an electrical engineer in his 60s, "identifies as a bi techno-sadist."

Weiss lists but avoids detailing BDSM practices, which range from the benign (spanking, "corsetry and waist training") to the grisly ("labial and scrotal inflation"). We also hear about "incest play" and the baffling "erotic vomiting." Weiss attended workshops in "Beginning Rope Bondage," "Hot Wax Play," and "Interrogation Scenes" (Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch trials, uniformed Nazis). Her "all-time favourite workshop title": "Tit Torture for an Uncertain World."

Equipment for BDSM activities can be acquired as pricey customized gear at specialty shops. Quality handcrafted floggers run from $150 to $300, while a zippered black-leather body bag goes for $1,395. But even ordinary objects, such as table-tennis paddles, can be adapted as "good pervertables." Home Depot is sometimes dubbed "Home Dungeon" for its tempting offerings, such as rope, eye bolts, and wooden paint stirrers, which we are told make "great, stingy paddles." The thrifty take note: Rattan to make canes can be cheaply purchased in bulk at garden-supply stores.

A recurrent problem with Weiss's book is that, despite its claim to be merely descriptive, it is full of reflex judgments borrowed wholesale from the current ideology of gender studies, which has become an insular dogma with its own priesthood and god (Michel Foucault). Weiss does not trust her own fascinating material to generate ideas. She detours so often into nervous quotation of fashionable academics that she short-shrifts her 61 interview subjects, who are barely glimpsed except in a list at the back.

One feels the pressure on her to bang the drum of a pretentious theorizing for which she has little facility and perhaps no real sympathy. There are clunkers: "These binaries rely on the social construction of risk." And howlers: "In what follows, I unfold the thickness of such loadedness." Or this résumé of the circular thinking of Judith Butler, the long overrated doyenne of gender studies: "In Butler's work, intelligibility provides a horizon of recognition for subjectivity itself, within which all subjects are either recognizable or unrecognizable as subjects." Weiss speaks of her own "positionality" and "Foucauldian framework," but she seems unaware that Foucauldian analysis is based on Saussurean linguistics, a system of contested and indeed dubious validity for interpreting the untidy realm of physical experience. As for Butler, there are few signs in her work that she has yet done the systematic inquiry into basic anthropology and biology that academe should expect from theorists of gender.

Furthermore, Weiss is lured by the reflex Marxism of current academe into reducing everything to economics: "With its endless paraphernalia, BDSM is a prime example of late-capitalist sexuality"; BDSM is "a paradigmatic consumer sexuality." Or this mind-boggling assertion: "Late capitalism itself produces the transgressiveness of sex¬—its fantasized location as outside of or compensatory for alienated labour." Sex was never transgressive before capitalism? Tell that to the Hebrew captives in Babylon or to Roman moralists during the early Empire!

The constricted frame of reference of the gender-studies milieu from which Weiss emerged is shown by her repeated slighting references to "U.S. social hierarchies." But without a comparative study of and allusion to non-American hierarchies, past and present, such remarks are facile and otiose. The collapse of scholarly standards in ideology-driven academe is sadly revealed by Weiss's failure, in her list of the 18 books of anthropology that most strongly contributed to her project, to cite any work published before 1984—as if the prior century of distinguished anthropology, with its bold documentation of transcultural sexual practices, did not exist. Gender-theory groupthink leads to bizarre formulations such as this, from Weiss's introduction: "SM performances are deeply tied to capitalist cultural formations." The preposterousness of that would have been obvious had Weiss ever dipped into the voluminous works of the Marquis de Sade, one of the most original and important writers of the past three centuries and a pivotal influence on Nietzsche. But incredibly, none of the three authors under review seem to have read a page of Sade. It is scandalous that the slick, game-playing Foucault (whose attempt to rival Nietzsche was an abysmal failure) has completely supplanted Sade, a mammoth cultural presence in the 1960s via Grove Press paperbacks that reprinted Simone de Beauvoir's seminal essay, "Must We Burn Sade?"

Weiss is so busy with superfluous citations that she ignores what her interviewees actually tell her when it doesn't fit her a priori system. Thus any references to religion or spirituality are passed by without comment. She also refuses to consider or inquire about any psychological aspect to her subjects' sexual proclivities, no matter how much pain is inflicted or suffered. She declares that she rejects the "etiological approach": Any search for "the causation of or motivation for BDSM desires" would mean that "marginalized sexualities" must be "explained and diagnosed as individual deviations." To avoid any ripple in the smooth surface of liberal tolerance, therefore, flogging, cutting, branding, and the rest of the menu of consensual torture must be assumed to be meaning-free—no different than taking your coffee with cream or without. (These books approvingly quote BDSM players comparing what they do to extreme but blatantly nonsexual sports like rock climbing and sky diving.) Weiss's neutrality here would be more palatable if she were indeed merely recording or chronicling, but her own biases are palpably invested in her avoidance of religion and her moralistic stands on economics.

Staci Newmahr, an assistant professor of sociology at Buffalo State College, did her ethnographic research in a "loud, large Northeastern metropolis" that she mysteriously calls "Caeden." The city has five SM organizations, three public "play spaces," and three private dungeons for play parties. Newmahr went "deeply immersive" in Caeden: While informing everyone that she was a researcher, she also became a participant, taking the alias "Dakota" and logging over a hundred hours a week in the SM scene. (Newmahr prefers the term "SM" to "the newer and trendier" BDSM.) Members of the SM community in Caeden are less affluent than those in Weiss's Bay Area sample but just as overwhelmingly white. Newmahr did 20 "loosely structured" interviews, which included off-topic conversation. Her portraits are sharply observed and represent a significant contribution to contemporary sociology.

Newmahr captures how her subjects, even before they entered SM, viewed themselves as "outsiders" who lived "on the fringe of social acceptance." Most are overweight, but it's never remarked on. Several women are over six feet tall, generally a social disadvantage elsewhere. Newmahr gets answers from her subjects to questions about the past that Weiss never asked: Some men are small-statured or have vivid, angry memories of being bullied at school. Newmahr notes the "pervasive social awkwardness" in the scene, the "ill-fitting, outdated clothing" and the women's lack of makeup and jewellery. The men often have little interest in sports and own cars of middling quality.

In describing her subjects' style of "blunt speaking" and boasting, as well as their disconcerting invasion of personal space in conversation, however, Newmahr does not mention social class, about which she says little in her book. I would hazard a guess that she was uncovering the difference between lower-middle-class and upper-middle-class manners—the latter characterizing the world she customarily inhabits as an academic. These fine distinctions are insufficiently observed in the United States, where liberal political discourse too often employs a simplistic dichotomy between rich and poor. Both Weiss and Newmahr observe how often their subjects' casual conversations focus on science fiction or computer software. But Newmahr shows superior deductive skills when she connects this to the Caeden community's "affinity for complicated techniques and well-made toys." Where Weiss sees only rank consumerism, Newmahr recognizes an operative aesthetic of "geekiness as cool."

