Author: Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP

I retired as a clinical psychologist in private practice in 2014. I was a member of The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) 1994-2018, and maintained a Diplomate in Sex Therapy 2005-2018. I was a Sex Therapy Supervisor 2011-2018. I served in the AASECT leadership 2000-2018, including 5 years as a Director. I was twice Awarded the Distinguished Service to AASECT Award in 2012, and 2015, I chaired the AASECT AltSex Special Interest Group for 2011 -2015. In May of 2017, I was Awarded a 'lifetime achievement award in training , research and advocacy' by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF and the Community-Academic consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS). In 2016 NCSF took over that award, renaming it the Race Bannon Advocacy Award. In 2019, I became and adviser to Tickle.Life. Prior to all of that, I have been formally studying sexual deviance, sex variation, and the psychology sexuality for 40 years.

The Folly of Self Report

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP

“Know Thyself” — Ancient Delphic maxim
“Knowledge is Power” — Inscription on the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Often attributed to Francis Bacon, it is more accurately credited to Thomas Hobbes.
“We have met the enemy and he is us!” — Cartoonist Walt Kelley

Psychology is a young science, having gained entrance to the academy only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Before that it was regarded as a branch of philosophy; natural philosophy, as all sciences were known back at the start of The Enlightenment. Back then, psychology was not a thing! In the 18th and 19th centuries, the physical sciences emerged first, then the biological sciences, and finally, the social sciences took their present form in the late 19th and in the twentieth century.  This post builds on themes first articulated herehttps://elephantinthehottub.com/2015/08/everything-you-know-is-wrong

Psychology’s first out professional was William Wundt, a German physician who was the first to label himself a ‘psychologist’ and set up a research lab. He is properly regarded as the founding father of experimental psychology. Back in 1885, as Freud and Breuer were publishing Studies in Hysteria, and Von Krafft-Ebing was releasing the first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, and Alfred Binet was opining about associations and fetishism, it is possible to imagine that there was something in the water. The sudden change in the zeitgeist was leading to the emergence of new academic disciplines. The social sciences were getting formed in the image of the physical sciences that brought steam power, railroads, instantaneous communication through the telephone, telegraph and radio, electric light, and soon, relativistic notions that would upset the old social order and the very definition of reality.

This new science was getting energized by concepts like free association, the techniques of introspection, participant observation, and unlike the abstract concepts of electrons, ether, and radio waves, the exciting corpus of discovery was ourselves. There was no need for fancy equipment, William James taught that we could start right in closely observing and introspecting about ourselves. One of Freud’s greatest works would prominently discuss his own dreams.

Unreliability of Observations:

Hugo Munsterburg, German-American psychologist, (1863-1916)

But the exciting new science of psychology was almost killed in its crib when the boundless successes of the physical sciences crashed up against a very serious problem. Hugo Munsterburg, Wundt’s first research assistant, started to look at ways in which the emerging science of psychology might influence the legal profession.  Having trained in Wundt’s lab to carefully observe psychophysiological activity, he noticed that even very smart people who could be expected to be paying close attention did not give identical accounts of social events. In a famous demonstration, he arranged for two actors to stage a carefully scripted assault upon one another in the amphitheater and challenged his medical students to describe what they had seen. When the written accounts of the event were collected, Munsterburg reported that the physical descriptions of the men ranged broadly, and observers could not agree upon the start or outcome of the altercation. Some reported a weapon where none was present. Others misattributed dialogue, and lines were made up that were nowhere in the script. Munsterburg went on to challenge the legal profession to accept this and other evidence of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, but he got nowhere near changing anything. For his trouble, he did found forensic psychology as a profession, which was much needed at the time as the world of criminology was seized by the plague of phrenology, the pseudoscience of diagnosing the propensity for criminal behavior by the shapes and patterns of bumps on one’s head. Lacking rudimentary statistics and a cohesive theory about how to apply them, overgeneralizations and misattributions of causality were hard to restrain. After all, if humans had indeed descended from apes as Darwin had suggested, then perhaps humans with ape-like skulls were socially retrograde. These dangerous free associations went on to inspire bad criminology and eugenics theories that were seized by the later Nazis.

But Munsterburg’s work also raised serious questions about what good a science of human psychology might be if it couldn’t trust any of its observations. One of the great enduring themes in psychology has been the problematical limitations of our conventional wisdom about ourselves and what psychological experimentation and theory suggest about us. Munsterburg emigrated to the US during this early period of development, helping to establish the Harvard psychology program, but remained an ardent Germanophile. He is little remembered today outside of forensic psychology having been somewhat sidelined by his open advocacy for Germany just as the US became embroiled in World War I over the aggressive German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Munsterburg died in December of 1916, 5 months before the US entry into the war which doomed the Central Powers. Chances are good this is the first you have heard of him!

Unrestricted submarine warfare provoked American entry into World War I and also sank Munsterburg’s reputation as a founding father of American psychology.

The Dynamic Unconscious:

Not the first, but perhaps the greatest of all the contestants taking a whack at the pinata of our self-concepts was Sigmund Freud. Completely unrepentant about his assault, he eschewed the very use of the term ‘self’ itself. He coined the terms ‘id,’ ‘ego,’ and ‘superego’ to precisely convey Freud’s idea that we had no unitary self at all. Rather what passed for our mental process was an amalgam of independent agencies with conflicting purposes, the compromises among them reflected constant internal conflicts. Our mundane notions of goals, purposes and self were all defenses to soothe our discomforts about reconciling our animal impulses with our lofty social rules and expectations.

Actor Tom Hanks and his co-star, a soccer ball his character must create to stave off psychological isolation during the film Castaway (2000)

Freud’s vision was particularly dark because most of our thoughts are unconscious, and therefore lost to us accept through laborious psychoanalysis. And because the constant conflict between our sexual and aggressive desires and our social demands was both painful and unceasing, even in psychoanalysis, humans could never completely know themselves or escape this conflict. Alone on a desert island with no others to govern us, we still carried the legacies of our early experiences in society and our internalizations of what was right and wrong. For Freud, a crucial part of ourselves was not just unknown, but unknowable. Freud was not the first to observe that we did not know all our own thoughts. Associationists like Binet and neurologists like Charcot had recognized unconscious associations long before Freud. The unconscious was easily demonstrated with hypnotism, which was much studied at the time. But Freud was first to explain that the unconscious was a product of internal conflict.

Classical Conditioning:

Matters were not greatly improved when the great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his exploration of dog’s digestive physiology using the technique of classical conditioning. This discovery launched the field of behaviorism. By demonstrating that we could learn things absent volitional control or intention, Pavlov undermined our notions of agency and personal responsibility. Both Freud and Pavlov raised the specter of mechanistic determinism the libertines had gone to great lengths to dispel. But behaviorism and psychoanalysis would vie for the imagination of later psychologists and undergird huge advances in psychological research.

The Problem of Personality Traits and Behavior:

Gordon W Allport, American Psychologist (1897-1967) The originator of trait theory and founding father of personality psychology

The tension between psychoanalysis and behaviorism was very much at the heart of Gordon Allport’s invention of trait theory, which attempted to create an alternative basis for personality theory that was neither behavioral nor psychodynamic. Allport disliked Freudian theory’s recourse to explaining present day adult adjustment to early childhood experiences but objected to behaviorism’s superficiality.

Allport went through a dictionary and dug up 4500 adjectives that might be used to describe personality and used them to develop a more contemporary language for describing people. He demonstrated that these terms could be used reliably and consistently and had objective and predictable relationships to one another. His student, Walter Mischel, however, tossed a wrench in the plans when, as stable and reliable as they were, Allport’s terms didn’t predict behavior very well.

Perhaps you have seen one of the myriad internet articles about how poorly humans score at detecting lies in the laboratory. Although most of us believe we are pretty good at detecting dishonesty, when systematically examined in the lab, we tend to be pretty bad at it. Mischel’s work did the same number on Allport’s traits, and eventually a body of work arose testing trait theory that showed that many traits were more dependent on context of the rater and the rated than on intrinsic and stable dimensions of personality or their associations with behavior.

The Rise and Fall of Cognitive Consistency Theory:

A flying saucer, this one from a publicity still for Forbidden Planet (1956)

In Chicago in the early 1950’s a group of UFO enthusiasts formed a cult, The Seekers, around a woman who was practicing automatic writing, Dorothy Martin. Leon Festinger, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago at the time, got wind of this group and infiltrated it with a participant observer. Dorothy had predicted that flying saucers were going to offer the faithful an opportunity to flee the planet ahead of a worldwide catastrophe. In the anxious conditions hard on the heels of a catastrophic world war and in the midst of the warming Cold War, this was believable enough to some that her followers intended to rendezvous with the spacemen and escape to a better life.

Festinger assumed that the deliverance that Ms Martin predicted would not come to pass as expected, giving him the opportunity to test his new theory of cognitive dissonance. Festinger thought that, contrary to common sense, the cult would not break up when the predictions proved inaccurate, but that many would act even more committed. Those who had already acted on their beliefs to attend this rendezvous would redouble their beliefs and try to rendezvous again because of the disconfirmation. And some in the cult were so committed after the second failure of aliens to appear that one couple sold their home and the bulk of their possessions despite two previous no shows! In 1954, Festinger, Schacter and Riecken would publish one of the most influential books in modern psychology, When Prophecy Fails, articulating the now ubiquitous theory of cognitive dissonance. Festinger would go on to postulate the idea that humans functioned under a large and consistent network of values, attitudes, and behaviors.

Some of the same research that rolled back illusions about stable predictive traits also brought down cognitive consistency theory. Subsequent research intended to prove this theory instead showed that often people did not actually behave as their attitudes expressed in the laboratory and on surveys said they should! And neither were their attitudes all that scrupulously consistent. A contemporary example would be evangelical biblical literalists who are very concerned by people’s behavior that is not consistent with Biblical morality but who are enthusiastically supporting a Presidential candidate who openly breaks the Ten Commandments. Such examples are not just a characteristic of the political right! Many liberals and progressives are all too ready to curb freedom of expression if they think that speech is correlated with bad behaviors despite avowing personal freedom. These kinds of inconsistencies are the rule in human attitudes research, not the exceptions.

Logic and Emotion are Inseparable in Neuroimaging:

In fact, even the distinction between rational ideas and emotions gets fuzzy if you look too closely. After many attempts to separate logic and emotion, evaluation of neuroimaging suggests that statements that are clearly identifiable as one or the other are nonetheless processed by the same portions of the frontal cortex and amygdala which were heretofore though to be the physical seats of logic and emotions respectively. The neural pathways may be slightly different, and their connections surely are, but the brain does not have simply identifiable regions that separate logic and emotion!

All of this looked rather consistent with the work of Dr Freud, but, as told elsewhere in this blog, when Evelyn Hooker made an objective attempt to assess how effective projective testing based on Freudian theory might be in sorting out the differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals, not only did the homosexuals fail to look more pathological on the tests, but the best psychological test administrators could not sort out the gay men from the straight ones using only their test responses. If self-report couldn’t be trusted, it is quite possible that projective testing was little additional help.

Free Will is Sometimes an Illusion:

Psychologists have also found that people’s seemingly free choices can be totally controlled by magnetic brain stimulation to the motor area of the brain. Neto-Brazil et al (1992) reported that subjects could be induced to extend either their right or left index finger without any subjective sense of preference or impaired volition. While it is a fair criticism that simian neurophysiology evolved in circumstances in which magnetic stimulation was exceeding infrequent, and thus human behavior in a natural setting might still be free absent experimenter manipulation, it is clear that the subjective self-report of freedom of choice is an illusion that is not related to the statistical likelihood of making those choices! If we can produce this in the laboratory, there is strong reason to worry about ‘natural’ behavior even if it is more complex and nuanced and not deliberately manipulated by artificial means. Nonetheless, I am serene in my assurance that I posted this paragraph freely! Trust me!

The Wisdom of Solomon Asch:

In 1956, Solomon Asch reported a series of studies in which a research subject and 3-5 confederates of the experimenter examined lines drawn on index cards of either the equal, or substantially different lengths.  When asked to compare lines of obviously different lengths, three quarters of subjects would tend to conform to the group opinion even for obviously different line lengths if all the previous confederates had said they were equal.  About 25% of the research subjects were impervious to the siren call of conformity, but 75% succumbed sometimes, and 5% never gave a non-conforming response.  Asch concluded that the need for social conformity outweighed the real differences in line length.  This work and the behavior of German officers during the Nuremberg trails  inspired Stanley Milgrim’s experiments in obedience to authority.

The Milgrim Experiment:

“Don’t follow leaders and watch your parking meters.”  Subterranean Homesick Blues — B Dylan

In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgrim conducted a series of psychological studies off campus from Yale University in downtown New Haven Connecticut.  In an elaborate series of experiments designed to explore obedience to authority, subjects were recruited to an unprepossessing downtown storefront where experiments allegedly exploring memory and learning were being conducted.  When the subjects arrived, they were briefed and instructed to administer electric shocks as exploration of this method’s ability to accelerate learning.  They were then given the responsibility of administering increasingly painful shocks to a confederate of the experimenter who was strapped to a chair.  As the confederate made errors the subject would give increasingly painful shocks until the confederate, who appeared to be in discomfort asked for the experiment to stop and for release.   At that point, the research subject often asked the experimenter for permission to stop, which was denied.  Despite labels on the apparatus that indicated “very severe shock’ was being administered and obvious signs of distress from the confederate, 65% of the research subjects turned the shocks all the way up before the experiment was terminated.

This research earned Milgrim both a letter of censure for violating his ethical obligations to research subjects, and a prize for the best social research project in his first year of reporting the results.  In addition to its obvious benefits it advancing our understanding of the prevalence of obedience to authority, it also initiated important protections for the rights and welfare of research subjects.  For the purposes of this essay, however, both Solomon Asch’s and Stanley Milgrim’s work not only challenge ideas of trait theory, but also raise questions about how trustworthy our closely held notions of conformity, independence, obedience and empathy really are.

Response Biases:

The cumulative effects of these discoveries were pretty well understood 35 years ago when I took advanced survey methods. We spent an entire unit on how to cope with the problem of response biases in test construction. Generally, the top 4 response biases are:

1) Acquiescence. When in doubt – and even when not in doubt – respondents prefer to say “yes”.
2) Social Desirability. Respondents endorse responses that they feel display themselves favorably.
3) Intelligence. Many measures operate differently for smarter subjects, constituting a covert intelligence test, rather than measuring whatever the researcher intended.
4) State Anxiety. Responses are determined by how anxious the respondent feels instead of what the researcher intends to measure.

All scientific instruments need to be built to neutralize the possibility that they are measuring something other than intended, but these are the four usual suspects in social research and test construction. Acquiescence can be handled by reversing questions about half the time such that yes doesn’t always affirm a positive. “I like dogs” and “I hate canines” are sufficiently different questions that it may be worth using both in a survey. Social desirability can be combated by framing questions so that there is no answer appears more desirable than any other. In the immediately previous example, the question “I hate canines” is poorly framed with social desirability because it is socially undesirable in most western cultures to hate things. “I dislike canines!” would make a somewhat better wording. Intelligence can be reduced as an explanation if all questions are simply and clearly stated in language well below that used by most  respondents. For that reason, ‘canines’ is a poor word relative to ‘dogs,’ which is more universally understood. And care should be taken in asking questions that would arouse the average respondent’s anxiety. In the above example, I wisely declined to ask about whether anyone liked big scary dogs!

Better not to ask about that one!

Note that even though well-trained researchers can construct tests and surveys that get around these problems, the existence of response biases remains a challenge to the idea of self-reporting. If self-reports are so prone to such distortions, even well-asked, how valid can the answers to such questions be?

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory remains one of the most commonly used actuarial personality tests. It pioneered the use of special scales to check on the validity of its clinical measurements by assessing how open or defensive a given respondent was in taking the test. If a person was too defensive or refused to state anything socially undesirable about themselves, then the interpretive significance of their performance on other scales was diminished, or even invalidated. While validity scales cannot correct for response set distortions, they can at least detect defensive individuals who might not be candid. As such, they are more useful in testing for individual differences than assessing the prevalence of attitudes or behaviors in a sample of respondents.

“What’s a mother to do?”

Now that I have thoroughly demolished a host of common assumptions that we enjoy about ourselves, it is an inevitable question what the psychotherapeutic arts can do to cope with this massive burden of subjective unreliability. It is perhaps completely unsurprising that my summary of solutions strongly resembles a very concise primer of basic psychotherapeutic interviewing principles!

One of my favorite bumper stickers reads “Why question authority? They don’t know either!” And there is something in this quip which captures the essence of the post-modern solution! If no one’s account is all that reliable, there is no refuge in expertise as a superior authority to the subject’s own report.

There is strong evidence that there are some states and conditions that defeat the idea that an individual’s self-report is inevitably the best estimate of their experience. People lie, they are compelled by drugs, alcohol and altered states and magnetic electrodes wielded by crafty psychological researchers.  They hide, conform, and avoid conflict. Clients often fail to know themselves, but we are nonetheless able to tell the difference between people with low and high degrees of self-knowledge. Most of the time, fallible as it is, a person’s account of their experience is the best evidence we can get in most clinical situations.  We do not have a good substitute for closely observing where their behavior deviates from their statements about themselves.

Consent can approximate being fully informed, even though humans are highly fallible at foreseeing the full implications of their actions. We rarely decline to conduct psychotherapy despite the fact that we are open to the possibility that the results of therapy can’t be fully foreseen by ourselves or our contracting clients.

Continuous communications provide ample opportunity for self and other correction when our capacity for self-report and freedom of choice breaks down. We humans are social animals built to learn about ourselves in the mirroring of others. Our nearest simian relatives do many of the same behaviors we do. So intimate communications are a great place for checking our subjective experience. Intersubjectivity has failures, but also many successes.

And we can suspend our clinical judgment and ask open-ended questions while we try to understand the discrepancies between our understanding of a client and their self-report.

You might be more surprised to notice a resemblance between the recommended best practices here and the values and boundary rules of many kinky communities. Ground rules like don’t make assumptions, allow people to present as they wish, communicate continuously, and use continuous informed consent are prominent values in many kink communities. That is not a mere coincidence. Kink does not have to be an intimate experience, and it is possible to play with people one does not know or understand well. But if a person seeks to find a mate or intimate partner in these communities, the rules of communication must provide room for intimacy to develop. Many of the same behaviors promote emotional intimacy on the consulting room and the dungeon.

