Myths, lies, and cliches about BDSM. When will they end?
A good first step would be if BDSMers didn’t repeat them.
It’s a problem. After 35+ years in the Scene, it’s obvious to me that BDSMers still buy into cliches without examining whether those cliches actually hold up to real-life experience.
I think it’s because many BDSMers don’t complete the coming out process in their own mind. Instead of stepping out of the kink closet, they unconsciously carry the same moldy baggage with them.
BDSM/Leather newbies seem to wake up as internal switches flip on. They discover that BDSM is indescribably hot and emotionally liberating. For some people, that period of enlightenment more or less ends when they have finally given themselves permission to enjoy the things they enjoy. But the process of embracing BDSM should not be limited to self-discovery.
The next step is to expand our thinking to a mature philosophy about human sexuality itself. That means, for example, going beyond squeamishness about sexual things. It means developing an open mind by replacing judgement with curiosity. It means letting go of old assumptions and learning every lesson BDSM offers, to elevate our understanding of what this sexuality is and could be for us. BDSM can even be our journey into human enlightenment.
BDSM builds adaptability and versatility. It teaches us to evolve as a person and as a partner. BDSM can be our Zen meditation, our mind-expanding hobby, our foundation for a continually unfolding journey until we die. One thing BDSM should never be is static. If we still believe exactly the same things we did 20 or 30 years ago, where’s the self-discovery? Where’s the journey? Have we even done BDSM?
Now let’s talk about five cliches still in circulation about BDSM that seriously need to stop.
Cliche #1: It looks terrible for BDSM when a BDSMer turns out to be a criminal
Many people like to have sex. Some people who like to have sex commit rape. That doesn’t make all people who like to have sex rapists. People confuse kinky gear with the BDSM ethos: as a community, we educate about, emphasize, and promote compassionate, joyful, consensual relationships.
It’s also worth noting that the same people who are quick to blame the BDSM world for a few bad apples are often the ones who tell us not to judge them if their clergy get caught molesting children. Predators are viewed as the exception to the rule. Which is exactly how we should view the predators and jerks among us.
Why do we buy into the conformist world’s double standards? That happens when we internalize sex-negativity. We create our own mental prison. The prison of self-judgement lasts until we stop defining ourselves by the teachings of conformists.
The actions of those who abuse are not reflective of the BDSM community. As a community we have standards of consent that we teach and affirm. It’s time to break out of the idea that “it looks bad for BDSM” when someone who shares some of our kinks commits a crime. Our ethical impulses are healthy. Their criminal impulses are sick. They prey on us. They don’t represent us.
Cliche #2: Submissives run BDSM relationships because they get a safeword
First, some background on this cliche. Sharing the concept of safewords has been a good teaching tool when presenting education on BDSM to non-kinky people because it drives home the point that submissive people are aware and consenting. That their input is a vital part of any BDSM relationship. It also explains, in easily digestible terms, that a submissive can stop the action when it gets too intense.
Safewords are vital consent tools. They allow people who don’t know all of each other’s triggers to have consensual scenes together. They allow doms to understand what works and what doesn’t for their sub. They are a tool that also educates both partners on how to give each other maximum satisfaction without trampling on consent rights.
That being said, while safewords give submissives agency in a BDSM relationship, they don’t mean that the submissives run the relationship. Power is EXCHANGED.
A BDSM relationship is like any relationship. If both partners aren’t fulfilled, the relationship is heading for serious renegotiation or a break-up. No one partner has all the control.
Cliche #3: Submission is gendered.
Have you heard a professional dom talk about how male executives are so powerful in their daily lives, they need to compensate by giving up control to a master or mistress at the end of the day? Did you ever bump into people who say that women are more naturally inclined to be submissive than men?
Those claims are toxic sexist bullshit, no matter who says it.
Submission is not gendered. First, in the great wide world of wealthy male executives, the vast majority prefer a blow-job to a trip to a stern person in leather boots. The idea that a man is submissive only because he is socially powerful is a cliche based on toxic masculinity and ends up making ordinary guys without high-powered jobs feel even worse about themselves. What’s their excuse for dreaming about licking their dominant’s boots? Second, did it ever occur to anyone that maybe some men became powerful executives because they need to emotionally compensate for their deep-down need to submit? It has to me: I’ve met many a self-identified male dom and even more closeted male subs who hid their submissive desires for fear people would think they were weak.
What skews the picture of submission in BDSM toward the feminine is that we live in a world which undervalues women and conditions them to think of themselves as loyal followers rather than leaders. Yes, maybe more women are comfortable asserting their submissive identity in a world which treats women as second-class citizens because it follows the vanilla social narrative all around us. And, for sure, men are uncomfortable asserting their submissive identity in a world that keeps telling them that if they aren’t dominant, they aren’t “real men.” But if you’ve spent more than 10 minutes in BDSM, you should, by now, know that men are just as likely as women to crave sexual surrender in a power context, regardless of economic class, race or religion.
One day, maybe science will cough up a few facts on how genes influence the normal human impulse towards submission. For now, what we do know is that an impulse to surrender oneself to a perceived higher authority is a universal human urge. For some, it may emerge as religious devotion. For some, it is following an influencer. For BDSMers, it’s about roles that bring ecstasy. That isn’t gendered either.
Cliche #4: BDSM Self-Invented Myths
From secret societies and royal houses to arcane training rituals … OMG, please stop inventing fanciful myths to make BDSM sound like a sex cult with a high membership bar. You know who does that? Cultists! BDSM isn’t a mystery cult with a dazzling, linear history. It’s an erotic pleasure that’s been randomly documented since the Age of Pharoahs, which then got labeled as a sexual perversion by psychiatrists 160 years ago. Doctors stained their research with religious beliefs and, today, religious ideology still rules the public impression of BDSM.
BDSM is an umbrella term for many radically disparate communities – and we fall under the bigger umbrella of “Kink,” which can mean any non-conformist inclination. We’re a multitude of different cultural experiences and backgrounds. My experience of BDSM as a queer white dominatrix is different from my Leather brother’s experience as a heterosexual African-American master, which is different from my Leather sister’s experience of being a lesbian Asian-American submissive which is different from my wheelchair-bound friend’s experience of BDSM and disability, and all of that is different from a transgender person’s experience of BDSM. Our diversity is our strength out of necessity. “If we not for ourselves, who will be for us?”
We are all in this together, united as an oppressed sexual minority in a sex-negative world. So drop the elitist rap and keep it authentic.
Cliche #5: BDSM is perverted.
No, it isn’t — unless you think there is really such a thing as “normal” sex and that missionary position sex between man and woman is the only “right” expression of human sexuality. If you don’t believe that reproductive sex is the only right way to have sex, then you shouldn’t believe you are perverted for liking other types of intimacy, whether that’s oral sex, anal sex, or hanging upside down in a latex bondage suit in your spare time.
There is nothing perverted about playing hard and rough with your bodies and minds. Your body is your birthright.
A long time ago someone asked me “what was the most perverted thing you ever heard?” My answer — “The most sexually perverted thing I ever heard was two people who do the same exact thing every time they have sex.”
We need to stop repeating the myths. We need to focus on the truth: like every other intimate sex act between people who trust each other, BDSM is consensual and normal.
In the next blog, I’ll list the truths we should be repeating to every receptive audience (including ourselves)!