Despite her wealth of assembled data, Newmahr still stumbles into the weeds of academic theory. We get "hermeneutic" this and "hegemonic" that and trip over showy obstacles like "discursive inaccessibility." There are empty phrases ("As Foucault illustrated so powerfully") as well as a lockstep parade of the usual suspects, like the automatically venerated Butler. Even more troublesome are Newmahr's semi fictionalized sections, which she posits as intrinsic to the genre of "auto-ethnography": "The postmodern view of ethnography as a jointly constructed narrative rather than an accurate objective depiction of social reality has gained support in recent years." Her accounts are "not necessarily verbatim" but "edited or blended, resulting in representations not entirely true to time and space simultaneously"; they are "creative representations of authentic experiences."

But is this questionable practice defensible in scholarly terms? The postmodernist slide away from the search for factual truth undermines the entire raison d'être of universities and the professors who ought to serve them. It is cringe-making that students are being fed this postmodernist gruel: History is a narrative; every narrative is a fiction; objectivity is impossible, so who cares what's real and what's not? Newmahr declares, "All ethnographic work is on some level 'about' the ethnographer" (a claim that begs for refutation). Peculiarly, she then decides to exclude her own personal responses to her SM experiences because it might invite voyeurism. But she can't have it both ways, fictionalizing her material (inescapably "about" her) and yet arbitrarily concealing herself.

Where this diffidence becomes unsettling and even alarming is in Newmahr's graphic descriptions of scenes she witnessed or participated in. The first night she enters an SM club, she sees a woman in a nurse's uniform "quietly nailing a man's scrotum to a wooden board," as he "hissed and screamed." Newmahr was "taken aback" by this horrific spectacle but tells us nothing more.

Newmahr's refusal to comment on this activity, to which I would apply a term like "barbaric" (a concept evidently falling outside the anesthetized world of academic theory), becomes even more glaring when the object of abuse is herself. On one occasion, she lies on a bed in a deserted apartment, where a stranger straddles her and presses a thick cord on her throat until her breathing nearly stops; he smashes her in the face again and again with the back of his hand and draws a razor blade across her cheek. Except for a momentary panic at her isolation and potential danger, we learn nothing of her reaction. Newmahr's flat affect, always disconcerting, becomes positively chilling when she says of a sadist and masochist indulging in "edgeplay": "Only the bottom is risking her life, and only the top is risking a prison sentence."

Despite its defects, this book contains tantalizing possibilities for a more flexible approach to gender studies. At times, Newmahr uses theatre metaphors like "social scripts," derived from Erving Goffman, the great Canadian-American sociologist whose work in such pioneering books as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) was one of Foucault's primary and deviously unacknowledged sources. Newmahr intriguingly describes SM as "improvisational theatre," where "observers drift from scene to scene" and where the performers must act as if the audience is not there. But this excellent train of thought is not followed or developed.

Like Weiss, Newmahr tries to evade making judgments: She shies away from "the ultimately unhelpful questions about whether SM is or is not deviant sex." Nevertheless, she comes close to a breakthrough at the very end of her book, when quoting a Caeden resident who sees SM play as a way "to connect with the animalistic part of our beings." But because nature and biology are erased from the Foucauldian worldview, with its strict social constructionism, that hint is not followed up on. Post structuralism is myopically obsessed with modern bourgeois society. It is hopelessly ignorant of prehistoric or agrarian cultures, where tribal rituals monitored and invoked the primitive forces of nature.

When she acutely declares that "issues of power are at the core of SM play," Newmahr is unable to progress, because the only power that exists for post structuralism resides in society—which every major religion teaches is limited and evanescent. In the absence of knowledge of the historical origin and evolution of social hierarchies, Newmahr ends up with strained conclusions—for instance, that in the structured play of SM "the erotic is desexualized," which is absurd on the face of it. Her own hunches are more reliable, as when she rightly calls SM "a carnal experience"—without realizing she has broken a law of the claustrophobic Foucauldian universe, where nothing exists except refractions of language and where the body is merely a passive recipient of oppressive social power.

Danielle Lindemann, who earned her doctorate in sociology from Columbia University, is a research scholar at Vanderbilt University. Dominatrix has vibrant passages of sparkling writing that demonstrate Lindemann's talent and promise as a culture critic. Her personality charmingly surfaces even in the acknowledgments, where she hails the "giant, cheap margaritas" at the Dallas BBQ chain as "influential in the successful completion of this project." Her knack for compelling scene-setting is shown at the start of the very first chapter:

One night, I realize I've accidentally stepped on a man rolled up in a carpet. We're at a Scene party in the basement of a restaurant in New York's East Village. I approach the bar and put my foot on what I assume is a step, when I hear a faint "Oof!" The man is laid out in front of the bar, fully submerged in the rug, his face peering out of a roughly cut hole. I step off and apologize, but I am immediately "corrected" by a nearby domme.

"That's okay, sweetie—he likes it!" She proceeds to kick the carpet repeatedly and with great force in her platform boots, while the other people at the bar look on with a mixture of nonchalance and delight. The man in the rug beams the whole time. I return to the table where I've been sitting.

"I just accidentally stepped on a guy rolled in a rug," I tell the group of people who've brought me to the party.

"Carpet Guy's here?" one responds.

Lindemann adroitly positions herself as a respectful but bemused observer, like Alice in a perverse Wonderland. Unlike Weiss and Newmahr, she maintains her professional objectivity and atonement to ordinary social standards by preserving her outsider's stance and declining to become a participant in the world she is studying. Lindemann is brisk and discerning as she explores the world of professional dominatrixes ("pro-dommes"), mainly in New York but also in San Francisco. Pro-¬dommes, who call their work spaces "dungeons" or "houses" (short for "houses of pain"), are rarely "full service," that is, providing sex. Instead they cater to a broad range of tastes and desires, which Lindemann organizes into three types: "pain-producing dominant, non-pain-producing dominant, and fetishistic."

Requested scenarios include smothering (categorized with choking as "breath play"), mummification (encasing in plastic wrap and duct tape), infantilism (a man put in diapers), "splash" (playing with messy food like creamed corn or pies), animal transformation (a man becoming a puppy or pony), "French-maid servitude" (a man donning a maid's uniform to clean house), "prison/interrogation fantasies," and "secret-agent/hostage fantasies." Rarities reported by Lindemann include a "leprechaun fetishist" and a client "aroused by a Hillary Clinton mask."

The audacious voices of Lindemann's pro-dommes fairly leap off the page. These fierce women have a haughty sense of métier. "I will not recite dialogue," they proclaim on their Web sites. To bossy customer demands, one pro-domme replies, "I am dominant. You are submissive. You serve me."

Another instantly rejects any client who says, "I want." She insists on "etiquette, protocols," and hangs up on callers who fail to show due respect. It is proper for prospective clients to begin, "Mistress, I want to serve you. My enjoyments are ... "

Pro-dommes often call their payment a "tribute" rather than a fee, as if they were sovereign nations or celestial divinities. In written correspondence with Lindemann, some pro-dommes habitually capitalized "Me." What comes strongly across is the mystique surrounding pro-dommes, with their special expertise and their disdainful separation from the world of prostitution. The Internet, rather than magazines, has become the preferred advertising medium. One pro-domme says flatly, "Print is dead. Nobody who can afford to see me doesn't have a computer."

