Meet the Rockadopoleis!: Sex, Love, and Power
This podcast is about the complex dynamics between sex, love, and power. We explore art, literature, theory, and philosophy, often in the context of our own BDSM-based female-led relationship. The show is for adults only. We're a Femdom couple, and we often talk about our physical relationship in explicit terms. That said, we're not here to tell you what to do or how to do it. We are here because we enjoy thinking and talking about art and ideas, especially when they pertain to our own strange and wonderful lifestyle.
Meet the Rockadopoleis!: Sex, Love, and Power
Season VI, Episode 5: From Stigma to Scholarship in BDSM
This episode uexplores the evolution of academic perspectives on BDSM over the past 50 years or so. From sociology to psychology and anthropology, we explore academic interest in BDSM.
Episode Art: Detail of The Humanist Library of Sélestat in France, Photographer: Claude Truong-Ngoc, date unavailable
Hi everyone, welcome to Meet the Rocketopolis. I'm Yislike Rocketopolis.
Speaker 2:And I'm Lance Rocketopolis.
Speaker 1:And today's episode we'll explore the cozy relationship that the academic world has with the kink world. So up until relatively recently, maybe 50 years ago or so, practitioners of kink and BDSM were routinely treated by a variety of vanilla institutions as perverts, criminals, deviants, degenerates, psychopaths, etc. And when I'm talking about institutions, I'm also talking about the actual places where the research and the learning take place, such as a university or a medical school, or maybe a powerful religion like Catholicism, or pornography a powerful religion like Catholicism, or pornography.
Speaker 2:I would say that there are educational opportunities to be found in porn, whether it's getting some inspiration for a particular scene or whether it's learning about some kinky technique that could be useful about some kinky technique that could be useful.
Speaker 1:So there are also the words institutionalization and institutionalize, which refer to a state of being in which individuals are deeply molded mentally and emotionally and socially by institutional powers, for example someone who's been in prison so long that they would have a very hard time taking care of themselves in the outside world. So from what I've observed of longtime academics, and especially professors and it appears that many of them would have a hard time adjusting to life on the outside, so to speak. So I taught in higher ed for 17 years and when I finally left the academic world I felt so free and so lighthearted that I actually thought that it was possible that I had a literal demon, a demon of happiness, living inside of my body. I was living in a state of sheer joy and confidence and self-actualization for about nine months, and then I had to get a real job and that started a new phase in my life which led to me accepting my kinkiness, which I could never have done, which I could never have accepted when I was in academia. So this episode will focus largely on current relations between the academic and the kink worlds.
Speaker 1:So through the life of this show, lance and I have been resourcing academic research for the podcast mostly from Google Scholar, but the number and kind of articles that we can access on Google Scholar and other research databases is extremely limited, because the vast majority of academic research is protected by a very expensive paywall. Some databases, for example the sciency ones, cost university libraries millions of dollars a year just for that one database, and losing access to those databases is the one and only regret that I have about leaving academia. Yeah, and you can get some of them by paying as a civilian for, like JSTOR and other databases that are available commercially to non-academics, but it's still really expensive, frankly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even if you contribute to your alumni association, it doesn't afford you much.
Speaker 1:Right, no nothing.
Speaker 2:That's not part of the plan.
Speaker 1:Right, no, nothing, that's not part of the plan. I went through the whole alumni process just so that I could get access to more databases, and it was just really paltry what they were willing to give me, Anyway. So in today's episode we're going to discuss the academic world's current interest in the kink world and the extent to which that interest is or is not a good thing for kinksters. And we do have access to some of the academic research on Google Scholar, which does have access to some of the work in some of those databases. But instead of focusing on sharing the research with you all, this time we're going to focus on whether that research represents kink and BDSM accurately and ethically. And when I say ethically, I'm referring to mine and Lance's own ideas about how kink should be represented in academia. And my ideas may be a little idiosyncratic. Lance is pretty mainstream when it comes to kink vanilla relations. You want everybody to just get along yeah, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so first we're going to provide some of the highlights of academic research over the last 15 years, and then we'll talk about what that research might mean to kinksters. Right, what's it to us? So there are researchers in a wide variety of fields that have published articles on topics associated with kink and BDSM, and most of those fields are under the broad umbrella of the social sciences. And while most of my graduate training and scholarship was in the humanities, I also got a master's in the field of education, which is a field that has its grimy little fingers in many different academic fields, mostly in the social sciences. But interestingly, my major professor in the School of Education was actually a philosopher of education and philosophy is a humanity, and I'm very grateful to have had him as my mentor whereas the social science researchers were collecting so-called data and putting it through a series of pseudoscientific processes that eventually end up creating a bit of quote-unquote knowledge. Sorry, not sorry if what I'm saying is triggering any social science people out there who might be listening, but I'm not being critical here, just to be a little bitch, because I took those research methodology classes and I had to learn how to do that type of research myself, and part of my learning involved developing a high tolerance for bullshit. I worked on people's grant-supported research and did live the life of a researcher for some time, and at one point I even had my own little grant for my own little classroom-based research. And that was the point when I realized how easy it is to manipulate data to support the outcomes that you want. Okay, scary stuff.
