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Rick
reviews:
Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures
Edited by Peggy
Kleinplatz and Charles Moser
|
 There
is now an academic/psychological book out about BDSM. It is the
reprint of a Journal of Homosexuality special issue on Sadomasochism
(Vol. 50[2&3] 2006). It has been several years in the preparation
and it is worth every bit of the work done by the editors, Peggy
Kleinplatz and Charles Moser. It is a boon to our community because
now we have a body of research literature, all in one place,
which describes us to those defenders of the status quo, the
academic, legal and medical communities.
There have been psychological studies going on about us for years. Going
back to the end of the 19th Century, as I have written about in this
column, but it is only in the last couple decades that people, with the
exception of Havelock Ellis, have tried to study us without the filter
of moral judgment, and this volume contains the most recent research
on the subject.
The book begins, as all good academic literature should, with a discussion
of the literature. This paper is by Thomas Weinberg, a professor of sociology
at Buffalo State University. He covers the academic ground for the last
thirty years or so. He touches on the psychological, sociological and
legal literature, covering it exhaustively, and suggesting some gaps
for further research.
The next paper covers studies of individual aspects of what we do. Niklas
Nordling, N. Kenneth Sandnabba, Pekka Santila and Laurence Alison do
a wonderful piece on the differences between Gay and Straight individuals
in the Scene. What is interesting about this is paper to me is that it
not only shows the differences between gay and straight, but also about
the differences between the European Scene and the scene in the United
States, the research was done in Finland.
Next is a paper on spanking by Rebecca F. Plante. She studies the spanking
scene as an exercise in “self stories”. She shows how for
spankers the scene is different from the SM scene and why its participants
make this distinction.
Peter Dancer, Peggy J. Kleinplatz and Charles Moser continue with a study
of 24/7 slavery. This is a study of those who attempt to handle a 24/7
slavery relationship in the modern context. What they found is that these
relationships, when they work, are both long-lasting and pleasurable
to everyone concerned and how much they mirror more conventional relationships.
While I suspect that this is because that they have to be lived surreptitiously
so much of the time, I was amazed at how many people were found who attempt
this kind of relationship.
Margot D. Weiss then discusses “Mainstreaming Kink; The Politics
of BDSM Representation in U.S. Popular Media”. I had some problems
with this paper. While I felt that she covered the subject very well,
even including those who have issues with the idea of mainstreaming the
BDSM community, I felt that her political orientations tended to intrude
into her understanding of the subject matter. This might have to do with
my issues against multiculturalism but I really do not think that BDSM
can be put into a multicultural context. There is a conservative strain
in some people, particularly those who have problems with mainstreaming
BDSM, which somehow does not fit with the ideas of multiculturalism.
Beyond that, multiculturalism assumes homogeneity in the groups it wishes
to turn into victims, and homogeneity is most certainly not what BDSM
is about.
Her discussion of the movie Secretary I didn’t really buy as she
didn’t take into account either the requirements of drama or an
understanding of how the two characters in the movie worked. She did
not try to understand the characters and how they were reacting to the
script; rather, she chose to discuss the political de-fanging of the
movie. Now, I would like to see a portrayal of the SM world as it exists,
but I think the simple fact that the people in the movie were portrayed
as “normal” people just looking for a normal life was a big
enough step for the film world, and should be applauded. There are some
things that cannot be taken on all at once, and that, in my opinion is
one of them. After taking on Secretary, she discusses the fact that BDSM
is, in many ways, an outlaw culture that is difficult to understand,
she is following three papers, all of which talk about the “normalcy” of
the people participating in the Scene.
Patricia A. Cross and Kim Matheson constructed the next paper, “Understanding
Sadomasochism: An Empirical Examination of Four Perspectives”.
This paper breaks up the objections to BDSM in the academic and world
into two categories, the Medical/Psychoanalytic Perceptions and the Social/Context
Perceptions. Each of these is then broken up into two sub categories.
The psychoanalytic gives the conservative Freudian view of SM and the
medical view of it. The Social Context gives the radical Feminist view
and the “escape from self” ideas of B.F. Baumeister in the
1980s. Using modern assessment techniques they found little or no confirmation
of any of the perceptions of mainstream psychology’s views of BDSM.