Another of Lindemann's disarming chapter openings: "I'm sitting in a basement dungeon in Queens, and the first thing I notice is the cheerleading outfit emblazoned with the word 'SLUT' hanging on the back of the door." What a marvellous book this would have made had Lindemann sustained that clear, engaging, reportorial style! But as in everything blighted by post structuralism these days, we soon hit the obscurantist shallows. We hear about the "dialectical process," "instantiation," "discursive constitutions," and that dread phenomenon, "normative, gendered tropes." Insights about drag are credulously attributed to Butler that were basic to discussions 40 years ago of transvestism in Shakespeare's comedies and that were soon superseded by David Bowie's avant-garde experiments with androgyny in music and fashion.

As this book began to veer astray, I felt that Lindemann's mind was like a sleek yacht built for exhilarating grace and speed but commandeered by moldy tyrants for mundane use as a sluggish freighter. Her book is woefully burdened by the ugly junk she is forced to carry in this uncertain climate, where teaching jobs are so scarce. The very first paragraph of her acknowledgments shows what has happened to this and countless other academic books: Lindemann effusively thanks a Princeton professor "for giving me the idea that Bourdieu may have had something to say about pro-dommes' claims to artistic purity." Well, the dull Pierre Bourdieu, another pumped-up idol forced on American undergraduates these days, had little useful to say about that or anything else about art, beyond his parochial grounding in French literature and culture. (No, Bourdieu did not discover the class-based origin of taste: That was established long ago by others, above all the Marxist scholar Arnold Hauser in his magisterial 1951 study, The Social History of Art.) The leaden Bourdieu chapters bring Lindemann's momentum to a humiliating halt and effectively destroy the reach of this valuable book beyond the dusty corridors of academe.

Lindemann stays cautiously neutral about the acrimonious, long-running debate among feminists over whether sadomasochism is progressive or reactionary. But she so distracts herself with paying due homage to academic shibboleths that she doesn't pursue her own leads—as when a San Francisco pro-domme describes what she does as "performance art." Lindemann should have investigated the genre of performance art as it developed from the 1960s and 70s on (thanks to Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Eleanor Antin, and Bowie), which would have given her a superb cultural analogue. She notes pro-dommes' ability to "create environments" and separately draws a very striking parallel to the Stanislavski theory of actors' total identification with their characters. But neither of these exciting ideas is fleshed out.

Buried in a footnote at the back is a glimmer of what could have made a sensational book: Lindemann says that pro-dominance "may have more in common with other theatrical pursuits than with prostitution." "I was recently struck to find, during a visit to the Barnard College library," she writes, "that the books about strippers were sandwiched between texts relating to pantomime and vaudeville, while the texts about prostitutes inhabited a different aisle." Yes, modern burlesque was in fact born in the 1930s and 40s in vaudeville houses that had gone seedy because of competition from movies. Lindemann was poised to place pro-dommes' work into theatre history—a tremendous advance that did not happen.

The lamentable gaps in the elite education that Lindemann received at Princeton and Columbia are exposed in her two-page "Appendix C: Historical Context," which is an unmitigated disaster. Two millennia since ancient Rome are surveyed in the blink of an eye, and we are confidently told, on the basis of no evidence, that the professional dominatrix is "a fundamentally postmodern social invention." Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (author of the 1870 SM novel Venus in Furs) are mentioned in passing, but only via an academic book published less than a decade ago. There is no reference to the immense prostitution industry in 19th-century Paris, where flagellation was called "le vice anglais" (the English vice) because of its popularity among brothel-haunting Englishmen abroad.

All three books under review betray a dismaying lack of general cultural knowledge—most crucially of so central a work as Pauline Réage's infamous novel of sadomasochistic fantasy, The Story of O, which was published in 1954 and made into a moody 1975 movie with a groundbreaking Euro-synth score by Pierre Bachelet. The long list of items missing from the research backgrounds and thought process of these books is topped by Luis Buñuel's classic film Belle de Jour (1967), in which Catherine Deneuve dreamily plays a bored, affluent Parisian wife moonlighting in a fetish brothel. Today's formalized scenarios of bondage and sadomasochism belong to a tradition, but post structuralism, with its compulsive fragmentations and dematerializations, is incapable of recognizing cultural transmission over time.

These three authors have not been trained to be alert to historical content or implications. For example, they never notice the medieval connotations of the word "dungeon" or reflect on the Victorian associations of corsets and French maids (lauded even by Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell). It never dawns on Weiss to ask why a San Francisco slave auction is called a "Byzantine Bazaar," nor does Newmahr wonder why the lumber to which she is cuffed for flogging is called a "St. Andrew's cross."

To analyze the challenging extremes of contemporary sexual expression, one would need to begin in the 1790s with Sade, Gothic novels, and the Romantic femme fatale, who becomes the woman with a whip in Swinburne's poetry and Aubrey Beardsley's drawings and turns into the vampires and sphinxes of late-19th-century Symbolist art, leading directly to movie vamps from Theda Bara to Sharon Stone. And where is Weimar Berlin in these three books? Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical The Berlin Stories, set in a doomed playground of sexual experimentation and decadent excess, was transformed into a play, a musical, and a major movie, Cabaret (1972), which has had a profound and enduring cultural influence (as on Madonna's videos and tours). The brilliant Helmut Newton, born in Weimar Berlin, introduced its sadomasochistic sensibility and fetish regalia to high-fashion photography, starting in the 1960s. Weimar's sadomasochism and transvestism as portrayed in Luchino Visconti's film The Damned (1969) helped inspire British glam rock. Nazi sadomasochism was also memorably re-dramatized by Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling in Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974).

Where is the Velvet Underground? The menacing song "Venus in Furs," based on Sacher-Masoch's novel, was a highlight of the group's debut 1967 album. On tour with the Velvets that same year, Mary Woronov did a dominatrix whip dance with the poet Gerard Malanga in Andy Warhol's psychedelic multimedia show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Other SM motifs have woven in and out of pop music: a brutal bondage billboard on Los Angeles's Sunset Strip for the Rolling Stones' 1976 album, Black and Blue, was taken down after fierce feminist protests; dominatrix gear and attitude were affected onstage by Grace Jones, Prince, Pat Benatar, and heavy-metal "hair" groups like Mötley Crüe.

I was very disappointed to see Xaviera Hollander go unmentioned. That vivacious Dutch Madame's feisty memoir, The Happy Hooker (1971), detailing her bondage and fetish services, sold 15 million copies worldwide. But there is no excuse whatever for the absence in these books of Tom of Finland, whose prolific drawings of priapic musclemen formed the aesthetic of gay leathermen following World War II. And the most shocking omission of them all: Tom's devotee, Robert Mapplethorpe, whose luminous homoerotic photos of the sadomasochistic underworld sparked a national crisis over arts funding in the 1980s. Yet our three authors and their army of advisers found plenty of time to parse the meanderings of every minor gender theorist who stirred in the past 20 years.

