Thank you for this, Sue. I think that this 'exceptionalism' with regard to gender and kink issues is political in origin, and the politics are being driven by highly motivated sexual minorities at the extreme end of the spectrum. The backdrop is DEI – under the terms of which every 'yuck' must be accepted as someone's 'yum', on the grounds that all 'lifestyle choices' must be 'included' in the name of 'diversity'. We can no longer look beneath the surface and declare that some 'choices' are inherently unhealthy for both individuals and society as a whole. This is leading us down a disastrous path.
To all reasonable people – and therapists trained in traditional models of therapy – aberrant behaviour, especially that which causes harm to others, consensually or otherwise, suggests that there is in interesting backstory which is worth exploring, and a power dynamic worth examining. It is our duty, as professionals, to do that – that is our job after all.
There is also a place for healthy shame in human society – as I have said several times before, the word 'pervert' is currently much underused in my opinion. There are very valid reasons why every successful society has had guardrails around sexual behaviour, even if at times (as you acknowledge) they were too strict.
Thank you for your very thoughtful reply Lucy….I particularly agree with your point about backstories and our duty to explore them. These are precisely the areas where psychotherapy has something vital to offer. More generally, it does feel like we’ve failed in our role as gatekeepers of the profession—but perhaps we can be restorationists, reclaiming the depth of enquiry that has always been central to the work. Anything else is not psychotherapy.
If 'harm to non-consenting others' is defined as the symptom of a disorder, it follows that 'harm to consenting others' has been depathologised.
The problem is that psychiatry pretends to be apolitical, in its failure to consider power in society, and why someone would consent to being harmed. You'd think the profession would be curious about that.
I don't think the changes in the DSM-5 occurred independently from the growing economic power of the tech industry, which built its infrastructure and wealth on the back of extreme porn. In the 1990's, San Francisco was the nexus for both.
Great point Daniel about harm to consenting others' has been depathologised…..psychiatry is highly politicised…activists shout louder than the rest of us….and Studies show that 69% of DSM-V task force members and 56% of panel members had financial ties to pharma (e.g., consulting fees, research funding, stock ownership, speakers’ bureaus). This was an increase from DSM-IV…..don’t know much about porn industry involvement would could you say more please?…thank you for your reply. https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/2010-issues-4/diagnosing-conflict-interest-disorder
Thanks Sue, I have no evidence that the porn industry intervened directly in the DSM in the way that the pharmaceutical industry did.
I meant that as hardcore porn and BDSM became normalised in the 1990's and 2000's by the rapid growth of the consumer internet, therapists would also have been under pressure from clients to accept their porn use and kink as normal and healthy, given that therapists rely on client support, referrals and positive reviews to stay in business. Some therapists would have been porn users or kinksters themselves, under the influence of queer theorists such as Pat Califia, for example.
An interesting source of information about that era in the USA is Buck Angel. Independently, someone I know told me that their boss in a San Francisco tech company had built a BDSM dungeon at their headquarters, so he could enjoy a torture session during his lunch break.
Thank you for expanding Daniel…I like the point you make about therapists adapting to their clients…I accept that some people (maybe more than I think) like kink and wouldn’t question it if it wasn’t an issue for my client, but would draw the line at affirmation and celebration. Thank you for helping me clarify that for myself.
It has been noted that young people seeking help with their mental health, including for gender identity issues, are particularly likely to evaluate a therapist based on online reviews and online peer recommendations. Their peers, not the therapist's.
If one bad online review can ruin a therapist's career, and people like being told what they want to hear, the therapists who stay in business are more likely to skew towards affirmation.
I would contrast this to the state psychiatric model in which the patient typically has no choice as to which doctor sees them, and may be detained against their will.
Affirmation is therefore a result of the consumer principle applied to mental health - the customer is always right. I believe Jung pioneered the model, as he was known to indulge his wealthy clientele with lengthy sessions.
Is anyone talking about WHY there's a mass assumption that shame is a bad thing and should always be avoided or minimized? Is it just part of the general view that anything that feels bad emotionally must therefore be a bad thing?
