It seems like quite a lot more people are kinky these days than they used to be, even 10 years ago. “Kink” is itself a rather ambiguous category, encompassing both unusual sexual interests that are genuinely erotic (in the sense that they involve genital stimulation and/or other forms of stimulation that increase the level of arousal that leads to orgasm if taken to a sufficiently high level), as well as dominance behaviors that have little to do with eroticism. The category “BDSM” more directly points at dominance-related behaviors.
It’s to the point where, rather than BDSM being a niche interest, it’s hard, within at least some social bubbles, to find sexual partners who do not prefer, or even require, BDSM. This is, to particular individuals who do not wish to engage in BDSM but do wish to have sex, inconvenient, although without more details, complaining about it would amount to the incel-adjacent complaint of “people don’t want to have sex with me unless I meet some conditions I do not want to meet.”
The particular details are, though, important. One has to wonder, “why do all these submissives keep subbing to me?”. There is a naïve, liberal picture of BDSM, in which individual persons are interpreted as having unusual sexual preferences, analogous to other preferences (such as preferences for particular sex acts), and these preferences happen to be for pretend dominance behaviors, which are pretend in the way that acting is pretend (and in particular, improv; BDSM is usually more improvised than scripted, and the book “Impro” discusses status dynamics, a core part of both improv and BDSM).
Someone taking this view would, in practice, be bad at BDSM. The unusual preferences are not entropic deviations from a central tendency of normal sex (as the word “paraphilia” implies), but rather, deviations from central-case sex in a particular direction that involves dominance behaviors. While BDSM can involve the erotic, most is not inherently erotic; it is not the sort of activity that would efficiently produce stimulation of the genitals or similar sensations to those. Some people with little interest in sex, such as asexuals, are still into BDSM.
What seems to be happening is that people are labeling dominance behaviors as “sex”, but these behaviors are for the most part not actually erotic if one thinks critically about them, and the notion of entropic deviation from normal sexual preferences (paraphilia) is used to explain these deviations, and justify them in the framework of liberal sexual choice. One would not, in general, apply this sort of labeling to other primates; it would be easy to distinguish dominance from sex.
An important deviation from the liberal picture of BDSM is that liberal individual preferences are well-modeled as microeconomic, and BDSM preferences are not. Under microeconomics, agents generally desire to have more options, although there are some necessary constraints in terms of respect for others’ property and so on. BDSM submissives, however, seem to in some ways prefer to have options taken away, such as by being tied up. (While this could be explained in a number of ways, one relatively compelling explanation is that they feel themselves to already be under coercion, and prefer for that coercion to be concretized.)
In a liberal economy, agents voluntarily agree to constraints (such as the constraint of working as a waiter and serving people), and in exchange they gain money, which they can use to purchase, among other things, services from other people who become temporarily constrained so as to render these services (e.g. a waiter purchasing coffee).
In a BDSM context, those who take on constraints do not thereby gain a currency they can use to cause others to temporarily take on constraints so as to better satisfy their preferences; rather, people are sorted into “dom” and “sub” classes, so taking on constraints now is correlated, rather than anti-correlated, with taking on constraints in the future; this is a better match for a caste system than an economy.
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fiction piece, “Dark Lord’s Answer”, features an expert macroeconomist who is also an extreme BDSM submissive. This combination of macroeconomics with BDSM at first seems rather random, but I suggest that it is an aesthetically appropriate combination. Macroeconomics relates to military mobilization, and operates on cybernetic principles that attempt to control unemployment and inflation, causing people to have to keep working whether or not there’s anything to do, as if they’re being dommed. Although the relationship between economics and BDSM is rather complex, I have heard that more women became kinky after the 2008 financial crisis, which matches my model of the relation between macroeconomics and BDSM. (Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Planecrash” series, which I haven’t read, goes into a lot of detail of how BDSM behaviors may be connected to one’s interpretation of one’s social situation, or so I’ve heard.)
A more subtle point is that, above contradicting microeconomics, BDSM contradicts individualism itself. BDSM can involve non-individualist states of consciousness, for example, in hypnosis. The yearning to be someone’s slave is, rather than the yearning to be an autonomous individual, a yearning to be a component in a larger social system. BDSM can be linked to shame (through, for example, humiliation), which triggers non-individualist mental states, in feeling watched by an intrusive “big Other” whose perspective is not the perspective of any individual human, and which has the power to make you “valid” or “invalid”. The common social justice phrase, “you are valid!”, is creepy not so much in what it expresses directly as in what context it assumes, in which persons can be made “valid” or “invalid” on the basis of their “identity” and social/coalitional interpretations of them.
The trappings of BDSM, such as whips and chains, are not random “fetishes” that people are into. If hearing the phrase, “man ties up woman and has sex with her”, the first two available interpretations are rape and BDSM. Since rape preceded BDSM, a natural assumption is that BDSM often imitates rape; this happens explicitly sometimes (consensual non-consent, or CNC), but even BDSM that is not overtly CNC usually has the aesthetics of sexual assault or torture.
