Is Kinky Sex Going Mainstream?

Is kink going mainstream?

The wild commercial success of Fifty Shades of Grey seems to have produced a new chapter in the Great American Sexual Revolution. More and more people are intrigued by kinkiness. More and more are willing to try it out.

Practitioners of BDSM are clamoring for public recognition. They have formed clubs on college campuses like Harvard. It's called the Harvard College Munch. They have discovered that Harvard is nonplussed by the existence of such a club.

[For the record, BDSM is short for bondage, domination/submission and sado-masochism.]

Why is this happening? Some individuals are drawn to BDSM because it mimics an experience of childhood sexual abuse. Many others, however, are suffering the fallout of living in a pornified culture. The more people are exposed to pornography the more they are desensitized to sexual stimuli. The more they are desensitized to sex, the more effort they have to put into being aroused or satisfied.

Be that as it may, the BDSMers now want the general public to accept their idiosyncratic ways of achieving sexual rapture. They are insisting that that have a constitutional right to publicize their sexual behaviors, and that you have no right to judge them for the way they seek and find pleasure..

The New York Times seems mildly sympathetic to the rising tide of decadence. It writes:

And some real-life kinksters — a few of whom are appropriating the epithet “pervert,” much as gay activists seized control of “queer” — are wondering if they are approaching a time when they, like the L.G.B.T. community before them, can come out and begin living more open, integrated lives.

One hates to say it, but what could it possibly mean for sadists and masochists to “come out and begin living more open, integrated lives?” Why doesn’t the newspaper of record question this notion?

Apparently, “real-life kinksters” believe that they should identify themselves in public by their sexual behavior? Does this indicate that people who practice too much BDSM end up short a few little grey cells?

Picture this. A young professional woman explains to her colleagues that she had multiple orgasms the night before. And no, she didn’t achieve this apotheosis by using the Rabbit or even with her true love. No, she was being beaten, burnt and electrocuted by her favorite dom.

Those bruises you see on her face and arms… they resulted from "love taps".

Now, if she is really wants to be open and honest about her sexuality, ought she to distribute some videos of the experience? Surely, she kept an audio-visual record.

And then, if she is that open about her kink, doesn’t that mean that everyone else must be similarly open about his or her sexual preferences, sexual fantasies, sexual kinks and peccadillos.

Doesn’t the rule of relationship reciprocity require that people give back what they receive?

Need we even ask whether this type of public confession of extreme kinkiness will enhance this woman’s professional reputation? Kinksters do not worry about reputation or about anyone’s career.

The truth of the matter is that no one ever gained respect by advertising his or her sexuality. The surest and quickest way to compromise your dignity is to show the world how you have sex. 

And note the following: however decadent our culture has become, sensible people still insist on speaking of “intimacy” and “love making” more than having sex or f#&@ing.

But that is only half of the story. Over at Slate William Saletan stepped into the controversy with a sane, intelligent column about the mainstreaming of kink. He concluded that BDSM was never going to become main stream and that it should not. Not only would it offend large numbers of people, but it would also ruin the fun for the kinksters. Bringing kinkiness into the light of day would drain the pleasure.

But then Saletan took the discussion a step further and asked another salient question. Since most BDSM relationships involve mutual consent, Saletan asked, can you consent to your own abuse? “Consensual domestic violence,” he explained, is not “just another lifestyle choice.”

Uh, oh! Immediately Saletan found him besieged by the bullies of the sexual liberation movement. The pulled out their long knives and accused him of being an uptight, sexually repressed Puritan, a killjoy who wanted to ruin their fun.

Of course, half the thrill of BDSM lies in the fact that it takes place in the dark and that most non-participants do not want to hear anything about it. But the rest of the thrill of BDSM lies in the fact that it is dangerous.

Saletan is correct to call it “consensual domestic violence?” But  BDSM can very easily slide into outright violence. The issue has preoccupied the denizens of the BDSM underworld.

The NewYork Observer reported:

The BDSM scene can be violent by nature. Physical and psychological power, and the lack thereof, are at the heart of the erotic experience. As a result, sexual assault can be harder to define and harder to prove. But that’s not to say it doesn’t happen. Indeed, awareness of the problem seems to be growing, and controversies around the issue have been roiling the tight-knit fetish community all year.

Kitty Stryker and Maggie Mayhem were up late one night, chatting online. Both are known as sex-positive activists and celebrities within the sadomasochism world. That night, they began to swap sexual-assault stories and realized the experience was more common than either had known. The pair began collecting similar tales online, and it wasn’t long before they had amassed more than 300 anecdotes. The stories ranged from more benign assaults (unwanted groping) to tales of being drugged and raped. Many of the victims described abusers who were well-known members of the community, people who hosted parties or helped to organize the scene.

“What we found is that the abuse was systematic,” said Ms. Stryker, who regularly goes by a pseudonym. “People had these stories, but when they went to report them to community leaders, they were dismissed as drama. Not only that, but people were ostracized for reporting. It becomes clear how easy it is for an abuser to swoop in on a newbie.”

Meanwhile, Andy, a 24-year-old law student who lives in New York City, also began collecting abuse stories, publishing them directly on FetLife. Andy is something of a New York scene fixture, known for throwing massive BDSM galas that include such attractions as “glitter bathtubs” and fake-blood tableaux modeled on the TV series Dexter. A transgendered male, he quickly collected hundreds of anecdotes, many from fellow New Yorkers, some of which called out abusers by FetLife username. “I knew the people they were naming,” Andy said. “There were party organizers and influential people that users were saying had done horrible things to them,” he said. Publishing these accounts on the social network had a galvanizing effect. Every time someone “loved” a post it showed up on their feed. Soon, everyone on the site knew who was being accused of what—though they didn’t always know the identities of the accusers.

It makes sense. When it comes to BDSM transgression is the name of the game. To expect that people who are in the throes of a violent passion, whose consciousness is transported by the mix of pleasure and pain will respect pre-existing agreements is naive.

And note how the Observer, unlike the New York Times, looks at all sides of the argument.

But, what does it mean to consent. There’s more to it than saying Yes.  

For example, there’s the legal definition. If, Saletan points out, a sadist and a masochist draw up a contract describing what will and will not be permitted, the contract is not a binding legal document. Does this mean that, according to the law, you cannot legally consent to being assaulted or degraded?

Second, what if we remove the sex from the equation? Can two people consent to involve themselves in a mutually exploitative relationship, one where he agrees to allow her to exploit and abuse him and she agrees to allow him to exploit and abuse her? Is it an instance of relationship reciprocity? Is the behavior less abusive or not abusive at all if both parties have consented? What happens when one or both parties find the abuse to be sexually exciting. If a woman comes to work bearing bruises that were inflicted by her dom, do her colleagues have an obligation to report the abuse? Do they have the right to think less of her because she allows herself to be subjected to it?

Third, can you freely consent to be enslaved? If not, can you freely consent to play act enslavement, even if that play acting requires you to do everything that a real slave would be forced to do?