I wholeheartedly agree with you Daleth....so much so that I have devoted my next post to the topic of shame and its importance in the therapeutic process. I have taught fellow professionals how to work with shame, which many find difficult because it is a difficult experience, for over a decade and am delighted to share some thoughts about it. So thank you for the inspiration. I hope you will read it and give me feedback.
Very well said Sue. ‘Over valued’ beliefs are often applied to sexual behaviour, and if consent is not given while in the ‘adult ego state’ as you suggest, then it can be harmful. I found myself pondering recently why people would want to prolong sex for hours by the use of illicit drugs…how such practices shortcut the artistry, intimacy and connection that can be forged between two lovers through a carefully crafted tapestry of deep intimacy.
I’m with your curiosity Jennie with regard to artificially prolonging sex….’m also on board with your description of a sexual encounter…. I wonder how common that is these days…queered by porn and ideology.
Wow yes I see what you mean and thanks for this link. However, I don't think it's psychology itself that damages, so much as the way all avenues to the public mindset are harnessed to normalise particular agendas such as attacking Christian teaching on how Sexuality is God-given and intended to be expressed within certain parameters. The directive to 'be fruitful and multiply' has been under attack since the introduction of the Contraceptive pill and legalised abortion and indirectly via economic policies which make it difficult to afford children and the glorification of careers to distract from the importance of child-rearing. Now Sexuality itself is being completely detached from the context personal growth via formation of healthy relationships with humans rather than substitutes.
I’m in the process of digitally restoring a somewhat underground gay fetish magazine, which began around 1975 and published almost continuously to this day. It given me an extraordinary amount of work to proofread to judge the quality of Claude and other text regeneration tools I built, and I have to say AI based image and drawing restoration is nothing short of astonishing.
Quality is variable and it has probably 40% writing and columns, 30% imagery - art photography (Tress, Mapplethorpe), and drawings (Tom of Finland, Etienne, Rex, Bill Ward). The rest is advertising because Fetishism is above all an economic activity apparently.
Virtually any Fetish you could imagine is represented, heavily biased of course to leather and its family of theatrical garments, strangely derived from a quaint mixture of Ancient Greek, Roman and perhaps… Shogun. I the Imp of the Imperium.
As far as normalization goes, the number of mainstream Hollywood movies with men being whipped, immolated, shot, beaten, strung up by body parts, hosed, humiliated, confined, immobilized, rat-eaten, snake-bitten, vulture-pecked, choked, penetrated, cooked, flayed, tarred-and-feathered, branded, restrained, mummified, buried alive, hazed, shackled, gagged, electrocuted, blinded, drowned, starved, tied-up, tied-down, tattooed, frozen, shaved, stake-burned, dragged through broken glass, abandoned, force-marched; vivisected, drilled, acid-splashed, publicly stripped, chained, impaled, mass murdered, eye-gouged, bones broken, genitals crushed, keel-hauled, crucified, exposed, dragged, eaten alive, vaporized, mounted, hunted, scarred, force-fed, sleep-deprived, sewer-smeared, dissolved, parasite-infected, brainwashed, machine-fed, and St Sebastian pincushioned is amazing. And I’ve only made it to around 1985. By comparison, Justine seems like “On Golden Pond”.
Midway to today the magazine had a clinical psychologist who began a column, and it had many writers over the decades talking about kink and fetishes. I met the Psychologist by chance at a kink event - I’m forever the handsome mysterious guest, not into kink myself, at least not conventional kink, aesthetic kink. (I learned a different kink in the bed of the psychiatrists who passed me around in LA as a teenager, quite a different story.) He writes and speaks wonderfully which is entrancing of course.
But what he and they all spoke about slowly moved transgression and violence into theatre and ritual.
I’ve never read of “child ego” consent, I have to say that’s both a new one to me and a way of aestheticising these acts; having a vocabulary gives it the scene more “in the know” feeling (by definition an adult is giving consent, ego partitioning is very 19th Victorian Viennese. I live in the 21st century, not to be snarky).
That language is what triggered me.
Not normalized, aestheticised.
I don’t find kink is normalized at all, rather it has become aestheticised, a substantially different concept. To me it began in the late 70’s and early 80’s with the concept of “consensual submission”, safe words and other mechanisms which simply meant the experience was play-acting - it’s almost possible to trace back to various guides which came into circulation.