Again, the liberal kink advocate will say, this is individuals making informed decisions to satisfy their idiosyncratic preferences, it’s not rape even if it kinda looks like that. That still raises the question, why do these things look like sexual assault and torture? What’s going on with psychological states that prefer the trappings of these things?
If one doesn’t understand BDSM through an illiberal lens, one will be bad at BDSM. To satisfy subs, it can be important to understand the way in which people feel they live under concealed threats and can be more comfortable if the coercion they experience is more concrete and obvious. If the deviations from central-example sexuality are in the direction of subs wanting to be pretend-raped, rather than being entropic, then the easiest way to satisfy a typical BDSM submissive will be to pretend-rape them, ideally with some sort of method acting for sufficient realism. Method acting rape, unfortunately, trains one’s mind to do that sort of thing, by convincing some part of the mind that it’s real, so as to act sufficiently realistically. It is “unvirtuous”, in the Aristotelian sense; it trains bad habits. (Plato’s Gorgias, additionally, had the character Socrates say that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit injustice, pointing at a way in which domming willing submissives isn’t a free lunch, if the context of this domming is unjust.)
As a test of whether liberal assumptions are being followed, if there is a BDSM contract that involves a CNC scene, and the dom does something during the scene that upsets the sub, and the sub later accuses the dom of sexual assault or abuse, do people check whether the contract was actually followed? If so, then plausibly the community is implementing liberal assumptions about freedom of contract. If not, then a primary effect of BDSM contracts is to create a gray area where sexual assault is more acceptable than usual, and whether the behavior is considered acceptable is based more upon the illegible power dynamics of the situation than on the specific behaviors and agreements that in fact happened, as rule of law would require. (In my experience, I have never seen communities dealing with BDSM sexual abuse accusations check whether the actual contracts were followed, and my impression is that the law typically does not respect these contracts.)
I have heard at least one BDSM sub say (paraphrased) “yeah, basically an actual rape is taking place, and you beforehand agreed to have this happen, because you expected to enjoy being raped”. This perspective, that of someone actually considering and making the decision, is rather different from the idea that the coercion is entirely fake, which is used to justify BDSM. (To be clear, I don’t find the sub’s perspective entirely unrelatable.)
Perhaps a short summary is that BDSM culture imitates rape culture. Rape culture is a phrase that is confusing to the un-initiated, but can be understood partially from life experiences encountering it. It refers to a culture that, routinely, allows and even expects rapes to happen, covers these up, perpetuates myths such as “love cannot happen without coercion”, and so on. Certain institutions, such as typical psychiatric institutes and prisons, can be documented to have high rates of rape, although the more sociologically interesting fact is that there are similarities between such high-rape cultures and more general, out-in-the-open cultures.
If BDSM culture imitates rape culture, that doesn’t automatically imply that it is rape culture. But the imitation implies that, when BDSM is normalized, it is harder to distinguish rape culture from non-rape sexual culture. What would typically be considered signs of severe abuse can be, alternatively, interpreted as voluntary BDSM behaviors, if not checking in more detail. (Someone once joked to me about how he had bruises from his boyfriend beating him up, which is funny due to this ambiguity).
The Jewish law concept of marit ayin is relevant here. If something is not itself a violation of Jewish law, but would appear to onlookers to be one, then it is not allowed under marit ayin. Perhaps this is partially because it becomes harder for norms to be respected and enforced if there are a lot of apparent norm violations around. Similarly, it becomes harder to enforce norms against abusive relationships if there are a lot of apparent (even if not actual) abusive relationships around.
Sexual abuse happens in BDSM communities, like in other communities. The difference is that BDSM makes what constitutes abuse or a consent violation rather more subtle; simply ignoring a person saying “no” does not constitute nonconsensual behavior in a BDSM context, as there may have been a safeword set up. Therefore, what has to be judged is what the safeword was and whether it was ignored, which is higher-context, analogous to “parsing nested ‘quotation’ marks”. There is no way to, aesthetically, judge sexual assault by the “I know it when I see it” standard in a BDSM context, as BDSM adopts the aesthetics of sexual assault while differentiating itself from sexual assault by technicalities such as safewords. It is harder for a community to judge whether sexual assault even happened, since even video evidence is insufficient; there may have been a negotiation previously off-camera. It seems only doable with a system of technical pseudo-lawyers that judge independently of the normal legal system.
I know about BDSM, and I know about trauma behaviors, and I can’t help but notice the similarity. It’s hard to think of BDSM as some random stuff people are into, when the overlap, at least at a surface/aesthetic level, with trauma is so strong. Sexually traumatized people (especially women) often try to find partners who will control and rape them in relatively predictable ways, and BDSM relationships can look like this with an extra layer of pre-negotiation and safewords. Traumatized people tend to side with aggressors, and BDSM submissives will prefer relationships with people displaying certain forms of aggression. Abusive partners will often try to “own” their partner, and BDSM relationships can involve such “ownership” at least narratively (even if not meta-narratively). And, lo and behold, Aella finds a correlation between BDSM interest and having experienced sexual assault.
