I'll tell you what to think.

I don't get a lot of time to read for pleasure these days, though I somehow seem to find a lot of time to do other things for pleasure, but anyway, that's not the point. The point is, the following are my favorite quotes from my current favorite book, "Safe, Sane and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism," edited by Dr. Darren Langdridge and Dr. Meg Barker.

Don't get too excited, perverts, this is not purely jerk-off material. Or rather, if you're one of those skullfuck-my-brain-full-of-raw-data types of intellectual perverts, feel free to get extremely excited, because this book is comprised of 17 chapters containing 20 manuscripts, the majority of which are published academic qualitative and quantitive works by PhDs and other assorted experts. Talk about fucking sexy. Excuse me while I type awkwardly with one hand so I can rub one out real quick.

Phew. That's better.

So, I'm going to give you a few excerpts to think about, and I'm not going to elaborate on them, I'll just let them stand, and you can draw whatever conclusions or follow whatever thought processes that occur to you naturally. I'm not always going to tell you what to think, despite the title of this blog. Don't worry, I will tell you what to think, feel, do, say, want the rest of the time. Wait for it.

Most of the stories which reach beyond communities to the outside world are watered down, ‘maintstreamed,’ and deeply de-sexualised – often focused on an SM aesthetic rather than anyone involved in SM would identify as something they do. (p4)

Consent is a particularly problematic concept, that has been troubled in an important way by feminist scholarship. (p4)

The voice of the radical feminist drowns out the voice of the woman SMer. (p5)

The overwhelming whiteness of writing on SM is something that deeply troubles us. [There is] a lack of writing on race, ethnicity, trans, disability... (p6)

This paper defines S/M as a broad range of consensual, erotic, interpersonal interactions involving the administration and reception of pain and/or the enactment of dominant and submissive power dynamics. Historical evidence suggests that behaviours imitative of those we contemporarily identify as S/M have occurred for millennia. (p12)

Up until the 1940s, no clear distinction between sexual orientation and S/M practice appears in the literature. A distinct gay male leather community developed in the USA in the 1940s…distinct heterosexual and lesbian S/M communities emerged in the 1970s. Due in large part to the viturperous feminist sex wars during the second wave of feminism, a considerable literature on lesbian S/M communities exists as well. I suggest that these three distinct S/M communities, gay, lesbian and heterosexual, co-exist today as part of the larger S/M sexual culture. However, a paucity of data exists regarding the development and characteristics of heterosexual S/M communities and culture. (p13)

Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) also popularized the binary sexual identity schema based on gender or sex of object choice – homosexual or heterosexual. (p15)

Gosselin, Wilson and Barrett administered the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire to 57 S/M-identified women and found that, although the women showed ‘high psychoticism, low neuroticism and high libido traditionally associated with a stereotypic “male” image…this is not to say that the behavior of S/M women should be regarded as pathological…’ (p24)

Echoing the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1973, researchers, clinicians and activists are beginning to challenge the DSM diagnosis of sadism and masochism. (p25)

Masochistic interactions would provide ‘a temporary and powerful escape from high-level awareness of self as an abstract, temporally extended, symbolically constructed identity, to a low-level, temporally constricted awareness of self as physical body, focusing on immediate sensations (both painful and pleasant) and on being a sexual object.’ By temporarily adopting a masochistic identity, individuals could escape the ‘burden of selfhood’ and achieve respite from the demands of modern society. (p27)

Weinberg (1994) suggests six prerequisite social criteria for the institutionalization of S/M interests into S/M culture: embedded power relations, social acceptance of aggression, unequal power distribution, leisure time, imagination and creativity.

McClintock (1993) suggests S/M is uniquely wll-suited sexually for post-modern, post-procreative society because it flaunts socially constructed power, gender roles, identity and eroticism…

(1) S/M subverts reified social power relations by creativing and enacting exaggerated power roles and by appropriating the privelege to punish;

(2) S/M challenges the boundaries of sanctioned gender role behavior by allowing either gender to assume dominant and submissive roles;

(3) S/M mocks the concept of a unitary, fixed identity by allowing participants to move fluidly in and out of an S/M sexual identity and by facilitating participants’ adoption of various fantasy and S/M roles; and

(4) S/M deconstructs the paradigm of genitally oriented eroticism by utilizing non-genital, non-erogenous sites on the body for sexual arousal.

BDSM is a term used to describe a variety of sexual behaviours that have an implicit or explicit power differential as a significant aspect of the erotic interaction. (p35)

The subjective aspects of SM require their own taxonomy. Motives and intentions are complex and cannot ever be deduced from observation alone. (p37)

SM is said to have five common features: the appearance of dominance and submission, role-playing, mutual definition, consensuality and a sexual context for the individual... The emphasis here is on the appearance of dominance and submission, because the actual power in the relationship is much more subtle... SM is consensual by definition. Just as the difference between consensual coitus and rape is consent, the difference between SM and violence is consent. Non-consensual acts are criminal. (p38)

For others, the role-play provides the context for the SM and, sometimes, even for the relationship itself. That is, they find the roles create the erotic backdrop for the relationship; without these roles the partner would cease to be attractive. (p42)

Of interest, the ‘Mommy-boy’ dynamic is less common and often cast as an ‘adult-baby’ relationship... Even though these terms denote the gender of the participants, one cannot infer the sex of the participants from this language; lesbians often employ the ‘male’ terms and some men use the ‘female’ terms. (p43)

It is well known that sexual arousal alters pain perception, elevating pain thresholds over 80%… (p45)

…a fetish is distinct from partialism; the latter involves a strong sexual attraction towards a part of the body. Within the SM community, both possibilities are merged together and referred to as a fetish. (p49)

One of the difficulties in designating any set of proclivities as pathological is the lack of criteria for what constitutes ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ sexuality… The lack of objective criteria makes it all too easy for mental health professionals to rely upon predominant cultural values to guide assessments... At present, Western clinicians tend to think of ‘normal’ sexuality as monogamous, procreation-oriented intercourse, featuring the heterosexual, young (but not too young) and able-bodied. (p55)

…when distress is manifest, it may result primarily from social stigma surrounding SM. This phenomenon is akin to internalized homonegativity in gay and lesbian individuals. The recommended ‘treatment’ is to validate the distress rather than to ‘cure’ the SM desires... As for impairment, this [DSM] criterion is particularly noteworthy in illustrating the social biases that continue to pervade the DSM. For example, the DSM considers it a sign of impairment if SM is ‘obligatory’; why single out some behaviours as pathological when required for sexual fulfillment and not others? Why not decree that people who require heterosexual intercourse to reach orgasm are pathological? Actually that was precisely the case during the 1950s when women who ‘failed’ to achieve orgasm during intercourse were labeled ‘frigid’. (p57)

In the absence of theory or research demonstrating what constitutes ‘normal’ sexuality, it is all too easy to pathologize the unconventional based on prevailing social currents. SM is particularly liable to being stigmatized in societies uneasy with sexual pleasure for its own sake. (p60)

The reason for, and essence of, the question [whether law can ever make peace with violence] is the fundamental paradox that while law purports to substitute itself for violence – in the form of a civilized, and civilizing, alternative – it retains and depends on, an immanent violence of its own. (p63)

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