The Good News:

Psychotherapy cannot begin with great intimacy, but it is very unlikely to be successful if intimacy doesn’t grow in the therapeutic relationship. So many of the things that make all relationships successful underlie success in psychotherapy and in kink. Although they have important differences from mundane relating, they are not alien ground. The chief differences from everyday relating is that they have with in common with each other have to do with emotional risk and intimacy. You cannot know each other and get accepted for who you are in intimate relationships without being as honest about that as you can, the folly of self-report notwithstanding.

The Bad News:

Intersubjectivity and social construction of reality also mean that any identity you offer to others is a bid for acceptance, and you can never be fully complete only in your own opinion. Your self-report is the starting point, but you are not fully who you say you are if no one else agrees to it. “Consent counts!” has the disquieting implication that you are not who you say you are until some important group of other people can be persuaded to agree.

“Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.”  Solomon Asch in Social Psychology 1952

© September, 2019, Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, Ann Arbor, MI

Kink, Sex, and Aging

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP

Kink, Sex, and Aging:

The Who

“The things they do look awful c-c-cold. I hope I die before I get old.” Peter Townsend (1965)

This article is a brief overview of some of the ways aging interacts with being kinky. Such a summary calls for two caveats up front:
Kink is a subculture, and not just one community, but many small ones. That means that many of the strengths and problems of the general culture infiltrate kink subcultures. Social problems and prejudices from the general society do not stop at the dungeon door. Communities vary, and not all dungeons are the same.

I can’t promise you this job! You may need some preparation!

Kink is not a panacea, and where kink communities and values are potential resources, it can still be quite challenging to find and use them. Your experiences may vary from examples cited here. Just as I cannot promise that if you just want it badly enough, you can become a Cirque du Soleil acrobat, I can pretty much guarantee that you cannot do so without intention and dedication. Anecdotes presented here are not intended to norm kinky sexual experiences but to alert you to what might be possible when you set your goals. When participation in the world of kink does provide skills and advantages in dealing with the challenges of maintaining sexual satisfaction as aging advances, I do not mean to imply that the communities of alternate sexuality are the only places that such advantages can be attained.

Aging:

The model of aging implicit in this essay derives from Erik Erikson. Childhood and Society (1950) is great for further reading, although it is not about elder adjustment per se. Erikson transformed Freud’s developmental theory – think; oral, anal, phallic, and Oedipal phases — which was originally a biological theory of development, into a social theory, and then expanded it to cover the entire lifespan. For a more practical and less theoretical reading, I would also suggest Joan Price’s Naked at Our Age (2011) for a non-kinky discussion of sex and aging.

Erik Erikson, American Psychoanalyst (1902-1994)

Read more “Kink, Sex, and Aging”

Why Fetish Matters

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP5 Comments


A fetish illustration by Tom of Finland (Touko Valio Laaksonen 1920-1991)

The avowed goal of this blog is to stop the othering of clients who practice altsex behaviors.  Fetishism is the archetypical altsex issue because it is at the heart of how we define a sexual interest as deviant.  But in discussing fetishism, it is necessary to discuss language because the word reflects not a single concept, but a confluence of many different ideas, and the distinctions between those ideas are what this article will be about.  This leads us into the forest of the social construction of reality, especially that surrounding mental health diagnosis and how altsex clients are encouraged to identify and represent themselves.  That is going to require a great deal of historical context.

In giving this context, I have no illusions that this article will start at *THE BEGINNING*. Conflict over the meaning of symbols is at the heart of the human experience since the beginning of language and has its roots in the genetic legacy of ambivalence that makes fight, freeze, or flight responses adaptive for higher animals.  Stimuli can be perceived in different ways, and therefore take different symbolic meaning depending on their context. Different behavioral choices have differing outcomes, allowing selection to operate.  Social regulation of sexuality is a cultural universal, although there is wide variability in which behaviors are regarded as sexual and which are proscribed.  I have chosen to begin my discussion during the Age of Enlightenment because during that time, scientific and popular discourse replaced Church canon in the Western tradition.  As such, I realize that this account is likely to under-represent non-Western discourses.  I will quote a disproportionate share of nineteenth and twentieth century white males who held the commanding heights of sexological discourse during that period.

The meaning of fetish, and the history of fetishism is intimately bound up with the history of things.  Things as things, people as things, and even parts of people as things.  One of the insights you get from this study is that Freud was right.  If sex isn’t about everything, it surely is about something a great deal broader than the immediacy of procreation.  It throws into stark relief the fact that whether we have sexual feelings, or even sexual fixations on things is a different idea that whether we treat our sexual partners very well.  So this lecture is not just an attack on othering our clients, but also an attack on the sex negative idea that having fetishistic attractions is inherently devaluing or less than intimate with other human partners.  Those are separate ideas that can, but might not necessarily co-occur.

The Invention of Sexual Fetishes.

16th Century Benin bronze head. 
Originally representations of dead family members used in ancestor worship,
these became popular trade goods with the Portuguese.

A lucky three-legged frog Japanese netsuke circa 1910.  This fetish was carried to bring good fortune.
Photo by the author.

The term ‘fetish’ was originally coined from anthropology and meant to convey an object or symbol that was believed by its resident culture to possess magical or spiritual powers.  Fetish is a concept with colonial overtones, in that the objects of tribal cultures were regarded as fetishes because they lacked magical powers while similar Western cultural symbols were not so regarded.  The term first came into use as the Portuguese traders encountered Western African cultural artifacts in their sixteenth century explorations down the coast of that continent in hopes of gratifying their commercial fetishes for the silk, gems, gold and spices of the Far East without having to deal with their commercial competitors and middlemen, the Turks.

Alfred Binet (1857-1911) French Associationist and a father of modern psychology.
This idea that something was thought to be magical but really was not was preserved when the term was ported over to psychology and medicine by the intellectual progenitors of learning theory, the associationists, in the late nineteenth century as modern sexology was just getting its feet on the ground.  The leading associationist of his day, and a founding father of modern psychology was the Frenchman Alfred Binet, the developer of what would later be called the Stanford Binet Intelligence Test.  Fetishes offered Binet an interesting theoretical opportunity to explain how chance association might cause someone to learn that something was sexy when it wasn’t clearly instrumental for that purpose.  If a person had a chance idea, or mental association, with a sexually irrelevant object, such as boot, while otherwise excited or aroused, he might come to permanently associate the idea of boots with sexual arousal.  Just as deliberate study could cause someone to learn a language or skill, one could learn to become sexually attracted to something or someone.  A fetish was just unfortunate learning as a result of chance experience.  This also conformed to Christian notions of the day that held the undisciplined mind was prone to temptation and evil influence, so the concept was an easy sell to a public unfamiliar with psychological concepts.  All of this was advanced well before Ivan Pavlov won the 1904 Nobel Prize in physiology that established the field of classical conditioning.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) Austrian Sexologist.
This idea was expropriated by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his classic work, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), and yoked into service explaining his idea of the perversions of sexual desire away from their obvious biological purpose of procreation as had been revolutionarily advanced in Charles Darwin’s narrative-changing work, the Origin of Species, (1859).  Krafft-Ebing’s reasoning specified that the symptoms of problem sexual behavior were best classified with respect to their relation to the obvious purpose of sexual procreation.  Anything which interfered or redirected sexual desire away from sexual procreation was a medical disorder, rather than a moral failing.  Any poor wretch who came to Krafft-Ebing complaining that he was obsessed with lady’s boots but could not arrange to impregnate his wife was suffering from fetishism.  It may well be that in an age where women didn’t bare their ankles, a well-turned boot was mildly arousing, but if you were so over-the-moon about boots that you couldn’t commit intromission, this was clearly a redirection or perversion of the sexual desire from its evolutionary purpose.  While Krafft-Ebing was intent on confronting the religious moralism of how sexual deviance was viewed in his time, his theory preserved social stigma by suggesting that sexual variations were mental disorders.  After all, who wanted to be viewed as someone too diseased to consummate procreative sexual relations?  Krafft-Ebing was encouraging replacement of the concept of moral degeneracy with the idea of evolutionary or medical degeneracy.  Those interested in a more detailed discussion of Krafft-Ebing’s thinking can find it here:Richard Frieherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902)

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French novelist.
It is not mere happy coincidence that this happened in the middle of the industrial revolution, and industry was creating a cornucopia of consumer goods.  For anyone seeking a modern deconstruction of the relation between industry and sexuality, I recommend Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1857) who’s protagonist is led to her destruction by the erosion of the values of country life under the twin late 19thcentury onslaughts of greater social mobility and consumerism.  Despite a persistent narrative among later medical and psychoanalytic writers insisting that almost all fetishists are male, Flaubert and his later critics insist that Emma Bovary is proof that women can be fetishists, too.  Indeed, Emma Bovary is the archetypical fetishist, too lost in the objectifications of the trappings of the lush life to care about others, the commercial equivalent of Krafft-Ebing’s later sexual theory.  And Flaubert tautly draws our attention to the great problem poses by the second industrial revolution:  objectification, and he uses commercial fetishism as his argument.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Austrian neurologist and father of  psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud would build on the foundation laid by von Krafft-Ebing, when the father of psychoanalysis took up sexuality in 1905 in his famous Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality.  Therein he declared that “every sexual aim has an object.”  Fetishism occurred when the object of that sexual aim was an object in the world, rather than the partners’ genitals.   Freud thought that libido became attached to various aims and objects through the incomplete resolution of biological needs during the process of infantile psychological development.  In his developmental theories, he outlines these as feeding (the oral phase), toilette training (the anal and phallic phases), finally culminating in adolescence, sexual awareness becoming conscious, and properly focused on the genitals of the opposite sex partner.  For Freud, everyone had some unresolved needs from their development, so healthy individuals would have some oral, anal, or phallic interests even when they attained genital and procreative maturity.  But serious conflicts would lead to inhibition of sexual desire expressed in neurosis, or excessive sexual fixation through perversion, in which healthy sexual expression was impossible but pregenital behavior was expressed. 

How much can one really like a boot?  Perhaps, quite a lot. 
This painting hangs in Mister Jiu’s, a very innovative new restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown 28 Waverly Place.  Reservations highly recommended.  I do not know the painter or title.  Photo by the author 2018.
Note this exposition of Freudian theory modifies Krafft-Ebing’s explanation of fetishism and all sexuality in several important ways.  For Krafft-Ebing, sex is behavior, and deviant behavior that is incompatible with procreation is proof of genetic degeneracy.  For Freud, sexuality is unconscious motivation.  So Krafft-Ebing would consider someone who really liked boots a lot but had satisfactory relations with his wife as not having a fetish.  But Freud, who would agree that such a person was not ill, would regard interest in boots as fetishistic even though he would agree that it might not be pathological.  But it would still be infantile and regressive, since genital sexuality was firmly focused on higher generative purposes.  In his Three Contributions to a Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud reframed Krafft-Ebing’s descriptions of sexual behavior as abnormal and degenerate into a conflict theory. At the price of ‘normalizing’ people’s sexual variations, Freud preserved the idea that they were somehow less than optimal, and he universalized them.  Look in the unconscious, suggested Dr Freud, and you will find weird stuff about everyone because that is what the unconscious is:  the hidden socially unacceptable ideas that we all bury in the process of making a somewhat successful adjustment to sociocultural demands of our communities.

Freud’s role of sexuality as underlying motivation also had profound implications for the idea of what an object was.  For Krafft-Ebing and Flaubert, an object was a thing in the world that was not instrumental for sex.  In Freud’s use, the object was the mental target of the sexual aim.  Freud was working on a psycho-biological theory that explained human psychology in mental terms.  In the brain, everything was symbolic.  This allowed him to see the oral, anal, phallic or genital implications of anything, but it also meant his objects were not material.  They were the objects of grammarians, not physical items in the real world.  In “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud’s tour de force interpreting his own dreams, he suggested universal meanings of many different symbols, such as lightning, flying and guns are phallic symbols.  However, the meaning of symbols becomes complicated as their cultural and individualistic context varies.  White is associated with mourning in some cultures, black in others.  Boots could be seen as oral if you were intent on kissing them, anal if you considered them as protection of the feet from feces-filled Victorian streets, or phallic if you were primarily focused on the height of the heels or focused on how yours were better than theirs.  Depending upon and individuals’ associations, that boot fixation could represent a great variety of different things.  And since most of these associations were at least partially repressed and socially uncomfortable, Freud actually served to spread stigma almost as much as he was able to moderate it.  However, Freud greatly succeeded in furthering the medicalization of sexual variation that Krafft-Ebing had begun.

As complicated as all of this psychoanalytic reasoning was, it constituted a tremendous advance in the great log jam of theoretical discourse that organized late 19th century psychology:  the nature-nurture conflict.  The associationists’ and later, the learning theorists’ and behaviorists’ position was that fetishism constituted learned behavior.  Anyone who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time could have a powerful experience that caused a fixation of boots.  The Krafft-Ebing position was that some inherent genetic inferiority led to libido becoming attached to same sex partners, boots, or thwarted it entirely with sex dysfunction.  Freud showed that variant sexual outlets were a part of everyone sexual make up, and whether it manifest in observable symptoms was primarily the result of conflict between the desire for impulse expression and the wish for social conformity.  This success was part of where he got the street cred to remain the most important voice in sexology for 40 years.

Freud was a great collector of archeological artifacts.  Most of these were removed to Hampstead in 1938.  These were left behind and are now on exhibit in his old office in Vienna.
Photo by the author, 2015
But that authority was used only sparingly to destigmatize sexual preferences.  Freud’s career was mainly spent in defense of the Oedipus Complex, and such criticism as he made of Western society’s squeamishness about sex was much more focused on attacking repression than in defending sexual expression itself.  In order to sell the Oedipus complex, the pre-oedipal impulses were presented as regressive, and never added up to viewing a fetish as a healthy sublimation that made genital sex more fun and stimulating.   As a though experiment, try reframing your sexual fantasies such that procreation and only procreation is the ultimate erotic reward!  Note also that if I tried this thought experiment back in 1900, it might well have failed.  In a world where it was state policy to support fertility, in a western world characterized by state policy supporting fertility, anxiety about the changing role of women, and crashing head long towards a catastrophic test of national dominance that was World War I, you might have answered my mental question very differently.  Birth problems, the health challenges of corsetry and childhood diseases made reproduction a much less safe and precious bet than it is today in the day of increased but incomplete gender equality, zero population growth, effective birth control, and global climate change.

The prevailing Freudian view honored the clinical reality of the very limited number of clients who were seen were anxious about their ability to attract and satisfy mates, or their fears of breaking the law.  In 1983, when I did and exhaustive search of the psychoanalytic literature on paraphilias, there was only a single article about a possible case of female fetishism, and that was much disputed.  When Robert Stoller wrote a book Splitting, A Case of Female Masculinity (1973) the conclusion was that the ‘perverse sexuality’ in that case was really a symptom of personality disorder.  Before that, all the women partners of men who did kinky behaviors were regarded as with prostitutes or excessively psychologically dependent on men and weren’t ‘really’ perverse! 

For more on Sigmund Freud:  The Psychotherapeutic Theories about Kink: Myths and Realities about Sigmund Freud, 

Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) German physician)
Another dissenter from the general agreement that perversion of sexual interest from reproduction must be pathological was Magnus Hirschfeld, a name now little-known outside of sexology and gay advocacy.  In addition to establishing the first Western organization for the study of sex, Intitut für Sexualwissenschaft, Hirschfeld was a prominent early advocate for public acceptance of homosexuality.  His court testimony in a huge German scandal about homosexuality in the German military in the 1890’s attracted the attention of right wing and antisemitic groups and eventually led to the destruction of his institute.  Hirschfeld thought that fetishistic behavior was common and little cause for concern.  His concept of partialism, the eroticization of human anatomy other than the penis and vagina, was an attempt to normalize the diversity of erotic interests.  This idea partially caught on, and it is technically proper to refer to foot fetishism as foot partialism today.  Although he never attained the public influence of Sigmund Freud, Hirschfeld did recruit Richard von Krafft-Ebing to Hirschfeld’s alliance of prominent figures who supported the decriminalization of homosexuality before the former died in 1902.  Freud, however demurred.  Hirschfeld died in 1936, and Freud in 1939, but neither escaped the reaction from Nazism to scientific thinking about sexuality.  The Nazi’s destroyed Hirschfeld’s Institute in their first book burning in 1933, obliterating the best library of sexology writings assembled up to that time.  Later, Freud would be forced to flee Austria due to Anschluss, the political reunification of Germany and Austria under the Nazis in 1938.

The legacy of Krafft-Ebing’s and Freud’s work is that fetishism was a sexual perversion and retained much of the social stigma that it had prevailed from moral and religious authorities but was found to be ubiquitous in its manifestations in everyday life.  From bordello culture, to the stage and the new medium of cinema, to the nose are of American bombers in world War II, fetishist sensibilities were everywhere despite the scant clinical attention it required in the clinical office.
 
Setting the Stage for Fetish Culture:

Illustration of  a whipping device used in 18th century English bordello culture.
Prior to World War II there was no significant aboveground kink subculture.  Various forms of sensation play, what Krafft-Ebing termed sadism and masochism, has existed since prehistoric times and often manifested in religious practices such as penance, flagellation, and use of celices.  Starting in the 18th century, practices we recognize as modern kink existed in bordello culture.  With the rise of industrialization, women became capable of working outside the home and it has been estimated that as many as 25% of working women in mid-nineteenth century urban women augmented industrial wages with sex work at one point in their careers.  Some of this was surely kinky. 

Robert Bienvenue has shown in his doctoral dissertation that American kink arose as an underground phenomenon after World War I as kink enthusiasts turned to theatrical costume designers to make sexual costumes and kinky apparatus they had seen in sadomasochistic illustrations.  Early retailers, borrowing from the practices for mail order brides, devised contact lists and remail services for customers who were searching for willing partners to use their equipment, and a lively trade developed in underground photography.  Borrowing from the publicity machines of the burgeoning motion picture industry, these theatrical supply businesses also dealt in erotic photographs catering to their fetish-inclined customers.  The aboveground tip of this iceberg was books featuring faux accounts using medicalized tropes exposing the bizarre practices of sadomasochistic lesbians or crossdressing men, dwelling on the lurid details of these unsavory practices for salacious readers.   The modern send up of this is the character The Criminologist – An Expert in A Rocky Horror Picture Show.   In the guise of medical treatises, the publishers were able to avoid censorship.

Charles Gray as The Criminologist in Rock Horror Picture Show (1975).


Bob Bienvenue will be at the Multiplicity of the Erotic Conference May 23-25 in Chicago.