As men mimicking women lost the story and demanded permanent fantasy, I’m sure others do it to in Fetishland.
But make no mistake. Sadists and Masochists I’ve known don’t join clubs, shop from catalogues, or bother with justification.
Sociopaths know they are and control it. The dissolute know they are too, and yield to it.
Thank you Sufeitzy— I found your distinction between normalization and aestheticisation very thought-provoking. I think that gets closer to what I have been trying to articulate. It is not so much that kink has become “ordinary”, but that it has increasingly been stylised, ritualised, intellectualised and culturally aestheticised in ways that can obscure deeper psychological questions about power, vulnerability, shame, control and enactment.
My concern is less with consensual adult behaviour per se than with the way therapeutic culture can begin to treat these areas as symbolically protected from ordinary depth enquiry. Once aestheticisation merges with affirmation, the risk is that psychotherapy loses some of its capacity to look beneath the performance, language and ritual to the underlying emotional realities.
That’s the real problem isn’t it, the confusion of the mask with the actor, the persona with the person.
Underneath the terrible prose of performance, that’s what people like Judith Butler can’t fathom, there lies biology which is persistent and irreducible.
I am not sure the shrinks understand it as well as we inside the community. Basically, we think a fetish could be anything - like rubber raincoats. But kink and BDSM are fetishes specifically for power/lessness, in kink it being more of a roleplay and in BDSM more real (the dividing line is vague). So it really revolves around power and powerlessness, so when you just call it paraphilia you miss the point. It is a bit more, because power is not like a rubber raincoat, it is something more serious, right?
Another way to miss the point is to think it is all about sex - no, it only has the same kind of indirect relationship with sex as massage does. One does not automatically move from kinbaku (Japanese rope bondage) to sexual intercourse, the same way as one does not automatically move from massage therapy to sexual intercourse: but for a couple both can work as sexual foreplay. Non-couples do massage and kinbaku non-sexually.
What I am trying to say is that because it is about powerless/ness, it is super intense. It can be compared to jumping out of an airplane with a parachute and experiencing free fall before opening it. It is intense - and risky.
What I also would like to say is that it is not good that it is going mainstream, that people who know nothing about the lessons we learned the hard way, and the traditions and principles we developed to mitigate risks start doing it.
This leads to the Neil Gailman kind of situations, when an abuser tells people who know nothing about BDSM "if you want to do BDSM you have to eat your own feces". We in the community know it is false on all accounts, first because there is nothing you have to do, absolutely anything can be a hard limit, second, guess what, this kind of thing is by far the most common hard limit, almost everybody draws the line at feces, blood and the majority at urine too.
This will lead to a backlash. People curious about these things need to learn the lessons we did and the traditions we have built for this to not happen.
Anyhow if you want to interview someone who knows the traditions and principles of the community I am available (evenings at Central European Time)
Thank you — I found your distinction between fetish, kink and BDSM, particularly the centrality of power and powerlessness, genuinely helpful. My key concern, though, is less with kink itself than with the way therapists are being directed to affirm and even celebrate it, in a manner that feels markedly different from how we are trained to work with every other presentation except for trans identity. Traditionally, psychotherapy has invited exploration, symbolism, ambivalence and depth enquiry, especially around intense or high-stakes material. It is that departure from traditional therapeutic thinking that concerns me.
Well thought out piece Sue (love the title :), many thanks for updating us on the state of Psychotherapy training re: kink. Interesting parallel process within the training too in terms of the trainer/attendees dynamic mirroring an aspect of BDSM.
Psychotherapy in its intended form is definitely a threat to agendas that suppress critical thought, so it's unsurprising that exploratory therapy is being progressively censored.
Thank you Jo…such a good point you make about exploratory therapy being a threat to the malevolent elites (my words)…I hadn’t seen it so clearly before.
Thank you for this, Sue. I think that this 'exceptionalism' with regard to gender and kink issues is political in origin, and the politics are being driven by highly motivated sexual minorities at the extreme end of the spectrum. The backdrop is DEI – under the terms of which every 'yuck' must be accepted as someone's 'yum', on the grounds that all 'lifestyle choices' must be 'included' in the name of 'diversity'. We can no longer look beneath the surface and declare that some 'choices' are inherently unhealthy for both individuals and society as a whole. This is leading us down a disastrous path.
