Alright then, who was it?
"Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me"
A new study has discovered that practitioners of "bondage-discipline, dominance-submission, sadism-masochism (BDSM)" tend to be less neurotic, anxious, and paranoid, and more extroverted, conscientious, and open to new experiences than members of the "vanilla" general public. BDSM practitioners "either did not differ from the …
For the last 300 hundred years human sexual urges have been have been attacked and suppressed by religion, governments, do gooders and women's lib. The result has been a need to conform to a norm, the norm issued by all these self interest groups.
What is abnormal to one person is the elixir of a turn on to another.
I say if it floats your boat, get boating.
"I say if it floats your boat, get boating."
Within constraints. Lest murder and rape become acceptable.
Want to know this dirty old man's observations? The dominants tend from average psyche to potential sociopaths. The latter are of concern, for they respect no boundaries, social or legal.
Fortunately, sociopaths are unusual outside of political leadership. (sorry, couldn't resist a political joke.) And hence, are even more unusual in any "kink" crowd.
I use quotes for a reason. Kink for some is anything that isn't the "missionary position".
In that case, this dirty old man's dirty old lady of 30+ years are downright kinky.
But then, in our youth, we did submit an entire chapter to the Kama Sutra, with thanks. ;)
We're on disability today because of that contribution.
Not a very popular viewpoint, but one I agree with. Having moved in a variety of circles in my time, a good percentage of dominant people are just not very nice, and their behaviour towards others (not just their partners and not just in the bedroom) often verges on the abusive.
Actually the psychos usually get found out pretty quick.
The BDSM community is fairly tight knit and although not everyone gets along, as with any group, they will usually support each other and word gets around if a guy is wrong in the head.
As any Dom kno, the sub ultimately has all the power as (s)he has to give permission before play commences. If a guy misjudges this he will find himself blackballed by the community PDQ.
(Posted anonymously because... well.. you know)
Just don't tend to be an experimentally-minded sailor or mix with them, because you're liable to end up dead. Oddest thing how sailor jokes tend to get taken seriously and how quickly that can lead to trouble. Yes, experience; yes, I know it's still valid--but yes, personally, it's from long ago.
"As any Dom kno, the sub ultimately has all the power as (s)he has to give permission before play commences. If a guy misjudges this he will find himself blackballed by the community PDQ."
Yeah, except if the subs are basically in thrall to an arrogant asshole. Coercion exists in the BDSM community as much as anywhere else.
Quoting the article: "The results mostly suggest favorable psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners compared with the control group; BDSM practitioners were less neurotic, more extroverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, had higher subjective well-being, yet were less agreeable."
This defines the political class quite nicely I should think. Most politicians in the United States are definitely socio-pathic.
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It's the way you deal with it. And that isn't determined by your own (sexual) fantasies and or habbits but simply by the person(age) you really are. I guess this is way too cliched for these kinds of studies, in my opinion because there's little money to be made by stating the obvious, but it's simply the way it is.
Just because a woman is into bondage doesn't automatically make her a sex-crazed femme fatal nor does it mean that the only way you can get along with her is to tie her up.
The only thing to keep in mind is that you also can't rule these things out. Sometimes you /are/ dealing with a (sexual) disoriented person. But its not his or her hobbies which define that.
In my opinion researches like these are no better than the well known "violence on TV is bad because it corrupts children", while totally overlooking the small yet important factor that the real issue is the way those children deal with it. And that's something normally taught by the parents.
As said, IMO this isn't different.
Of course; in the end this whole research is flawed by design. Because let's go over something obvious once again: most people are not very comfortable talking about their sexual desires or fantasies. Doesn't that fact alone indicate that if you start a research into this matter you'll automatically get answers which only reflect a small portion of the people involved?
You said.. most people are not very comfortable talking about their sexual desires or fantasies
Maybe but a local BDSM club (of which we were all unaware till then) rented a room upstairs at our local and didn't seem too bothered about it. Once our giggling was over, neither were we. They left the door open so we could hear the slaps and yelps. They didn't mingle but they certainly didn't shy away. So maybe you're right and maybe you're just projecting your own feelings onto it.
Perhaps you should read the research paper before accusing the researchers of missing the obvious.
Curiously, the aforementioned event organisers specified tea and coffee to be provided[*] - no alcohol.
[*] Inevitable thought follows..."one lump or two?"
That wodge of jargon is pretty standard statistics. But it isn't enough to show that the people using those mathematical tests understand what they are doing. And that's a rather too common problem. Pocket calculators have been able to compute the mean and standard deviation of a set of numbers since the 1970s, and "serious computer software" has been doing this complicared stuff on desktops since the 1980s, and it's really easy to do some standard test, and get a good result, without knowing whether that result is even measuring anything useful.