World War II led to four massive changes in western society that dramatically reshaped the social context in which sexual variation and fetishism were understood.


Changes coinciding with World War II:

1)    The death of Freud broadened psychoanalytic discourse.
2)    The huge numbers of citizens under arms provoked changes in mental health care. 
3)    World War II fostered the development of computers and of survey technology. 
4)    Large number of men and women were thrown together in wartime work groups and were bonded by intense experiences in a single-gendered environment.
5)    Expansion of the economy in wartime led to increased material wealth and availability of consumer goods.


Was Britain’s civil defense plan a reaction to huge airborne fetishes from World War I?
Partly!
Freud died of mouth cancer in the first weeks of World War II.  His daughter, Anna took over as President of the International Psychoanalytic Association.  Anna was interested in children, and in defense mechanisms, and in the immediate post war years psychoanalysis broadened its theoretical scope.  Because Britain had suffered the world’s first strategic air campaign; bombing by hydrogen-filled zeppelin’s in World War I, the British government developed the world’s most comprehensive civil defense program.  In 1940, this included banishing all British children from the urban areas that were expected to be the focus of strategic air attack.  This proved fortunate, as starting in August of 1940 and continuing through late 1944, British cities were the focus of intensive German air attacks.  Although many children were saved by these measures, when the war was over, a great many were found to be suffering mental health problems that attended these separations and losses.  Psychoanalysis stopped studying childhood development primarily though the reports of adult patients and started looking at children directly.  This resulted in the British school of object relations whose founding mother was child analyst Melanie Klein and would soon give rise to modern attachment theory through the work of John Bowlby.  Psychoanalysis also focused less on trying to explain all psychic development on individualistic terms and framed its hypotheses in increasingly interpersonal terms.  And attention turned from focus of the murky operation of the unconscious and started to look at conscious processes and ego functions that had previously been the province of experimental psychology.
   
One of the most important developments was D W Winnicott’s idea that fetishes served the same function as teddy bears.  Children soothed themselves as their development took them outside of the orbit of maternal security.  Blankets, stuffed animals and dolls served to provide something to love that the child could take with them when parental support was not around.  Perhaps fetishes served to sooth anxieties that arose over the aggression and separation fears provoked by sexuality?   Unlike Freud’s theory that fetishes were a reassurance against castration anxiety – an exclusively male preoccupation, Winnicott’s theory suggested that girls and women might have fetishes too.

Is a teddy bear a lot like a fetish? 
D W winnicott said they accomplished the same purpose psychologically!
Britain was not the only country that suffered the privations of World War II.  In the US, the need for psychiatric services for 16 million citizens under arms led to the invention of clinical psychology and clinical social work as the massive personnel needs of the military absorbed physicians who previously dominated the provision of talk therapy.  In my first year of graduate school in clinical psychology, 1980, The University of Michigan Clinical Psych Program used up its last VA training grant.  But in the interim, the field of psychology stopped being restricted to attitude and personality testing and started to train full spectrum mental health providers.  With this change mental health began to face challenges that it become more based upon scientific evidence.

Your blog author is a product of the United States government’s shift  in the delivery of mental health services
 from physicians to clinical psychologists and clinical social workers.
A major manifestation of that reform was military’s need for a systematic system for the classification of mental disorders.  In 1952, the brother of the famous American psychoanalyst Karl Menninger, General William Menninger was assigned the task of creating a standardized diagnostic system.  Under the influence of psychoanalysis, a great number of different diagnostic systems had developed.  Menninger reviewed over 100 of these prior to mobilizing the American Psychiatric Association to create the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the Mental Disorders or DSM.  It was fifty mimeographed pages and sold for 50 cents.  It listed Krafft-Ebing’s system including fetishism, as a ‘sexual deviation’ without providing any behavioral descriptions.  The military was mainly interested in who was too ill to serve, who was malingering, and who they would prefer not to recruit in the first place.  Their main sexual concern had to do with homosexuality.  With the exception of homosexuality, which was removed in the transition to DSM – III, the list from 1952 is pretty much the same list as is in DSM – 5 which was last revised in 2013 and I will discuss in detail later.

William Menninger had the duty of commissioning the American Psychiatric Association to construct the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of The Mental Disorders (DSM).  He is even more famous for starting the Menningers Foundation with his brother Karl, the noteworthy American psychoanalyst.
Although it would be some years before the use of computers would advance survey research, this provided great impetus to psychology to become a data-driven science.   The first modern computer, ENIAC, was developed by the University of Pennsylvania for the military during World War II to save the extravagant personnel costs in creating artillery firing tables.  I never served that purpose.  Following completion of the Manhattan project, it performed calculations on the feasibility of building a thermonuclear weapon.  The largely female workforce of ‘computers’ was replaced by a delicate and finicky machine that was mainly comprised of vacuum tubes.  It kept overheating and shorting out when moths, which were attracted to the tubes, burned up and shorted out exposed wiring.  This led to the term computer bugs.  But computers would provide the capacity to analyze large data sets and transform social science, among many other things.

ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer in 1945.

The first use of survey methodology was done by Karl Marx, who is more famous for the invention of communist ideology.  He used surveys to predict election results by doing political poling in his resident district in London in the mid-nineteenth century.  The end of World War II saw the U. S. military repurposing survey technology to evaluate the effectiveness of strategic bombing.  The survey experts used in the US Strategic Bombing Survey were then absorbed by the major university-based survey organizations, including the Institute for Social Research, North American Opinion Research Center, and Stanford Research Institute. 

Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) American entomologist and sex researcher
He discovered that American sexual behavior was much more variable than previously assumed.

One of the first proponents of broadening the use of survey methods like this was Alfred Kinsey and he discovered that the diversity of human sexual behavior was far broader than psychoanalysis or behaviorism had heretofore identified.  Although clinicians knew from their consulting rooms that fetishism was very rare, Kinsey discovered fetish-like interests were very common.  Both the clinicians and Kinsey were correct.  Unless a fetish was causing a painful marital problem or legal difficulty, people seldom consulted a clinician about them.  But Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner, the movie publicity business and the United States Army Air Corps bombers’ nose art had demonstrated that fairly specific sexual interests were widespread and intensely felt. The resolution of this discrepancy would define the struggle for sexual acceptance for the next 70 years.

World War II era nose art.
The final development of World War II was a change in how the public recognized and represented sexual variation.  Its first manifestations were underground, but gradually became more salient in the media and public life.  It started with the facts of warfare that same-gendered groups were thrown together by war and encouraged to bond to form effective work and combat groups.  This was true for Rosy the Riveter as well as for G I Joe.  Lacking access to the opposite sex, many of these people recognized a desire for same sex partners.   Add to that the risk of sudden death, and the illusions of conventional cis-gendered and heterosexual conventionality began to fray at the edges.  Although the prevailing environment of social conservatism following World War II masked it, many people in these conditions satisfied their desire for affection, touch and love with members of their own genders.  The gay motorcycle clubs that were pioneering practitioners of sadomasochism existed before World War II, but greatly expanded as servicemen mustered out.  This led to the rise in the gay sadomasochistic motorcycle clubs that gave rise to modern Leathersex.

Classic modern Leathersex attire
Large single gendered communities didn’t just result in increased same sex attraction, but also fostered the development of gender-based values. World War II also resulted in a general acceptance of pin-up culture as heterosexual men relied on movie stills and pinup girls as substitutes for unavailable personal companionship.  Bomber nose art is testimony to these erotic arts. This enabled Hugh Hefner to started Playboy magazine to cater to those tastes after the war was over.  Soon there was a thriving above-ground discourse among partialists who preferred legs, asses and breasts, the reigning pin-up idioms.

Throughout the interwar period, psychoanalysis dominated the discourse about mental health.  Because Freud marketed psychoanalysis as a broader social theory that should inform education, law, child rearing and sexual relations, it greatly facilitated public discussion of sexual themes.  The rise of pin-up culture, Playboy Magazine, and the underground kink culture led to repressive reaction.  Just as the changing roles of women in the nineteenth century and Darwinism led to obsessions with physical and moral hygiene; radio, comic book and movies led to moral crusades against these media.    In 1934, Hollywood adopted the Hays Code which governed pictures until 1968, the Comics Code in 1954, and of special interest in this essay, the Kefauver Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency and prosecution of Irving and Paula Klaw in 1958.  This, incidentally, led to my first encounter with fetish illustration, when Time magazine covered the Klaw’s testimony before Kefauver’s commission.  A major part of Klaw’s businesses, Movie Star News and Nutrix Publications catered to photographs and illustrations catering to kink interests.  The most famous of his talents was Betty Page.  Klaw also had a stable of illustrators who augmented their income from work for Marvel and DC Comics with fetish work including Eric Stanton, Gene Bilbrew, Ruiz and Steve Ditko.  This body of work is probably responsible for the term ‘fetish’ becoming synonymous with kink when the stigma associated with kink was too great to refer to it as sadomasochism.  Indeed, the stigma was sufficiently great that when Alfred Kinsey conducted his pioneering work on American Sexual Behavior in the 1940’s, his team did not ask directly about sadomasochistic behavior., and instead substituted interest in sadomasochistic stories.  12% of his women and 24% of his men reported liking such stories, but he did not ask about whether they preferred identifying with the dominant or submissive roles depicted in such erotica.   Kinsey research relied on a snowball sample to get respondents, leading to valid criticism that he risked overcounting outlier sexual interests.  However, it would take until 1994 for the first survey of American sexual behavior that employed a representative sample of Americans.  It would take until Herbenick et all in 2017 before a broad spectrum of variant behavior was investigated with representative sampling techniques that might accurate describe US variant practices.  By the time Herbenick and her team did this, however, the term fetishism was in enough dispute that she did not ask about it directly.

One of Klaw’s photos Betty Page in fetish attire.  Thousands of her images were saved when Paula Klaw violated a court order to destroy all of Nutrix’s collections.
Fetish Culture:

Alex Comfort (1920-2000) British scientist and author of The Joy of Sex
A sea change in the discourse about fetishism began in the wake of the social changes in the early 1960’s and early 1970s.  With the publication of the first edition of The Joy of Sex, a new attitude was articulated by Alex Comfort, PhD.  Instead of a disabling obsession that made healthy intimacy impossible, in The Joy of Sex most fetishistic interests took advantage of human evolutionary tendencies to find analogue of our potential sexual partners ‘sexual releasers’.  He compared these interests to tying an effective fishing fly in trout fishing.  These releasers were not the sexual object itself, just analogous to a brightly colored fly that was not a salmon’s natural food, but looked enough like them to provoke a response.  Lingerie, ‘super skin’ such as leather, PVC, and latex, or exaggerated sexual features such as wasp-waisted corsets or high heeled shoes made sexual response easy and it is efficient to use them to turn your partner on.  In so doing, Comfort implicitly rejected the idea that most variant interests were pre-Oedipal substitutes.  His entry under disabling fetishes reads a lot like a modern description of an anxiety disorder.  This was no accident, Comfort wrote and extensive section on bondage in much the same spirit, emphasizing it’s ability to delay and intensify gratification rather than emphasizing its transgressive or dangerous aspects.  I would assert that The Joy of Sex constituted the implicit transition of the idea that a fetish might just be a sexual preference, rather than a mental illness.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the fight between sexually expressive and repressive trend in western culture had escalated into the ‘culture wars’.  The birth control pill proved a much more efficient and reliable method than IUDs and barrier methods, and the hedonism in popular culture increased.  In 1972, the first heterosexual kink groups started to meet above ground, and gay crossdressers launched the Stonewall Riots.  Thereafter, there was an explicit gay advocacy movement in the US.  Hippies advocated for free love, and communes sprang up practicing alternative lifestyles.  America has had a long history of such experiments starting in the early nineteenth century, but after the comparative conventionality of the 1950s, a new wave of experimentation followed.  In 1972, the first two above ground kink groups started to meet.  The Til Eulenspiegel Society (TES) began in New York in a church basement.  Named after a mythic German trickster with a scatological and masochistic imagination, TES was devoted to the outward celebration of masochism.  On the West Coast, The Society of Janus began as a pansexual organization that embraced people from a wide variety of sexual orientations and kink practices.  Both continue to meet today joined by a huge proliferation of local groups.  These are the Coalition Partners who are represented on the NCSF Board of Directors, today.

A somewhat unusual cheque made out to the Spanner Trust

The rise of a kink above ground subculture in the face of severe social stigma gave rise to the invention of consent culture.  Worried that no one would feel safe to come to kink social groups, advocates struggled to present kinky lifestyle as acceptable enough for novices to investigate.  In 1983, having identified that the chief reasons interested people had for avoiding S&M was that it seemed dangerous to deliver yourself up to someone who might be crazy, dangerous and intent on harming you, david stein invented the slogan Safe, Sane and Consensual. Long before usegroups or the internet this slogan went viral among the kinky social groups and remains a rallying cry to this day.  In 1988, Operation Spanner, a Scotland Yard prosecution of gay sadomasochists, provided publicity to the idea of sexual consent when the men convicted of allowing their partners to pierce and whip them appealed their convictions all the way to the House of Lords (the British functional equivalent of the US Supreme Court) and their convictions were upheld.  During this fight, the Spanner trust was established to raise money for the defense, and this proved to be the model for many kink advocacy organizations such as NCSF and Woodhull Foundation.  The Spanner case ended in defeat in 1995 when the EU Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain had every right to prohibit its citizens from consenting to assault, but that did not stop development of the consent discourse in kink.  Now, kink subcultures have much to teach the general society about consent in the age of high college sexual assault statistics and #metoo.  

For more about The development of kink groups and the culture of consent:  Operation Spanner, Slogans, Consent

The Assaults on the DSM:

Life is a cabaret, old boy!

The struggle to fight stigma in kink mirrors and lags the struggle to fight stigma on homosexuality.  The mimeographed ink on the original DSM was scarcely dry when the challenge began to remove homosexuality.  In 1954, Christopher Isherwood, author of the Berlin Diaries and noteworthy Hollywood screenwriter challenged his neighbor, UCLA research psychologist Evelyn Hooker, to design a study to challenge the idea that homosexuality was pathological.  Psychoanalysis rose to the defense of pathologizing homosexuality, arguing that psychological testing based on ego psychology could diagnose homosexuals from psychological test protocols. Hooker collected these data, and intelligence testing on 50 gay and 50 heterosexual males and farmed out the transcriptions to three of the best testing experts in the business.  In 1956 she published her results, all three of her experts had proved unable to sort the gay subjects from the straight ones, and the homosexuals did not show more psychopathology or lesser intelligence on the tests than their straight counterparts.  She would go on to win an American Psychological Association award for this work in the early 1960s and fuel a movement within the American Psychiatric Association among closeted gay psychiatrists.  This movement gained steam after the American astronomer Frank Kameny came out and started to formally confront the psychiatrists and this accelerated after the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village in 1969.  In 1972, the American Psychiatric Association published a version of DSM – II that stopped mandating that all homosexuality was a disease.  A more detailed version of this story is presented here:  Kink’s Evelyn Hooker Moment
 
In 1980, the American Psychiatric Associated fundamentally revised DSM – III, and did away with its heretofore psychoanalytic system and instead relied upon a nosology that was based on detailed descriptions of observable symptoms.  The new system was subjected to assessment of the ability of different raters to make the same diagnoses and passed.  Since this edition, psychiatric diagnosis in the United States has been based on this requirement that whatever a mental disorder might be, mental health practitioners should be able to describe its symptoms the same way.  While the new diagnostic symptom remained vulnerable to disputes about what these observed behaviors might mean, it was a huge improvement over psychodynamic constructs which different diagnosticians might not be able to articulate consistently.  At his time, Homosexuality was removed from the “Psychosexual disorders: section altogether except for “Ego Dystonic Homosexuality for people who felt their homosexual feels or behaviors were in intense conflict with their identity.   Most homosexuality had been de-pathologized.

Kink was not so fortunate.  Under the leadership of John Money, old terms like ‘sexual deviation’ and ‘sexual perversion’, which were severely stigmatizing, were replaced with ‘paraphilias’, a strange chimera of mixed Latin and Greek that best translated as unusual loves.  The new DSM – III included statistics, including data that showed all paraphilias constituted about .06% of the entire validation sample of mental health diagnoses.  On the other hand, sexual sadism, sexual masochism, fetishism, transvestism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and zoophilia were all mental disorders if they were repeatedly preferred or exclusive means of obtaining sexual satisfaction or intense sexual phantasies.

Charles A Moser, (1952-present) american physician and DSM critic.


Little was changed in that diagnostic system, with the exception that homosexuality was dropped altogether about a decade later as the DSM – IV was issued.  In the later 1990’s , Race Bannon, one of the founding activists who started the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, recruited Bay area internist Charles Moser to start advocacy efforts within the American Psychiatric Association to accomplish for kink the kind of work that had been accomplished by Hooker and Kameny for homosexuality.  In a series of 20 papers, Moser and his collaborators deconstructed the diagnostic concept behind the DSMs.   They claimed that the concept of paraphilia was fuzzy, the theoretical work justifying it was not based on science, that it was discriminatory to the kink community and the category did more harm in stigmatizing sexual preference as illness than it did good in the rare occasion it gave access to treatment that was genuinely needed..  Furthermore, with no agreed upon etiology and no proof of effective treatment, it did not make sense to justify inclusion of these diagnoses for access to unproven treatments.


Based upon the DSM – IVTR paraphilias criteria, in 2013 Christian Joyal and Julie Carpentier conducted a representative sample of the Quebeçoise population and gathered the following data:

Voyeurism
Men: 60%
Women: 35%
Exhibitionism
Men: 06%
Women: 03%
Fetishism
Men: 40%
Women: 48%
Frotteurism
Men: 34%
Women: 31%
Sadism
Men: 09%
Women: 05%
Masochism
Men: 19%
Women: 28%
Transvestism
Men: 07%
Women: 06%
Sex with a child
Men: 01%
Women: 00%
Note that, after years of psychoanalytic papers in which fetishism is the exclusive province of male psychology, more Quebçoises women than men report engaging in at least one fetishistic behavior in their lifetimes.  No one disputes that the classic example of Krafft-Ebing’s of a male who cannot procreate because he is too erotically attracted to boots is a rarity today as it was then and was in 1980 when paraphilias of all types didn’t constitute even one in one hundred psychiatric diagnoses.   But today about 44% of Quebeçoise’s think they have done a fetishistic behavior!  For more detail on representative sample statistics about kink: AltSex Beahviors in Quebec and the US

Because of these assaults, The American Psychiatric Association in 2013 in an attempt to preserve the diagnostic concept of concept of paraphilia, provided language for paraphilias to be regarded as mental disorders only when, in the opinion of the clinician, they caused significant life stress or impairment, or were nonconsensual. Note that the paraphilias review got more public commentary that any section of the DSM except that devoted to autism spectrum disorders.  A great deal of the input was from attorneys and forensic clinicians who required the concept in court, and from advocacy groups.  

