BDSM as a lazy ideology

I write a lot about ideologies here. Rituals of thought and behaviour that come out of our need to automatically solve predictable problems of a complex world. I also point out that ideologies ‘stack’. They all sort of ‘stick together’, making these bundles of beliefs and behaviours.

What I don’t do very often is write about BDSM. So I thought I’d combine the two. More seriously, BDSM is certainly becoming a more prominant feature of online culture, which probably reflects a growing interest in it. This is probably good, since BDSM is something that reliably interests about 60% of any population you survey about it, yet remains highly stigmatised.

But I’m not so interested in that as I am in the fact that BDSM seems like it might be lazy. It might be an ideology stack that people gravitate to, not because it’s the most efficient way of expressing some core human need, but because it’s just the most common. Let me explain what I mean.

¶Ideologies stack, reprise

In a previous article I talked about how ideologies ‘stack’. This is most obvious when you think about conspiracy theories:

If I’m the kind of person who suspects we never landed on the moon, then others are much more likely to assume I harbour doubts about who shot JFK, or concern myself over the ‘real’ motives around the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The reason for this isn’t that spooky—all of these things hover around a lack of trust in institutions. If you’re suspicious of your government, then you’re probably going to think suspicious things when they’re involved in weird stuff. But also, some theories imply the others:

believing that Earth is flat essentially requires that you think that NASA’s achievements are part of an elaborate conspiracy: there is no ability to travel to the Moon, nor are the photographs of a globular Earth from space authentic.

And, in that previous article, I spend time illustrating how the same thing is true of mainstream thinking too. It’s not just the fringe theories stack, all theories stack:

If we believe the poor are poor because of something they are doing, we might be less likely to help them. This action of ours helps keep our poor person poor. And if everyone feels like the poor should not be helped, we might bring into being laws and structures that stop us from helping them… [in theory] laws … which help those who help themselves, but … actually … the practice of not helping the poor who we observe doing whatever thing we think is making them poor. Now our poor person’s poorness is facilitated by our institution—an idea that became a thing. And of course, intervening on this cycle is far more difficult.

As I say a lot, ideologies are what brains do—graceful and practical solutions to an impossibly complex world. But they wouldn’t be very graceful if they were all at odds with each other.

I don’t think this is really that surprising or novel. More interesting is to consider what leads us to our different ‘stacks’. Not just why conspiracy stacks are so different to mainstream stacks, but why stacks can be different even within those categories. Woo-woo/alternative medicine stacks and survivalist/prepper stacks are both about a lack of institutional trust, and share many ideologies, but I doubt you’d confuse an adherent of one for the other.

And essentially:

I suspect its something like cultural laziness. There are some usual suspects that play a role. We have cognitive biases like confirmation bias which make us seek out things that support our beliefs, and other biases like the fundamental attribution error which make us demonise others, and a need for psychological comfort in the form of consistent explanations for complex or troubling aspects of the world. All these things make us gravitate towards various attractor states. But this requires the attractor states to be there in the first place.

I suspect the major factor at play is something about the small world architecture of communities. We cluster ourselves in social networks, which cluster our beliefs correspondingly. Our trust in certain sources of information is then narrowed to those in those circles—the ones that make us feel understood and seen. As a net bonus, we get consistency in the worldview we are exposed to, which is nice and increasingly necessary in an increasingly fractured society. And since adopting that worldview better integrates us into our community, we adopt them and make that identity our identity.

I think it’s not that prepping and woo-woo theory stacks are particularly good solutions to specific problems. I think the prepping and woo-woo theory stacks are just the most prevalent memes floating in the environment, and which handily capture a more general distaste for institutions. Take a woo-woo person and move them to Montana, and maybe they’d grow up prepper.

Alright. Reprise over. Now, I’m going to use this to explore an idea I’ve been batting around a while: is BDSM just such a lazy stack? Are some kinks just cultural laziness?

¶BDSM is definitely an ideology stack

Before we can work out whether BDSM is a lazy ideology stack or not, I probably need to convince you that it’s ideological in the first place.

Now, BDSM technically stands for some variation of:

• bondage and discipline;
• dominance and submission; and
• sadism and masochism.

because ‘BDDSSM’ looks silly. This seems nice and specific, laid out like this, but in practice, the range of stuff it refers to is enormous.

Most generally, the acronym is used to refer to any ‘kinky’ sexual practice. But this probably isn’t quite right. Like, it’s not clear that a sexual fetish for, say, cars or helicopters has anything to do with ‘BDSM’.

We don’t get much help narrowing it down from academics. Usually they’re pretty good at these kinds of qualifications, but a history of pathologising kink means that most of the literature is skewed towards disordered behaviour, rather than run-of-the-mill kink, and all the kinks are distinguished as discreet paraphilias, rather than being considered along a spectrum of sexual (and non-sexual) behaviour. Sociological work is slim-to-none, and a lot of it is too oddly specific for such a nascent body of literature to be of much help—I think looking at the intersections between various sociological concepts and kink is going to be very valuable, but we’ve probably got to look a bit more generally first?¹

Insiders, honestly, aren’t that helpful in narrowing things down either. You go on reddit, or read the popular books on the topic and you mostly find a focus on the practical aspects of the thing. Given the historical pathologisation, widespread misunderstanding, and potential mental and physical dangers of many aspects of BDSM, this make sense. Consent, trust, safety, and not feeling like a pervert are probably most people’s primary concerns when they hit the search bar. But it doesn’t help us narrow the topic down much.

