I originally published a post titled “The Psychology Of S&M” under my old pseudonym Clarisse Thorn, circa 2012. (I don’t have a precise record of the publication date, but I’m pretty sure it was in 2012.) For years, it was one of the most popular posts on my Clarisse Thorn blog, and it became the top hit on Google for the query “psychology BDSM.”
Today, I am thinking of that old post because I’m working on a new post about my history. Over on Twitter/X, I recently asked people what questions they have about the sex-positive feminist internet culture movement, in which I was deeply involved:
Lots of people asked me questions over there! I plan to answer their questions soon, in a new post. If you want to add any questions of your own, please feel free to leave a comment here! Nothing is off limits to ask, though I will delete comments that are mean or blatantly impolite (refer to my comments policy).
Meanwhile, here is a post about the psychology of BDSM. This new post contains elements of old posts that I wrote as Clarisse, over a decade ago. It also has some information I didn’t include at the time, whether because I didn’t think to include it, or because the context has changed so much, or because the information is new since 2012.
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BDSM is a 6-for-4 deal of an acronym: Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism, and Masochism. It’s sometimes called S&M, B&D, leather, or fetish. As an S&M writer and educator, I’ve received lots of questions about the psychology of S&M. People ask how psychologists would describe it, whether it’s a psychological disorder (answer: no), and whether it’s related to childhood trauma (answer: maybe, but not in a bad way). Note: I am not a trained psychologist, but I’ve read up on the history and been very involved in the relevant communities, as I will explain below.
First things first: S&M is not a pathology, and people who practice S&M are not “damaged.” There aren’t many S&M studies, but in 2008, this conclusion was supported by a large and well-designed survey that reached 20,000 people, performed by public health researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia. It was titled “Demographic and psychosocial features of participants in bondage and discipline, ‘sadomasochism’ or dominance and submission (BDSM): data from a national survey,” and it found that S&Mers “were no more likely [than non-S&Mers] to have been coerced into sexual activity and were not significantly more likely to be unhappy or anxious.”
Another study from 2009 found that consensual S&M usually increases intimacy for a couple:
… participants who reported that their SM activities went well showed reductions in physiological stress (cortisol) and increases in relationship closeness. Among participants who reported that their SM activities went poorly, some showed decreases in relationship closeness whereas others showed increases. The increases in relationship closeness combined with the displays of caring and affection observed as part of the SM activities offer support for the modern view that SM, when performed consensually, has the potential to increase intimacy between participants.
— 2009 study, “Hormonal changes and couple bonding in consensual sadomasochistic activity,” by Brad J Sagarin, Bert Cutler, Nadine Cutler, Kimberly A Lawler-Sagarin, and Leslie Matuszewich
(For people who have never engaged in this activity, it may be counterintuitive to imagine a situation where it went poorly yet still increased closeness between participants. If you are interested in this question, and in the distinctions between BDSM and abuse, this is a topic I’ve explored quite a bit!, especially in my article “Aftercare or Brainwashing?: A BDSM Theory Post.”)
I’d like to note briefly that people have told me about using consensual, intimate, trusting S&M activities in order to work through previous non-consensual, abusive experiences that they had. There’s nothing wrong with that. Indeed, the psychologist Peggy Kleinplatz published a scholarly article in 2006 called “Learning From Extraordinary Lovers: Lessons From The Edge,” which discusses how therapists can help their clients by studying alternative sexualities, and she included a case study of a couple whose S&M experiences helped them process and manage past abuse.
Still, as the 2008 Australia survey shows us, most people don’t practice S&M because they’ve been abused or because they’re unhappy: People who practice S&M have the same record of unhappiness and abusive history as non-S&M people.