Speaker 1:So, given all the caveats that go along with all of what I just said, we're going to talk about the quote-unquote research in TickBDSM of four of the social sciences sociology, psychology, anthropology and political science and we're not going to focus on the methodologies of these disciplines. We're just going to look at the published results of the use of those methods when they are used to study BDSM. So we'll start with sociology, and here's a definition of sociology from Case Western University, which is known for focusing on the social sciences. So here's the definition Sociology is the study of social life, social change and the social causes and consequences of human behavior. So the first three citations that come up in a Google search for BDSM and sociology are actually about the sociological study of BDSM. They are not actual studies of BDSM, they are studies of the study of BDSM. So here are four of the first 10 hits for BDSM and Sociology on Google Scholar. The first essay is titled the Beginning of the Sociological Study of BDSM, which is about the author's early career as a BDSM researcher in the 1970s.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. It sounds like a biography.
Speaker 1:Right, An autobiography of himself as a researcher. Right. The second essay that we came across is titled Playing with Danger Encouraging Research on BDSM as a Form of Leisure via Reflection and Confession.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a chapter within the book Sex and Leisure Promiscuous Perspectives.
Speaker 1:That particular chapter discusses the practice of BDSM, as you said, as a leisure pursuit chapter discusses the practice of BDSM, as you said, as a leisure pursuit, as is apparently research into BDSM, right? It kind of reminds me of what we talked about in the last episode, with the professors being the people who don't have to work, right? And I just want to let everybody know that I do still think that all of this research is really cool. It just irritates me, but we'll get to that later. The third essay from the field of sociology is titled Pleasure, power and Pain, a Review of the Literature of the Experiences of BDSM Participants, and a Review of Literature or a Lit Review is just a compendium of all of the research.
Speaker 2:It's a paper about the papers.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, yeah, the author had three goals, namely to critically analyze the meanings of BDSM for the participants and take a look at BDSM identities, and she also examined the ways that communities organize, and she also looked and examined the ways that community organization shapes BDSM experiences. She then suggests three other topics for a future study how BDSM and race come into play, exploring specialized roles and identities, and comparing and contrasting those who participate in BDSM on a limited basis versus those who consider it a core aspect of their identity. So at least she feels that the topic is ripe for a future study, and you'll see, by us describing all these topics, how varied and wide the study of BDSM can be.
Speaker 1:So source number four is titled Pseudomasochistically Oriented Behavior Diversity in Practice and Meaning.
Speaker 2:Part of the abstract reads as follows Using a multivariate statistical analysis that geometrically represents the co-occurrence of individual actions as a visual array, and they cite a 1954 article in Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences. It goes on. To conclude, four qualitatively different sexual scripts emerged Hypermasculinity, administration and receiving of pain, physical restriction and psychological humiliation. Although similar themes have been suggested before, this study demonstrates their empirical base. Humiliation was significantly associated more with females and with heterosexual orientation in men, while hypermasculinity was associated with males and with homosexual orientation in men.
Speaker 1:See, right there, I'm triggered. I'm triggered about the humiliation of women thing. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Well, they're stating findings that they're.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're stating their quote-unquote findings Right.
Speaker 2:So, first of all, one can see that this research is many layers deep. They are talking about papers within papers within papers. Second, what caught my eye was that they were using multivariate statistics, which I have studied. How researchers can use quantitative analysis, you know statistics to come up with such personal, non-quantitative and socially impactful conclusions.
Speaker 1:So it's hard for me not to see a degree of narcissism in a bunch of articles in which the subject of the article is the researcher himself. Regardless, there have been roughly 10,000 academic essays written on various aspects of BDSM since the year 2020. But according to Google's Gemini AI, over 5.4 million academic essays were written just in the year 2023. So today we're going to discuss a few essays that are less about the researchers and more about BDSM itself. So the final essay that we'll be talking about in the field of sociology is titled Unperverting the Perverse sacrificing transgression for normalized acceptance in the BDSM subculture. The essay discusses the attempts to destigmatize kink and the problems associated with doing so, including the idea that some kinks will be more destigmatized, in other words rendered more respectable to vanillas, than others, and so you can see this happening all over FetLife. And the author also characterizes kink as the quote lived experience of transgression and says transgression can challenge narratives of acceptance via normalization, and I take that to mean that doing kink is a good way to challenge the normalization of kink.