These books never manage to explain sadomasochism or sexual fantasies of any kind. In addition to its rejection of biology, post structuralism has no psychology, because without a concept of the coherent, independent individual (rather than a mass of ironically dissolving subjectivities), there is no self to see. One of the numerous flaws in Foucault's system (as I argued in my attack on post structuralism, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," published in Arion in 1991) is his inability to understand symbolic thought—which is why post structuralism is such a clumsy tool for approaching art. But without a grasp of symbolism, one cannot understand the dream process, poetic imagination, or the ritual theatre of sadomasochism, with its symbolic psychodramas. Freud's analysis of guilt and repression, as well as his theory of "family romance," remains indispensable, in my view, for understanding sex in the modern Western world. Surely current SM paradigms carry some psychological baggage from childhood, imprinted by parents as our first, dimly felt authority figures.

The mystery of sadomasochism was one of the chief issues I investigated in Sexual Personae (Yale University Press, 1990). My interest in the subject began with my childhood puzzlement over lurid scenes of martyrdom in Catholic iconography, notably a polychrome plaster statue in my baptismal church of a pretty St. Sebastian pierced by arrows. I traced the theme everywhere from flagellation in ancient fertility cults through Michelangelo's neoplatonic bondage fantasy, "Dying Slave," to the surreal poems of Emily Dickinson, whom I called "Amherst's Madame de Sade." I speak simply as a student of sexuality: I have had no direct contact of any kind with sadomasochism—except that I once had an author photo taken in front of a purple velvet curtain in the waiting room of a dungeon in a midtown Manhattan office building (which may be the very one where Lindemann's book begins).

In researching sadomasochism, I did not begin with a priori assumptions or with the desire to placate academic moguls. I let the evidence suggest the theories. My conclusion, after wide reading in anthropology and psychology, was that sadomasochism is an archaic ritual form that descends from prehistoric nature cults and that erupts in sophisticated "late" phases of culture, when a civilization has become too large and diffuse and is starting to weaken or decline. I state in Sexual Personae that "sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted," and that its "primitive urges" have never been fully tamed: "My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind."

Sadomasochism's punitive hierarchical structure is ultimately a religious longing for order, marked by ceremonies of penance and absolution. Its rhythmic abuse of the body, which can indeed become pathological if pushed to excess, is paradoxically a reinvigoration, a trancelike magical realignment with natural energies. Hence the symbolic use of leather—primitive animal hide—for whips and fetish clothing. By redefining the boundaries of the body, SM limits and disciplines the over expanded consciousness of "late" phases, which are plagued by free-floating doubts and anxieties.

What is to be done about the low scholarly standards in the analysis of sex? A map of reform is desperately needed. Current discourse in gender theory is amateurishly shot through with the logical fallacy of the appeal to authority, as if we have been flung back to medieval theology. For all their putative leftism, gender theorists routinely mimic and flatter academic power with the unctuous obsequiousness of flunkies in the Vatican Curia.

First of all, every gender studies curriculum must build biology into its program; without knowledge of biology, gender studies slides into propaganda. Second, the study of ancient tribal and agrarian cultures is crucial to end the present narrow focus on modern capitalist society. Third, the cynical disdain for religion that permeates high-level academe must end. (I am speaking as an atheist.) It is precisely the blindness to spiritual quest patterns that has most disabled the three books under review.

The exhausted post structuralism pervading American universities is abject philistinism masquerading as advanced thought. Everywhere, young scholars labour in bondage to a corrupt and incestuous academic establishment. But these "mind-forg'd manacles" (in William Blake's phrase) can be broken in an instant. All it takes is the will to be free.

What is an opinion and how does this affect religious views on sexuality?

I would like to begin this blog entry firstly by defining what an opinion ( or having an opinion ) actually means. Having established this, I would like to move onto how opinions of ‘moral reasoning’ effect religious groups and their ‘opinion’ on sexuality.

I felt that an examination of religiously endorsed ‘moral views’ was needed after such an ill informed and bias argument against BDSM practioners was outlined in a blog post i discovered. (Please view my original post regards the topic here) AND also 'Dealing with ignorance within BDSM' by Krafted Khaos - @KraftedKhaos.

What is an opinion? It has been agreed since the time of Plato, that there is a difference between ‘an opinion’ AKA ‘common belief’ and ‘certain knowledge’. The two are very different in the terms of public discourse.An opinion has a degree of uncertainty, a subjectivity to it – an example can be an enthusiastic amateur disagreeing with the top scientists on carbon emissions and it’s affect on our planet.

Are we all entitled to ‘our opinions’?

There are two ways at looking into our right to an opinion. Let’s answer that question by examining an example:

“All gay people have red hair!”

1) No one can stop you saying “All gay people have red hair!”, no matter how many times that view has been disproved. Does having an opinion mean you can say whatever you want, whenever? Thinking and saying whatever you feel like?

or

2) Do your opinions need to be serious candidates for the truth?

The logical and accepted norm is, of course, number 2.

In the realm of accepted public discourse, you are NOT simply entitled to your opinion – based solely on what you think without the ‘science’.

You can only argue for what you can defend with hard facts. Constructing and defending an argument based on accepted facts (all the facts), entitles you to an opinion. An opinion which must then be taken as a serious candidate for the truth.

Far too often ‘I’m entitled to my opinion’ feeds and defends beliefs which should have been abandoned long ago.

Humanity has come a long way since the days of burning witches. But, no matter how much time has passed, there is one thing Christian groups – sorry – Religious groups can use to justify their actions: ‘It’s not the sinner we hate, it’s the SIN!’  It’s the SIN which offends – not the sinner, it’s the actions which are immoral.

Such is the view of BDSM.

As I noted earlier, an opinion needs to be based on ‘facts’. When the issue is of public ethics and acceptability, beliefs or opinions grounded on religious  faith  simply isn’t enough (on it’s own,) to forge an accepted public discourse on whether BDSM is morally repugnant.

I also find it shallow when religious groups refer to BDSM as a ‘lifestyle’.  To me, this implies that BDSM is seen as an inessential add-on to a person rather than a core defining feature of that person. It also implies that religious groups who view BDSM’ers as ‘mentally ill’ or ‘morally corrupt’ cannot see the inner lives, concerns, passions and core beliefs of BDSM’ers as being as morally significant as their own.

My final paragraphs: I do not in any way see religion as a ‘lifestyle’. It is a core belief, I support the free exercise of one’s religion. I do not deny the moral depth of religious people.

Being Christian does not affect job performance. Being gay does not affect job performance. Practicing BDSM does not affect job performance.

Being religious does not impede or increase moral reasoning or principles, nor does being gay, being into BDSM or kink. Let us view others as no less worthy of our regard on the basis of such differences as sexuality and religion.

Arguments that cannot be used to call #BDSM morally acceptable. WTF??

In a blog entry I recently discovered, written by a single Christian girl ( who claims to want to understand the" objective truth") I discovered an entry regarding BDSM, it's morality and acceptability.

Quick reminder that this is the 21st century.

I found this 'persons' viewpoint of BDSM offensive. Totally uninformed, erroneous, clueless, nescient, uneducated, ignorant, agnostical, naive, lacking in factual evidence...I could go on, but I think I'll spare her any more of my linguistic revilements, for now.

Below is the article to which I am referring to. 

I suggest reading it. 

I suggest commenting on it. 

I suggest informing the writer of her erroneous ways and here is the link to the article if you so wish to comment on her Blog.