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Some Psychological And Community History
S&M was first medicalized around 1886, when a doctor named Richard Krafft-Ebing published the manual Psychopathia Sexualis. This landmark tome hauled many sexual practices into the light, then attempted to categorize them. Of course, the doctor’s ideas hewed close to contemporary mainstream ideas of what was acceptable, and so he thought that basically everything was a disorder — including, for example, homosexuality. (This was part of a broader mania for categorization that manifested in many ways modern Americans would consider problematic. Another contemporary example would be the 1911 Dictionary Of Races Or Peoples.)
It’s interesting to imagine what our mental health paradigm might be if Psychopathia Sexualis had never existed. It had a huge influence on psychiatry. Later, the psychiatric establishment began publishing a text called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. The first edition came out in 1952, and it called homosexuality a disorder. This changed in 1973, partly in response to gay activists. But subsequent versions of the DSM are still criticized for many reasons. Our cultural diagnoses of mental illness are shaped by lots of people with very different motives, and truth is hard to find. A 2010 New Yorker article by Louis Menand outlined many critiques of the DSM, such as the allegation that today’s psychiatry “is creating ever more expansive criteria for mental illness that end up labelling as sick people who are just different.” Arguably, doctors have an incentive to do this, since they make money selling treatments for illness, and more illness means more treatment.
The original version of the post you are reading right now, which I published in 2012, contained what became the standard argument for removing BDSM from the DSM, i.e., a consent-based standard. In 2013, the final version of the DSM-5 was released: The BDSM community had finally carried the day. An article in The Atlantic later described the activist history behind this shift, which can be partially credited to an activist organization called the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), founded by Susan Wright. (I met Wright in my twenties and was starstruck. She gave me a hug! Susan Wright! She hugged me!) There was also significant effort within the academy, including a 2006 paper called “DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument for Removal,” co-authored by Charles Moser and Peggy Kleinplatz (the same Kleinplatz I mentioned above).
It’s worth mentioning some of the intermediate steps in this fight. For instance, private networking among therapists who understood the BDSM community perspective was critical. Circa 1993, an activist named Race Bannon made a handwritten list of doctors and lawyers who were S&M-friendly, and began passing it around to his friends. The way I heard the story is that this was, at first, literally three handwritten names. New names quickly got added to Bannon’s list, and when the Internet became popular, the list migrated online. Now, the Kink Aware Professionals (KAP) list is enormous. It includes profession categories from accounting to web design — not just doctors — and it lives on a website maintained by the NCSF.
When I was going through my own complicated and difficult S&M coming-out process (you can find the story in my old book The S&M Feminist), I was lucky enough to find the KAP list. My S&M-friendly therapist talked me through my anxiety and socially-created disgust, rather than diagnosing me with a spurious “disorder.”
Another organization that helped with the DSM transition is the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities, which used to have a conference (they gave me a free community ticket one year and I got to meet some amazing people). There is also the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, an incredible museum and venue where I volunteered extensively throughout my twenties (dedicated readers of my Clarisse Thorn blog may recall that I used to post cool stuff I found in the archives). While writing this post that you are reading right now, I discovered that the Leather Archives building is about to be renovated and tomorrow is their last open day for a year, so if you’re in Chicago and you’ve never visited this incredible spot, I advise you to go tomorrow :)
So many people have worked towards greater sexual expression, and I have an urge, in this post, to “honor the fallen.” There were people and projects that contributed, but are obscure now, or vanished entirely. For example, there was an incredible blog called “Kink Research Overviews” that has since been deleted, for reasons I assume are personal to its author. (If you are a friend of mine or a researcher working in this field and you would like the archive link, then I will send it to you as long as you agree not to post it publicly.) Even within my own work, there were ideas that I worked with and eventually discarded, like the idea of “BDSM as a sexual orientation.” I think that “the orientation model” of BDSM worked well for a short cultural window, but I would hesitate to promote it today; and yet I wrote an essay about BDSM as an orientation that was helpful to some people when it was written. The essay even got republished, eventually, with my permission, in an Oxford anthology about sexuality.
