BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism) is a fetishized role play game, or real life practice, enacted between consenting adults whereby Dominance and submissive roles are expressed through various forms of physical or emotional bondage, disciplinary actions such as corporal and non-corporal punishment, and sensual impact play through the use of floggers and whips, spanking implements, and other practices. Sexualized fetish clothing on display is common. The BDSM aesthetic is often found in film, art photography, and theater to express overt and uninhibited sexuality.
It’s a catch-all term for a variety of atypical sexual practices.
READINGS:
This is a range of practical, academic, and historical readings related to sex and modern BDSM practices.
BONDAGE
soon
DISCIPLINE
- SPANKING HOWTO, from the Community Resources section for Domestic Discipline.
Included are readings and infographics meant to help with a range of impact play, from lite sensual spankings, basic maintenance spankings, to genuine disciplinary corporal punishment. A Self-Spanking infographic is also included.
SADISM
The Marquis de Sade is known for SADISM, a term coined in his name. Typically understood to take joy in making others suffer, Sade’s writings certainly depict this mindset. But Sade the myth wasnt Sade the man. His life was one that can only be understood through the lens of history.
Sade lived through the period of philosophical and scientific Enlightenment, a time of great poverty but also of great writers with great ideas. These ideas led people to question the social order. And as such, they were considered dangerous to those who had ruled feudal society for centuries.
Though not an architect of the French Revolution, Sade took part in it and witnessed the collapse of old religious and aristocratic power he despised. Which suggests a question: If his writings epitomized the sexual indulgence of aristocracy, speaking in defense of the powerful over the weak, why then did he join revolutionary republicans against the French monarchy?
He spent much of his life incarcerated in prisons and asylums on various sexual and political charges. He was famously a resident of the Bastille, having been sentenced to death. But at the onset of the French Revolution, he was released by decree due to a general amnesty. Whereupon he renounced his aristocracy and title. After the fall of the monarchy, Sade would later be elected to the Estates Generale as a parliamentarian during the First Republic.
BIOGRAPHICAL
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Chapter 4, The Philosophic Libertine, from “The Marquis de Sade,” a biography by Donald Thomas Segher. This, on Sade’s first imprisonment at the age of 24, after ostensibly having whipped a prostitute, which resulted in a police investigation and ultimately a short detention.
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Chapter 10, Citizen Sade, from “The Marquis de Sade,” a biography by Donald Thomas Segher. This, on Sade’s release from an asylum in the wake of the French Revolution, after nearly twenty years in detention. Then, how he joined revolutionary efforts and was ultimately elected as a parliamentarian in the Estates Generale of the First French Republic.
SELECTED WRITINGS
Though it was illegal to be hold outright atheist views, Sade’s writings were as close as one could get to total rejection of the church and God. Here, Sade uses dialectic to mock the absurdity of the Church’s views in the face of a person’s actual death.
- Philosophy in the Bedroom: A dialectic promoting total authority and sexual domination by the powerful against the downtrodden and weak in the rhetorical tradition of Greek philosophers from antiquity.
While scandalous, his work should really be interpreted through the lens of Rousseau’s Origin of Inequality, The Social Contract, and Confessions. In Philosophy of the Bedroom, Sade seems to be mocking Rousseau by inverting everything Rousseau wrote in support of. Yet Sade despised hypocrisy most of all, and Rousseau attempted a third way between libertine republicanism implied by Rousseau’s works and the absolute monarchies common in Europe at the time. Further, in Confessions, Rousseau confessed his many sexual sins, arguing for chastity and religious piety. Sade also had great disdain for both the religious and the aristocratic order that had jailed him for the very widespread offenses they themselves engaged in.
Underneath Sade’s explicit call for aristocratic total authority and sexual abandon was also the exposing of those indulgent sexual liberties aristocrats had always engaged in privately. Sade’s real crime was not sexual but, as Segher notes in the reading above, a kind of aristocratic class libel, having impertinently written and publicized what aristocrats were really up to behind closed doors. As evidence Sade really didn’t believe what he writes here in Philosophy in the Bedroom, he would later join republicans in Revolutionary France to overthrow the monarchy and squash the very aristocracy of which he had been a member. Only to be jailed once again after the fall of the republic to conservative forces that led to Napoleon’s rise. But such is political irony.