Then next section is perhaps the scariest part of the book because it
deals with the legal and social effects when BDSM comes in contact with
the general community. Chris White does an paper about the legal issues
of the Spanner Case, in which a group of gay men were prosecuted for
assault (committing it and participating in it) in spite of the fact
that the SM they were committing was completely consensual. White shows
the twisted logic of the courts and the consequences when people with
set, moralistic ideas get power over people who they don’t, and
refuse, to understand.
Robert Ridinger then talks about how the same issues that England dealt
with in the Spanner Case; play out in the legal system in the United
States. Again these cases are characterized by twisted logic, moral judgments
that one would not expect in modern jurisprudence. Of course we in the
US don’t have a single legal code to deal with, but numerous ones,
so Ridinger lays out several cases, those which were “won” in
the sense that the defendants won and those in which the defendants lost.
What is interesting is that the idea that one cannot consent to assault,
except in certain exceptions, primarily sports, is the problem in both
legal systems. The legal system doesn’t see that SM can be a social
activity beyond the bounds of the legal definitions of assault. He gives
a balanced presentation of the arguments, after all, the idea that rough
sex could be used as a defense in domestic violence cases or even murder
can be persuasive to some.
He then goes on to show how anyone engaged in BDSM can suffer job discrimination,
child custody issues, etc. simply because people object to their lifestyle.
He then talks about the necessity of activism as these issues have to
be kept in flux in order to achieve the balance that will both protect
individuals from government attacks on their privacy and people who would
use BDSM as an excuse for criminality.
The only non-academic in the book is Susan Wright, one of the driving
forces behind the NCSF and its current spokesperson. She writes about
her successful work to change the policies of the National Organization
for Women from hostility to BDSM to neutrality towards BDSM. She talks
about how SM organizations arose out of the gay movement and the formation
of SM advocacy groups like the NCSF and the Woodhull Foundation. She
writes about the tempest when Jack McGeorge was outed, about the discrimination
study in 1998 and the opposition to SM events in hotels around the country
by far right moral advocacy groups. Again, she concludes that there is
a lot of work to do, particularly in getting SM out of the Diagnostic
Statistical Manual (DSM). The Leather Community is only asking to be
left alone, after all, to do what they do and enjoy the same protections
as do people whose sexuality is more acceptable.
The next paper, by Marty Klein and Charles Moser, is the most frightening
of all the papers. It is the story of a child custody case in which one
of the authors, Marty Klein, participated as a consultant for the wife,
who had divorced her husband to enter a relationship with a dominant.
The custody case hung on whether the mother’s life with her dominant
was healthy for the child. The court had to agree that the dominant was
good with the child, and the child wanted to stay with his mother and
had no knowledge of the couple’s sex life, but that didn’t
matter because a psychologist was able to diagnose the couple from the
DSM-IV-TR as suffering from Sexual Sadism and Sexual Masochism. The psychologist
then went on to conjecture that because paraphilia is progressive, and
paraphiliacs tend to have multiple diagnoses that the dominant would
eventually develop pedophilia and molest the child involved.
The psychologist’s view prevailed, even though it was based not
on any facts, but simply on the opinions and conjectures of the psychologist.
It certainly was a call to activism for Drs. Klein and Moser, and it
should be a call to activism for us all.
Odd Reiersøl and Svein Skeid contribute an paper showing how the
International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) is just as outdated
in dealing with Fetishism, Transvestic Fetishism and Sadomasochism as
is the DSM (although they don’t explicitly make the comparison)
and the efforts of an initiative known as ReviseF65 to change them.
The next paper is not so much a piece of academic writing as a compilation
of contributions by various writers on the BDSM scene in their country
or city. It is instructive because it shows that BDSM lives in a lot
of different cultures (although Europe and North America predominate).
This is a result, I suspect, not so of the internet spreading BDSM, but
of the internet helping people of similar interests find each other.
Freud noted that Sadomasochism was the most prevalent of all the “perversions” (Freud,
S. 1962, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, J. Strachey, trans.
New York: Basic Books, p. 23), and while I suspect he was simply talking
about Vienna or at best Europe, it would seem that it is something which
is universal among the developed world. (In the parts of the world where
violence is endemic, I suspect that it is not used as sex play.)
