BDSM

What is BDSM?

BDSM is an umbrella term for erotic practices and role-play around bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism and masochism. The four letters cover three pairs that partly overlap. What binds all these forms is that they rest on the informed consent of everyone involved; without that it is not BDSM but abuse.

What BDSM looks like in practice

BDSM rarely looks the way it does in films. Most people who do it do something small and domestic.

A first example, and the most common one at that: a couple who agree that one of them decides what happens that evening. No gear, no cellar, no costume. What changes is who decides, and that the other person allowed it beforehand.

A second example sits far from that. A session with rope, a blindfold and a build-up of a few hours, with what will and won’t happen agreed in advance and a safeword that ends everything at once. That is BDSM too, and the difference from the first example is not moral but practical.

What the two share is the conversation that comes first. The encyclopedic description puts it this way: BDSM play is usually set up so that the consenting partner can withdraw their consent at any moment, for example with a safeword agreed in advance.

Where the letters come from

The abbreviation is a merger, not a design. B/D stands for bondage and discipline, D/s for dominance and submission, S/M for sadism and masochism. The letters overlap: the D does double duty for discipline and dominance, the S for submission and sadism.

That explains why people who do BDSM rarely say they “do BDSM”. They say they love rope, or pain, or that they like being in charge. The umbrella is useful for outsiders and for dictionaries; within the practice these are separate things.

What falls under each letter varies widely too. Bondage covers everything from wrists above the head to a full suspension in rope. Discipline covers rules, punishment and reward, often with no pain involved at all. Dominance and submission are about who decides, and can exist without anything ever happening that looks like BDSM from the outside. Sadism and masochism are about giving and receiving pain or intense sensation, from a slap to needles.

Someone can feel at home in one of those four and not in the rest. That is the rule rather than the exception, and it is exactly why “do you do BDSM?” is a much worse question than “what appeals to you?”.

Why people do it

The appeal almost never runs through pain. It runs through who decides, and what it does to your head when you don’t have to be that person for a while.

Sagarin and colleagues measured that and published it in Archives of Sexual Behavior. In 58 participants they took saliva samples before and after a scene. In those who were tied up, received sensation and followed instructions, cortisol rose during the scene; in those who led, it did not. And in those who said afterward that it had gone well, that stress marker fell again and the felt connection grew.

• For the one who gives up control, the gain is usually rest: a stretch of time in which nothing is asked of you and you have nothing to decide.
• For the one who takes charge, the gain lies in attention and responsibility, in a form that ordinary life rarely lets be this explicit.
• For a couple, the payoff is the conversation. BDSM forces you to say out loud what you want, and for many couples that is the real effect.

BDSM fixes nothing. It makes visible what is already there, in both directions, and a relationship where no one talks does not get better from it.

How people get started

Almost everyone starts with talking, and that is not a tame recommendation but what actually happens.

The usual route: a conversation about what appeals to you, a short list of what is and isn’t allowed, a safeword, and then something small. Hands above the head. A blindfold. A slap. What comes after builds on what worked last time.

The traffic-light principle is the most used tool here: green means go on, yellow means slow down, red means stop at once. The encyclopedia describes that same system.

What separates the careful approach from the sloppy one is not experience but pace. Anyone who wants to arrive in a single evening at what they saw online skips the part that matters.

Misconceptions about BDSM

“People who do this are damaged.” That has been studied and it is not true. Wismeijer and Van Assen compared 902 BDSM practitioners with 434 others in The Journal of Sexual Medicine and concluded that BDSM is recreational leisure rather than an expression of psychopathology.

“It is a psychiatric disorder.” Not anymore. The ICD-11 removed sadomasochism as an explicitly named example of paraphilia, and the DSM-5 does not regard consensual activity as harmful unless serious injury is at risk.

“The line with abuse is a gray area.” That is exactly what it is not. Dunkley and Brotto summarize in Sexual Abuse that the feature setting BDSM apart from abuse and psychopathology is the presence of mutual informed consent from everyone involved. They even propose the explicit way the BDSM community handles consent as a model for conversations about consent in clinical and educational settings.

“It is rare.” Also not. The encyclopedia cites estimates of 5 to 25 percent of the population, and in Herbenick and colleagues’ study of more than four thousand American students in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 47.3 percent had at some point had a partner grab them by the throat.

What I see myself

In twenty-five years, the picture I have of who comes in here has turned out almost the opposite of what people expect.

They are rarely people looking for something extreme. They are people who are tired. Women who are responsible for everything all week and want one evening where that isn’t the case. That longing is the core, and whether rope comes into it or a hand on a throat is almost beside the point.

The shame sits with the word, not with the act. Once someone has said out loud what she wants, everything after that gets easier. That conversation is the hardest part of my work and at the same time the part where the most happens.

What you can do yourself

• Start with one sentence about what appeals to you, not with a list. Saying one thing out loud is enough to open the conversation.
• Agree on a safeword before anything happens, and agree on what happens after it: stopping is different from pausing.
• Do something small and see how it feels. Hands above the head, a blindfold, a slap. The build-up comes later.
• Talk it over the next day. What felt good during a session sometimes feels different the next morning, and that is information.
• Don’t look for therapy in a scene. BDSM makes things visible; working through them is something else.

Read more about BDSM

On this site, BDSM for beginners is the starting point, the article on safety in the BDSM context covers safewords and the traffic-light principle, and the page on consent shows how I make that concrete in a date.

Beyond this site, the review article by Dunkley and Brotto is the best starting point if you want to know how researchers look at consent within BDSM.

Sources

• Psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners. Wismeijer & Van Assen, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 10(8), 1943–1952, 2013. Compares 902 BDSM practitioners with 434 others; provides the conclusion that BDSM is recreation rather than psychopathology.
• The Role of Consent in the Context of BDSM. Dunkley & Brotto, Sexual Abuse 32(6), 657–678, 2020. Provides the distinction between BDSM and abuse through mutual informed consent, and the proposal to use BDSM practice as a model.
• Hormonal changes and couple bonding in consensual sadomasochistic activity. Sagarin, Cutler, Cutler, Lawler-Sagarin & Matuszewich, Archives of Sexual Behavior 38(2), 186–200, 2009. Saliva measurements in 58 BDSM practitioners; cortisol rose in the receiving role and then fell in those who felt the scene had gone well, with increased connection.
• Diverse Sexual Behaviors in Undergraduate Students: Findings From a Campus Probability Survey. Herbenick, Patterson, Beckmeyer et al., The Journal of Sexual Medicine 18(6), 1024–1041, 2021. Provides the figures 47.3 percent ever choked and 43.0 percent ever choked a partner among more than four thousand students.
• BDSM. Wikipedia. Provides the breakdown of the abbreviation, the traffic-light principle, the prevalence estimate of 5 to 25 percent, and the classification in DSM-5 and ICD-11.

Related terms

• Consent. The condition everything under this umbrella rests on, with the three layers it consists of.
• The 3 V’s. The classic safety framework BDSM leans on: safe, sensible and voluntary.
• Aftercare. The care that belongs with a session and gets skipped most often.
• Breath play, ageplay and animal play are three very different corners of the same umbrella.
• D/s. The middle two letters, and the only branch that needs no pain or rope.
• Fetish. A preference that exists alongside this umbrella and sometimes fits inside it.
• Kink. The wider circle BDSM itself falls under, with the Dutch figures alongside.
• Mentor. The experienced practitioner who shows a beginner the ropes, apart from the play.
• Protector. The scene companion who acts as a buffer for someone who has just arrived.
• Sadomasochism. The S and the M from this abbreviation, with the history of the word.
• The full vocabulary is in the A–Z list.