‘Are You Top or Bottom?’: Social Science Answers for Everyday Questions about Sadomasochism

Abstract

Sadomasochism remains a topic of curiosity for academics and non-academics alike. There has been a recent proliferation of scholarship on the topic to explain and justify the behaviors of practitioners of sadomasochism, who remain a diverse yet understudied population. This article offers answers for questions typically asked about sadomasochism. The article includes a brief historical sexological background, explores the topic of sadomasochism from a social science perspective, and deals with linkages between sadomasochism and the sex industry, which I argue deserves more attention by researchers.

Pleasuring bodies: Performativity and sexual play

“…Kink practitioners are actively playing with power, acting out different power structures, and playing with the transformative power of pleasure by pressing into new somatic intensities (Paasonen, 2018a). The consensual exchange of power has been described as a defining element of kink (Guidroz, 2008) and is used by many kink practitioners in therapeutic ways to explore and deconstruct how forms of systemic violence and power inequality are experienced (Lindemann, 2011). There has been a significant amount of work that explores the eroticisation of power in a kink setting and where the limits of these practices lie.…”

Fifty Shades of Leather and Misogyny: An Investigation of Anti-Woman Perspectives among Leathermen

“…Interest in BDSM and leather culture did not enter public or scholarly discourse as a result of the popularity of Fifty Shades, however. The combined term sadomasochism (S/M) was coined by sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis in 1885 (Krafft-Ebing 1965) and commented on by psychologist Sigmund Freud (1938) (see Guidroz (2008) and Weinberg (1995)). S/M refers to giving and receiving pain for erotic pleasure (Krafft-Ebing 1965;Weinberg and Kamel 1995;Zussman and Pierce 1998).…”