Fortunately, we do have the name, which has almost universal adoption. Seems a good start. You have:

1. Bondage: which is all about physical, and sometimes mental, restraint.
2. Discipline: which is all about rules, protocols, punishment and reward, training and obedience.
3. Dominance and Submission: which is fundamentally about power exchange between those who exert control (the dominant) and those who give it up (the submissive).
4. Sadism and Masochism: which is all about those who derive pleasure from inflicting mental and physical pain and discomfort, and those who derive pleasure in receiving it.

Now, in my last article, and really, all over the place on the site, I point out that ideology stacks are good solutions to specific aspects of the world. At their core, we can identify aspects of the human experience that need to be addressed in behaviour—real relationships between things that need our attention, and so we must create a framework which minimises some aspects of the world, in order to maximise others. And often, the way we address this is by lazily adopting the behaviours of people who are attending to that very same aspect of experience.

The grouping that BDSM covers is, fundamentally, a set of behaviours borne out of a set of beliefs surrounding how certain feelings can be best expressed and satisfied. This is what an ideology is. Ideas, which become actions based on those ideas, which go on to contribute to institutions, which:

don’t have to be literal institutions. They can be culture too. If I had a patriarchal ideology, I would be inclined to believe that men and women should participate differently in activities and act to make that so. A patriarchal culture would support that by socialising men and women to be more likely to participate differently in activities in the first place. And the cycle continues.

And, in the name, we have our institution—a culture that defines a set of behaviours based on a belief-system. It’s an ideology.

And what’s particularly curious about the name is that it lumps what are ostensibly four distinct sub-categories into one big one. Bondage and discipline can be thought of as distinct, even if sometimes they’re grouped together. Dominance and submission are usually thought of as a pair (you’ll see this online as D/s). The same is true of sadism and masochism (S&M), typically. And yet, all four come together to collectively form BDSM.

There’s something going on here at the core. There’s a reason these four are grouped, and the helicopter-attracted are left out in the cold.

What we have, then, is an ideology stack.

¶Is it a lazy stack, and why would that be interesting?

It’s what’s at the core that makes this interesting to me. Four distinct sets of practices, grouped together… by what? What is the core set of experiences this little stack of ours attempts to express?

Because, you regularly see figures hovering around 60%—a pretty substantial majority of people—who’re into BDSM, at least in theory (the figure for those who’ve had a go hovers closer to 20%).² So whatever this core is is pretty widespread.

And if BDSM is a lazy stack, it means we’re wasting a huge amount of time and effort writing paper after paper pointing this out and measuring just how little any measure of pathology corresponds to it. If it’s a lazy stack, then all these people are hiding chains and whips under their beds because they haven’t come across other stacks which might satisfy these impulses too. And trying to figure out what these other stacks might be seems like a much better way of making BDSM less scary than screaming “it’s not really that weird!” You don’t have to convince people that rope bondage is super normal off the bat, you could slide in at some shallower end of the pool, no?

Alternatively, and honestly I’m almost hoping for this one, BDSM isn’t a lazy stack. It’s actually just the most efficient way of expressing whatever this core human experience is. And wouldn’t that make for some very saucy speculation!? That the optimal way to make 60% of people happy comes in the varieties of bondage, discipline, domination, submission, and the ’chisms!? Wild.

¶Some research questions

Alright, now. I’ve had this article in the works for months. And I’m completely stymied on getting to serious answers because of the exact same issues I faced trying to define our little stack. Research is still typically either:

1. very surprised that all this kinky voodoo isn’t pathological; or
2. very interested in (or limited by circumstance to) extremely limited subpopulations that make generalisation difficult,

and the articles that don’t suffer from these problems are called stuff like BDSM, becoming and the flows of desire, which I’m sure is all very interesting but helps me exactly zero.

So, what I’ll do instead is pose my little research questions for you and highlight some of the themes in BDSM that seem to me like they might be getting co-opted by laziness, for when I find some meaningful answers, or for when people who are better informed point me in the right direction.

Now, I shit on that article earlier, BDSM, becoming and the flows of desire, but in actual fact it describes very well the thing I find most interesting about the stories people tell about their kinkier sides. Check these little vignettes out:

Me and a friend of mine always played zebra and lion when we were kids. It was a game where one of us was in a vulnerable pos- ition and the other would attack, we wrestled, and the game always ended when the zebra died … the feeling … to be in a vulnerable position with the knowledge that something will happen, but you do not know exactly what

And

When you start connecting stuff you will sooner or later think: ‘Hey, wait a minute, why was it always me who was the Indian being captured by the cowboys’? And I realise it now. I was always the one who got caught; I was always the one who was exposed to stuff. But at the time it was not sexual, it was natural.