Another person I want to credit, because I think he is unfairly obscure, is the brilliant and inimitable writer Patrick Califia. Here are some quotations from Califia’s book Speaking Sex To Power, a collection published in 2002, containing essays Califia published during the previous eight years:
One of the smartest things I ever heard about S/M was uttered by a gay man, Steven Brown, who used to pair up with me to do educational lectures about the scene. He once said, throwing up his hands in despair about the suspicious grilling we were getting, “I do this because I am a loving person. I love and respect the people I play with. And that includes being able to embrace parts of them that are supposed to be unlovable.” …
As a top [i.e. a dominant/sadist], I’ve learned how to communicate in terms that will make sense to the other person. I’ve learned patience. I have a deep love for the vagaries of human nature and respect for the wisdom of the body. I am able to create a positive experience within a framework of limitations handed to me by another person. … I’ve learned how to keep my intense sexual experiences from spilling over into parts of my life where that kind of role-playing would not be appropriate. That is, if anything is, the First Principle of participating in these kinds of erotic fantasies. In order to be a responsible, safe player, you have to know when to be your scene-self, and when to be your mundane self.
I still remember how crushed I was when I read Story of O and Return to the Chateau [these are two famous BDSM novels from the mid-1900s] and came to the ending, where Sir Stephen loses interest in O and tells her to kill herself. I can also remember being furious with the way Nine And A Half Weeks (the book, not the movie) ends. The submissive woman has a public breakdown. She begins to cry hysterically, and is abandoned by her master, so that strangers have to obtain help for her. One of the cruelest stereotypes of S/M people is that we don’t love each other, that there is something about our sexual style that makes our relationships mutually destructive and predisposes us to suicide. We are supposed to be content with existing as two-dimensional caricatures of vanilla people’s erotic paranoia, emerging from our warrens only after dark, always clad in body-hugging fetish gear, having no real lives outside of public dungeons clubs and “violent” pornography. What’s really sad is the fact that a number of us buy into this insane picture of how a “real sadomasochist” is supposed to behave. It’s a good way to end up burned out, disillusioned, and in exile from the realm of pervery.
— from Patrick Califia’s book Speaking Sex To Power
What I love about this is how Califia nails the potential beauty and also the tragedy of these perceptions: BDSM practices, done rightly, can be so positive; and yet these negative stereotypes and assumptions can ruin that possibility. Since negative imagery is part of the practice itself, it is truly a delicate process to understand how and why it can work positively.
I reiterate: What made it possible for BDSM to be interoperable with feminism, and positive within the broader culture, has been the development of sophisticated consent frameworks. This was a huge part of my activism, back in the day, and it is still something I think about a lot. It’s become popular in some modern scenes to say that consent is a social construct. Yes it is — a useful one!
Again, I’ve extensively explored the distinctions between BDSM and abuse, especially in my article “Aftercare or Brainwashing?: A BDSM Theory Post.” Also, you can read most of the books I wrote as Clarisse for free. I am a different person now, and some of the things I wrote back then are not things I would write today; but I stand by those ideas as they functioned in their context; and there remain good, important ways to work with those ideas today.
There was a quote I used to mention a lot. It came from a blogger who has since deleted her blog, so I won’t name her, but I always thought this quote was on point:
It’s ironic that the most perverse manipulations of power in my life occurred in a past vanilla relationship, where I tolerated tyranny because the normative structure of our relationship obscured the fact that that is what it was.
— anonymous blogger, circa 2010
This was my dream: To help everyone understand the vagaries of power; to help the powerless find power in the kindest possible way; to increase consent everywhere, for everyone, using these frameworks. And thereby, to increase access to transcendent connection. For everyone.
This is not and never was because I thought everyone should do BDSM. Many people should not do BDSM. (Probably most!) Rather, this dream emerged because consent — real consent, not coerced “verbal consent” — real consent, the sort of consent that signals true attunement and harmony — is a social construct that some of us hope to use to make life better, in general, for everyone, as much as we can.