Speaker 1:So on to the field of psychology, which is infamous for its stigmatization of BDSM and facilitation of the incarceration of thousands, if not millions, of sexual deviants for the last few hundred years at least. But eventually psychology did change its mind and decided that BDSM was super cool and healthy and should in fact be celebrated for its focus on consent and self-acceptance. So here are four relatively recent studies of the psychology of BDSM. So the first psychology article we looked at was from the of sexual medicine and it's titled psychological characteristics of bdsm practitioners right.
Speaker 2:This article compares the psychological characteristics of bdsm practitioners against a quote normal or control group. The conclusion that they drew was that BDSM practitioners were less neurotic, more extroverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection, sensitive and had a higher subjective well-being. Yet they were less agreeable, which we can attest to a little bit in our meetings.
Speaker 1:Yeah, agreeability and the lack, the term agreeable and agreeability and discussions of the lack thereof in Kinkster's numerous academic research essays.
Speaker 2:The scores in that paper were generally more favorable for those with a dominant rather than a submissive role. So kudos to you for being more psychologically adept. And the least favorable scores were for the controls the normal vanilla people More neurotic, less extroverted, less open to new experiences.
Speaker 1:The second psychology article comes from a social policy journal and it's titled the Psychology of Kink a survey study into the relationships of trauma and attachment style with BDSM interests.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this paper was similar to the one that we just talked about and it was more focused on traumatic experiences and it tries to answer the question as to whether BDSM was a coping mechanism. In short, the conclusion was that it is not a maladaptive coping mechanism. I like the fact that they end in policy implications. Bdsm practices deserve perception as normal sexual practice, free from stigmatization. So that's again a normalization of our practices.
Speaker 1:The third essay is titled A Systematic Scoping Review of the Prevalence of Etiological, psychological and Interpersonal Factors Associated with BDSM.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is an impressive summation. They looked at hundreds of articles and finally selected 60 of them to provide an. Reported that they engage in BDSM, and it concludes that we are not psychopaths. In the selected samples studied, bdsm practitioners appear to be white, well-educated, young and do not show a high rate of mental health or relationship problems. This paper also supports the idea that BDSM broadens sexual interests and behaviors instead of hyper-focusing on one specific interest or kink.
Speaker 1:And finally, we have Not to Become a Dominatrix Moral Panic in the Supervision of a Social Psychology Dissertation on Heterosexual BDSM. And our final article from Psychology is how Not to Become a Dominatrix Moral Panic in the Supervision of a Social Psychology Dissert. Psychology dissertation on heterosexual BDSM.
Speaker 2:This article describes the difficulties one PhD student or candidate had defending their dissertation on female domination. The abstract was a little confusing to me. It seems that this PhD student performed as a dominatrix in a Berlin dungeon and it freaked the fuck out of the professors and students in her psychology department, it appeared that they actually started to think that she was a dominatrix.
Speaker 1:It appeared that they actually started to think that she was a dominatrix. It seemed like they were saying that when she provided her findings to her committee or to whoever was supervising her, they freaked out because they I mean they literally thought that she had become a dominatrix or had been a dominatrix all along.
Speaker 2:Was it the fear that?
Speaker 1:she would use a bull upon them if she didn't get her PhD? Probably not. So, moving on to anthropology, over the last 30 or 40 years, anthropology has become more and more complex in its concepts and terminology. Long gone are the days of intrepid explorers studying exotic cultures in far-off lands. These days, the field tends to focus on microcultures close to the home turf of the anthropologist, and a lot of that has to do with lack of funding. Right, it's a lot cheaper to study the warehouse workers on the outskirts of town than it is to go to Bali.
Speaker 2:Right. No excursions to the Amazon jungle to study the native people there.
Speaker 1:So our first article from the field of anthropology is titled Kink Subcultures and Community Membership, and it's a chapter in the book Kink in the Digital Age Gay Men's Subcultures and Social Identities.
Speaker 2:It discusses the formation of kink subcultures, describes prior research on those subcultures and analyze the function that those subcultures provide to its members.
Speaker 1:So the second anthropology essay is titled Techniques of Pleasure, bdsm and the Circuits of Sexuality, and this is actually a book, not an essay or a chapter in a book, and it's an ethnography of the pansexual and sadomasochistic communities in San Francisco, and the author suggests that kink is no longer seen as transgressive, at least not in that particular social world, and that makes sense in San Francisco. It appears that kink has just become fully integrated into the greater culture of San Francisco.
Speaker 2:So why the objection to them being in the gay pride parades? It's just curious, the whole cultural shift, how it's accepting and then rejecting. It seems to ebb and flow and then rejecting. It seems to ebb and flow.