Arguments that cannot be used to call BDSM morally acceptable

Is there anything good about BDSM?: Arguments that cannot be used to call BDSM morally acceptable

May 17, 2013 at 7:44 pm

I have previously argued that BDSM, (SEE BOTTOM OF THIS ARTICLE) whatever the participants want to say of it, is morally reprehensible.

 Here I will argue how my opposition could – and could not – defend their view if they disagree.

Arguments that cannot be used to call BDSM morally acceptable

1) “What you described is abuse, not BDSM:”

Here is a definition of domestic abuse:

“Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members. This can encompass, but is not limited to, the following types of abuse: psychological, physical, sexual, financial, emotional. Controlling behaviour is: a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape and regulating their everyday behaviour. Coercive behaviour is: an act or a pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim.”

BDSM often include “physical and other forms of violence”. (Participants in this sexual kink may not like the word violence, but per definition it fits.) It is no surprise that it does, because sadism is part of the name of BDSM, and thus a component that may or may not be part of such a relationship. It includes many types of “acts to make a partner subordinate”, it often include bondage which obviously “deprive”, for the time of bondage, “of the means for independence, resistance and escape”. Dominance often amounts to “regulating the sub’s everyday behaviour”. Much of BDSM include acts to “punish”, and many subs describe feeling fear (being “frightened”) during scenes.

Some warning signs of abusers include: Controlling behaviour, “playful” use of force in sex, verbal abuse; rigid sex roles (man above, woman lower); a sense of entitlement (many doms say they “deserve” the treatment the sub gives them); and hierarchical self-esteem (needing to be “better” than another to feel good about himself). Most of these warning signs of potential abuse are present in what I hear of almost every BDSM relationship.

As such, BDSM and abuse are not mutually exclusive.

I can imagine a relationship with no bondage ( no “depriving of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape”); with discipline or punishments that cannot be called “violent” at all and does not amount to “control” by the dom because the sub has to ask to get it; no dominance that controls the behavior of a partner – but the partner in “submission”  by wanting to generally please and be loyal without there being control; no sadism (violence) or masochism (taking of violence to fulfill needs). But will such a relationship, deprived of anything that counts as abuse, still be a BDSM relationship?

2) Sub: “But I do not see it as abuse”:

Many abuse victims do not know they are being abused. Their communities or the abusers tell them that it is not abuse, that they should be thankful for what they have, etc. To quote one abused woman:

Sometimes it takes time away from “normal” to see that it is indeed not normal after all. After 3 months of separation from my husband, I have new insight as to what normal is. When you are in a mentally or emotionally abusive marriage, sometimes you don’t know that your normal is not normal after all.

3) “It is consensual”:

Consent is not enough to make something right. Many employees, for example, choose to keep their jobs even though the boss is a bully, thereby consenting to be treated the way the boss treats them. Treating your workers badly is still not morally right. (And many child molesters get the child to “consent”- but the consent do not count as the child is too young.)

However, I agree that doing something to another without consent would normally be immoral. Consent is probably part of the utter minimum of decent behavior under most circumstances. If BDSM is consensual it avoids one type of very immoral behavior, but so does “we don’t rob money during scenes.”

But even with such a small yardstick, BDSM is ambigious. BDSM acts may exploit and worsen the kind of personality flaw that makes someone consent to things that is not good for him or her.

4) “But my relationship is not like that”:

This blog post is not about your relationship. It is about BDSM. For example, one sub could say:

He is very concerned when I have a backache … he likes to cane me during scenes.”

Concern during backaches is not BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Domination/ Submission, or Sadism/ Masochism). Caning during scenes, however, is one of the many things that counts as a BDSM practice.

If there are BDSM aspects to your relationship that are morally positive, you are welcome to describe those, so I can add to my understanding. But mentioning the non-BDSM aspects of your relationship to defend BDSM is like saying “He is opposed to stealing TVs and hi-fis” to defend someone who steals computers.

What is more, I have never spoken to a BDSM participant who – if (s)he gives any evidence to study the truth of his claims by – actually speak the truth about their relationships. They will say things like “we have a mutually respectful relationship” – and when I go to their blogs, one of the most recent entries has him calling her a [semen receptacle], and her crying bitterly because she wants to be loved, not a mere [semen receptacle] – and she really believes this is his actual view of her, that she is nothing more to him. If your partner sees you as an object, you are not in a mutually respectful relationship.

Or they will testify things like: “he will never hurt a fly” with the next sentence “he likes to induce pain on me, but I like it” and somewhat further in the conversation “I get punishment beatings which I do not like, and they hurt more than what I like.” If he induces pain, he hurts you. If there are pain in your relationship that you do not like, it is not wholly true that you like the pain he brings into your relationship.

5) “But I like it/ crave it”:

1) Desiring something does not make it good. For example, selling heroin is not morally good, even though addicts crave it. It is not morally good, because it destroys the one who gives in to the craving.

2) It is often not true that the sub enjoys BDSM – for example, a punishment to discipline the sub will probably be enjoyed by either only the dominant, or neither of them. Many subs speak of experiencing negative emotions like fear during scenes, and actually likes the feeling of relief from getting out of these negative situations afterwards. None of them actually enjoy pain or will, for example, butt their head against walls for fun.

3) Subs often “want” the opposite of what they want: They actually want kindness, tenderness and reassuring words of encouragement and praise like everyone else, but they feel they will be in a better position to enjoy having these needs met if they start with rough treatment and negative messages. The rough treatment – degradation, insults, etc., is what they “want” but the opposite of what they really want. A man who gives them the bad treatment could certainly make them unhappier. They take that risk, in the hope that a scene, where they live themselves into the bad, will end with the good. When the dom is not good at providing the good part, he can say he did only things the sub “allowed” and even “craved.” But he did not give her what she really enjoys, and he probably did harm her psychologically.

One dom testify that every sub he ever met was conflicted over her wants, with a part of her that finds her BDSM desires deviant. Which make sense, really: Obviously in any sane person, there will be a part that dislike these things. Between those two conflicting and opposite desires of the sub, the dom chooses to give the deviant one. I suggest that this says a lot about the character of the dominant partner.

6) “I don’t feel like this is something bad”:

I will quote CS. Lewis on this:

When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both bad and evil: bad people do not know about either.

Perhaps you do not regard something as morally bad, because your soul has become used to the badness in BDSM. If you disagree, show me what positive moral values is encouraged by BDSM.

7) But this is safe and sane!:

Safe is free from the possibility of getting harmed or hurt. If you want me to believe that BDSM is safe, you have to convince me that bondage, discipline, domination/ submission, and sadism/ masochism does no damage or pain of any kind to the self image, the body, the interpersonal relationships, the mind, or the acknowledgement of real moral values, of the submissive, or the dominant, or the reader of BDSM blogs and websites.

If you want to tell me it is sane, you have to convince me that there is nothing insane about wanting bondage instead of freedom, domination instead of you and others each getting their will, or pain (I don’t just mean physical pain, but also the mental pain of being degraded and treated as less than) -in yourself or your partner – instead wanting a healthy, non-hurting, autonomous body. mind and heart.

And sane things could still be unethical. I can think of several reasons why a sane man would want to rob a bank, but that does not make bank robbery morally right.