To all reasonable people – and therapists trained in traditional models of therapy – aberrant behaviour, especially that which causes harm to others, consensually or otherwise, suggests that there is in interesting backstory which is worth exploring, and a power dynamic worth examining. It is our duty, as professionals, to do that – that is our job after all.
There is also a place for healthy shame in human society – as I have said several times before, the word 'pervert' is currently much underused in my opinion. There are very valid reasons why every successful society has had guardrails around sexual behaviour, even if at times (as you acknowledge) they were too strict.
Thank you for your very thoughtful reply Lucy….I particularly agree with your point about backstories and our duty to explore them. These are precisely the areas where psychotherapy has something vital to offer. More generally, it does feel like we’ve failed in our role as gatekeepers of the profession—but perhaps we can be restorationists, reclaiming the depth of enquiry that has always been central to the work. Anything else is not psychotherapy.
If 'harm to non-consenting others' is defined as the symptom of a disorder, it follows that 'harm to consenting others' has been depathologised.
The problem is that psychiatry pretends to be apolitical, in its failure to consider power in society, and why someone would consent to being harmed. You'd think the profession would be curious about that.
I don't think the changes in the DSM-5 occurred independently from the growing economic power of the tech industry, which built its infrastructure and wealth on the back of extreme porn. In the 1990's, San Francisco was the nexus for both.
Great point Daniel about harm to consenting others' has been depathologised…..psychiatry is highly politicised…activists shout louder than the rest of us….and Studies show that 69% of DSM-V task force members and 56% of panel members had financial ties to pharma (e.g., consulting fees, research funding, stock ownership, speakers’ bureaus). This was an increase from DSM-IV…..don’t know much about porn industry involvement would could you say more please?…thank you for your reply. https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/2010-issues-4/diagnosing-conflict-interest-disorder
Thanks Sue, I have no evidence that the porn industry intervened directly in the DSM in the way that the pharmaceutical industry did.
I meant that as hardcore porn and BDSM became normalised in the 1990's and 2000's by the rapid growth of the consumer internet, therapists would also have been under pressure from clients to accept their porn use and kink as normal and healthy, given that therapists rely on client support, referrals and positive reviews to stay in business. Some therapists would have been porn users or kinksters themselves, under the influence of queer theorists such as Pat Califia, for example.
An interesting source of information about that era in the USA is Buck Angel. Independently, someone I know told me that their boss in a San Francisco tech company had built a BDSM dungeon at their headquarters, so he could enjoy a torture session during his lunch break.
Thank you for expanding Daniel…I like the point you make about therapists adapting to their clients…I accept that some people (maybe more than I think) like kink and wouldn’t question it if it wasn’t an issue for my client, but would draw the line at affirmation and celebration. Thank you for helping me clarify that for myself.
It has been noted that young people seeking help with their mental health, including for gender identity issues, are particularly likely to evaluate a therapist based on online reviews and online peer recommendations. Their peers, not the therapist's.
If one bad online review can ruin a therapist's career, and people like being told what they want to hear, the therapists who stay in business are more likely to skew towards affirmation.
I would contrast this to the state psychiatric model in which the patient typically has no choice as to which doctor sees them, and may be detained against their will.
Affirmation is therefore a result of the consumer principle applied to mental health - the customer is always right. I believe Jung pioneered the model, as he was known to indulge his wealthy clientele with lengthy sessions.
https://genspect.substack.com/p/jung-the-red-book-and-the-gnostic
Is anyone talking about WHY there's a mass assumption that shame is a bad thing and should always be avoided or minimized? Is it just part of the general view that anything that feels bad emotionally must therefore be a bad thing?
I wholeheartedly agree with you Daleth....so much so that I have devoted my next post to the topic of shame and its importance in the therapeutic process. I have taught fellow professionals how to work with shame, which many find difficult because it is a difficult experience, for over a decade and am delighted to share some thoughts about it. So thank you for the inspiration. I hope you will read it and give me feedback.
Very well said Sue. ‘Over valued’ beliefs are often applied to sexual behaviour, and if consent is not given while in the ‘adult ego state’ as you suggest, then it can be harmful. I found myself pondering recently why people would want to prolong sex for hours by the use of illicit drugs…how such practices shortcut the artistry, intimacy and connection that can be forged between two lovers through a carefully crafted tapestry of deep intimacy.