These are two BDSM practicioners exploring their kinky origin stories. And, honestly, it doesn’t really seem all that kinky? As the latter fella says:

So maybe it is congenital, but I think it’s also the environment that shapes us.

These kinds of stories aren’t uncommon at all. An instagram post that’s floating around out there talks about how someone discovered their kinkier side because their boyfriend pretended to be a dominant, getting them to do burpees and star jumps and whatnot because they found it sexy, and she comes to find it sexy too until she found out that he actually just wanted her to lose some weight. Or, I’ve heard from at least three independent people, that when they were young, they used to tie up their barbies or their action figures, and get a little rush out of it.

There’s something here, present in some people, that precedes sex. A desire to please. A pleasure in vulnerability. A corresponding thrill around being pleased, and being given power over that vulnerability.

So my first question is, what is this? If we’re speaking about laziness, it’d be particularly lazy to entirely ascribe this to nascent sexuality. Even if it’s not completely independent of sexual development, it seems pretty unlikely that it’s only that. And, so, to develop our wayward ‘Indian’s musing, how much of where these feelings end up is shaped from what it started as by a lazy stack of cultural ideas?

A pretty core obstacle to working this out is that some of the attraction to BDSM is the relief in being able to openly embrace some troubling aspect of the self. Sure, it’s still a bit off-piste to admit you’re into spanking and ropes, but it’s way less startling than telling people that you’ve struggled with dark, sadistic urges since you were a child.

The second question I have is about the role of stress, pain, relief, and pleasure. You don’t need to be a biologist to realise that a lot of BDSM involves a bunch of high-speed hormones sloshing around in various glands. And in fact, lots of these processes overlap enticingly with various addiction pathways. The rush of something good after something bad, and the anticipation of things are extremely powerful drivers of behaviour. But, as this review points out:

it should be noted that the biological processes associated with BDSM interactions are not necessarily the same as those involved in the development of BDSM interest

And more tellingly, clinicians interested in porn addiction worry a great deal about just how ‘trainable’ our sexual arousal is to the exact same kinds of novel and highly stimulating stimuli that make up a good slice of the BDSM pie.

Once again, we have this potential crack in our BDSM ideology stack—do people like this stuff because it’s the most efficient mechanism to express something deeply human? Or is it just that, you like to be powerful or vulnerable, and then you choke or get choked a bit, and your body goes “hey, fuck zebras and lions, that was pretty cool, let’s do more of that”.

The last, main, question that I have surrounds the fact that BDSM is rarely a complete replacement for sexual behaviours, nor is BDSM entirely sexual. There are actually only a handful of themes that repeatedly appear in literature again and again:

• A desire to please or be pleased;
• A desire to control or be controlled;
• A desire for power, or powerlessness;
• Feelings of trust and relational bonding;
• A ‘discovery’ of self;
• Exploration of limits;
• Something, something, humiliation?

The sexual stuff is often just woven around these threads. Aella is a blogger that does some very interesting survey analysis on sex-related topics, and one of her posts tries to identify BDSM subtypes. Running your eye down these categories gives you the same impression as scouring the literature or forum threads, but more succinctly. The sex part seems almost secondary to the core:

Aella's Subtypes. You can explore these on her site, because I'm not going to detail them here better than she does.

Putting aside humiliation, which I find hard to explain easily, it seems like it would be very easy to explain all of these features of BDSM completely absent of BDSM itself. Like, giving up control is freeing, for someone anxious about the controllability of things. Controlling stuff is also nice, if you’re anxious about it. And who isn’t anxious about controlling stuff?

It’s also notable, thanks again Aella, that irrespective of kink, the things people are most drawn to are feelings of warmth, and desire, and love. This is what people seek out in any kind of relationship

It feels like a lot of this could be just as lazily explained away by saying BDSM largely hijacks architecture that exists for other social behaviours. You have hormones for testosterone, oxytocin, and vasopressin (pdf) flaring, and is it a coincidence that these are also involved in relational and hierarchical activity?

And, to bring it all back home, I’ll point to Aella again, who found in her survey that there is a notable difference in fetish onset by age and gender. The more classicly represented BDSM kinks appear later, and the more mainstream, earlier, consistant with the idea that exposure to the ideas is important. The more classically feminine kinks appear earlier, and the more masculine, later, consistent with the idea that females are socialised earlier that males on average. This is hardly empiricism at its finest, because you could probably make lovely evolutionary arguments here too, but it certainly isn’t counter to my idea that BDSM is just a lazy stack that sucks people in as they encounter it.

¶Outro

In the end, this article kind of disappointed me. We have these essentially anodyne questions, and no real answers. But with any luck, it does what I hoped it would do, and point out that:

1. Lazy ideology stacks are everywhere we look; and
2. BDSM really does seem to me like a very likely candidate for one.

Viewed this way, it’s really not that strange or surprising that people like it. Equally, though, it doesn’t really help us understand very deeply anything about human nature. It just points vaguely at all the usual stuff. Perhaps I’ll come back to this, and sharpen it up as I refine these ideas more. But until then, I guess you’ll have to just handle the fact that, at the core, BDSM is a little boring.