For more detail on the DSM – 5: Arrival of the Deathstar, Review of the DSM -5 Plenary at AASECT 2013

My colleague Susan Wright, in an article documented a corresponding decline 75% in custody matters in which kinky people and their attorneys requested NCSF assistance following these 2013 changes.  I will conclude on a less optimistic note:  since Donald Trump’s campaign for President, we have seen corresponding increase in local actions against meeting of our member groups, and in assaults on kinky people.

Take Aways:

What might readers conclude from this story:

1)    The meaning of terms like ‘fetish’ is a moving target.  This article maps some of the changes in its interpretive significance, but is itself only a snap shot of recent history, and that significance will continue to evolve.

2)    That the problem of othering Is endemic, and as we chose new ways to try to level social differences, we are continually creating new ones, and these are obstacles to good care.

3)    That the meaning of what we do as professionals is subject to the same forces, and we will be subjected to changing contexts analogous to these but also different from them.

4)    That it is impossible to fully convey the significance of these terms without discussing the social context in which they arose.

5)    Knowing the history of one’s profession is important in coping with those, even if we find portions of the story boring alienating, and less than flattering.


©Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, Ann Arbor, April 2019 All rights reserved.

Resilience

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP
“I Can’t Drive 55” — Sammy Hagar
“Anything worth doing is worth over-doing”!  An anonymous wag
“So put me on the highway, and show me a sign,
And we’ll take it to the limit one more time” — Glen Frey, Don Henley, and Randy Meisner

“Roads?  Where we are going, we don’t need roads”! — Emmet Brown
Limits, and the Problem of Idealization:

This exploration of the need for resilience, repair, and reconciliation begins with limits, and the chosen quotes highlight just how ambivalent our society is with these.  Likewise, organized kink, with its transgressive impulses, desire for safety, genuine reverence for equality and freedom, and its love of exceptionalism, is similarly split.  It took NCSF over 6 years to hammer out a satisfactory definition of ‘consent’ among its coalition partner organizations to use in NCSF literature because of the huge diversity of what that term ‘consent’ might mean, and because of the fear that someone’s freedom might be sacrificed to someone else’s sense of limits.  Safety is not the prime directive for kink, notwithstanding its pride of place in our PR slogan.  Those who truly want safety above all else, are probably best advised to stay home!

But limits are particularly problematical because novelty is exciting.  Risk is a turn on.  And the role definitions of good kinksters feature facing fears, giving up control, embracing stress and pushing one’s personal limits.  In this regard, some kinksters sound like athletes.  Often, their mission is to play by the rules, but to transcend limits.  Some good submissives want dominants to push their own limits.  Some good tops want to do exactly that to others.  The Mother-May-I style of consent might be worth trying on a lark, but almost no one wants it to be the backbone of their playing style.   NCSF and the therapeutic community agree that continuous affirmative consent needs to be maintained at all times, and there are many ways this can be accomplished that are not wooden and mechanical, but there is great variety among people into kink about how this is understood and implemented.  Continuous consent can be very hot if done correctly, but, like everything else in kink, not everyone is in to that.

Role playing aggravates this, because our role descriptions are infiltrated by idealization.  Helen Fisher blames this on the neurotransmitter serotonin’s influence on the appetitive or courtship phase of human mating.  I say we develop fantasies about our ideal partners and go seeking them.  Fisher says millions of years of evolution has built brains that do the work of getting us so attracted to someone that reproduction might occur, and that means using the neurophysiology of obsession.  Fisher and I are each at least partly right.  Long before our observations, Romeo and Juliette said this:

Romeo and Juliette from the 1968 Franco Zefferelli production.


“But soft!  What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliette is the sun.
Arise fair sun, and kill the envious moon
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid, for she is envious.
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it.  Cast it off!
It is my lady! Oh, it is my love.
Oh, that she knew she were!
She speaks, yet she says nothing!  What of that?
Her eye discourses, I will answer it.—-
I am too bold.  “Tis not to me she speaks.
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their sphere ‘til their return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of those cheeks would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp.  Her eye in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See how she leans that cheek upon her hand.
Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek.”
“What is in a name?  That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called
Retain that dear perfection that he owes
Without that title.  Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself!  —  William Shakespeare,  ‘Romeo and Juliette, Act II, scene 2’
It seems that Romeo and Juliette have it bad for each other, each is deeply in the throes of romantic idealization.  Elizabethan playgoers recognized excessive romanticism in this famous poetry over 400 years ago.  And this illustrates that idealization is a danger not just for kinksters, but for lovers of all preferences and identifications.  But idealization is particularly dangerous for kinksters because lust is privileged in the kink communities.  Shakespeare here is saying that love is the close cousin of madness.  Having resisted stigma, risked contact with people who may or may not be all that safe sane and consensual in the name of lust, kinksters act like lust matters.
 
Cognitive dissonance alone acts to build commitment to kinky passion and relationships.  We value what we have suffered, sacrificed, and worked ardently to achieve.   And having done all of this, we would like to imagine that our partners are specially, even magically gifted and committed.  Even kink educational efforts, which are designed to inject a measure of reason into how play is conducted also wind up defining good and bad role playing.  Kinky folk challenge themselves to be good masters, good slaves, and good masochists just as we all strive to be good citizens, good parents, and good professionals.  Consensual non-monogamists do it too.  I remember overhearing in the hallway at an event one man telling another how he would never attempt to maintain 6 paramours at a time again; five was too many!  This left me wondering if the Turkish Sultan ever had a garage sale!

‘Harem Scene’ J G Delincourt, an excellent example of 19th century French orientalism. 
Harem life certainly seems to be going smoothly here!
This can make some dominants want to hit harder, be more demanding, and be pushy.  It can make some submissives feel like they are being bad at their role if they use their safeword or fear they will harm the performance of their partner if they stop a scene.  Novice submissives not only need to be taught that they cannot have every piece of candy in the store on the first trip, but that it is a sure sign of inexperience to proudly declare they have no limits and will try anything.  As endearing as such devotion may feel, it is more wisely understood as a failure to recognize one’s own limits, rather than the communication of ultimate affection.  This collision between inexperience and idealized roles is largely responsible for the 2014 Consent Violations Survey finding that 75% of the violations occurred either before, or within the first three years of our respondents’ involvement in the organized kink community.

But problems with limit setting and consent violations do not simply end after three years of training and experience.  As kinksters become more experienced, they learn their limits, and some wish to push those limits.  They often are exposed to new experiences where they have yet to learn their limits.  Some relax their guard.  And with increased intimacy and commitment, lovers want to please each other more, not less.  The problem of being edgy may get better with self-knowledge and kink education, but it never disappears.  And for some pushy kinksters who constantly seek to know their limits, it is hardly possible to know one’s limits without ever exceeding them.

From Consent Violations to Consent Incidents:

In our previous research, the NCSF 2014 Consent Violations Survey, my colleagues Susan Wright and Derrell Cox and I decided to use the term ‘violations’ because we wanted to cast the broadest net possible to capture problem experiences that might illuminate any systematic problems in how organized kink handles consent.  That NCSF team had been working hard for several years with NCSF’s Coalition Partners to define a broadly acceptable concept of consent, and this research was meant to be a reality check about how well individuals thought consent worked in local organizations and events.  We were looking for problems, not strengths.  Consent and its Discontents
 
Our results showed some problems, and we have reported back on these, but we also learned that many consent ‘violations’, while they constituted situations in which respondent’s play experience did not meet their expectations, did not really constitute ‘violations’.  Our respondents, astute readers, and we investigators recognized that these unmet expectations could be painful, scary, and even traumatic, but did not stem from behaviors that the respondent viewed as malevolent.  The best alternate term was volunteered by Charlie Glickman; the more neutral ‘consent incidents’.  Although we knew from the start asking the questions this way loaded the dice, it was a new perspective for me to consider that we might have created a less sensitive instrument for investigating coping strategies for consent events that focused on individual participants’ responsibilities for resolving incidents because of our a priori emphasis on organizational solutions.  It is clear from the diversity of incidents however, that every bit as important as organizational solutions; dungeon masters, complaint policies, mentoring, safeties, and educational programing might be in reducing predatory behavior and novice vulnerability, education in self-protective preparations is important, too.  A great many consent incidents constituted success stories about overcoming problems that are somewhat routine, and in our next survey, every effort will be made to be less fixated upon primary institutional prevention, so we can mine the wisdom inherent in such successes.

Trauma vs Resilience:

The theories of trauma and resilience, as they apply to behavior that is known to entertain significant risk, apply to much kinky behavior.  While we have the potential to be changed by any experience, and have increased potential in novel and intense experiences, experiences that might overwhelm our coping ability and can be damaging, and sometimes we can be changed in ways that are painful and unanticipated.  Life is inherently stressful, and we often embrace goals that are difficult, painful, challenging and stressful.  But we do not always have complete freedom of choice about the extent or intensity of the risks we face.  Neither are we always correct in our anticipations of how we will respond to intense experiences.

A convoy of U. S. Army Humvees courtesy of Military.com
The United States military has, as a consequence of long asymmetrical conflicts following World War II, has been at the forefront in efforts to train soldiers in resilience.  Combat can only be made so much less stressful by through combat skills training and good military discipline.  Fear, loss and pain are commonly encountered by many troops.  So the military has turned to psychology to provide resilience training for the troops.  Although modern tactics like Improvised explosive devices have caused terrible wounds for troops, improved emergency medical treatment has saved many people who previously would have died.  The heroic stories of rehabilitation from these losses speaks the effectiveness of resilience training.  The sad suicide rates for veterans for whom such training is insufficient also speaks to the need for the training, and for the social support that amplifies its effectiveness.  It also shows that resilience and effective personal responsibility are not an alternative to the need for constructive social changes.

The goal of resilience training is to prepare ourselves for levels of stress that might exceed our anticipations.  While enhancing our resilience is entirely consistent with radical existential responsibility for our sexuality and mental health, it is not at all inconsistent with the idea that social systems and cultural practices that impose unnecessary and unfair risks should be opposed by social change efforts.  The concept of resilience is not about the moral process of assigning blame for a mistake or deflecting calls for social justice.  It is about self-protection even in the face of accepting risks in order to get what you desire.  The goal is to make yourself as robust as possible in the face of unexpected adversity as opposed to succumbing to changes you cannot control due to adverse experiences.

The American Psychological Association (APA) lists the following as evidenced-based correlates of resilience.  If you wanted to enhance your psychological resilience, this is a great place to start. The categories listed below are APA’s.  We will follow each APA bullet point in italics with our suggestions from kinky life in in regular typeface:

Make (and maintain) connections.  Good relationships with close family members, friends and others are important.  Accepting help and support from others who care about you and will listen to you strengthens resilience.  Some people find that being active in civic groups, faith-based organizations, or other local groups provides social support and can help with reclaiming hope.  Assisting others in their time of need can benefit the helper.
 
Given that 70% of socially involved kinky people are not out to friends, family, other members of their churches or civic organizations, or co-workers; it is important for dealing with kink risks that one have social connections who know and accept your kinks, and who can be talked to if you experience a consent incident or violation.  Likewise, even if you are a novice in pursuing your kink interests socially, your learning journey can still make you an accepting friend and listener to others.  The benefits to resilience from social connections do not depend nearly so much on giving and receiving good advice as they do empathetic listening and acceptance, and creation of safe psychological space with your support system.  Although it may be challenging, try to maintain all the connections you safely can even though a crisis may have changed your feelings.

Avoid seeing crises as insurmountable problems.  You cannot change the fact that highly stressful events happen, but you can change how you interpret and respond to those events.  Try looking beyond the present to how future circumstances might be a little better.  Note any subtle ways in which you might already feel somewhat better as you deal with the difficult situation.
 
Kinky folk are often already better than average at looking at things from multiple points of view.  However, this sound advice from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT…  I know and don’t start!  But there you go again, looking at things from multiple perspectives!) and is also about the crucial strategy of avoiding single-minded thinking and being overwhelmed by strong emotion.
 
Accept that change is a part of living.  Certain goals may no longer be obtainable as a result of adverse situations.  Accepting situations that cannot be changed can help you focus on those that you can alter.
 
We do not have scientific data to prove this, but in our clinical experience, many kinky clients are more reluctant than other psychotherapy clients to accept loss.  Perhaps this is the result of having to overcome social stigma and its attendant obstacles to identify, own, and act upon their kinky desires.  Knowing what you have to give up, and what you might be able to change is not a simple matter easily reduced to an aphorism.  But having a prior conversation with yourself and your most intimate supporters can facilitate making the determination of how to face a loss.  The key here is that your anticipation of a loss and its actuality may feel very different because you are in different emotional states. Having a prior conversation helps ground you in multiple points of view and makes it easier to use your support systems if something stressful happens. Having such talks about what might go wrong and how to deal with it not only constitutes good safety planning, but helps you manage your emotional reactions.

Move toward your goals.  Develop some realistic goals.  Do something regularly – even if it seems like a small accomplishment – that enables you to move toward your goals.  Instead of focusing on tasks that seem unachievable, ask yourself “What is the one thing I can do today that helps me move in the direction I want to go”?
 
Being a genius at strategic thinking helps, but it is not necessary to have a master plan to deal with adversity.  If you have one and can implement it, that’s great!  But it is crucial to actually take constructive steps. Taking the step you can take today is much better than imagining the better step you cannot do right now.  We often think of displacement as a defense, but defenses are just another name for coping strategies.  For example, if you cannot fix the main injustice that has harmed you, it can help in your healing to act to help protect others in the future.  That may be a displacement, but it is also a net good.

Take decisive actions.  Act on adverse situations as much as you can.  Take decisive actions, rather than detaching completely from problems and stresses and wishing they would just go away.

Some people react to adversity by becoming passive and feeling helpless.  This advice is targeted for them.  It can be quite difficult to implement.  Obviously decisive actions need to be judiciously considered and effective actions will be a great deal more solace than failed efforts, so decisiveness is not automatically helpful.
 
The research behind this specific advice is based on   the model of depression based upon learned helplessness.  Taking decisive action is an antidote to passivity and excessive rumination.  Taking effective action helps manage the emotions by confronting any internal narratives that you are helpless.  If your sexual desire focuses on wishes to give up all control and responsibility as keys to your identity or erotic pleasure, then this component of resilience might be a bigger challenge for you than other people.  For example, you may wish to give up and fantasize that others will rescue you.  Often, this is easier to imagine than to arrange, and you will be better served by strategies you can initiate and carry out.

The other threat this APA advice is targeting is repression.  Repression and denial often undermine effective coping by protecting us from the negative emotions associated with real dangers without addressing real risks. There is very strong clinical evidence that kinky people, in owning parts of their inner darkness are less repressed than most psychotherapy clients, and than the general population.  If so, repression and rigid denial may be less likely to be problems for you, but can still be encountered.  Kinky clients are often pretty good at facing their fears.  If this is true for you, it may be a strength of your response to a consent incident.
   
Look for opportunities for self-discovery.  People often learn something about themselves and may find that they have grown in some respect in their struggle with loss.  Many people who have experienced tragedies and hardship have reported having better relationships, greater strength even while feeling vulnerable, increased sense of self-worth, a more developed spirituality, and heightened appreciation for life.

The kink aphorism “Careful what you wish for!” applies here.  One does not always learn what one expects to in a heroic journey; that is part of the growth and part of what Joseph Campbell said makes it heroic.  You may not think of your kink experiences that way, but the very openness that makes kinksters seek knowledge about their dark sides should still be counted among your assets if things go wrong.  Likewise, all relationships, not just kinky ones, can grow stronger overcoming adversity.  Where you judge it to be safe, overcoming a consent incident can be a relationship strengthening experience if those involved respond to the challenge empathetically.

Nurture a positive view of yourself.  Developing confidence in your ability to solve problems and trusting your instincts helps build resilience.

Such evidence as science can provide suggests that many kinksters are strong in personal efficacy whether they take dominant or submissive roles in their preferred play.  Emotion being highly privileged in the world of kink, it can hardly be said they are afraid to act on their instincts.  But losses and unexpected reverses being what they are, it is always tempting to blame oneself when risks turn out badly, even if you are ordinarily brave and insightful.  One is in a fundamentally different position, and often in a different emotional state when a risk turns out badly than when you were contemplating the taking of that risk in prospect.  This advice, for kinksters and everyone else, is a warning about solving the emotional tensions associated with loss by blaming yourself.  While it is true that you may have made mistakes in a risky decision, it is even more true that you will need to rely on your own faculties to rectify them.  This precept is about not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs just because you were expecting an egg just when the goose laid a poop.  Disappointing as that may be, you still may get plenty more golden eggs.

Keep things in perspective.  Even when facing very painful events, try to consider the stressful situation in a broader context and try to keep a long-term perspective.  Avoid blowing the event out of proportion.

Note that the metaphor of the golden goose from the previous paragraph is highly relevant here, too.  You need your judgement to interpret how serious the implications of a consent incident might be to your kinky goals.  Perhaps your risk tolerance is less than you had anticipated.  Perhaps you are disenchanted with your hope of finding sexual acceptance.  Your trusted partner might have been a systematic predator.  As painful as such new learnings might be, your judgment is still going to be needed in deciding to handle this unwelcome feedback.  Good social support and clear goals are still going to require you to keep making judgments and keep evaluating your goals.  And sexual and social risk will continue to be part of your decision making.

Maintain a hopeful outlook.  An optimistic outlook enables you to expect that good things will happen in your life.  Try visualizing what you want rather than worrying about your fear.

This is hard advice to implement, especially if you felt you were already doing this as well as you could when a consent incident blind-sided you.  This is the reason we emphasized that even well-thought-out kink experiences were risky and that one could not know one’s limits without occasional mishaps, accidents, and even disasters.  The same optimism that may have caused your adventure to miscarry might be successful in better achieving your goals if you can evaluate the causes of your mishap and persist in your strategy, albeit modifying it with the new learnings from the consent incident.  If your incident was partly caused by failed social systems, optimism will be an asset in your efforts to fix these failures so that others are protected from the loss it was your misfortune to face.