Speaker 1:I feel like there's a geographical element to that. When we were looking at the gay YouTubers castigating you know like really critiquing the pride parades, because the Leathermen were accepted there, because they were accepting, because the parade was accepting Leathermen, I see I don't think that was happening on Folsom Street in San Francisco. I mean, I don't know, but that would make sense. The last time I was in San Francisco it was in October and there were Leathermen walking up and down Folsom Street right in the middle of a weekday.
Speaker 2:The next essay is titled it's Complicated Sex and the BDSM Subculture, and it focuses on the impact that the subculture has on practitioners' interpretation of the relationship between BDSM and sex, and I'll just quote the article Greater involvement in the BDSM subculture increases participants' likelihood of viewing their sexuality in terms of BDSM, but decreases their likelihood of viewing BDSM in sexual terms. So, as the title suggests, it's complicated. Basically, if you meet a BDSM partner through the kink community, you're less likely to have sex with them.
Speaker 1:And the final anthropological essay is A Queer Boundary how Sex and BDSM Interact for People who Identify as Kinky, and this one is also about the relationship of kink and sex. And this one is also about the relationship of kink and sex, and the authors have identified seven themes regarding the relationship between sex and BDSM and the ways in which kink flows into sex. And here are those themes Kink flowing into sex, kink as spice for sexual interactions. Kink and sex as connection and intimacy. Kink and sex as an expression of erotic energy. Kink and sex as an expression of power exchange, kink as spirituality and kink as freedom. I like it. I like anthropology. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, those all really seem authentic to me.
Speaker 2:The last field that we will be discussing is political science.
Speaker 1:So the first essay we'll be talking about is titled Digital Kink Obscurity A sexual politics beyond visibility and comprehension.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This paper deals with the dichotomy of the positivity of being out in the open for sexual freedom and social justice reasons versus the necessity of self-protection provided by anonymity.
Speaker 1:And you and I, Lance, we really do deal with that issue on a regular basis. We don't actually go out and push those boundaries, but it kind of preys on my mind, Does it you?
Speaker 2:Certainly.
Speaker 1:The next essay is the Medicalization and Demedicalization of Kink. Shifting Context contexts of sexual politics.
Speaker 2:Right, this is a topic that you mentioned earlier on in this episode. It's an older 2016 article that talks about the shift in the definition of paraphilia in the DSM-5. Paraphilia in the DSM-5. So that was a major shift and obviously it would generate a lot of discussion in academia. Even the law community is getting into the Academic Publication Act. Bdsm, kink and consent what the law can learn from consent-driven communities. Published in the Arizona Law Review.
Speaker 2:The authors of this essay talk about the self-policing that occurs within the BDSM community and the difficulties that the law community and society have with our definition of consent. For them, there's a problem, and it lies in the fact that many jurisdictions do not allow consent for those things being done as part of the BDSM scene, so they don't even recognize that, even if you give consent, that's not real consent and shout out to wwwevilmonkorg. They have a whole webpage on BDSM and the law. Lastly, in the political science sphere is the essay sexy warriors politics and pleasures of submission to the state. This paper analyzes the fetishism of the military. It states that there is a relationship between soldiers' bodies and the state, and he uses language and theoretical categories from the King community to understand these relationships.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, that blew my mind too. Mine too. From the abstract, while few would dispute that dominance and submission are involved in all hierarchical social relations, I follow Foucault in arguing that communities that eroticize these roles have broadly applicable insights into the productivity of power. Combining theoretical arguments with empirical illustrations of how fetishism and militarization concatenate, the author demonstrates how to think critically about the relationship between gender, war, desire and agency. I do so because, like it or not, war is sexy in the contemporary US culture.
Speaker 1:Very nice. Yeah, that is sexy actually. I mean that's really because it's so real life. So we hope you enjoyed these discussions of social science research into the kink world, of social science research into the kink world. I must admit that I did enjoy this exploration of kinky scholarship quite a bit. I'm very much an auto-sapiosexual. But the fact that I enjoyed many of the big words doesn't change the fact that the research that we've provided is very likely 99% bullshit.
Speaker 2:Well, that is your opinion. Personally, I think it's more like 75% bullshit, but that's only my opinion.
Speaker 1:Hold on, let me check.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, actually it's 68.2% bullshit Far lower than my estimation, but that's actually a good thing, because I thought you were objecting to kink being studied and having it normalized.
Speaker 1:I mean, how much normalization were we actually seeing here? It seems like the researchers were backing off.
Speaker 2:To me. There were several papers in our quick review of literature that was saying that we're normal people, just to back off, and I'm hoping that this trend will lead to less stigma against us and more legal protections.
Speaker 1:The legal protections, yes, but I'm proud of the stigma. The legal protections, yes, but I'm proud of the stigma. So this concludes our discussion of academic incursions into the kink world. In our next episode we'll return to the leather community. So thank you very much for joining us today and until next time, have a great week.