TWO LETTERS, A STATEMENT ON HIS DETENTION, AND SADE’S LAST WILL
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Two letters to Monsieur Gaufridy written by the Marquis de Sade.
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A short statement by Sade on his detention.
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Last Will and Testament by Sade.
MASOCHISM
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, unlike Sade, wrote beautiful prose about the thrall of sexual submission. His work gained significant readership and popularity in his own lifetime, the late 19th Century, and was only suppressed when it became used by the mental health community as a depiction of deviant sexuality. He never thought he’d written from that perspective and was devastated by the reputational harm and loss of popularity after it had been labeled deviant. Soon thereafter, it was removed from publication and largely forgotten for decades. In the 1950s and 60s, long after Massoch’s death, renewed recognition of his work as literary masterpieces followed.
- Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, is a German novel first published in 1870.
In it, a man has a fetish for a statue of the Greek Goddess Venus covered in furs, as personified by Titian’s painting Venus with a Mirror.
When a woman discovers this, she covers herself in furs and presents herself to him as a joke. But he becomes enthralled by her. So begins their journey of humiliations, verbal abuse, and whippings, as he submits himself to her whims. The more he gives the more disdainful she becomes in an escalation that ends in tragedy.
This is a beautiful novel, on the par with The Story of O in its literary merit. This translation is free from Gutenberg.
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Chapter 6, The Uses and Abuses of Suffering. From, “In Defense of Masochism,” by Anita Philips.
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Psychologist Erich Fromm On Masochism. These ideas about Masochism go back 50-60 years. They’re not part of recent DSM editions. But they give an idea on the growth and evolution of medicalization of sexual deviancy, as discussed by Foucault in Sex in History. (See above)
DOMINATION AND submission (D/s)
- Chapter on Techniques of D/s, in the book, “Erotic Power: An Exploration of Dominance and submission”, by Gini Graham Scott.
LAW
- Paper: S/M and the Law, by Matthew Weait, Professor of Law and head of Continuing Education at Oxford University. This is just a general paper about the legal boundaries of consent and kink, and should not be viewed as legal advice for any specific jurisdiction. But for kink practitioners, it’s still an important read. Bottom line: DO NOTHING WITHOUT INFORMED CONSENT.
ACADEMIC
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Paper: The Cultural Formation of S/M: A History and Analysis, by Kathy Sissan, published in, “Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism,” edited by Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker. This gives a general overview of S/M practices from the 1600s through to publication in 2007.
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Paper: Themes of S/M Expression, by Charles Moser and Peggy J. Kleinplatz, as published in, “Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism,” edited by Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker. This gives an overview of modern S/M practices. There’s nothing in here the typical kinkster doesn’t know, but it might be beneficial to newbies with an academic bent.
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Paper: Beyond Safety: Erotic Asphyxiation and the Limits of S/M Discourse, by Lisa Downing, as published in, “Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism,” edited by Darren Langdridge and Meg Bowers.
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Essay: The Pornographic Imagination. From, “Styles of Radical Will,” a collection of essays by Susan Sontag.
In this early work in her career, Sontag explores five pornographic novels now widely recognized as literature: The She Devils, (Trois filles de leur mère) (1926), by Pierre Louÿs; Story of the Eye, (Histoire de l’oeil) (1928) and Madame Edwarda, (1937), both by Georges Bataille; The Story of O, (L’Histoire d’O) (1954), by Pauline Réage; and The Image, (L’Image) (1956), by Catherine Robbe-Grillet.
All of these are French novels, and all depict various paraphilias. The Story of the Eye depicts omorashi (pee play) fetishism, for example. But the last two, The Story of O and The Image, are precedent setting. They have become cliche depictions of gothic kink and sexual submission.