Take care of yourself.  Pay attention to your own needs and feelings.  Engage in activities that you enjoy and find relaxing.  Exercise regularly.  Taking care of yourself helps to keep your mind and body primed to deal with situations that require resilience.

Given that kinks often come from deep within us and are profoundly felt, it is easy to imagine that pursuit of them proceeds from our deepest authenticity.  But given that even conventional sexuality, let alone kinks, is deeply socially stigmatized, it is also common to have conflicted feelings about even intense desires.  Sudden or unexpected losses can bring out deeper ambivalence and make self-care difficult and ambiguous.  Likewise, kink is often not a relaxing form of self-expression.  Many kinksters seek increased intensity of experience and more stress.  Deciding what behaviors and thoughts will lead to decreased stress can be complicated.   Feedback from kinky members of your support system can be especially helpful if you have questions about managing your self-care that others who are not aware of what your lifestyle entails.

Additional ways of strengthening your resilience may be helpful.  For example, some people write about their deepest thoughts and feelings related to trauma or other stressful events in their life.  Meditation and other spiritual practices help some people build connections and restore hope.

A consent incident, especially one that happens within your community of support can be especially isolating.  In finding alternate strategies for supporting yourself, it is important to recognize your vulnerability, and use safe sources of support while you reassess the riskiness of your relationships to people and communities.  At such times, it is important to go slowly while you determine what resources you can trust, and where your personal safety lies.

The key is to identify ways that are likely to work well for you as part of your personal strategy for fostering resilience.

No laundry list of resilience strategies can be exhaustive nor universally applicable.  You must mix, match, expropriate and invent the methods that work best for you.  This APA list and our additions are only a starting point.  You must decide which of these strategies work best for you, setting side those that are not so helpful.
 
Additional ways to work on building your resilience:

Work on your dark side.  While you may feel that exploring your kinks is working on your dark side, your own sexual stigma and sex negativity are also part of that dark side.  It is all well to seek validation from others, but this is useless insofar as you fail to accept yourself.  Confronting your own sex negativity does not just mean moving towards the sex you want, but also moving away from sex you do not want and going slowly about sex about which you remain explicitly ambivalent.

Know your hard boundaries from your soft ones.  Just as it is kink idealization to imagine that the best submissives never use their safewords, so is it a false sign of sophistication or self-knowledge to have no hard limits.  One way to know your limits is to imagine how you will feel if an edgy scene goes wrong, rather than imagining it turning out perfectly.  Do not attempt activities or relationships if you are not ready to fail, even if you have a capable partner whom you trust and who is eager to perform them.

Insist on feedback.  Part of the thrill of kink is contracting for an adventure that goes a little beyond your anticipation and control.  Your captive is utterly helpless and cannot possibly escape.  You are not allowed to say ‘no’.  You get to feel the thrill of the knife at your throat as she has her way with you.  For many people, these are the sweet spots of kinky dreams.  But aftercare is where you start to heel from the pain and stress you willingly embraced in a scene and where you get to evaluate its impact on your self-concept and relationship.  While it may seem unromantic at times to debrief them, there is no going to the edge without constant feedback and giving that up for a time should not be confused with abandoning it altogether.  This is also one of the places that trust gets built which enables further exploration.  If you feel worse about yourself after humiliation play rather than better, it is time to pause and explore why.

Remember that kink is highly embodied.  Your reaction to a consent incident, like your reaction to an intense scene that goes smoothly, is physical as well as mental.  Your aftercare needs will persist even if something happens that makes parts of your planned aftercare strategy unavailable to you.  It may mean that it is not time to discuss what went wrong right away because you or your play partner is still in an altered state of consciousness.
 
For more on this see:  Mistress Adobe’s Sub-drop tool kit (That link is already in Elephant https://elephantinthehottub.com/2015/12/coping-with-top-and-sub-drop-a-safety-kit)

©Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, Ann Arbor, January 2019

Sexual Behaviors in the United States and in Quebec: Looking at Sex Variation

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP
Debbie Herbenick, PhD
In July of last year, Indiana University School of Public Health researcher Debby Herbenick and her study team published the first replication of Ed Laumann et al’s National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) in nearly 25 years.   Commissioned to provide a scientific basis for sexual health interventions in response to the AIDS crisis, the NHSLS was limited to asking questions about hetrosexuality, homosexuality, and those behaviors most instrumental in HIV transmission.  Laumann et al, wisely focused on social networking theory in the hope that understanding who was sleeping with whom might guide policy.  But the NHSLS did not inquire broadly about sexual variation.  It barely made it through the Congressional appropriation process over the politics of using public money to pay researchers to ask citizens questions about their sexual behavior.  Kink was simply too outrè to include and retain hope of funding.



Despite the fact that Karl Marx first used survey methods to forecast London election results in the 1840s, and the US had been regularly using surveys for a variety of purposes since the 1940’s, the NHSLS was the first and only investigation of US sexual behavior using a statistically representative sample of the US population until Herbenick’s recent work.  Not that Laumann’s work accomplished much politically.  Following his publishing of The Social Organization of Sexuality (1994)and Sex in America (1995) based on the NHSLS dataset, fear provoked by the AIDS crisis led the Federal Government to squander over a billion dollars on ineffective abstinence-only education which relied upon none of this research team’s insights.  But that study did provide the first sound statistical basis for describing who and was having sex with whom, and what kinds they were having among the various common sexual practices that comprise the modal portion of the spectrum of sexual variability.  It is the single most frequently cited work in the sociology of sex since the work of Alfred Kinsey.

Herbenick has been conducting sexuality studies on representative US samples for eight years.  Most of these have looked at sexual variation issues related to heterosexual and LGBT orientation, modal sex behavior, and even and sex toy use.  Spurred by the dark whispers of various insurgents and her own towering scientific curiosity, Herbenick, D, Bowling, J, Fu, T, Dodge, B, Guerra-Reyes, L and Saunders, S, in PLOS One (2017) broadened the spectrum of behaviors investigated, directly replicating Laumann’s questions about conventional practices, but inquiring substantially more broadly.  Herbenick’s 2015 questionnaire published therein was not a comprehensive Noah’s Ark of every conceivable variant practice, but it did cover the rudiments of homosexual practices; multiple partner behaviors; kink, sex toy and erotica use; and inquired about internet use and mobile apps.  To repeat, this study provides the first inquiry ever about such an assortment of practices on a representative US sample.  And it provides plenty of brand new information and basis for suggestions about how those of us interested in further research on CNM, polyamory and kink might delve next for a deeper understanding of the relationship between kink, mental health concepts, and the management of social stigma.  This in turn, is valuable to therapists who might treat the problems and discontents of the sexually adventurous.

Here is a very abbreviated summary of the study results. These are lifetime percentages of the listed behaviors for men and women:
Behavior
M%
F%
Behavior                    
M%
F%
Vaginal intercourse:
85
83
Gave partner oral sex:                    
83
82
Received oral sex:                                       
85
85
Insertive anal sex:
46
–
Received anal sex:                                       
09
37
Worn sexy underwear/lingerie:    
26
75
Partnered sex in a public place:
45
43
Tied up partner, or been tied up:
26
22
Playfully whipped or been whipped:
16
14
Spanked or been spanked:
30
34
Used vibrator/dildo:
33
50
Used an anal sex toy: 
18
16
Sex enhancement pills/herbal supps:  
21
08
Read erotic stories:
57
57
Sex guide or sex self-help book:
32
34
Used a phone app related to sex:
12
06
Looked at a sexually explicit magazine:
79
54
Sexually explicit video/‘porn’:
82
60
Sex over Facetime/Skype:
14
11
Nude or semi-nude photo of self:
24
27
Received nude or semi-nude photo:
41
27
Flirted with someone in chat/SMS:
40
36
Gone to a strip club:
59
30
Taken a class/workshop about sex:
04
04
Had a threesome:
18
10
Had group sex:
12
06
Gone to a sex party or swingers party:      
06
05
Gone to a BDSM club or dungeon:
04
03
In addition to these gender differences, the Herbenick team tabulated data about age cohorts, and how many people had done the behaviors in the last month and last year.  They also inquired about the subjective appeal of the above behaviors, which was in all cases broader than actual participation.  Of course, behavior and meaning are highly variably associated.  The research team addresses this explicitly in accounting for the large number of lower frequency sexual behaviors that are conducted by less than two percent of respondents in the last month but have much higher aggregate lifetime percentages.  These data focus on behavior, and appeal, but not on other attitudes or identifications so it is fair to say that these data tell us a lot about who has had sex scenes with multiple partners simultaneously but does not tell us about polyamory or consensual nonmonogamy.  Although some of the signature behaviors of BDSM are asked about directly, it is not possible to estimate the overall prevalence of the main BDSM behaviors without items addressing cross dressing or fetishism.  We eagerly await the team’s later report about trans, gay, lesbian and heterosexual behavioral differences in these behaviors.

Christian Joyal, PhD

Still, much can be said about this rich data trove that comes from the brave first effort to collect systematic data on a much broader spectrum of sexual practices.  The first observation is that, like Christian Joyal’s team’s research on Quebecoises, the conventional romantic behaviors remain widely the most popular.   The largest proportion of respondents in both data sets find them appealing and in both data sets, appeal is broader than participation.   In both data sets, a very wide bandwidth of sexual variability is common, and an even broader bandwidth is uncommon, but statistically frequent enough to be practiced by more than 5% of the population.  Whatever one’s moral judgments might be, none of these behaviors were statistically aberrant.   In this sense, they constitute a partial validation of Joyal’s conclusions about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s paraphilia diagnoses, even though Herbenick did not attempt a direct replication:  appeal and frequency of most behaviors do not justify calling any of these activities paraphilias except taking classes and workshops and attending BDSM clubs or dungeons if the definition of ‘paraphilia’ requires they be statistically anomalous.

For comparison, here’s a look at Joyal and Carpentier’s lifetime frequencies on their sample of questions based on the eight paraphilias of the DSMs.

Voyeurism
Men: 60%
Women: 35%
Exhibitionism
Men: 06%
Women: 03%
Fetishism
Men: 40%
Women: 48%
Frotteurism
Men: 34%
Women: 31%
Sadism
Men: 09%
Women: 05%
Masochism
Men: 19%
Women: 28%
Transvestism
Men: 07%
Women: 06%
Sex with a child
Men: 01%
Women: 00%
Joyal and Carpentier’s questions do not line up well with Herbenick’s.  For example, the psychiatric definition of voyeurism as being aroused by viewing someone non-consensually is very different from viewing porn or receiving a sexy pic from a willing partner.  Herbenick did not report questions that assessed frotteurism or cross dressing at all.  Additionally, cross dressing means very different things in Gay female impersonation, heterosexually identified cross dressing, fetishistic cross dressing and humiliation play, ‘shemale’ porn, and transgender sexualities where it is not technically cross dressing at all because clothing is fully appropriate to one’s (non-traditional) gender.  Sadism and masochism also track poorly to ’whipped or been whipped’ and ‘spanked or been spanked’ questions where power role is not specified.  Joyal’s and Carpentier’s conclusion that 48% of Quebecois respondents endorse at least one ‘paraphilic’ behavior begs for a comparison statistic from Herbenick’s sample about how many Americans had done at least one of any BDSM or multiple sex partner activity lifetime, last year, or last month, although this would still exclude the nonconsensual paraphilias Joyal included in his overall figure. 

It takes some reading between the lines, but in many way, these figures look similar.

That said, the participation of the most popular single dimension of BDSM: spanking, runs at least 7 times the frequency of ever having attended a BDSM club or dungeon.  If we recognize that not all ‘spankos’ regard themselves as kinksters and recognize the non-overlap of those who prefer whipping, role play, bondage, and the absent major categories of crossdressing and gender play, and fetishism, it is probable that participation in BDSM communities covers about 10 percent or less of people who have ever tried kinky behaviors at least once so far in their lifetimes in Herbenick’s sample.  This makes those kinksters who do participate in ‘out’ community activities seem like an elite vanguard who are at risk of being systematically different from the bulk who do not socially participate.   This also suggests that considerable risks attend our efforts to extrapolate what we know about kink from studies of kink samples of convenience drawn from socially ‘out’ kinksters.   I note also that in S.Wright, D. Cox and R. Stambaugh’s 2014 Consent Violations Survey, 70% of our sample of convenience stated that they were not out to family, co-workers, or people with whom they lived.   I am using ‘out’ here in quotes to mean out enough to participate on-line or socially in kink, a definition shared by neither Joyal’s team nor Herbenick’s.

These results do not inquire directly about the important phenomenon of on-line sexual communities. But they do provide some basis for reassuring us against panic stemming from spreading technology use.   If negative health or psychological effects attend technology use, surely the low rates of use of phone apps, for example, preclude epidemics related to their use.  Men and women have strikingly similar rates of picture sharing on-line.  This does not prove that they are sent and received consensually, or such behavior is satisfying, but the appeal rates of these behaviors suggest that many find the fantasy appealing in prospect despite media-documented risks and problems.
©Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, Ann Arbor, August 2018

Boundaries, Identity, and Transgression

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP2 Comments

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can walk abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding
To please the yelping dogs.  The gaps I mean,
No one has seen the made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet and walk the line,
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and others so nearly balls.
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side.  It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need a wall:
He is all pine, I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head.
‘Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it
Where there are cows?  Here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense. 
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’  I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly and I’d rather
He said it for himself.  I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Mending Wall, 1917  Robert Frost

Brene Brown

“Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.”

Brene Brown



On the eve of American entry into World War I, American poet Robert Frost penned “Mending Wall,” this playful, transgressive, and highly nuanced meditation on boundaries.  In it, he questions everything about boundaries.  Their necessity and utility, the need for cooperation in their maintenance, their relationship to tradition and identity, the fact that maintaining the boundary provides occasion for community, and he recognizes that boundaries are both responses and prey to aggression that menaces us from the dark place in others of which we are often fearful.  Despite his neighbor’s otherness, Frost’s narrator cannot resist poking him about the wall, and when he does, he finds psychological differences and defenses that have little to do with good husbandry.  In this he recapitulates our ambivalence about diversity:  that the recognition of difference often requires tolerance.

Woodrow Wilson imagined he could keep a divided United States out of World War I.  Once in, he violated many of our most cherished boundaries that protect freedom of dissent.


Back in 1914, secure within the natural boundaries of two great oceans, the United States had a strongly pacifist President, and little reason to fear that the dark forces gathering in Europe would engulf us.  Greater was our natural fear of our own fellow citizens, whose historical ethnicities and identifications would be deeply divided when the war broke out in Europe.  About a third of Americans were of German origin, and sympathy for Germany was widespread.  Another third, and many of our country’s cultural traditions, came from Great Britain,  one of Germany’s opponents  And yet we would all have to pull together when the Atlantic proved not to be a boundary, but a battleground.  German insistence on using unrestricted submarine warfare sank American ships and killed American sailors, thus dragging the US into the war.  Uncomfortable with one another or not, Americans would fight together despite their differing ethnic identifications and identities over this ‘boundary issue.’


In psychotherapy, boundaries are often viewed as a valued necessity.  In my shorter quote, Brene Brown sees them as a concomitant of constructive self-esteem.  She is emphasizing that we cannot uphold our values if we cannot say ‘no’ to pressures from others to compromise them.  Like Frost’s classic poem, which was apt to his times, Brown’s quote is apt to ours, when public servants decline to compromise across party lines for fear of betraying their principles.  Parlous times make for rough boundaries.  Some are even proposing a wall…

The Great Wall of China.  Our current President was hardly the first to consider a wall.  This one was indeed, ‘great’, ‘big’ and ‘beautiful’, although far from entirely effective.

Boundaries are an important kind of psychological resource, and those who experience serious boundary problems are vulnerable to many social ills.  But boundary problems are endemic to the human condition, careful thought and reflection are needed when clients appear to handle them in a dysfunctional manner.  Community context, subcultural values, client goals, and partner agreements must be thoroughly understood to interpret the meanings associated with boundaries properly.  Often, boundary problems are overdetermined, influenced by many factors, and are not susceptible to simplistic solutions.
Boundaries are often described as an individual psychological skill or attribute.  People do vary considerably in their skills at using them. However, this essay proceeds from a rather difference conceptualization; boundaries are socially constructed, and require collective participation to maintain or break.  Often, they are not a simple contract between two parties, nor is the responsibility for their maintenance clear or constant.  Anyone who examines successive maps of Europe over the last millennia sees that boundaries are far from static, as they ebb, flow, endure and evaporate over time.  Nor are they simple contracts between neighbors, as Frost observes.  For a look at how much the map of Europe has changed over the last 1017 years, click on this link to YouTube (takes about 2 minutes.) Changing European Boundaries 1000AD to the Present

In the previous essay on this blog, Darkness I closed with the suggestion that consent was an important ethic, but only the starting point for an ethical framework for BDSM.  Boundaries are an excellent example of how consent cannot cover all the bases.  Boundaries are often not a simple matter of agreement between two roughly equal parties.  Not only are parties not always nearly equal, but boundaries are defined, imposed and maintained by stakeholders who may not be present nor have any input in consent agreements.
One of the things I have often heard from therapists about kinksters is that they have “poor boundaries.”  This is a very interesting comment, and it does not do to immediately refute it.  This is particularly true because we all know clients, kinky or not, who do in some manner have poor boundaries.  They are late for appointments, or they fail to pay their bills.  They don’t do their therapeutic homework, or interrupt us or their partners in session.  They show off at inappropriate times, or hog the spotlight.  Sometimes they insist on being the identified problem.  Other times, they refuse our suggestion that they have any problem at all.  Some, in a meeting of G-7 participants, barge in front of the assembled heads of state.  Oops, sorry, that is not a kinky client, that’s the President of the United States!  “Good fences may make good neighbors”, but there is a lot of boundary violation going around these days.   In the electronic realm, we often do not even know where the boundaries are.

However, as I write this, we see lots of analogies on the international stage that make boundary violations inevitable, if not exactly acceptable, and the root causes for these are not always clear.  Fighting in Syria deliberately destroys the boundaries of people’s neighborhoods, and they find themselves struggling to smuggle themselves into Europe, thereby violating international borders.  Donald Trump determines to build a 30-foot wall on the American/Mexican border at a point when net migration from Mexico is zero.  And his conceptual boundaries decline to differentiate an American citizen of Mexican descent from an undocumented migrant.  These discussions of boundaries are impregnated with issues of power.

Syrian Refugees coming ashore on the Greek Island of Lesbos in 2016.

