Solis
You know that you make psychologists crazy, right?
by , 10-19-2014 at 05:28 PM (9336 Views)
Researchers often start with the conceit “my prejudices brilliantly describe reality” and design research projects to celebrate their insights. The best of them, when confronted by evidence that they’re wrong, publicly announce the fact. The rest of them hide the confounding evidence away in a locked file cabinet.
And so it is with studies of the BDSM community. There’s a near universal prejudice among academics that members of this community are defective: the products of broken homes, with little ability to form stable attachments and a psychopath’s predilection toward violence as the answer to all questions. “Traditional discourses on sexuality have framed BDSM participation as reflecting immorality or an underlying psychopathology. Rubin (1993) observed that BDSM has long been located in the “outer limits” (bad, abnormal, unnatural, damned), which she contrasted with the “charmed circle” (good, normal, natural, blessed) of the sexual hierarchy.”
A funny thing happened on the way to publishing their scathing criticism: they discovered that they were wrong, wrong, wrong. Among the highlights of the serious academic studies:
• The size of the community is determined by what questions researchers ask; as little as 2% of the population and as higher as 26%, have reportedly been involved in BDSM.
• Over 40% of folks interested in BDSM knew it by age 18; half of that group knew it by the onset of puberty.
• Research over the past three decades has shown that BDSM participants are generally decent, psychologically and socially well-adjusted people.
• Males who participated in BDSM scored significantly lower than other men on psychological distress.
• In general, we’re neither anti-woman (that is, misogynist) nor anti-feminist.
Indeed, the search has now begun to recognize the evidence that DS relationships might be fundamentally healthy. That is, not just “not bad” but “good to great!” That occurs, in part, when researchers figured out that the lifestyle was a lot more than just an expression of a set of sexual practices. Some are that BDSM seems to be better understood as a form of “serious leisure experience,” which requires perseverance and effort to acquire specific knowledge and skills, has a unique culture and rules, and brings durable benefits and rewards. Indeed, your growth in the community has been described as “career-like.”
What benefits and rewards? I’d start with the obvious fact that we talk a lot more in and about our relationships than the folks in Vanilla Land do. We tend to be more narcissistic, though if the universe really does revolve around me, I'm not sure that it's narcissistic to notice. They tend to drift more, as many of us have discovered, into passionless politeness and decades-long ruts.
And, on whole, we’re healthier and happier:
The results mostly suggest favorable psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners compared with the control group; BDSM practitioners were less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, had higher subjective well-being, yet were less agreeable.
(I wonder which half of us qualified as the “less agreeable”?)
Of particular significance: two sets of studies found that women have faster, more frequent and more intense orgasms when they have dominant male partners. One researcher, interested in the genetics of it all, described us as “high-quality males.” (That’s on my business card now.)
(Another researcher described your intense pleasure at our presence as consistent with a genetic adaptation for “differential sperm insuck” – a term that I stared at for a long while.)
There are idiots, thugs and frauds in our community. The combination of a deeply submissive partner with an abusive cretin who exploits the situation can lead to tragic results. That said, many younger, newer members of the community are haunted by the suspicion that they’re “sick” or “weird” or “wrong.” They need to know, and we need to be confident in telling them, that they’re not. They might be padawans in need of paddlings (padalings?), but there’s nothing wrong with that.
You are who you are, and that's good. Pursue your passions. Embrace the opportunities for intense experience. Don't let your past limit your future. If you need to be bound, at least don't let it be by your fears.
Cheers,
S.
Go to Profile
Mark as Read
