Intro To BDSM

Fundamentals, Types and Roles, Safety Rules, and More

By Nuna Alberts, LCSW. Listen to the Podcast at How To Sex.

If you’ve ever fantasized about getting kinky in the bedroom, you’re not alone. The runaway success of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy of books; the three top-selling print and e-books in the United States between 2010 and 2019; not to mention the sales of the movies they generated, prove that interest in BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism) is anything but rare.

BDSM can involve role playing, sensory manipulation, and more. Here are a few popular ways enthusiasts like to get kinky!

Prevalence: How Many People Practice BDSM?

Further proof: Nearly 47 percent of women and 60 percent of men have fantasized about dominating someone sexually, while slightly more women and less men are aroused by the idea of being dominated, according to a 2016 study. The same study also found that almost 47 percent adults would like to participate in at least one nontraditional type of sexual activity, and 34 percent said that they’d done so at least once in the past. No wonder if you search the phrase “BDSM” on Google it will return more than 500 million results. By comparison, the phrase “missionary sex” returns about 163 million results.

The History of BDSM: Not So New

Explore a little more and you’ll also discover that BDSM is nothing new. Among BDSM’s historical high points:

• Art and texts from ancient Greece and Rome show physical pain being used as an erotic stimulus, per the book An Illustrated History of the Rod, by William M. Cooper, first published in 1868.
• The Kama Sutra, the revered Sanskrit text on sexuality written in India about 2,000 years ago, describes six appropriate places to strike a person with passion and four ways to do it. It also has chapters titled “Scratching,” “Biting,” and “Reversing Roles.”
• The Marquis de Sade, a French aristocrat who lived from 1740 to 1814, wrote a variety of erotic novels and short stories involving being beaten and beating others. Eventually the author’s name gave rise to the term “sadism.”
• Similarly, the term “masochism” is derived from the name of Austrian nobleman and author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose 1870 novel Venus in Furs describes a dominant-submissive relationship.
• Back in 1953, a Kinsey Institute study found that 55 percent of women and 50 percent of men were aroused by being bitten.
• And even pre-Fifty Shades of Grey, 36 percent of U.S. adults reported having had sex using masks, blindfolds, or other forms of bondage.

Is BDSM Still Considered a Medical Disorder?

At one time, mental health experts were dubious about whether those who practiced BDSM were mentally healthy. But the American Psychiatric Association took a huge step in destigmatizing kink with the release of the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in 2013. For the first time ever, the guidelines drew a clear distinction between consenting adults who engage in sexual behaviors outside the mainstream, such as BDSM, and those who force others to engage in those behaviors without consent.

That means simply experimenting with, say, whips and chains, is no longer a sign of mental illness that by itself “justifies or requires clinical intervention,” the manual states.

There are true sexual disorders that are similar in theme. Sexual sadism disorder, for instance, involves inflicting physical or psychological pain on another for the purpose of sexual pleasure. And sexual masochism disorder involves deliberately involving yourself in a situation in which you are humiliated, beaten, or abused for the purpose of sexual excitement.

The difference between these two disorders and BDSM is consent, in the case of sexual sadism disorder, and that BDSM does not go to the degree of causing significant distress or impairing function, in the cas...