Boundaries are an important part of social life, and transgressive values can be highly problematical with these.  Often, therapeutic boundary discussions are saturated with power dynamics that conflict with constructive therapeutic goals.   We as therapists often assume our role is to set boundaries in therapy and if we have difficulties getting a client to accept our lead on how these boundaries are to be observed, we make negative judgments about the client.  That may be appropriate sometimes.  In kink, as in other walks of life, transgressive behavior can denote insensitivity, hostility, and a readiness to harm others.  But like those unwanted migrants, these behaviors originated someplace else before they wash up on the shores of our consulting rooms.  Often clients are using the best boundaries they are able, and their handling of limits is a reflection of their past experiences that seem far more compelling to them than our rules do.   In our own ways, all of us are like those Syrian refugees, living as best we can within the boundaries around us until we can’t, and then taking the risks that we will be sanctioned for violating somebody else’s rules.   It turns out, feeling like you can set your own boundaries is often correlated with having high social privilege.

Of course, this discussion of boundaries follows hard on the post about darkness because of the problems ‘boundary violations’ pose for the attempts of the kink communities to use consent and contracting as boundary processes.  Consent violations degrade safety, and undermine the integrity of kink’s PR claim that “Safe, Sane and Consensual” provides genuine security for participants to make sound decisions about which erotic risks they wish to assume.  Contrary to Frost’s implication that walls aren’t needed if there are no longer any cows to stray, boundaries provide a measure of security, whether we need it every moment, or only occasionally, and even when there are no longer any cows.

As a cautionary, I point to data from the 2014 Consent Violations Study, in which one sixth of those people who had had at least one consent incident to report, described five or more.  Given the prevalence of kink education efforts and the pervasive kink culture of consent, it is fair to conclude that there are people who repeatedly risk re-traumatization through BDSM experiences that are not conforming to safety norms in the kink community.  Although we found that consensual non-consent and 24/7 submission experiences are riskier than some other BDSM experiences, these multiple consent victimizations were not associated with especially high-risk types of play.  Rather, those complaining of these violations seemed to take little benefit from the norms and structures that kink has set up to make communities safer.
 
Therapeutic Boundaries and Ethical Considerations:

The culture of psychotherapy may share some fundamental values with the kink community, but the two cultures diverge at many points.  One of these key differences is in how boundaries are understood.  This essay on therapeutic boundaries for altsex clients is the beginning of a discussion about the various goods that are in conflict, but it is intended to legitimate the feelings often reported by kinky clients and the therapists who treat them that crucial goods are in conflict which are understood in fundamentally different ways by the two communities.  In such circumstances, it is typical to feel ambivalent and torn between competing values.  This is often a consequence of social role conflict, and competing values, not necessarily deep-rooted psychopathology. 

Some of these differences emerge from the histories of the helping professions and of kink, which will be briefly reviewed here.

In previous essays, I have reviewed the lives and some of the contributions to kink of crucial figures like the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.  These authors wrote and behaved in ways that were very critical and defiant of the conventional social boundaries of their times.  The Divine Marquis never saw a socio-sexual boundary he did not wish to break.  He eroticized murder and disparaged the use of the guillotine for bureaucratically decreed dispassionate executions.  Von Sacher-Masoch gave us the sadomasochistic contract, but despite his erotic fantasies of submission, he leveraged his social position to coerce his wife into behaviors to which she declined to consent.  Although these two writers did not dictate the modern boundaries of BDSM, they did much to establish its ethos.  And it is an ethos of violating contemporary sensibilities about how sexuality is conducted between partners in which conventional boundaries are ignored.

When kink began to organize as a subculture, however, it developed boundaries of is own.  This initially involved respect for other participants’ secrecy about ‘the Life’, and shared efforts to prevent those who were not part of sadomasochistic communities from knowing about BDSM activities until they were regarded as safe to tell.  In some of the early gay leathersex motorcycle cubs, new members had to prove they were sincere by starting out in submissive roles, regardless of their preferred sexual scenes.  This ensured that new members were fully indoctrinated in the group’s etiquette, as well as discouraging anyone who was not serious or sincere.  Early contact organizations carefully protected sadomasochists’ identities through re-mail services, in which codes were employed to ensure that participants’ identity and addresses were protected until they were ready to reveal them to those who corresponded to establish relationships or sex play.

Boundaries about doctor/patient confidentiality implemented by the United States Federal Government

Doctors and psychotherapists are also aware that many matters discussed with their clients are stigmatized.  Clients are afraid that others will know if they have a disease, disability, or painful history.  In an attempt to ensure that such matters are fully shared in treatment, doctor-patient communications are confidential.  Laws like the Health Insurance Parity and Portability Act (HIPPA) ensure that many aspects of a patient record remain confidential.  It is a measure of the social acceptability of these arrangements that such rules are characterized as ‘privacy’ when we discuss medical information, but ‘secrecy’ when discussing customarily private sexual behavior!  But therapists and altsex clients are both familiar with the importance of confidential communications even if some reasons are more widely viewed as legitimate than others for maintaining these boundaries.

In another chapter I discussed the development of the Safe Sane and Consensual (Slogans) ethos and its viral spread among the early above ground kink communities in the 1980’s. This led to the eventual development of an ethos of explicit sexual contracting, and educational programs aimed at making play safer.  Other attempts to create boundaries include the institution of Dungeonmasters to monitor the safety of playspaces, and house rules of conduct in playspaces to prevent outsiders or novices from interfering in scenes.  While there are many kinksters who criticize, disagree, or even reject some of these ideas and procedures for enforcing boundaries, it is fair to say that experienced participants in kink social organizations have extensive exposure to community boundaries, and many who have never played face-to-face have read about them.

Figaro was a barber and a surgeon.  Its all in the wrist, you know!

Therapists, proceeding from their status as allied health professionals, learned about professional boundaries from the professional ideologies of physicians.  Physicians in turn, learned their professional boundaries from their long emergence from quasi professional status in the medieval period to alpha professionals today.  Back in Galen’s time, “First do no harm” was their equivalent of “Safe, Sane and Consensual”.  Intended as a professional ethic, it also functioned as a public relations statement. Back when doctors had little knowledge of the boundaries of what they ‘knew”, it was impossible to implement except by rote repetition of accepted practice.  Remember that melodious buffoon in The Marriage of Figaro?  He wasn’t just a barber, but a surgeon, and as such he was the object of much jest, but also considerable fear.  Although adept with a blade, surgeon/barbers lost many patients due to the risks of therapeutic bloodletting and from unintended sepsis due to unsanitary incisions stemming from the lack of knowledge about the germ theory of disease.  With the emergence of medicine as a systematic science in the 19thcentury, physicians and surgeons gained the social and commercial power to dictate what good professional boundaries meant.  Good patient management has gradually come to mean not only that physicians, not patients, get to determine the time and place of their meetings with clients, but that they no longer make house calls and instead maintain offices with lots of diagnostic equipment and the tools to maintain sterile conditions.  The power balance between physicians and clients has been decided by physicians, hospitals, technological advances and medial insurers, with little input from their clients.

All of this was very far along in practice in 1980 when I began training as a clinical psychologist.  I was taught that I was responsible for determining the time, place, length of appointments, and great training effort was expended on what I could say about clients and to whom.  I was instructed that therapeutic boundaries were all important in establishing the boundaries for successful treatment, and that it was my job to educate my clients to these rules.  This did not mean rigidity was recommended for its own sake, but my ethical boundaries as a therapist, while grounded in Galen’s dictum, were not just between my client(s) and me.  I was a representative of my entire profession, not just my personal values or therapeutic orientation.  I had responsibilities to my client and even myself, but also to my profession, the state, and to the larger society that needed to be considered in setting boundaries and in contracting with my clients.  This is equally true in 2018.  As an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist, I promise to adhere to The AASECT Code of Ethical Conduct.  This set of guidelines was adopted with three goals co-equally in mind:  protection of the public, protection of the profession, and protection of the individual practitioner.  Never mind that those lofty goods occasionally conflict, and their interpretation was dependent upon time, place and changing social context.
 
Boundary maintenance has a central role in the in how we as therapists think about professional ethics.  We set appointment times not only to regularize and regulate our own schedules, but to communicate our stability, predictability and reliability to clients.   We keep the focus on their thoughts feelings experiences and narratives as demonstration and fulfillment of our promise to put their welfare first.  We moderate our feelings about their stories because personal stories are highly emotional, and over-responding to their experience risks substituting our narrative for their own.   When Sigmund Freud discovered that severe behavioral symptoms might moderate from discussion alone, but that in such intimate discussion, patients often fell in love with their doctors, often in ways that went far beyond routine gratitude for the gifts of relief from illness, psychotherapists became sensitized to the importance of boundary maintenance in handling these transference feelings.  Professional neutrality wasn’t merely an expression of routine social discomforts about emotionalism, but disclosure might obscure the client’s symptomatic needs to view the therapist unrealistically, and failure to notice that in treatment might delay the process of cure.  So, all manner of personal information and contact outside of the therapeutic office became professional boundary issues too.

In June of 2017, AASECT put on an Ethics Workshop in Las Vegas addressing professional boundary issues in dealing with the alt sex communities.  Ruby Bouie Johnson, Angie Gunn, and I were moderated by Reece Malone and AASECT Ethics Advisory Committee Chair, Dan Rosen.  I went first and outlined some of the historical context I have presented above.  Noting that subjectivity was privileged in kink in a way that it was not in psychotherapy, I suggested that appropriate boundaries depended greatly on whether you accepted the Freudian ideas that transference was ubiquitous, and addressing it central to the process of therapeutic transformation. If you believed in transference, then you needed to keep firm boundaries so that therapy was not contaminated by what the client knows about the therapist’s life outside of the consulting room.  Ruby discussed process for negotiating boundaries in treatment in the context of intersectional cultural competence, and recognized that in her home state of Texas, some goods needed to be sacrificed to the necessity of maintaining a license to practice.  Angie emphasized the sex negativity of needing to hide our sexualities from our clients who were in the process of trying to decide to come out about theirs.  She maintained that authenticity required open expression of one’s gender and sexuality.  Still, you could hear a collective gasp when she revealed that she sometimes became nude with clients.  In the regulatory context of Portland, and with her clientele, Angie maintained that touch was a boundary violation, but nudity was a good role modeling.  Debate about this echoed for several weeks on the AASECT Listserv.

If this was intense enough to be worth doing, you may not want the therapeutic consequences of needing to discuss it’s impact on the client who saw you.

Boundaries are not just about what goes on within the psychotherapeutic consulting room, however.  Among the most persistent inquiries in AASECT from those serving the kink communities are questions about how proper boundaries with that community are to be maintained.  In many places the alt sex communities are small, polyamorous, and it is not possible for kinky therapists to play near where they practice without risking the possibility of running into clients.  Many clients would not be offended and have no basis for objecting to seeing their therapist expressing personal sexualities.  But AASECT itself, and the other psychotherapeutic professions have serious and cogent objections.  Those of us who hold licensed professions and who have signed our agreements to uphold the codes of conduct from our professional organizations are contracted to uphold their standards of conduct.  Often these were made with the recognition that unethical therapists often used the intimacy of the consulting relationship to meet their own sexual needs with vulnerable clients who were seriously harmed by such behaviors.
 
While this may go a long way towards clarifying the boundaries of professional behavior, it does not really resolve Angie Gunn’s challenge about the benefits of clients who are coming out about their sexuality.  For myself I have resolved this as follows:

1)   About 70% of 2014 Consent Violations Survey participants, all of whom discovered the survey either through on-line kinky groups or their local BDSM social organizations, said they were not out to family, co-workers, or other people with wom they interacted routinely.  As important as the decision to be out can be, under the prevailing conditions of social stigma, it is by no means a sure sign of sexual authenticity for all clients to be out.  I regard therapy as a place to explore such questions where, as passionately as the client, or even the therapist may feel about the issue, the opportunity is preserved for neutral discourse about it.
 
2) 150 years of professional sexology have failed to reveal enduring scientific principles about how people choose their preferred forms of sexual behavior.  In this vacuum of good theory, the dictum ‘first do no harm’ is better served by neutrality, and by trying to privilege the client’s discourse over the therapist’s about such matters.  In many cases, I refer clients to external sources for their psychoeducation.  Making clear that these are the opinions of the writers, not my own, the client is invited to discuss anything the readings may bring up.
3) While at SSSS 2017, I saw data suggesting that early childhood sexual experiences involving older, but non-adult participants, might account be correlated with paraphilic interests relative to normative ones.  This is the best data ever that some specific historical factors might predispose a client to kinks.  But even the biggest effect sizes accounted for only a substantial minority of the variance between measures: about 30%.  So even with such data, I would be assuming a lot if I tried to apply this to clients who didn’t volunteer such stories spontaneously in treatment. (Poster:  Associations between Paraphilic Interests and Early Sexual Experiences: The Role of Partners and Perceptions – Lauryn Vander Molen, BA; Scott Ronis, PhD; Raymond McKie, MSc; Terry Humphreys, PhD; Robb Travers, P.)
4) While therapeutic transference has never been adequately demonstrated by properly scientific means, it has been widely clinically understood for 130 years.  For half of that period, it was seen as the crucial factor in all treatment.  If a client’s feelings toward the therapist are crucial in many cases, I owe my clients’ freedom from the burden of knowing about my sexual interests and behaviors, even if this constitutes a kind of paltering that implies support for cis-gendered heteronormativity I may not really support.  I can only oppose conventional or alternative practices in therapy if I believe that these represent a clear and present threat to the client’s welfare or self-determination.  A client running into me at a kink event or a conventional one risks the possibility of provoking them to realistically re-context our work.  That has draconian implications for my ‘freedom’ to express myself sexually in place clients might encounter it, even if I had their full foreknowledge and permission.  If I am to be an authentic professional, I must put client welfare first, but I might still be an authentic kinkster if my kink did not require the general public to know about it.
5)    The fly in this ointment of personal disclosure is power. I enjoy professional power and privilege and a freedom to negotiate the boundaries of my treatment with clients who, from their personal discomfort, suffering, and even psychopathology, must turn to me for help.  In return for those powers, I must not demand of clients that they assent to being exposed to my personal sexual choices.  The professional consulting relationship deprives them of the full freedom to say whatever they think about my sexuality, no matter how hard I try to level the inherent power imbalances.  When advocates demand that I ‘check my privilege’, this is how I interpret the checking in question is to be accomplished.
6)    Because I cannot immediately effect the resolution of social power imbalances in American society, I have a professional and ethical obligation to advocate against arbitrary stigma.  This may be a long and arduous process, but it creates the possibility that a day may come when being out or not will not be a risky hallmark of personal authenticity.  When that happens, the boundaries we need will change, and therapists and clients might enjoy greater freedom of sexual expression.  I do not believe that day is yet here, but this essay is a tiny piece of the work towards bringing it about.

© Russell J Stambaugh, March, 2018, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved

Darkness

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP3 Comments
“Oh, you never turned around to see the frowns
 On the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you.
You never understood that it ain’t no good,
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you.”
“Like a Rolling Stone” – B. Dylan

Mary Gaitskill in 2017, courtesy of the New York Times
Back in April, the New York Times printed a review of Mary Gaitskill’s new book, “Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays”.  Those of you who have been paying close attention know that Gaitskill is the gifted author of the short story that became an iconic 2002 movie about kink, The Secretary.  In this review are included some remarks which serve as an excellent jumping off point for our exploration of a heretofore neglected discussion about kink that emphasizes its dark side.  Trite as it is to say, if you have been reading this blog closely, you may well fail to know the power of the dark side.

Despite the extreme good fortune of inspiring a commercially successful movie of our chosen subject, and there is only a handful of such films, Ms Gaitskill was not altogether satisfied with the transition of her oeuvre to the screen.  Here I shall quote directly from the Dwight Garner’s review.

“She was displeased with that movie, [Gaitskill] writes.  It was breezy and upbeat, absent the darker shading.  The takeaway, she writes, ‘is that S/M is not only painless; its therapeutic:  It has made both characters more confident, better looking, happier, freer, and self-actualized.  Best of all, it has led them straight to marriage!’”  How kinky is that?

It would be easy to dismiss this as the conventional culture and its agents; director Steven Shainberg; or the movie’s producers, cleaning up BDSM for mass market consumption.  For her part, screen writer of record, Erin Cressida Wilson, won a Sundance Festival Award for this work, her very first screenplay.   At least that awards committee didn’t see her work in such a critical light.  But if you have both read the short story and seen the film, there is no debating that Gaitskill’s original is truer, grittier, and the more sadomasochistic of the two works.  And in the rest of Garner’s review, it Is made clear that Gaitskill has enough sadism to recognize it for what it is in others and that she sees herself as the wielder of those little hammers, a characteristically kinky position.  In her own way, she is a social critic.

Kink and the problem of idealization:

Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Secretary (2002)  Nice blouse!
One might be tempted to accept the ‘cleaning up’ of Gaitskill’s story as evidence of the intrusion of ever present fetish elements into kink.  And it is true that the movie settings are lovely, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s blouses exquisitely pressed and silky as any fetishist might crave, but hardly consistent with her role as a down and out woman for whom a job as a secretary constitutes social advancement.  And kink itself has a somewhat convoluted relationship to erotic idealization.  Fetish itself represents the triumph of fantasy over utilitarianism, just as Krafft-Ebing warned us long ago.  For those not so inspired, it is difficult to imagine a brassiere, an opera-length glove or a well-turned boot could provoke more passion than a human body expressly designed by eons of evolution to stimulate procreative desire.  But fetishism is not simple idealization, as anyone who has encountered its intense specificity can attest.  As a teen, I remember reading those letters to Dear Playboy and Penthouse Variations in which fetishists would go on and on about how only barefoot hogtied cheerleaders would do, tennis shoes were completely outré!  There is something going on in fetishism beyond simple idealization.  But it also takes a certain optimism to believe that, with billions of people engaging in various forms of sexual intercourse around the planet, a specific regime as stigmatized, awkward, often alienating, and sometimes downright dangerous form of human expression could be transformative.  Good psychotherapy doesn’t routinely leave bruises except perhaps to the ego.  But there is a serious discourse about kink that it isn’t genuine if it isn’t dirty, doesn’t leave bruises, isn’t dark enough, and doesn’t break the rules.
As a therapist, I have encountered any number of people who earnestly represented to me how kink is therapeutic.  I believe them, as far as it goes, but I also take such declaration with a large grain of salt.  As beneficial as it can be to get what you want, so much human behavior is difficult to explain in terms of simple drive satiation.  If it was, millionaires would quit work when their earnings exceeded their initial ideas about how much money they need to spend, rock climbers would quit climbing El Capitan’s sheer face after a single success, and no one would go back to the exact same kind of lover who left them broken-hearted the conclusion of their last affair.  Often, exactly the opposite is observed.