I’m with your curiosity Jennie with regard to artificially prolonging sex….’m also on board with your description of a sexual encounter…. I wonder how common that is these days…queered by porn and ideology.
Psychology has done massive cultural damage.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/all-about-sex/202605/evidence-mounts-sex-dolls-reduce-mens-sexual-compulsivity
Indeed it has Crimson…psychology is now reverse engineering in my opinion. Thank you for your comment.
Wow yes I see what you mean and thanks for this link. However, I don't think it's psychology itself that damages, so much as the way all avenues to the public mindset are harnessed to normalise particular agendas such as attacking Christian teaching on how Sexuality is God-given and intended to be expressed within certain parameters. The directive to 'be fruitful and multiply' has been under attack since the introduction of the Contraceptive pill and legalised abortion and indirectly via economic policies which make it difficult to afford children and the glorification of careers to distract from the importance of child-rearing. Now Sexuality itself is being completely detached from the context personal growth via formation of healthy relationships with humans rather than substitutes.
Thanks, Sue
Great piece
have cross posted
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-long-goodbye-and-it-happens-every
Dusty
Thank you Dusty…I appreciate you cross posting….very encouraging! Graham Linehan restacked too so I’m very chuffed 😊
Yes I saw the re-stack by Glinner, Sue. A re-stack by Glinner really does get the word out!!!!
I’m in the process of digitally restoring a somewhat underground gay fetish magazine, which began around 1975 and published almost continuously to this day. It given me an extraordinary amount of work to proofread to judge the quality of Claude and other text regeneration tools I built, and I have to say AI based image and drawing restoration is nothing short of astonishing.
Quality is variable and it has probably 40% writing and columns, 30% imagery - art photography (Tress, Mapplethorpe), and drawings (Tom of Finland, Etienne, Rex, Bill Ward). The rest is advertising because Fetishism is above all an economic activity apparently.
Virtually any Fetish you could imagine is represented, heavily biased of course to leather and its family of theatrical garments, strangely derived from a quaint mixture of Ancient Greek, Roman and perhaps… Shogun. I the Imp of the Imperium.
As far as normalization goes, the number of mainstream Hollywood movies with men being whipped, immolated, shot, beaten, strung up by body parts, hosed, humiliated, confined, immobilized, rat-eaten, snake-bitten, vulture-pecked, choked, penetrated, cooked, flayed, tarred-and-feathered, branded, restrained, mummified, buried alive, hazed, shackled, gagged, electrocuted, blinded, drowned, starved, tied-up, tied-down, tattooed, frozen, shaved, stake-burned, dragged through broken glass, abandoned, force-marched; vivisected, drilled, acid-splashed, publicly stripped, chained, impaled, mass murdered, eye-gouged, bones broken, genitals crushed, keel-hauled, crucified, exposed, dragged, eaten alive, vaporized, mounted, hunted, scarred, force-fed, sleep-deprived, sewer-smeared, dissolved, parasite-infected, brainwashed, machine-fed, and St Sebastian pincushioned is amazing. And I’ve only made it to around 1985. By comparison, Justine seems like “On Golden Pond”.
Midway to today the magazine had a clinical psychologist who began a column, and it had many writers over the decades talking about kink and fetishes. I met the Psychologist by chance at a kink event - I’m forever the handsome mysterious guest, not into kink myself, at least not conventional kink, aesthetic kink. (I learned a different kink in the bed of the psychiatrists who passed me around in LA as a teenager, quite a different story.) He writes and speaks wonderfully which is entrancing of course.
But what he and they all spoke about slowly moved transgression and violence into theatre and ritual.
I’ve never read of “child ego” consent, I have to say that’s both a new one to me and a way of aestheticising these acts; having a vocabulary gives it the scene more “in the know” feeling (by definition an adult is giving consent, ego partitioning is very 19th Victorian Viennese. I live in the 21st century, not to be snarky).
That language is what triggered me.
Not normalized, aestheticised.
