This flawed logic has resulted in the diagnosis “sexual masochism” appearing in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV TR (DSM-IV-TR), the industry standard for mental-health bureaucracy. “Sexual sadism” is in there, too. You can’t write a case report, create a treatment plan, or (most importantly) bill an insurance company without using the DSM’s nomenclature of supposed dysfunction.
Is there any objective proof that people who get wet during a spanking are also getting ripped off financially, intimidated by bullies, anorexic, being battered, or likely to engage in self-mutilation? No. And there never will be, because we are conflating two separate categories of human experience. One is a sexual identity or experience; the other is a state of disenfranchisement, oppression, traumatization, or self-hatred. People consent to the former; they wish they could escape the latter. The earliest attempts to educate mental-health professionals about BDSM focused on the fact that this was a sexual style based on consent and negotiation. These were pleasurable acts committed by adults who chose to enjoy kinky sex. This message reached a certain number of people. But it is very difficult to overturn generations of fear and disgust. For many “experts” whose credentials allowed them to pronounce on our mental health (or sickness), the fact that people would consent to do these things became proof that BDSM players had to be mentally ill. If you weren’t crazy, this reasoning goes, you wouldn’t want to do these things or agree to have them done to you. For therapists who are judgmental about sexual variation, the fact that someone would consent to wearing a pair of nipple clamps or having their face slapped just proves that they are indeed sick and unable to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy experiences. And the person who does such awful things to them is a monster.
For alleged social scientists to judge human sexuality this way is embarrassing. The assumption that variant sexualities are mental illnesses has more to do with conservative religious values than it does with objective observation. If a mental state or human behavior is unhealthy, we ought to be able to demonstrate that it makes that person unhappy, interferes with their ability to give and receive love, prevents them from setting goals that give them a sense of fulfillment, and injures their health. It’s not enough to say BDSM is sick or crazy because most people don’t do it. Most people don’t become concert pianists or Olympic athletes, either. These are individual dreams of excellence that cause people to devote a great deal of time and effort to perfecting their abilities. If you took away the opportunity to compete in their chosen field, these “minority members” would be devastated. Does that prove they are addicted or coerced into loving classical music or diving from high places? You can see how this line of thinking breaks down if we ask some reasonable questions.
This is not to say that BDSMers (or our relationships) are always happy and strong. Our community has its share of people who are mean-spirited or manipulative or crackers. Some of us find romantic love and lots of sex with ease; others experience higher levels of loneliness and unsatisfied desire. But this is simply the human condition. It’s okay for us to be imperfect. We struggle, like anyone else, to figure out what sort of relationships are ethical or will meet our needs, how to communicate unwelcome information to a partner, whether to let a conflict result in separation or rededication to the relationship. That doesn’t prove that we are sick or crazy. As long as we are conscious of our own and others’ well-being, and striving to contribute to that, we are on a good path and we don’t need to engage in harmful self-criticism.
AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW OF MASOCHISM
How many times have you heard someone say, “Pain is a warning that our bodies are in danger”? It sounds like a truism. But, like most assumptions, it deserves a closer look. While pain can be a symptom of disease or injury, human beings have always sought to control their reaction to pain. If we couldn’t tolerate at least some discomfort, sadness, anxiety, or less-than-wonderful physical states, how would any of us get through an ordinary day—much less deal with hard work or a chronic illness?
For millions of years, people have deliberately constructed painful situations and faced them to obtain a number of different benefits. In some societies, painful ordeals or body modification mark an individual’s transition from childhood to adulthood. Obtaining spiritual guidance has often required a sacrifice, to prove the seriousness of one’s intent and create an altered state that allows communication between this world and other realms. Consciously choosing to suffer discomfort has resulted in the acquisition of wisdom, experiencing divine rapture, obtaining healing, and locating and killing meat for the cooking pot. Whether the goal is mundane or transcendental, the ability to use our hearts and minds to convince our bodies to continue to function while we are aching (or worse) is the hallmark of courage, loyalty, and strength.
One of the most painful physical events a human being can endure is the birth of a child. Are women “masochistic” because they endure pregnancy and birth?
The rituals and other trials I described above are not examples of sexual masochism. But they highlight the physiological reasons why it’s possible for us to get aroused by pain. When our bodies feel stress, they autonomously produce chemicals that help us cope. We may pant, bringing extra oxygen into our bodies. Adrenaline, endorphins, and natural narcotics flood our nervous system. Euphoria and agony are next-door neighbors—you can’t break that paradoxical connection. And if you are not willing to tolerate contradictions and paradoxes, human behavior will never make much sense to you.
Postindustrial Western societies romanticize sex. To some extent, this is good. I wouldn’t want to go back to a time when premarital sex hardly existed, women had no sexual autonomy, and marriages were arranged by the couple’s families. Falling in love is a good reason to be together, even if its initial intensity can rarely be sustained forever.
Euphoria and agony are next-door neighbors—you can’t break that paradoxical connection.
We’ve come to expect a level of intimacy and understanding or rapport, especially in the first stages of sexual experience, that very few lovers can sustain. Some women’s first experience of intercourse is easy; others feel varying degrees of twinginess or even a stab of pain when the hymen is broken. But even after that inconvenience is eliminated, it takes some practice for two bodies (especially two bodies of dissimilar gender) to create a mutual rhythm of lovemaking. Being able to tolerate discomfort or even get turned on by it may be one of the things that helps us put up with each other long enough to get better at providing pleasure.
On an online message board for kinky women, a conversation took place about why experiencing pain makes some women get wet. In less civilized times, getting hurt might be a signal that sexual assault was going to occur. One or two of them speculated that this reflex might have helped their gender survive rape.
I have no idea whether most women or only a handful get physically excited by roughness or pain. Even if this reaction occurs, it does not justify violence against women. Rape is evil because it involves using another’s body as if they were an object, ignoring the person inside and their response to it. Most of the time, rape is an unpleasant and squalid experience that has no pleasurable content. But even if rape results in an orgasm for the victim, I assert that it is as evil to give someone an orgasm against their will as it is to fuck them while preventing them from coming.