El Capitan in Yosemite.  Granite sheared by glaciation makes for a steep ascent. “That was fun, let’s climb it again”!  Photo by the author
People do accomplish therapeutic achievements sometimes in kink, but when it comes to shadow play, that process of knowing our dark sides, Freud and Jung, its original proponents, were frighteningly pessimistic about the possibilities.  In Analysis, Terminable and Interminable(1937), Freud wrestled directly with the observation that no amount of good psychoanalysis ever made the unconscious go away altogether even though therapy was the process of making the unconscious conscious.  For Freud, the process of confronting repression was valuable, but one could never know all of one’s dark side, and there were some impulses it would never be OK to enact no matter how insightful one became about them.  Jung was more optimistic, but, looking at the broad cultural sweep of symbols, he was the first to admit that darkness never really goes away.  So, what does it mean to ‘play’ with it?  It is a pathway with no clear destination.

Organized BDSM tries to create space for darkness to be expressed ‘safely’, and as might be expected, such safety is always a little bit relative.  Certainly, it is safer to lie at home in bed masturbating to fantasies of whipping someone and imagine they are loving it than it is to go out and find such a person, acquire the whipping skills to do this safely, get to know the partner well enough that you serve Goldilocks her porridge up at just the right temperature, and suffer the possibility that your partner will flee in terror somewhere in the middle of the process before you learn enough to make the enactment satisfying enough to both of you become sustainable.  For all of kink’s confrontation with conventional romantic idealization, there is a genuine dollop of optimism, if not wild-eyed idealization, in such attempts to find kinky liaisons.  Yet this was even more true in the past, before the internet, use groups, self-help references and FetLife, and people still attempted kink and succeeded in establishing relationships based upon conducting it.

Vlad,’the Outer’, Putin, Kompromat King, courtesy of Getty Images.  “Your secret’s safe with me”!
Likewise, is it rather optimistic to imagine that one’s life will be greatly improved if someone knows about your kink and accepts it.  Surely this achievement would be balm to life-long fantasies and case histories of actual rejection, but it won’t cure your herpes, fill your bank account, or stop your excess drinking. People in BDSM all face stigma over their behavior, and this is a powerful leverage to create community, although kink was stigmatized for years before such communities became common and above ground.  And just when it  appears that kink is making genuine headway to social acceptance, out comes evidence of the Ashley-Madison hack, or content changes at Fetlife due to credit card billing restrictions, or Russian kompromat trying to out the President of the United States for urophilia, to rub our noses in the fact that doing kink still carries substantial social vulnerability even for out practitioners who have taken reasonable steps to protect themselves from the consequences of the judgments of others.  If kink still carries risk, so too is idealization a potential motive to undertake risks in hopes that getting what one wishes for will be as good in reality as one has long imagined only in erotic daydreams.  And before we mistakenly attribute this kind of thinking exclusively to kink, please note how similar this kind of idealization is to conventional heteronormativity.

Despite the idealization surrounding fetish, and the optimism that facing risk will bring delights far beyond mundane sexuality, kink is rather contemptuous of conventional idealization.  Some of this goes back to de Sade’s confrontation with Rousseau and The Church, but modern kink is dismissive of conventional relationship structures, often surprisingly disparaging of conventional sex behaviors even though conventional folk (and kinksters) pursue them with durable enthusiasm, and kink is often strongly anti-romantic.  This is not to say that great loves are not built among kinksters, but many kinks can’t be pursued without eschewing romanticism.  While many new submissives dream of finding and all-knowing top, part of a good top’s role description is keeping submissives from over-whelming themselves and that involves denying them some of what the submissives imagine they desire.  Tops want to frustrate sometimes, and bottoms desire to be frustrated and give consent to exactly that treatment.

Perhaps stigma can be blamed for this variant of MKIBTYC (My Kink is Better than Your Kink) is an occasional form of socially divisive behavior within the organized kink community, where it is actively discouraged.  Here I have creatively perverted the term to apply to kinksters’ occasional tendency to assume superiority over ‘Conventionality’ and use the term ‘vanilla’ as a put down for those who just aren’t hip enough to recognize that kink is ‘superior’.)  Cognitive dissonance alone might be sufficient to explain anyone preferring their chosen forms of sexual expression: having paid the costs of such ‘choices’, we are vulnerable to becoming wedded to their benefits.   Alfred Adler would have no trouble explaining the shaming of conventionals as a turning passive into active after enduring lifelong shaming of one’s kink, and seeking mastery over the very tools of one’s historically experienced vulnerability.

Serious leisure can be arduous.  Rhymes with sex work is real labor.  
Like other areas of human striving, BDSM is sometimes a great deal of work to get to the fun.  Dolling up for those sexy fetish pin ups can take many hours of perspiring in latex under klieg lights.  Good suspension rigs can take hours to do aesthetically.  Playing so quietly that you don’t wake the kids is mostly a turn off that needs to be overcome rather than central to the fun, just as it is for conventional folk.  And rough play requires days of self-care long after the endorphins have worn off.  For many sensation players, that discomfort is a source of pride, but it still hurts, too.

Similar routine inconveniences plague other forms of what DJ Williams refers to as ‘serious leisure’, and conventional sexuality, too.  Serious snow board enthusiasts just as regularly cope with the dangers of taking a spill, or from triggering avalanches.  In kink, it is not always sufficient to overcome routine negative emotions, but to court and intensify them to the limit of personal endurance.  Kinksters don’t just crave intense orgasms, but intense theater that evokes the darker emotions.  Transvestism, cuckolding, and other erotic role play are often shame-based even as participants complain about the social stigmatization of their kinks.  People who crave acceptance do so acting on impulses to do the unacceptable.  All the conventional fears and disgusts: rejection, abandonment, loss of control, loss of autonomy, loss of freedom, loss of identity, injury and loss of bodily integrity, racism, sexism, infantilization, even evil itself are sometimes directly courted. 



Dom/mes and tops, and even submissives deliberately dress to look scary.  They play in ways that routinely exceed any hope of plausible deniability.  Often, they appear to be showing off.  Edge play may be in the eye of the beholder, but being edgy is often seen as a source of status in the communities.  While many try to conceal their kinks, there is considerable pride and public esteem to be had in the community for being out about them; often, the edgier the better. This is not a new development, back in the forties and fifties, this was a characteristic of the S/M outlaw motorcycle cultures only a few of whom may have been presumed to have ever read de Sade or Genet.  There are many in kink who are openly contemptuous of being normalized, suburbanized, or commodified for mass market consumption.  There is a thrill to be enjoyed scaring children, and furry little animals.  It is not just sensation-seeking that keeps emergency room staffs telling tall tales of removing gerbils from the occasional rectum.  An otherwise respectable kink research organization nicknamed their survey of the health needs of the BDSM communities “The Gerbil Survey” in jest, but playing on precisely this dynamic.  An anonymous wag suggested to me that the survey needed a trigger warning!

Kink often embraces things that are despised, dirty and disgusting, from the scut work of polishing boots, to playing with urine and feces, to giving up power and social status, to eroticizing performing the dusting.  The problem of idealization is again illustrated by kink eroticism, which tends to veneer over the unpleasant implications of all this.  While cinematic depictions of Pauline Reage’s perverse training at Chateau Roissy are invariably clean stylish and resplendent with fetish appeal, cleaning up must be a fulltime job with all the blood, saliva and feces involved in all that slave training.  Laundry must be a constant preoccupation despite the scanty attire.  And the Marquis de Sade’s writings would have required an army of hired help he could never afford (He may have been an aristocrat, but the Divine Marquis was chronically short of money!) just to clean up after his literary parties, and that is before we get to the problem of disposing of the dead bodies.  In reality, the Divine Marquis got into plenty of legal difficulty precisely because, once the judgments made at the height of concupiscence were made, he was unable to clean up after their messy interpersonal consequences.  While many of these literary exploits are ‘only’ fantasies, they are willfully messy ones.  No one gets pregnant or an STI unless it serves a dark story line.  It should be noted that most kinky play does not require unwanted contact with dirt and disgust, but the critical term is ‘unwanted.’ What is the point of having a slave if they cannot be forced to sleep in the wet spot?  And how do you know you have surrendered any power unless you have to do things that are genuinely unpleasant?

Jack Morin, reworking John Money’s theory of love maps–or personal erotic templates–could not escape a conclusion that would have nonplussed the late 19th century learning theorists:  rather than mainly stemming from early but repressed positive experiences, eroticism in Morin’s view was equally likely to be erected on earlier experiences of fear, loss and emotional travail.  Robert Stoller for a time considered that kinks might be caused by childhood medical ordeals.  Von Sacher-Masoch believed his love of being beaten by imperious women and his erotic fixation on fur stemmed from a preadolescent experience of being whipped for disrespecting his haughty aunt.  Suffice it to say, she had not specifically intended to awaken his eroticism, but to punish him into submission.  In this way, turning an oppressor’s intended punishment into a source of lust constitutes a kind of mastery.  It restores some personal agency to a story in which the victim rescues something symbolic from maltreatment.  These examples illustrate Morin’s idea that sexual excitements come as frequently from ‘troubling’ experiences as they do from routine drive expression or the desire to repeat good times.

 Lambert Wilson as the chief Merovingian in the Matrix Reloaded (2003)
Well dressed, but what the heck is a Merovingian?  The short answer: bad guys.
The long answer: an early Frankish dynasty (457-752) that established French rule of Gaul.

In conventional media, kink is just emerging from a period in which sadomasochistic attire is used to denote villainy.  Only in the last few years have immaculately suited villains in haute couture duds been opposed by good guys who look like they emerged from the fringes of punk rock (for example, The Matrix)!  Ordinarily, a kinky costume is an unsubtle device to spare us the trouble of character development.  Kink is bad, and everyone knows it.  But not only is it sometimes highly erotic to be bad, it can be socially productive and necessary.
Perversity, creativity, and transgression:

I have pointed out that when Krafft-Ebing first used the term perversion to characterize his kinky psychopathologies, he expropriated a term from moral, religious and legal cultures to characterize erotic preferences that did not serve obvious Darwinian and reproductive purposes.  But he was persuading the professional class on the strengths of medicalizing sexual problems when he did so, and trying thereby to ease the acceptance of his model of sexually variant behavior.  When the Freudians appropriated this language, the lay understanding of psychoanalysis was that kink was moral perversion.  Never mind that Freud believed that we are all perverted in the unconscious, the public understanding lagged the psychoanalytic one.  Freud thought perverse desires were normal, even if their expression in behavior was atypical.  The part the public understood is that these unconscious desires were in opposition to all good conventional social norms.  But Freud laid the intellectual foundation for dramatic philosophical and artistic changes.

A still from the notorious razor/eye sequence from Un Chien Anadalou (1929), Luis Bunel’s and Salvador Dali’s surrealistic silent film.
The artistic and intellectual works of Pablo Picasso, Andre Breton and Salvador Dali, Jean Genet, Michel Foucault and Mick Jagger all keep us mindful that the unconscious and kinky were meant to be seen as transgressive, somewhat turning Freud on his head.   Kinks aren’t normal, they are shocking, crazy, and bad!

All those towering creative figures were transgressive, as they took a current line of thinking about art and society and overthrew conventional understanding for a new one that emphasized differences with the old ways of seeing and interpreting social reality.  Picasso attacked the illusion that experience is contiguous, and reality was concrete.  Breton sought beauty in ugliness, and emphasized ways in which the primitive and modern were contiguous, not opposites;  he reveled in making scary and incomprehensible narratives.  Genet made a mockery of morality; Foucault of professionalism.  Where Elvis Presley and Black R & B made the emerging rock n roll explicitly sexy, Jagger reminded us that what makes us hot isn’t orderly, obedient, or even all that good for us.  In the 1970 movie Performance, getting in touch with your dark side involves not only hot wax play, but bending your mind, light, and gender before getting you killed.  Maybe I’ll skip the cinema this evening and stay in and just listen to Their Satanic Majesties Request on the hi-fi!

A promotional poster for the 1970 movie, Per
In 1984, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel outlined this relationship between perversion and the creation of new artistic paradigms in her book, Creativity and Perversion.  Although she was careful not to license all kink as creative, she did recognize that the impulse to transgression played a key role in looking at things in new ways.  Like psychoanalysis itself, perversion sometimes provided the impulse to look at the world in new ways, and for artistic, scientific and intellectual progress to occur, sometimes the old ways needed challenged or even to be overthrown.  The perverse impulse to reject conventional wisdom could provide that motivation and freedom of thought.  Although Chasseguet-Smirgel is writing in the Freudian tradition, she goes well beyond Freud in this assertion.  Where Freud thought we all had a little perversion in us, erotic variation only became pathology when it displaced healthy sublimations of the (re)productive sexual impulse.  Chasseguet-Smirgel suggests that rejection of conventionality could be personally productive and good for society.  Carried to its logical extreme, well beyond her limited argument, kink could be, is some cases, the healthiest adjustment for some individuals.



This, of course, is congruent with the argument that Richard Sprott and David Ortmann; Michael Aaron; Chris Donahue, and others who think the first order of business in any therapy of someone coming in disturbed by their kink is to hook them up with the kinky communities.  There the client(s) can learn to put their kinks in perspective and profit from the stories of others who are somewhat out about their own kinks.  Of course, not all kinks are created equal, and genuine destructiveness and non-consent can limit this for rare individuals, but it rests upon the assumption that out kinksters are healthier than closet ones, which we simply have no data to demonstrate.  And, according to the 2014 Consent Violations Survey, 80% of kinksters are not out to someone.  So there is good reason to question whether every person who comes in the door is ready to profit from attending BDSM social organizations despite the excellent educational sessions and sound consent ideology to be found there.  But plunging clients into the steamy world of social kink where they will learn what they like to the accompaniment of the drumbeat of the lusts of others is a far cry from Freud’s idea that making the unconscious conscious in the quiet meditation of the consulting room will sublimate desire.



Peter Chirinos and Caroline Shabaz refer to the potential benefits of shadow play in their recent book on Kink Aware Psychotherapy.  They, like myself, have seen individuals whose kinky ‘play’ takes an important constructive role in their response to traumatic experiences in the clients’ personal histories.  Michael Aaron and Dulcinea Pitagora also write about this.   Tops and Dom/mes also say that they see this in their play partners.  While clinical anecdotes can be highly persuasive, they cannot inform us of whether the client we are just starting to see is engaged in such constructive ways, any more than good epidemiological data can.  They do, however, show that others have found such ways can be healthy for some clients.

Transgression is not an unlimited virtue, however.  Kinksters can be ashamed and guilty in unhealthy ways about their kinks, or they can take so much satisfaction from their kinks that this overpowers the empathy they need to moderate their behavior with others.  Willful rebelliousness is a constant problem for those who try to establish norms and provide safety in the kink community.  Recognition of the flaws of authority and conventionality can feed narcissism, romanticize defiance, and fuel anarchy.  I side with Chasseguet-Smirgel in her opinion that perversity can be highly adaptive and creative, but it can also be compulsive and reductionist.  One hates to imagine two kinky ships devoted to hogtied cheerleader bondage passing in the night over the obstacle of bare feet vs tennis shoes!  It should be expected that kinky folk will be conflicted about their perversity, and simply offering permission and affirmation of it in treatment is not likely to resolve deeper internal conflicts.
  
The best initial place to begin work on perversity in treatment is from a suspension of judgment that does not privilege conventionality.   It is important to empathize with the client’s experience of this dimension of their personality, both in perversity’s constructive, neutral, and damaging aspects.  The rush to confront or affirm these feelings makes no sense until you can understand the complexity of the client’s relationship to them.  That takes time, and is not usually possible in brief treatment.  To help with many problems, it is not necessary.  But it is often necessary with people who are deeply conflicted about their kinks, and who are torn between their desires to be accepted as conventional but remain fascinated with their darkness.  In such struggles, ‘authenticity’ may not lie in identification with our light sides, or our dark sides, but in the interplay between light and shadow, which is often experienced as struggle.  In her own way, Gaitskill is trying to tell us that kink is not for the faint of heart.  Then again, conducting psychotherapy isn’t for the faint of heart either!

© Russell J Stambaugh, September, 2017, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved

Consent 301: Consent, It’s Discontents and Safety

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP

In the first half of 2017, Susan Wright and I took our Consent Roadshow to the Society for Sex Therapy and Research (SSTAR) in Montreal on April 21, and I took the 2014 Consent Violations Survey to the 8th Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS) in Chicago, May 26th.

I have finally posted the slides here.  The 2014 Consent Violations Survey slides follow the context material about consent and safety in the kink community.  Most of this material is already known to kink insiders such as those who frequent CARAS.  But we wanted more context for interpreting the data for therapists who might be less familiar with the social organization and ideology of BDSM social groups.


Consent 301: Consent, It’s Discontents, and Safety

Kink’s Evelyn Hooker Moment

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP
Cabaret

“Start by admitting from cradle to tomb
It isn’t that long a stay.
Life is a cabaret, old chum
Only a cabaret, old chum
And I love a cabaret”
Fred Ebb and John Kandler
From its modern inception, psychiatry regarded homosexuality as a sexual perversion and as psychopathology. You heard the beginning of this story on Elephant in the post on Richard von Krafft-Ebing, here: .Richard von Krafft-Ebing  In the early 1950’s, flush with huge administrative responsibilities for 16 million service personnel and veterans of World War II and the Korean War, the US army demanded an official classification system for all of the mental disorders. At that point, hundreds of different local nosologies were in use.  After all, the armed forces needed a systematic way to determine who was crazy, who was malingering, and a reasonable basis for knowing how to allocate their medical resources.  As a minor afterthought, sexual perversions were included in the resultant volume:  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the Mental Disorders I constructed after much debate, by the American Psychiatric Association.  Sexual deviations were mentioned, but not described, in the initial 50-page mimeographed publication, which sold for the entirely manageable price of 50 cents, when a Coca-Cola sold for a nickel and a Saturday matinee cost 25 cents.  The so-called ‘Kinsey Report’ cost more!