And, on my experience, if any statistician is picked to take part in a survey, they will lie, just for the LOLs.
Trust and selflessness are the two crucial factors that make a BDSM relationship work. While it's true that these should be a part of any physical relationship, vanilla or otherwise, when you're dealing with restraint and punishment it gets very bad very quickly if either are missing.
Perhaps this is why those who have successful and enjoyable Dom/Sub relationships show these traits - they wouldn't last very long without them!
There’s a third aspect you’ve missed: kinky folk are amazingly good communicators. They are much better, on average, than the average person on the street at expressing their wishes honestly; they are also far more skilled at listening with empathy.
Ahhhh, that “Submit” button has a whole new meaning today :D
Not exactly a BDSM practitioners ourselves but we both do take part in age-play and I enjoy TV-play with my wife and yes it takes a hell of a lot of trust for you both to commit to something so personal. You can't get into the full experience or fully enjoy it without being able to express yourselves clearly or trust each other explicitly. That leads to the way we bring up our kids, we talk openly ( obviously not about this! ) in our house, we don't have secrets and make sure we all talk to each other about things. When we had to explain the "birds and the bees" to our daughter, it was just a casual and open talk, no silly embarrassment or mumbling about "trains and tunnels", just the facts using the correct terms and due to our solid relationship we stressed that mature relationships are about about trust and caring for the other person.
On the subject, the thing we found so hilarious was when my Missus would come home from work and we'd laugh about all her ( bored? ) female work colleages getting so excited about the 50 Shades rubbish. They kept asking her to give it read but she said she had no interest in it, which they couldn't quite figure out. As we both agreed, if that lot stopped reading about it and actually started doing it they'd realise that it's much more exciting to make your own fun rather than reading someone else's fantasies.
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"Associations were examined using χ2 tests of independence with φ and Cramer's V as effect size measures and eta or Pearson's correlation. Group differences were tested using analysis of covariance, with partial η2 as effect size measure. A priori contrasts were tested using α = 0.01 to correct for multiple testing; for all other tests we used α = 0.05, two tailed."
Okay, I'm still interested but does someone want to explain what all that shit means?
Stripping it down the the nub:
Compute the statistics on the people - where the "average" is (that is, where is the line where half the people are above the line, and half below), and compute how spread out people are (are they all pretty close to the line, or are they all pretty far away from the line).
Then, compute the differences between the two groups - where is the average for one group vs. the average for the other group, and what is the spread of one group relative to the spread of the other group.
OK, so far pretty simple. But what if one group's average is just a squeak above the other's? If the spreads are small, that may mean something, but if the spreads are large, it may mean nothing. So how do you turn that sort of fuzzy statement into measurable science? You do some math that tells you "what are the odds that that difference is really a difference, and not just noise?" That's what the χ2 (chi-square) tests do: they allow you to mathematically model the odds that the differences are really a difference.
To people who know statistics, they know what those terms all mean, and this is basically the researchers showing how they came to the conclusions they did - describing the way they did the math.
My supervisor in statistics used to say that many physicists and engineers distrusted statistics because it tended to demonstrate that their experiments were not convincing (or their engineering tolerances were not actually good enough).
I imagine he's dead by now, an Internet search doesn't find him, which is a pity because when the crucial test for the discovery of a new boson last year was announced in terms of its statistical significance, he would surely have cheered.
I didn't entirely believe hi, though, until our company got a new MD, a mechanical engineer, who wanted us to stop using this "statistical process control" because he didn't believe in it.
Well, given that even the first demonstration of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity depended on statistical analysis, Rutherford was wrong.
In fact my supervisor's favourite was the size of Pluto. Following its discovery, each successive measurement was smaller than the last. The explanation was that the original discoverer had estimated the size at the extreme top of the range - it was after all the only planet discovered by an American and it needed to be big to explain the perturbation of the orbit of Venus.
Successive measurements were more accurate but, because they didn't like to challenge the estimate of a Great Astronomer, were still quoted at close to the top of the range, instead of in the middle. Thus the size of Pluto progressively declined until eventually it was downrated altogether from being a planet - a move which a number of American astronomers continue to complain about.
Eddington did the measurement to demonstrate Special Relativity, and another Quaker, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, was in the chair at the IAU when Pluto was downgraded. As one of them myself, and someone who has done a lot of statistics in his time, can I just remark "Yay Quakers"?