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A Personal And Spiritual Coda
When I wrote my post last year about my experiences being canceled, I included some notes about BDSM towards the end. Part of the post describes my brief engagement to Curtis Yarvin, a famous far-right blogger who promotes authoritarianism. Here is what I wrote:
During my engagement to Curtis, he asked me to have his child, and then during my pregnancy, Curtis and I broke up in rather scandalous circumstances. Curtis then sued me two weeks after I gave birth, which severely damaged both my health and my personal finances. Eventually I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder from the entire sordid situation.
At this juncture it’s worth noting that people like to speculate about sexuality in my relationship with Curtis. Of course they do. It’s the internet, right? The fact that I have done a lot of BDSM somehow relates to what happened between me and Curtis. This becomes a reason (in their minds) that it was okay for me to be hurt so badly. Some of the jokes are funny, I must admit, like the comment suggesting I was locking him in a “BDSM cuck shed” (I was not). But this aspect remains frustrating for me, given my ideals as a sex-positive feminist.
Anyway, Curtis and I didn’t do BDSM as part of our relationship, so all the weird commentary about this is irrelevant. I also think it’s interesting that the single most traumatic outcome of my life happened after I tried to marry a conservative guy who repeatedly insisted that he was monogamous and vanilla. I’ve never had anything remotely this bad happen in any of my BDSM relationships; I’ve never been diagnosed with PTSD after a BDSM relationship either. Indeed, one of the biggest and best-designed studies on BDSM found no broader correlation between abusive experiences and BDSM desires. So, while I am open to in-depth discussions of BDSM and psychology and whatever else is relevant, I’m not sure my relationship with Curtis has anything to do with it.
— from my 2025 essay, “Canceled Left And Right”
One of the beta readers on my article about cancellation was perplexed by my decision to do this, and asked why I insisted on including those paragraphs. I am constrained in what I say publicly about Curtis, so I will end my specific statements about Curtis there; however, allow me to spell out the implications of these paragraphs and why I felt it was important to include them. During that relationship, I became isolated from my primary community for various reasons. The relationship was a bad relationship in ways mainly related to that isolation.
So if anyone tries to use me and my ex-fiancé as an example of BDSM being bad, they are wrong, and I am mad at them. Community isolation and unhealthy relationships are, I would argue, inherently problematic — but BDSM does not equate to either one of those things. (Also, just to be clear, this is not an example of conservative men being inherently evil, either! Honestly, people.)
In recent years, I have become less focused on BDSM and more interested in spirituality. In a post I published a few weeks ago, “Spiritual Transmission And Leadership,” I did something I’ve never done before: I drew an explicit line between one of my early spiritual experiences and one of my early BDSM experiences. There is a lot more to say here. I have not been sure how to say it, but I’m getting there.
BDSM and spirituality has always been something that people discussed within the BDSM scene. There are famous icons within the scene who explicitly use BDSM as a spiritual tool, like Fakir Musafar and others. (Importantly, as demonstrated by Janet Hardy’s story of spiritual awakening and/or energy overload, immense risks exist here. Please be careful out there, friends.)
Back when I was deep in the BDSM scene, I didn’t think of myself as “spiritual,” so I didn’t pay much attention to that segment of the community. It’s funny to me now!
There was another famous categorization effort from the era of Psychopathia Sexualis. It was by William James, published 1902, titled The Varieties Of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature. One of my dreams, now, is to find ways of clarifying and chronicling this sort of thing, in the language of our time — and more importantly, transmission of such divine experience, with the right kinds of safety and consent.
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Update, 5/24: I changed the image at the top of this post (the previous image showed multiple candles and was nice, but didn’t feel sharp enough).
To summarize, BDSM and vanilla are both fine if consent is managed the relationship is caring?
(I'm pretty vanilla (or was, these days I'm celibate), but I have enough imagination to see how BDSM would work.)