————–

So please: If you think you have evidence to suggest BDSM is morally better that I give credit for on this blog, please give it. Bring up some actual moral standard, for example kindness or justice, and explain how BDSM, or some aspect of it, is kind or just or whatever moral standard you admitted.

_____________________________________________________

Why BDSM should not be seen as acceptable by mainstream culture

November 10, 2012 at 5:46 am 

When can you call yourself a good person? The usual secular answer goes something like this:

I don’t hurt anyone. I do not want to hurt anyone. So I am a good person.

I previously argued that this approach to moral goodness is less than adequate, but that is not today’s topic. Point is, someone who does not want to hurt others – physically, emotionally, economically, etc. is regarded, by almost any set of values including the purely secular, as superior to those who want to hurt others. And that simple baseline idea of morality: “Do not hurt others” is a fairly good start for a moral conscience. Per extention, hurting others on purpose is the baseline standard of moral evil.

Where does that put people who like sadistic or masochistic acts? (Warning: Violent sexual graphics in link.)

Are people who condone this as moral as those who oppose this?

A sadist hurts people. A masochist finds sadistic behavior – hurting others – acceptable, something (s)he encourages and defends in a partner. This hurting could be physical pain, or it could be humiliation , insults and degradation.

The BDSM community may say that their standard of morality is “safe, sane and consensual.” In my opinion, that is automatically a lower standard than not hurting people:

>    To safely hurt people – in other words, hurting them emotionally and physically, but not to such an extent that their life or health is in danger – is a lower moral standard than not hurting them. It is also nonsensical. Part of the definition of “safe” is “free from hurt” and “protected from being hurt”. As such, anything or anyone that causes hurt is, per definition, unsafe.

>    To sanely hurt people – hurting them while staying in control of your emotions, while doing nothing that the BDSM community will regard as crazy, is a lower standard than not wanting to hurt people. It is also a contradiction in terms. Mental health professionals regards both sexual sadism and sexual masochism as mental disorders.*

>    To hurt consensual people is a lower standard of morality than not hurting people. A similar example will be selling cocaine only to consensual buyers – of course, that is morally worse than not selling cocaine at all. But the similarities goes further: Drug sellers not only want to sell to consensual people, but they do what they can to enslave their customers further, so they can sell more drugs and make more money. Likewise, sadists encourage their consensual submissives to consent to worse pain and worse humiliation than before. And both drug sellers and the BDSM community push their product because they want to enslave new customers.

Anyone who is involved in BDSM (I am not speaking about the ropes and blindfolds part here, but pain and humiliation) have rejected the simplest basic human value of “it is wrong to hurt people.” Can you reject this value, and still be a good and trustworthy member of society, safe for those around you to be with? I do not think so. I believe this will spill over into the other human interactions of the BDSM participant.

I do not expect to make any BDSM participant en ex-participant with this post. I want to tell “vanilla” (non-BDSM) people to not regard these people as normal people who just have different sexual needs. This is not in the same class as, say, a fetish for high heels or even a preference for your own gender. This is a direct rejection of the most basic value of how to treat humans. To the degree you start to  find sadism/ masochism in pornography and literature acceptable, you reject the most basic moral standard that is written on normal human hearts. To the degree you watch that kind of pornography, you encourage and even fund cruelty.

(Edit, added about 12 hours after this post first appearing: I should have asked this before, but please do not link to BDSM/DD web sites or blogs in the comments, including the place where you optionally fill in your blog name after your name and e-mail address. Thank you)

——————

Note*

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders regards both sexual masochism and sexual sadism as mental disorders. Because of, among others, pressure from the BDSM community, consensual masochism or sadism is only regarded as a mental disorder nowadays if it causes “clinically significant distress or impairment in important areas of functioning.” It appears humiliation and degradation is prone to cause significant distress for the person subjected to it, and I expressed the opinion that letting go of the “hurting people is wrong” standard will dause impairment in social functioning.

Even when all sadism and masochism was considered mental disorders, BDSM people already called “sane” one of their values.

Should college networks ban porn?

 
Cherwell is the independent student newspaper of Oxford University, England. Founded in 1920 by students Cecil Binney and George Edinger, it has continued as a weekly publication during term-time to this day.Cherwell is named after a

BuzzNet Tags: bdsm porn

local river in Oxford and is published on Friday mornings when 3,000 copies of each issue are distributed around Oxford's colleges, the Oxford Union and some local cafes. The staff of Cherwell, including the Editors, changes every term.


Jennifer Brown, Anna Cooban on Monday 6th May 2013
 

Jennifer Brown and Anna Cooban go head to head.

YES

Jennifer Brown

The St Anne's Feminist Discussion Group this week mused putting a motion before their JCR to ban the use of pornography on the college network.

There are, of course, cases for the proposal. The most widely used argument is that porn is degrading to women and therefore, in allowing students to watch it, colleges are inadvertently allowing male (and female) students to be exposed to the objectification of women.

As I’m sure you will agree, using the words ‘slut’, ‘whore’ or ‘bitch’ to describe females is hardly progressive. Nor is the idea that a woman will submit to anything her male partner demands. And whilst some may argue that this is reality, that this is how some people behave during sex, it does not mean that such behaviour is right. For if that is the case, it is not just college rules which need to change but society’s perception of women also.

Furthermore, I am sure few will argue that porn which depicts women being raped, put into cages or performing oral sex on a dog, is really ‘suitable’ late night viewing.

And, yes, you may think bringing this up is all a little over the top for a matter solely concerned with students who are not generally associated with sexual abuse. . The majority of students at Oxford and indeed across the country will not delve into ‘violent’ porn like this. At least I hope not.

But the fact remains that it is available on the internet should a student wish to find it. Banning porn from its college network may seem a ridiculous idea, yet if acts such are these are socially unacceptable in some places, any desire to prevent association with them does become a little easier to digest.

The negative effects of porn do not end here. Porn engenders unrealistic physical standards for the majority. One only has to look at statistics for cosmetic surgery within the UK: 9,843 cases for ‘boob jobs’ are recorded for 2013 alone. Clearly presenting ideal archetypes has a detrimental affect on the self-esteem of individuals.

And as increased expectations not only affect notions of physical appearance, but sexual performance too, it is hardly surprising that individuals take issue with the concept of porn even prior to any discussion of college imposed bans.

Evidently, what people have failed to realise is that banning porn in colleges would be a good thing. Banning porn would be sending out the message that we wish to disassociate ourselves from porn’s link to sexual discrimination, the promotion of anti-social behaviour and out of proportion expectations.

Considering the collegiate system and heavy workload, many people in Oxford often find meeting a potential love interest a challenging task. Thus, they regress to the confines of their room, safe in the knowledge that porn will always provide an adequate alternative to social interaction and indeed, sex.

If St Anne’s adopts the potential JCR motion, then it could become the the leading light of Oxford as porn addicts come out of the woodwork and prepare themselves to find someone real rather than sitting behind their desks (where they work and eat) fixating over videos of people they’ll never meet.
 

NO

Anna Cooban
Banning porn is far too moralistic. If watching porn does provide issues for college internet connectivity then any ban on pornography hits no theoretical or moral brick wall, only a practical one.