<quote>"Associations were examined using χ2 tests of independence with φ and Cramer's V as effect size measures and eta or Pearson's correlation. Group differences were tested using analysis of covariance, with partial η2 as effect size measure. A priori contrasts were tested using α = 0.01 to correct for multiple testing; for all other tests we used α = 0.05, two tailed."</quote>
Effect size measures are the expected differences you would find, given the p values expressed. In other words, it's a projected value of what the 'effect' of the difference would be. Phi and Cramer's V are correlations between nominal/categorical values, since pearon's correlations doesn't work for things like categorical crosstabs. Without getting the paper, they did something like numbers of males/femals who have/haven't been admitted to a psychiatric ward, or any other form of group membership. ANCOVA(analysis of covariance) is just t tables for multiple groups, with some expected differences controlled for (removed). For example, there may be systemic differences between different genders at two different college campuses, and I want to pose the question: do women graduate more often then men do, regardless of family income levels. You control for SES (previously measured) and find out if there are still differences, or if the gender differences are actually the result of SES differences.
The alpha level choice is a bit weird, because the language seems to indicate that they chose it regardless of the tests they ran, but it would have been much easier to use either the Bonferroni or Sidak methods of correcting. Essentially, when you do multiple group testing, you can accidentally deflate the p values, and receive significant differences where non exist.
Two tailed just means they looked at confidence intervals around the top and bottom of the distribution, rather than assigning the CI to one side or the other; standard practice, since the distribution is assumed to be gaussian. Oh, and the partial bit just means the correlations after controlling for differences.
/research psychologist, although one who doesn't find this area of research to be anything useful.
Google it, but the very core of this is the assumption that if a hypothesis is formed and then a method of somehow isolating a process defined as causative is determined to be valid, then with a few tests refined mathematical analysis of the results is pursued for "proof". There are a few problems. The identity between tests is defined using strictly exclusive measures, with a great deal being "intuitively" adjudged unimportant which is definitely arguable. (Deciding that the color of a test area is unimportant is a common example.) The second is the usage of methods to determine identity between subjects--and the third is that the empirical hypothesis doesn't allow for proof, it allows for the transition between hypotheses and theories, which most supposed scientists in any modern discipline evidently find hard to grasp.
My apologies in advance. That is the correct explanation, however.
But which mental health standard was being used? The whole field does not know any, there are only categories for when something seems troubling the social-economical functioning. And whatever neurosis the tested people might actually suffer from, the act of sublimating that into some play might be in itself the main factor here. Perhaps next time compare with other random groups like train spotters or theatre lovers. If my hobby is to suck the blood of wandering sheep, the very thing which keeps me sane and pleasant to be around: what does that mean?
And doing a Chi squared test doesn't impress anyone.
Ah, but as someone who has had academic papers published in the past, 90% of any paper is boring background stuff everybody skims over that they want you to include to pre-empt obvious questions about the 10% that is actually interesting.
So no, most of any academic paper isn't going to impress anyone.
What you're largely referring to is clincal psychology, a field that doesn't have any claim to science, and which has a pretty active history of ignoring glaring flaws in favour of their ad hoc 'expertise'. Look up the 1954 book by Paul Meehl, or the 2000 meta-analysis which confirms that. Unlike the rest of the field, clinical psychology hasn't really moved on beyond Freud
... we need TPTB in the Mental Health community to start listening.
There is a group called Revise F65 whose aim is to "get sexual sadism, masochism, fetishism and transvestic fetishism abolished from the World Health Organization's list of psychiatric diagnoses, ICD."
These are archaic and obsolete definitions based on attitudes from the last century, yet, at the moment, these are what are used to define us and, worse, victimise us, for instance there are divorce custody cases where one (vanilla) partner uses the other's preferences to claim that they are not fit to care for the child because they are "mentally ill".
Speaking as someone who runs a business making Affordable Leather Products, supplying BDSM gear to consenting adults, and who has been involved in the Fetish Community for 20 years, it is easy to see that there are fewer fundamentally fucked-up people involved, not least because they are *happy* with their interests and preferences and they have learned to ignore society's ignorant prejudices that what they are doing is wrong/ bad/ sinful/ harmful etc
Hear, hear!
I am a moderator on a discussion board bridging kink and mental illness. A couple of years ago I started a thread analyzing trauma and whether it is correlated with kinky behaviour. It was certainly not an unbiased sample, but there were plenty of forum participants who reported no traumatic events in their lives — so many that the consensus seems to be no connection.
There is another aspect or two of BDSM that seems to have escaped the author of the article.
First, what precisely separates kinky behaviour from abuse? The borderline is enshrined in the kink motto “safe, sane and consensual.” If behaviour falls outside these borders, it is abuse; inside, consensual play. Note the issue of consent is ongoing consent which may be revoked at any time (but NOT retroactively).
Second, while the Dom(me) is nominally in power and the sub, well, submits; the REAL power structure is inverted because the sub always holds the ultimate go/no-go authority. This is accomplished by safewords (or safe-gestures when words cannot be spoken) which (a) are agreed upon in advance by discussion and negotiation and (b) are ALWAYS respected; refusal to respect them is grounds for assault charges.