I can empathize with wanting to be physically constrained, since I’ve had the experience of psychotically believing that I was causing great damage to the world through fairly subtle motor actions, and wanting to be in a jail cell or similar. In a state of shame, it can be relieving to be deprived of freedom, so as to assure one’s self and others that the harm one can cause is limited. I think BDSM and trauma, as psycho-social phenomena, generally involve similar, illiberal, non-individualist mental states, since I’ve experienced some of both.
Again, someone who didn’t at some level understand this would be bad at BDSM. I don’t think the things I am saying are entirely obvious, but I think they (or at least, largely similar explanations) are pretty obvious conditional on understanding BDSM well enough to be any good at it. What if part of what’s going on is that traumatized people are looking for relationships that have a lot in common with the sort of high-violence relationships they would normally seek, but have enough aspects of normal consent to reduce potential problems including policing by a broader community? That would seem to explain a high fraction of cases, though not all of them.
There is some research indicating that BDSM may help traumatized individuals recover from trauma, but, still, this implies that BDSM is related to trauma and its popularity may indicate widespread traumatization. I don’t find it unlikely that BDSM could help process trauma (I think I have done at least some of this), I just think that, to the extent that it helps, it’s because trauma and BDSM engage similar mental states, and preferences for BDSM aren’t random paraphilias.
Other than trauma, there are other explanations. For one, talking about kink is, somehow, more socially acceptable than talking about sex directly, especially weird sex. It seems more socially odd to say you’re into, say, fisting, compared to saying you’re into whipping people. This seems like a rather suspicious set of social norms. Pointing to tolerance for BDSM as evidence for tolerance of strange sexuality (“kink” or “paraphilia”), and therefore sexual liberation, is, accordingly, suspect if not coupled with tolerance of unusual intrinsically erotic behaviors.
This is still pointing at a general cultural problem of sexualized power dynamics, but isn’t so much about traumatized individuals as the culture itself. I think it is, accordingly, overly broad to say BDSM is always traumagenic, although perhaps it is in the typical case. At least, it’s hard to explain why BDSM might grow to being a majority preference without changing cultural factors at play.
Another cultural factor is the domestication of humans. If most humans are domesticated, that raises the question of whether there is a class of human-domesticators, and how humans might recognize them. The BDSM dom seems to, in some ways, behave similarly towards the sub as an animal handler would behave towards a domesticated animal (for example, whips and chains are used on both humans and horses; it’s even more explicit in petplay), which may appeal to whatever intuition in domesticated humans is looking for the domesticator class.
There is at least some BDSM that legitimately seems like it could be enjoyed without engagement with trauma. For example, wrestling people in bed can be a fun adversarial sexualized game; it can be fun for some of the reasons regular wrestling is fun and sex is fun. My point is not so much that this entire category of thing is bad so much as that the statistical pattern of behavior indicates things being wrong in the culture.
I’m not really trying to condemn people from a high horse here; this is about non-individualistic systems that create incentives on individuals (and entrain people into non-incentive-based behaviors), much more than it is about the choices of individuals. “Kinkshaming” seems to come mostly from conservatives who think enforced monogamy is great. I think enforced monogamy and BDSM have the same problem, of displacing eroticism with systems of domination, and one could have reasons for preferring either one to the other given lack of other options.
The freedom to submit is a paradoxical sort of freedom, recalling the riddle, “can God create a rock so heavy even He cannot lift it?”. People can claim to be “liberated” by kink, but what does that mean, if the relevant liberty is liberty to adopt chains? What would it even mean for the practice of dominance itself to be liberated? I think someone could come up with a galaxy-brained take about how, really, BDSM can liberate people despite the paradoxical constraint, but, isn’t the most straightforward interpretation of “BDSM” that BDSM practitioners aren’t seeking to be liberated in the first place?
Re. rape culture: I think the best definition of a rape culture is that it's a culture that doesn't have a word for rape, like ancient Greece and Rome. This is why descriptions of "the rape of Leda" or "the rape of Helen" are usually ambiguous about whether it was seduction or rape: the Greeks and Romans didn't distinguish between seduction and rape. The words translated as "rape" are also translated as "abduction" and "seduction". All these things meant "unauthorized sex", meaning authorized by the protector of the person being raped. A person with no protector could not be raped / seduced / abducted. It had nothing to do with the woman's wishes. You might argue that every marriage in such a culture is institutionalized rape.
Rape was like murder, which in very ancient Greece was not a crime as far as most polis were concerned, but a private matter for the families involved.
Rape cultures like this don't cover up rape--they literally have no concept of it, and no shame associated with committing what we would call rape. In ancient Greece, what we call raping women was a status competition; the more and more-desirable women a man raped, the more status he had. Achilles, Herakles, and Zeus, the greatest heroes and the greatest god, were also famous for their rapes. Much of Iliad is a long argument between men about who gets to rape whom.