Porn, in this context, is watched privately by adults in their rooms. What such a ban hints at is an objection to the personal use of pornographic websites, a prudish revulsion to the masturbatory indulgences of – let’s be frank – a predominantly male demographic.

Perhaps it makes some slightly queasy to know that somewhere in college a student may just be reaching their moment of ecstasy while the rest of us are poring over our textbooks.

However, the issues surrounding porn are clearly much bigger than this – it would be foolish to deny that the birth and subsequent boom of the porn industry has not in some way damaged society. The impossible scenarios depicted in these videos warp expectations of an individual’s own sexual experiences. Watching porn would make anyone feel that they had to climax within seconds and possess E-cup (and yet suspiciously perky) breasts, or a ten-inch penis that is perhaps better suited to a travelling circus than symbolising ‘true’ masculinity.

Porn is a feminist issue and to suggest otherwise is to deny the role it plays in objectifying women. Yet I find it hard to imagine that the proponents of this motion would have the same distaste for pornography if it was a widely accepted fact that men and women enjoyed watching porn to the same extent.

Porn is arguably just as much a male as a feminist issue; from increasingly younger ages, boys are pressured into following this ‘norm’ just as girls are taught to play with Barbie dolls, such that for one boy to buck this trend is an act of defiance rather than an uncontroversial personal choice.

Such a ban would be based on well-founded concerns and a debate that aims to raise awareness of porn-related issues is invaluable. However, forcing through the motion is little more than nannying.

The entire basis of modern capitalism is designed to make us all feel inadequate, encouraging us to yearn for something we do not have. To ban porn on these grounds would be to also ban any women’s fashion magazine that holds airbrushed supermodels as standards of acceptable beauty, music videos that depict pin-thin 20-somethings grinding on their 40-year-old rap overlords.

Men’s fitness magazines promote body builders as the pinnacle of masculinity, yet with hearts so fatty that the irony of the word ‘fitness’ appearing next to these specimens is inescapable.
We are constantly bombarded with reminders of the person we are supposed to be. Any student-led revolt against the porn industry is going to fall on deaf ears when it challenges a problem that is ingrained in our culture.

Porn is a destructive force of modern culture and a result of the 1960s sexual revolution that has, ironically, come full circle to produce a new kind of entrapment. Yet to restrict the personal use of pornography outright is to argue for the banning of any medium which produces the same destructive effect.

---

"Porn is not inherently misogynistic"

Simone Webb counters the arguments in last week's porn debate from Cherwell’s “Should college networks ban porn?”

Simone Webb on Thursday 9th May 2013

Photograph: Cherwell

The debate by Anna Cooban and Jennifer Brown in Cherwell on whether colleges should ban internet porn from their networks was badly argued, written and informed. Both pieces rested on dubious assumptions and a naïve approach to pornography: Brown’s article misused statistics astoundingly, while Cooban’s ignored some of the most important arguments in opposition to colleges banning porn.

Firstly, Brown showed a complete failure to differentiate ethically between consensual and non-consensual scenarios. For instance, the line “I am sure few will argue that porn which depicts women being raped, put into cages or performing oral sex on a dog, is really ‘suitable’ late night viewing” did not distinguish between the two acts which are both non-consensual and illegal (rape and bestiality) which are therefore already not permitted and require no further regulation, and an act which may well be fully consensual and part of a BDSM scenario (being put into a cage). Similarly, she states that it is not right for a woman to submit to her male partner during sex, which again erases the experiences of women who enjoy consensual BDSM activities (and assuming, as is often the way, that all BDSM involves female submission and male dominance).

Secondly, I want to touch briefly on Brown’s failure to demonstrate a causal link between the viewing of porn and cosmetic surgery: the argument essentially ran: “Porn! 9843 ‘boob jobs’ in the UK this year! Therefore porn bad!” One data point is not enough even for me to warn against assuming that correlation is causation; Brown did not even demonstrate correlation, or look at all at the break-down of that statistic.

Thirdly, Cooban’s argument against banning porn brings up, rightly, the way in which it is not just porn which affects self-image, behaviour, etc. However, she ignores two significant arguments against the banning of porn by college networks. The first is the way in which it affects students who may also choose to be sex workers, cutting off valuable sources of income. I quote from an email sent to me by a sex worker and Oxford alumna, Violet Rose: 

“Student sex workers might face loss of earnings if fewer people could view their sites and … purposely causing loss of earnings for other students seems like a wilful lack of worker solidarity between students, which may not have been apparent to more privileged (non-working) students”. (As requested, a link to her website. Largely safe for work.)

The second is just as significant: porn filters frequently block not just pornography and erotica, but also sexual health resources, particularly those for LGBTQ people: I would suggest that it would be negligent and harmful for colleges to put porn filters in place with this in mind. LGBTQ young people who require sexual information or even just wish to explore their sexuality using porn or erotica may be negatively affected.

Finally, I need to address the assumptions made by Cooban and Brown about porn. Porn is very much a feminist issue, but I take issue with the pessimism Cooban and Brown display. Much of the porn industry is misogynistic and aimed at men. But there is a burgeoning effort by many to produce ethical porn, porn which treats women as sexual agents and is female focused, queer porn (which treats transgender people with the respect often denied them by the mainstream porn industry) and feminist porn. T

here is erotica, for instance, like the Hysterical Literature video series (to be found on YouTube) which focus on women’s pleasure for its own sake, as opposed to more overtly performative displays of the female orgasm. For a college to institute porn filters banning ethically produced, non misogynistically presented and overtly consensual porn means that the filters boil down to preventing – or trying to prevent – adults making an informed decision to watch other adults engage in sexual acts, which is frankly bizarre. Porn is not inherently misogynistic and dangerous.

SOURCES: http://www.cherwell.org

Therapy and BDSM Lifestyles

Andrew Robertson, University of Phoenix

Dr. Lori Travis

April 3, 2008

Abstract

There is a long, dark history of the psychiatric community's bias against the BDSM community and their practices. Starting with the DSM-II, Sexual Sadism and Sexual Masochism were classified as paraphilia's, most likely due to the historical writings of authors such as Freud and Krafft-Ebing. Oddly enough, for a practice that is so based in research and the scientific method, there is no research to date that proves these activities are harmful to the participant's mental state, or that they are indicative of pathology. Therapist's bias can be very harmful to the mental health of their patients; at best a therapist's negative bias can make clients distrust the therapist and the psychiatric community. In some cases, it can damage their self esteem, and can cause other issues as well. There has been a surge of positive and supportive research in the last several years that has demystified and even supported BDSM as a non-pathological sexuality by psychologists, psychiatrists and medical doctors who identify as kink-friendly or kink-aware. This article aims to add to that positive information to assist in education to prevent continuing this harmful trend of negative therapist bias towards people who engage in BDSM activities.

Therapy and BDSM Lifestyles

Imagine, if you will, that your therapist might look at you badly because of the way you choose to have sex; especially the foreplay that leads up to it. Suppose they said you would need to stop articipating in that kind of sexual activity as a condition of further therapy. Suppose that no matter what the reason was that you decided to go to therapy, your therapist decides to focus on your sexual activities and treat that aspect of your life simply because they believe that the types of sexual activities you participate in is wrong. How would this make you feel?