...Group differences were tested using analysis of covariance, with partial η2 as effect size measure. A priori contrasts were tested using α = 0.01 to correct for multiple testing; for all other tests we used α = 0.05, two tailed....
Modern data collection and processing systems using spreadsheets allow you to compute any complex statistical function you like at the touch of a button. Work that used to take skilled mathematicians weeks can now be done instantly.
Worse, you can also alter various parameters slightly and repeat the calculation - many times, until you get the best set of numbers to support your argument. This is probably what the η2 and α figures are: I suspect that the results would have been much weaker if different parameters were used.
The impact of this trick can lie anywhere between justifiable technical disagreement between statisticians, and downright fraud. It is extensively used in 'Climate Science' to maintain the fiction that earlier temperature variation was pretty flat, and that therefore the temperature rise from 1980-2000 was very unusual....
More extroverted is positive? Says who? I thought we'd got past this extrovert = good, introvert = bad theory.
Or is the author also of the opinion that people who are not loud, shouty and dont post everything about themselves on twitter are deviants that need to become more like the more highly visible extroverts of society?
Going as far back as Moser (1979), several studies have indicated that more educated people are more willing to experiment sexually.
Is it likely that there is some kind of correlation between education and mental health? I can think of a few likely relations between the two, from the more cynical version that mental health issues will hold you back in school to the idea that education will help you overcome mental health issues.
If anyone can find a study comparing people of the same level of education who do and do not participate in bdsm, I'd like to see it. Otherwise I'm going to assume that good mental health causes better education which causes more interest in fringe sexual techniques.
Have a nice day.
Given that higher intelligence tends to correlate with a higher instance of autism spectrum disorders and a higher chance of displaying particular classes of mental illness such as schizophrenia and - if you count it as a mental illness - sociopathy, I'd say no, it's not likely at all.
Of course education and intelligence don't correlate all that well these days. You only have to look at the prevalence of poorly researched statistical metastudies that "prove" everything is bad for you and good for you in quick succession to see that. Perhaps it depends how you define education.
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I would think that the Taliban, the US Christian Right, the BNP, heroin addicts, paedophiles, serial killers, rapists, the Provisional Wing of the IRA, and the Israel Home Party could all provide people compared to whom BDSM practitioners would look very mentally healthy.
After all, let's think about Rugby players. Every week in winter they get cold and wet while sometimes getting quite seriously hurt. They get shouted at by coaches, they go home during the week knackered after training, and they enjoy it. Yet nobody regards them as particularly odd.
"Like boxers who spend 12 rounds"
That would be professional boxers, and not in every contest. Three to five (shorter) rounds is much more common.
"punching the shit out of each other"
I think you'll find there is quite a bit of strategy involved. The interesting part of full contact sports is precisely that it's as much of a mind game as a physical activity. Mindlessly punching the shit out of each other is what you see in pubs amongst the drunk, not in a ring. I'm sure even the untrained eye can spot the difference.
"and sometimes ending with brain damage, detached retinas, or even death?"
Yes, there are risks involved, just like in any sport and many other non-sport activities. You just learn to manage, control, and minimise those risks, while accepting the residual.
"As a sport?"
My personal definition: "if it's not likely to kill you it's not a sport", but that's just me. :)
Disclaimer: I do my bit of punching and kicking, and as a result of my age I'm starting having to rely on strategy and skills against younger opponents' speed and endurance.
I think Terry Waite, after being released, was quoted as saying 'I used to enjoy bondage and preached, that it was a special experience between consenting adults. Then I was kindapped and discovered my fantasies were all immature bullshit and learnt to stfu'.
This of course may all be completely false or in otherwords, a 'study'.
If you find a real BDSM couple who doesn't loath that book I'll be shocked. Nothing like a semi-popular book that takes all the worst, and wrong for that matter, stereotypes about your already-misunderstood community and puts them into a neat little package for people who know nothing about what you do to stir up some negative emotions.
I would just like to point out that all the most self-confident people I know are subs. And by subs I mean full-time pets, not people who just like being tied up on the weekend. There's a very long winded explanation for this, but the short version is that they have to be confident to be able to give themselves over to another person like that. Believe it or not in a full time D/s relationship the sub is often the stronger of the two people involved. I also don't find it surprising that Doms/Dommes are generally well adjusted, but for different reasons. Caring for a sub in a BDSM relationship takes a very special type of person, able to care deeply for their partner even while whipping them.
And yeah, in case you're wondering, my spouse does often get tied up and punished for our mutual pleasure. Anon for, I think, obvious reasons.
There are all kinds of people in all lifestyles or sexual orientation. I admit, I'm into the scene a bit and have quite a number of friends who are as well. Many are fine people... some are flat out crazy... a few are quite dangerous... no more than those who are not in the BDSM scene that are psycho.
There are plenty of dangerous unbalanced church frees out there...