On its gothic romance bone fides, The Story of O is partially set in a stone castle, with chains and cuffs dangling from the ceiling to bind our heroine, so she can be mercilessly whipped for the pleasure of her Masters.
The Story of O is like a twisted Jane Eyre. As Mr Rochester gets burned and blinded in a house fire, in contrast, so too is O branded and submits herself totally to her fate. It conforms both in setting and tone to 18th-19th century gothic romance.
The Image, however, is much more like a modern Truman Capote novel. It depicts a sadomasochistic lesbian relationship, with the narrator being a male friend to the Domme, who is brought in to help torture the woman’s helpless submissive.
It has fantastic twist, where the submissive tires of her Domme and the Domme’s antics with our male hero, and dumps her outright. Then, in a call to tradition and patriarchy, our hero dominates the Domme, and they live happily ever after. That last bit is cliche, but the sub dumping her Domme is truly inspired.
Those two books were hugely influential in later depictions of kink. Particularly in films like, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kamp, The Night Porter, Seven Beauties, 9/12 Weeks, and Secretary. For example, I wonder if Fassbinder got the ending for Petra von Kant from The Image, they’re so similar. They also depict the fetish aesthetic: leather chaps, public nudity, chains and cuffs, rope, whips, and the pleasures of punishment.
Sontag’s analysis questions whether this pornographic material is also literary. Which, she concludes, yes, it’s literature. A classic paper on kinky erotica, and still relevant almost sixty years after original publication.
- Essay: Fascinating Fascism. From, “Under the Sign of Saturn,” a collection of essays by Susan Sontag.
The first section is about Nazi propagandist and filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, and her collection of photographs of the Nuba, an African tribe, published in 1974. Sontag uses these images to define what she viewed as the essential elements of a fascistic aesthetic. But the second section is more relevant to c/BDSM discourse. There, Sontag shifts course to Nazi regalia, popular in the gay S/M subcultures of San Francisco and New York during the 1960s and 1970s. In this, she contrasts the murderous abuse of gays at the hands of Nazis with gay subculture claiming control through inculcation of its aesthetic within their own subculture. This is a classic essay and highly relevant to modern kink culture.
- Two chapters: 1: The Language of Sade and Masoch,, and, 3: Are Sade and Masoch Complementary?. From, “Coldness and Cruelty: Masochism,” by Giles Deleuze.
ON SEX IN ANTIQUITY AND PRE-ENLIGHTENMENT WESTERN CIVILIZATION:
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Section on Sexual Practices in Western Antiquity, Chapters 3 and 4 on Early Civilizations and Greece. Then, Chapters 5 and 6 on Rome and Early Christianity. From the book, “Sex in History,” by Reay Tannahill.
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Chapter 1, Sex and Violence and Nature and Art, within Sexual Personae, by Camille Paglia.
ON THE COLLAPSE OF MEDIEVAL SEXUAL DISCIPLINE AND THE FIRST SEXUAL REVOLUTION IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT:
- Portions of the PROLOGUE and Chapter 2: The Rise of Sexual Freedom, from The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution, by Faramerz Dabhoiwala.
ON VICTORIAN SEXUAL REPRESSION AND MEDICALIZATION OF SO-CALLED SEXUAL DEVIANCY:
- Chapter 3, Periodization, and Chapter 4, Domain, in History of Sex Vol 1, by Michel Foucault.
ON TORTURE:
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Chapter 1, The Body of the Condemned, and Chapter 2, The Spectacle of the Scaffold, from Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault.
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In the Penal Colony, a short story by Franz Kafka.
PEOPLE OF COLOR, LGBTQ+, AND OTHER MARGINALIZED VOICES
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Introduction. From, “The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography.”
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Chapter 1: The Dark Side of Desire. From, “The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography.”
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Kat Blaque’s Youtube Channel. Kat is relevant here for being a black woman, M-F transgender, and very kinky. She’s like a trifecta here! Her videos are insightful, emotional, and always her lived perspective. Highly recommended.
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