It is surprising and disturbing just how much a therapist's bias can interfere with their ability to provide effective service to their clients; in some cases this bias can hurt the client. In just the last few decades, homosexuality has been removed as a paraphilia and more often therapists are providing objective and effective therapy for this group, thanks to the efforts of the Division 44 Committee on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Concerns Joint Task Force, who established the Guidelines for Psychotherapy with Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Clients (APA, 2000). Sadly, there is another group of people who practice sexual activities that are also not considered normal by societies standards, and therapists tend to have the same bias towards this group that they used to have for the gay and lesbian communities not too long ago: practitioners of Bondage/Discipline/Dominance/Submission/Sadism/Masochism, also known as BDSM. Through the course of this paper, we shall strive to educate on what BDSM is and the practices of it's participants, the general views on the psychiatric community, the damage that can be done by a therapist's bias and what can be done to help prevent this from being an on-going problem.

Kinky sexual activity falls under many varied terms and acronyms, including, but not limited to, Sadism and Masochism (SM), Bondage and Discipline (BD), Dominance and Submission (D/s) and Master or Mistress and Slave (M/s). There are many other terms used to describe the kinky acts that people in this community engage in, however, for the purpose of this paper, we will use the term BDSM as an umbrella term.

In his landmark book SM101, Jay Wiseman defined BDSM as the “knowing use of psychological dominance and submission, and/or physical bondage, and/or pain, and/or related practices in a safe, legal, consensual manner in order for the participants to experience erotic arousal and/or personal growth” ( p. 10, 1996). This is an intentionally broad description of what BDSM is to those who participate in kinky sexual or sexually oriented activities. The reason for engaging in these activities varies from person to person, but can include spiritual growth, enhanced sexual arousal and even to bring one closer to one's chosen partner or partners. It is generally agreed upon that most people who engage in BDSM activities do not do so for the pain specifically; rather, they choose to use pain to increase their awareness, their spiritual growth or their sexual arousal, or even just to feel the sensation. These are the same reasons that people considered normal by the standards of society engage in what is generally considered to be normal sexual behaviour, or, as BDSM participants call it, vanilla sex.

Some individuals prefer to engage in what they call scenes, where the BDSM activities are limited to the duration of the scene only. These scenes can be very physically and emotionally gratifying to a large number of people, and normally one individual takes on a dominant role and one or more individual take on a submissive role. These scenes are considered Erotic Power Exchange, or EPE, where one individual has more power over the other for the duration of the exchange. There are, however, a number of individuals interested in long-term scenarios called 24/7, meaning 24 hours a day, seven days a week, where they choose to live their entire life in such a relationship dynamic. These individuals so closely identify with the dynamic of power imbalance that they feel more gratification from a relationship structured entirely around this dynamic. This 24/7 relationship is called Total Power Exchange, or TPE, and one person has more power over the other on-going, and is not limited to any particular time frame (Dancer, 2006).

Therapist's bias has often caused therapists to treat patients improperly and for problems that the patient truly does not have. Nichols writes,

“Unfortunately, the prevailing psychiatric view of BDSM remains a negative one: These sexual practices are usually considered paraphilia, i.e., de facto evidence “of pathology”(Nichols, p. 281, 2006). Further, Nichols writes that:

“Certain “paraphilic” preferences are statistically abnormal but pathologically “neutral”; i.e., no more inherently healthy or unhealthy than mainstream sexual practices. Psychiatry has a rather shameful history of collusion with institutions of political power to marginalize certain subgroups of the population, particularly women and sexual minorities. Most psychological theories are unconsciously biased towards the preservation of prevalent social mores. Therefore, it is particularly critical, when evaluating behaviour that has controversial social meaning, to base judgments of pathology strictly on factual evidence. At this time, the data do [SIC] not exist to support the idea that BDSM activities are, by themselves, evidence of psychopathology, nor that their practitioners are more likely to be psychologically disturbed than the rest of the population” (Nichols, p. 282, 2006)

Sexual Sadism and Sexual Masochism were first listed in the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Revision Two, or DSM-II, as sexually deviant behaviours and were classified as paraphilias in 1968. This listing may have been due to historical psychological literature of authors Freud and Krafft-Ebing. In the DSM-II, these paraphilias were given provisional categories of Sadistic Personality Disorder and Masochistic or Self-Defeating Personality Disorder. Although the definitions of these have changed throughout the revisions of the DSM, which is currently in Revision Four, this historical negative outlook has seriously biased much of the psychiatric community of past and present (Kolmes, Stock, & Moser, 2006). In the DSM-IV, these have been declassified as paraphilias unless the practice thereof interferes with one's ability to function in normal society. Unfortunately, the damage has been done, and BDSM practitioners have been persecuted in much the same ways that homosexuals used to be, and to some extent still are. Until the majority of the psychiatric community accepts BDSM as a non-paraphilia, this will continue.

As with most issues in our society, there is no easy solution to changing prevailing negative views in the psychiatric community about people who engage in BDSM activities. Education is going to be an important factor in changing these views, and is essential in creating a large network safe psychological environments where BDSM practitioners will not feel embarrassed to discuss their sexuality or lifestyle with their therapist. There has been a surge of positive and supportive research in the last several years that has demystified and even supported BDSM as a non-pathological sexuality by psychologists, psychiatrists and medical doctors who identify as kink-friendly or kink-aware.

Consequently, there is a long road ahead of BDSM practitioners before they will be accepted as a sexual minority rather than as sexual deviants with psychological issues. A therapist's bias against BDSM can damage their client's outlook on their self esteem as well as their willingness to acquire further psychiatric care from that or any other therapist. BDSM is used by participants for mutual gratification and often for spiritual growth using emotionally and sexually charged themes and activities to do so, and there is no research to prove that these activities are harmful to the participant's mental state. Alas, it all boils down to knowledge and tolerance; therapists need to educate themselves on what occurs in a BDSM setting and relationship and practice tolerance of other peoples sexual tendencies regardless of their own personal beliefs. Fortunately, the number of kink-aware and kink-friendly psychologists and psychiatrists is growing, and they are slowly expanding on education to the psychiatric community at large.

References

American Psychological Association (2000). Guidelines for psychotherapy with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients. American Psychologist. 55(12) 1440-1451. Retrieved April 7, 2008, from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pdh&AN=amp-55-12- 1440&site=ehost-live

Dancer, P., Kleinplatz, P., & Moser, C. (2006). 24/7 SM Slavery. Journal of Homosexuality,

50(2/3), 81-101. Retrieved April 2, 2008, from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=21269114&site=ehost-live

Kolmes, K., Stock, W., & Moser, C. (2006). Investigating Bias in Psychotherapy with BDSM Clients. Journal of Homosexuality, 50(2/3), 301-324. Retrieved April 2, 2008, from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=21269624&site= ehost-live

Nichols, M. (2006). Psychotherapeutic Issues with Kinky Clients: Clinical Problems, Yours and Theirs. Journal of Homosexuality, 50(2/3), 281-300. Retrieved April 2, 2008, from http:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=21269620&site=ehost-live Wiseman, J. (1996). SM 101. San Francisco: Greenery Press.