I don’t find kink is normalized at all, rather it has become aestheticised, a substantially different concept. To me it began in the late 70’s and early 80’s with the concept of “consensual submission”, safe words and other mechanisms which simply meant the experience was play-acting - it’s almost possible to trace back to various guides which came into circulation.
As men mimicking women lost the story and demanded permanent fantasy, I’m sure others do it to in Fetishland.
But make no mistake. Sadists and Masochists I’ve known don’t join clubs, shop from catalogues, or bother with justification.
Sociopaths know they are and control it. The dissolute know they are too, and yield to it.
Masochists want the universe to punish them.
Narcissists want the universe to reflect them.
Sociopaths control the universe.
Dissolute surrender to the universe.
Thank you Sufeitzy— I found your distinction between normalization and aestheticisation very thought-provoking. I think that gets closer to what I have been trying to articulate. It is not so much that kink has become “ordinary”, but that it has increasingly been stylised, ritualised, intellectualised and culturally aestheticised in ways that can obscure deeper psychological questions about power, vulnerability, shame, control and enactment.
My concern is less with consensual adult behaviour per se than with the way therapeutic culture can begin to treat these areas as symbolically protected from ordinary depth enquiry. Once aestheticisation merges with affirmation, the risk is that psychotherapy loses some of its capacity to look beneath the performance, language and ritual to the underlying emotional realities.
That’s the real problem isn’t it, the confusion of the mask with the actor, the persona with the person.
Underneath the terrible prose of performance, that’s what people like Judith Butler can’t fathom, there lies biology which is persistent and irreducible.
The rest is theater.
I am not sure the shrinks understand it as well as we inside the community. Basically, we think a fetish could be anything - like rubber raincoats. But kink and BDSM are fetishes specifically for power/lessness, in kink it being more of a roleplay and in BDSM more real (the dividing line is vague). So it really revolves around power and powerlessness, so when you just call it paraphilia you miss the point. It is a bit more, because power is not like a rubber raincoat, it is something more serious, right?
Another way to miss the point is to think it is all about sex - no, it only has the same kind of indirect relationship with sex as massage does. One does not automatically move from kinbaku (Japanese rope bondage) to sexual intercourse, the same way as one does not automatically move from massage therapy to sexual intercourse: but for a couple both can work as sexual foreplay. Non-couples do massage and kinbaku non-sexually.
What I am trying to say is that because it is about powerless/ness, it is super intense. It can be compared to jumping out of an airplane with a parachute and experiencing free fall before opening it. It is intense - and risky.
What I also would like to say is that it is not good that it is going mainstream, that people who know nothing about the lessons we learned the hard way, and the traditions and principles we developed to mitigate risks start doing it.
This leads to the Neil Gailman kind of situations, when an abuser tells people who know nothing about BDSM "if you want to do BDSM you have to eat your own feces". We in the community know it is false on all accounts, first because there is nothing you have to do, absolutely anything can be a hard limit, second, guess what, this kind of thing is by far the most common hard limit, almost everybody draws the line at feces, blood and the majority at urine too.
This will lead to a backlash. People curious about these things need to learn the lessons we did and the traditions we have built for this to not happen.
Anyhow if you want to interview someone who knows the traditions and principles of the community I am available (evenings at Central European Time)
Thank you — I found your distinction between fetish, kink and BDSM, particularly the centrality of power and powerlessness, genuinely helpful. My key concern, though, is less with kink itself than with the way therapists are being directed to affirm and even celebrate it, in a manner that feels markedly different from how we are trained to work with every other presentation except for trans identity. Traditionally, psychotherapy has invited exploration, symbolism, ambivalence and depth enquiry, especially around intense or high-stakes material. It is that departure from traditional therapeutic thinking that concerns me.
Well thought out piece Sue (love the title :), many thanks for updating us on the state of Psychotherapy training re: kink. Interesting parallel process within the training too in terms of the trainer/attendees dynamic mirroring an aspect of BDSM.
Psychotherapy in its intended form is definitely a threat to agendas that suppress critical thought, so it's unsurprising that exploratory therapy is being progressively censored.
Thank you Jo…such a good point you make about exploratory therapy being a threat to the malevolent elites (my words)…I hadn’t seen it so clearly before.
Based on my vast personal life experience, I agree with this.
Thank you Jenna.