Margaret Nichols, a psychotherapist from New Jersey, contributes a paper
aimed at the practicing therapist. In many ways she is not saying anything
different than any of the other papers, but she couches the information
for the practitioner who has to work with a person who does what we do.
Ethically, a practitioner cannot work with someone who has issues that
he or she is not informed of. When I went into therapy with my ex-wife
I had all kinds of apprehension going into therapy because I was afraid
of what the therapist would think of our (later my) sexual practices.
Many in the psychological and psychiatric community think they already
understand what we are about, and like Queen Victoria, they are not amused.
This paper will go a long way towards solving that problem. She very
much gets it, that we are not just a group of sexual fantasists, but
rather we are redefining the sexual landscape, and the psychological
community needs to come along.
The next paper, by Keely Kolmes, Wendy Stock and Charles Moser is a research
project that shows why Nichols’ article is necessary. It is a survey
of Sadists, Masochists and others with an interest in BDSM and how they
fared in therapy. They also tried to contact mental health professionals
about the subject but the response was too small to be representative.
They made a questionnaire up about good and bad experiences that people
had in the consulting room. It is not a pretty picture, primarily because
of the lack of education that therapists have about BDSM, and the fact
that some practitioners advertise as Kink Aware, for unethical reasons.
I agree that there needs to be more education, but this cannot be achieved
without first showing the psychological community that what they thought
they knew from antique research and moral prejudice is wrong. We need
to change the paradigm in which we speak about sex and sexuality, from
how to contain it within a box of normalcy, to how we can free our sexuality
to be what it is, not what some apostle or therapist says it should be.
This brings us to the last paper, but one of the editors, Peggy Kleinplatz.
Kleinplatz is a sexologist and sex therapist from Ottawa. She counsels
people on how to solve their sexual problems. Her paper begins with two
case studies, the first from a heterosexual couple where the man is having
erectile problems and once they had solved these they stayed around to
figure out how to increase and enhance the pleasure from their sex lives.
The second couple is perhaps more problematic. They are a pair of self
described “Leather Dykes” but their relationship was going
no where sexually. It had to do with the fact that sex was dangerous,
they were having flashbacks and cut offs in their sexual practice and
so their sexuality had become more dangerous than fun. They were sexually
inactive for 5 years before coming in for counseling. Their problem was
simply that bad experiences in their past made sex frightening. By using
techniques like bondage to help the couple show their trust and their
love Kleinplatz was able to help them grow more and more comfortable
with their sex play. By approaching the danger, rather than backing way
from, it they were able to get their sex lives back.
Kleinplatz ends her paper with 10 lessons that the vanilla world can
learn from those of us who practice sex on the edge. I am going to talk
further about these lessons in a later column, but she does two things
here that are very important. First, she proposes that sexuality is an
art, a personal art that requires all the passion, planning and attention
as any high art. Secondly, she deftly parries many of the objections
that people have to going beyond the vanilla techniques that are the
sole repertory of most lovers.
While this book is, on its face, an academic/psychological research book,
it is, as a beginning, something else for the community. It is a plea
for sexual freedom, not just the freedom to choose partners as we want,
the old definition of sexual freedom, but also to be free to choose sexual
practices that we want. It is a plea for an end to the use of outdated
scientific methodology to study what we do. It shows just how ignorant
the psychological establishment is about what we do, and that it is no
longer simply a matter of thinking, in the words of one prosecutor that, ”No
one should be able to do that to someone,” in order to pathologize
what we do. This is a moral argument and moral arguments have no place
in the search for scientific truth.
One of the things that research articles do is to show how their research
points to further research. Several of these articles do this, but I
would like to suggest that there is perhaps another avenue that might
be explored. If you look at the early writers about psychology their
sexual investigations, particularly Freud, Krafft-Ebbing and Ellis, they
were looking for the “why” of the matter. Kinsey, realized
that until he could find out the “what” he couldn’t
approach the question of why, and much of sexual research in the later
part of the 20th Century was about the what, but we can’t get caught
in this what. Until we find out the why some people become prudes and
others libertines, we won’t be able to understand why people become
sex offenders. Until we understand why some people like and live with
vanilla sexuality throughout their married life and others feel the necessity
to experiment, we won’t understand why some people have great sex
lives and others fall away from their sexuality. I would think that this
is the avenue to pursue in sex research in the next century, and this
book seems to point that way.
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