The second half of the Kinsey Report (1953) was a close contemporary of the DSM – 1

And there the matter might well have rested but for the twist of fate that found a psychologist at UCLA living next door to an expatriate British writer.  Both had spent time in Germany during the rollicking period of sexual license that comprised the waning years of the Weimar Republic.  She was well acquainted with the gay life, and generally accepting of homosexuality.  Both were deeply affected by the rise of Nazism, and the holocaust that became World War II.   She had barged her way into the nascent psychology profession in the 1930’s when it was less than friendly to women, mainly through her reputation as a brilliant researcher.  He was working on a screenplay that would eventually become a brilliant little send up of the funeral industry.  Your blog author saw that film, The Loved One at age 14 at the recently reopened Heights Art Theater in Cleveland Heights, Ohio in the company of his parents.  It played not long after the foreshortened run of a more famous film, Louis Malle’s The Lovers (1958), which had played there just a few years earlier and had been shut down as obscene, leading to the Supreme Court Case Jacobellis v Ohio, in which Justice Potter Stewart entered the famous opinion the he couldn’t define pornography, but “I know it when I see it.” in the process of overturning the theater owner’s conviction.

Evelyn Hooker

Christopher Isherwood

The writer was Christopher Isherwood, who you are far more likely to know for his Berlin stories which included the tales of American expatriate Sally Bowles, and became the basis for the famous Broadway musical Cabaret.  The psychologist was Evelyn Hooker, an ardent early advocate for de-pathologizing homosexuality.  Isherwood challenged Hooker to use her skills to conduct what became  one of the most famous studies in diagnostic history.
 
As the professional discourse arose about whether homosexuality might not be a disease began to heat up, advocates for retaining the diagnosis claimed that they could use psychological testing to prove it was a mental disorder.  They could diagnose it using psychological testing protocols derived from projective testing.  Hooker arranged to test exactly that assertion, by taking three of the best projective tests, and challenging their star practitioners to blindly sort the protocols of homosexuals from those of heterosexual men.

She chose a leading authority on each test to evaluate the subjects’ protocols, to sort them into homosexual and heterosexual piles, and to evaluate the extent of each subject’s signs of psychopathology on the tests. She also collected her subjects’ sexual preferences and gave each an IQ test.  Bruno Klopfer was a top expert in the Rorschach test which was widely regarded as the best projective test for assessing psychopathology. He scored the Rorschach protocols. His book was so famous that I read it in my first projective testing course in graduate school 25 years later in 1981.  Edwin Schniedman, the inventor of the Make a Picture Test, interpreted the protocols from his test, and Mortimer Mayer interpreted the Thematic Apperception Test protocols.  Hooker gathered the data in her home, typed up the testing transcripts, counterbalanced them for IQ, and then farmed them out to the experts for interpretation.  The ratings were blind because the test evaluators never actually saw the test subjects, only these protocols, as a protection against the possibility that some sort of information irrelevant to the hypothesis might account for the experts’ ratings of the tests.  When the results came in, the three experts all agreed that they could not sort the protocols effectively through test interpretation.  Contrary to the opinions of the clinical profession, their best experts could neither detect psychopathology differences in these two samples, nor could they correctly sort the heterosexuals from the homosexuals.  In 1961, Evelyn Hooker got a lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association for this work and became an ardent professional advocate of removing homosexuality from the DSM.  In the mid 70’s, it was replaced by the diagnosis ‘Ego-Dystonic Homosexuality’ in later versions of DSM – II, and taken out altogether in DSM -III in 1978.  Hooker’s study was the fatal blow to the idea that homosexuals were all suffering from psychopathology that prevented them from being healthy heterosexuals.


Christian Joyal is a thoroughly French sounding Quebecois sex researcher with a crew cut, winning smile, and wry sense of humor.  In his SSTAR presentation on his 2014 Journal of Sexual Medicine article,  Joyal asked the awkward question, “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual?  Where are the statistics?” which left me imagining the Monty Python skit about the cheese shop with zero kinds of cheese.  The DSMs have not included these data since 1978!  In his day job, Joyal investigates subjects convicted of pedophilic crimes in a lab with fabulous virtual reality facilities.  There he can arrange all manner of stimuli and see how these effect patient’s brain function using fMRIs.  He was utterly innocent of any interest in undermining the Paraphilia Section of DSM – 5 until he found himself wondering about the relationship of his subjects’ sexual fantasies and their illegal behaviors.  Joyal found many of his subjects had clear deficits in that portion of their brains related to executive function, which is implicated in processes of planning and impulse regulation.  But before he could draw conclusions about the relationship between pedophiles’ fantasies and their behavior, he would first like to have a baseline about the general population’s fantasies and behavior.  Having read the best books on fantasy and seen no studies worth reviewing, he concluded that his efforts to examine this connection required that he gather the data about ordinary peoples’ fantasies for himself.

Variant, perhaps, but far from statistically unusual!
He was aware that the diagnoses of the paraphilias, of which pedophilia was an example, depended on the recognition that paraphiles have ‘anomalous’ fantasies or behaviors.  So he made sure to include questions in his survey of fantasies examples that included all the major paraphilia categories from DSM – 5.  These are essentially eight classes of these fantasies and behaviors.  Voyeurism (looking at someone non-consensually for the purposes of sexual arousal) Exhibitionism: (exposing oneself to someone non-consensually for sexual arousal) Frotteurism: rubbing up against someone’s body without their consent for the purposes of sexual arousal) and pedophilia.  These acts were unethical, and in most cases heavily criminally sanctioned in Quebec.  He also looked at the consensual paraphilias:  Sadism, Masochism, Transvestism, and Fetishism.  These, of course, are the core interests of BDSM.  These are also the specific fantasies and behaviors that constitute the ‘anomalous’ content of the vast majority of paraphilias, even though countless other variations exist.

With the exception of pedophilia, none of these fantasies are criminal.  Obviously, private fantasies would not be known to authorities.   However, inn some jurisdictions in the United States, any visual material of children under the age of consent (which itself varies depending on what state you are in) intended to provoke sexual feelings can be a serious criminal matter.  In Quebec, Christian can do fMRI scans of any image he wishes to construct on his fancy VR equipment as long as no real life child was used to make it.  In many places in the United States, it would be illegal to construct images of any sort that were intended to provoke pedophilic desires, even in a controlled research environment, and no IRB could approve such a research design that involved a researcher in criminal conduct.   So Dr Joyal is in a position where exploring the relationship between fantasies and behavior is important, and such research is possible to conduct, which might determine just when some fantasies might be genuinely dangerous, and when they are actually helpful to people who are trying to control behaviors that might be criminal or damaging.

The results of Joyal’s study, as summarized in his 2014 Journal of Sexual Medicine article, completely exploded the idea that sexual fantasies involving paraphilia content were ‘anomalous’.  Far from it.  A great many fantasies involving multiple partners, power exchange, sadism, masochism, and bondage, casual sexual encounters, and encounters with multiple partners were reported by more than half of Joyal’s sample of Quebecois. Individuals who reported none of these fantasies were in the extreme minority.  Only three of the 55 things Joyl and Carpentier asked about were so uncommon that less than two standard deviations (a little under 2%) of their respondents reported ever having them.  Thus, hardly any fantasy was anomalous, and the diversity of these fantasies seemed to have no respect whatever for the boundaries of conventional sexual practices implied by the DSM.  It is true that ‘intimate relations with romantic partners’, and ‘romantic encounters on the beach’ were very popular, enjoyed by a large majority of respondents (85-90%).  But far more fantasies that the psychiatry manual referred to as ‘anomalous’ were extremely widespread, even among a nearly representative sample of Quebecois.

None of this should be surprising to professional sexologists, who have known since Alfred Kinsey’s landmark studies in 1948 and 1953, that sexual behavior is more varied than conventional wisdom endorses.   Later works by Friday (1973), Playboy (1974), and Janus and Janus (1993), Laumann, Gagnon, Michael and Michaels (1994), have reminded us of that variability, although the latter study elided direct assessment of kinky behaviors.  Recent studies suggest an uptick in interest and behavior in kink, but most, with the exceptions of Richter et al, of Australia and Langstrom et al of Sweden, the studies lacked representative national samples.

For over thirty percent, some variant behavior was acted upon one or more times in their lifetimes.  Here, Black Leatheramn cavort in front of the camera at the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco.  The Folsom Street Fair is exceptional among kink events in its widely publicized open photography policies.  Cameras and smart phones are often banned at most kink events.
In immediate follow up to the JSM study, Joyal and Carpentier drew a representative provincial sample of Quebec, compared telephone and on-line administrations, and followed up their inquiries about fantasies with questions about abuse history, fantasy satisfaction, and behaviors.  In si doing they replicated a considerable body of research that has failed to demonstrate any statistical evidence for the widely held mythology that interest in kink is linked to early physical or sexual abuse.  These nearly representative samples established that 34 percent of Quebecois had acted on one or more of their variant fantasies within the DSM – 5 consensual paraphilia spectrum at least once in their lifetimes.   In yet a later article, they would demonstrate that 3 in 10 subjects had engaged in a knky behavior one or more times lifetime, up considerably from the 1.4-2.1% rate for behaviors in the past year Julia Richters et al had found in data from 2001 in Australia, and this underscores another of Joya’s observations that how these sexual behavior questions are asked makes a substantial difference in how frequently people endorse them..  Joyal also found that subjects who admitted to masochistic fantasies had significantly more intense and satisfying fantasies than those who did not enjoy masochistic fantasy. 

Overall, this series of papers by Joyal and Carpentier fail to answer the larger question  concerning the relationship between fantasy and behavior.  Are fantasies a compensatory safety valve we use to salve our frustration for experiences which we prefer not to undertake the full risks of living out in reality?  Or are they precursors to specific plans and actual behavior?  The answer is not simple.  It is clear that many people in Joyal’s studies day dreamed of behaviors they did not actually carry out:  The fantasy endorsements were far higher than the behavior rates in all categories.  But some people actually do things in the kinky categories they also dream about.  The study design could establish base rates, but could not establish causality.  Furthermore, pedophilic fantasies were so infrequent in these studies that few inferences could be generalized from such tiny numbers.  So clearly Joyal has much more work to do in that fabulous lab.


ICD -11:

But on another level, Joyal’s research comes at just the right moment.  The revision of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the Mental Disorders – 5 is not the end of the process of struggling to define the proper diagnosis and treatment of problems in variant sexuality.  In 2017 and 2018, the further revision of medical diagnoses continues with the revision of the IDC – 11, the International Classification of Diseases – 11, a system of categorizing all diagnoses and conditions that affect medical health.  The current recommended revisions of this document can be found on the NIH website, and is conducted under the auspices of the World Health Organization, part of the United Nations.  WHO offical site for the ICD -11 revision  This is extremely important, as this system of classification underlies the DSM -5, and serves as the basis for diagnosis and treatment for every billable medical code and procedure everywhere in the world.  Struggles over some of these codes have huge implications for epidemiology, insurance reimbursement, and public health in all western countries, and the behavior of NGO’s in the developing world.

The current beta draft of this document drops the consensual paraphilias; transvestism, fetishism, consensual sexual sadism, and consensual sexual masochism, from the classification system altogether.  Where ICD – 11 is adopted as recommended, these will no longer be paraphilias at all, as Kinsey had suggested 65 years ago and as Joyal has demonstrated again in his recent research.  These standards are recommended by WHO, but they are adopted on a country by country basis.  Indeed, the four Scandinavian countries, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland have already dropped consensual paraphilias from their national coding systems derived from ICD -10.  It is unlikely that places dominated by traditional thinking and religious conservatism will adopt the ICD – 11 as recommended.  In Uganda, homosexuality is still regarded as a both criminal and psychopathological, even though it was already dropped before ICD -10 in most other countries.  But the ICD – 11 is likely to have a major impact in the Europe, the West, and in parts of Asia such as Korea, Japan, and China.

Evelyn Hooker did not end psychiatric discrimination against homosexuality with a single study.  It took the work of Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings and the Gay Liberation Front, and the inside work of gay psychiatrists, and disruption of APA’s annual conference by activists to force consideration of this data.  Compared to that difficult struggle, National Coalition for Sexual Freedom’s negotiations with the DSM – 5 Paraphilia Committee and Norwegian activists editing of the ICD – 10 have proceeded with little conflict.  But just as the data would never have provoked change without the hard work of activists, Evelyn Hooker and Christian Joyal and Julie Carpentier’s data armed activists with the scientific power they needed to complete the political work required to change diagnoses.

Those of you who read my summary of Michael First and Ken Zucker’s presentation at AASECT 4 years ago may recall that Zucker’s last words in that piece were a response to my concern about the DSM-5’s two-tiered diagnostic system because psychiatrists might fail to attribute distress of a paraphilia to social stigma, rather than anything intrinsic to sexual variation.  He had said to wait until ICD -11.  Ken Zucker and Michael First’s DSM – 5 plenary at AASECT
’ 

That moment has arrived.  Much of the credit for the ICD – 11 change rests with this research.

© Russell J Stambaugh, June 2017, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved



Further Discussion of the AASECT Position Statement

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP1 Comment
There has been considerable discussion of the AASECT Position Statement – Sex Addiction, and a great deal of media coverage, most of it favorable.  Despite the fact that no professional organizations were mentioned in the statement, there has been strong reaction from addiction organizations who vigorously disagree. 

The function of this post is to aggregate my further contributions to the discussion of this topic.


The International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals is not a professional organization, but a privately held LLC operated by Patrick and Stephanie Carnes and directors picked by themselves.  It provides certification training in ‘sex addiction’.  The link to their response can be found here:

IITAP Response to the AASECT Position Statement

That link was posted to the AASECT List on December 14, 2016 by Geoffrey Goodman, PhD, ABPP, FIPA, CST, CSAT-S, CMAT-S, RPT-S 

I responded December 16, 2016:

I, for one, am not very impressed.   That is code language for this being my official opinion, not necessarily that of AASECT.  So lets put on our decoding decoder rings.


This IITAP ‘decoding’ document is an attempt to reframe the AASECT statement a sort of promise of future support because it is less absolute than AASECT’s previous statements on sex addiction is simply incorrect. 

1) AASECT has not had a previous advocacy position on sex addiction, at least as far back as 1990. But there was no time when we had the mechanism to do it before 2004.  For more on that, please see my blog post  from elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com.  Individual AASECT Members, however, have often ardently opposed it.

2). It is pure fantasy that AASECT will change its position in the light of new data that hasn’t come in yet.  

That statement reflects IITAP’s belief that such research is just around the corner, but that has been their position for thirty years.  I know the feeling,  I have believed that cheap nuclear fusion power was only 20 years away since the early 1970’s!   Just between you and me, it’s still more than twenty years away now!  

In fact, the existence of a similar mechanism for sex addiction and chemical addictions is a major piece of the puzzle neuroscientists need to achieve to make the analogy work.  They more or less have that now.  They must also reliably demonstrate that ordinary sexual response, non-addictive substance use, and other sources of pleasure that are not about drugs and alcohol do not respond in the same manner.  Otherwise, we are probably seeing evidence of generalized pleasure circuitry, not evidence of addiction.  Likewise, it would be advantageous to see overlap with other colloquial addictions in their conceptual model that addiction treatment is appropriate for the wide range of things they call addictions is correct..   

I am working on a blog post for Elephant that address this relatively high conceptual bar.   To put it very briefly, to show that correlation is probably causality you must demonstrate that your measures are reliable; that they correlate with those things you intend to predict, and they do not correlate as well or better with other measures deemed close to your concept, but yet which lie outside of it; and that they correlate even less well with extraneous things that your model doesn’t include at all.  Frankly, we can rarely meet that standard with the evaluation of other treatment methods, including our prefered models.  But that is what you need to be able to do to defeat Roger Libby’s awkward assertion that behavior is nearly impossible to interpret outside of its context.  Please remember that, reparative and conversion therapies have been found to be unscientific and ineffective, (here I’m referring to the late Robert O Spitzer’s conclusion that 200+ anecdotes  of reparative treatment success did not constitute scientific evidence sufficient to oppose banning them altogether at American Psychiatric Association) not just inhumane, and that the overall efficacy of sex offender programs, in which treatment must be focused on changing sexual behavior, failure rates are extremely high according the O”Donahue and Law’s pessimistic Chapter 1 in Sexual Deviance:  2ed (2008) Guilford Press.  There is no unambivalent changing of sexual behaviors that are persistent enough to raise problems severe enough that they might be seen as powerful as chemical addictions.

3). IITAP still comes around to implying they are much more open and inclusive than they are, mainly by grossly falsifying their history, and end by urging us to play nice. They have, in effect, over-personalized the statement.  

My brief version of the history reflects that of Eli Coleman, who lived it.  I was in grad school at the time and not at any of those meetings.  After a few years of working together on hypersexuality, the addictionologists broke with the sexologists over language, particularly the term ‘addiction’.  Any characterization of AASECT minimizing that sexual problems are real is unfounded.  We demurred years ago that sex problems constituted, in and of themselves, ‘addictions’ and diagnosable mental disorders.  We still demure today.   Not because there are no diagnosable sexual conditions, but that that is a distinct minority of problem sexual behaviors.  Intimacy problems, relationship conflict, reaction to stigma, unmanaged stigma are all best conceptualized in psychological terms even though they have neurological concomitants.

In the meantime, members of other organizations who wish to work together on problem sexual behaviors are welcome!  This is what that work looks like.

4). When working on this statement, we were focused on principles, not organizations.   We are against shaming techniques, pathologizing sexual minorities, and over-grand conceptual schemes that are not backed by quality data and inference regardless of which organization does what.  Please do not do it here, either.  And we are for sexologically-informed treatment, not just that done by AASECT Certified professionals.

It is my opinion that the term sex addiction is indefensible.  If later proof validates the concept, well, we can rethink that.

I might add, that I do not think much of the argument that we must use the sex addiction terminology willy nilly simply because the client might bring it in.  I would not call my client a rabbit simply because he claimed to be one, and when organizations that broke with the larger community of mental health researchers over the use of this term sold it to the lay community, it is not the clients’ term that we are seeing brought in, but the organizations’ premature and incorrect construction.  And with it has come problems of labeling, shame, blaming, flight form personal responsibility, and confused public discourse that make treatment more challenging rather than easier in many instances.  Having resisted the term ineffectively, we are now stuck with the problem discourse.  

If we are on record as opposing this language, for every person who defensively declines to admit they have a problem because there is no such thing as sex addiction, perhaps there is a perfectionist somewhere who won’t kill themselves in despair because they are too ashamed to face such a scary problem.  Perhaps routine desire differences between couples will be easier to address if one person is not prematurely labeled as having the identified problem.   Those are the hoped for benefits of putting this sex addiction Djinn back in the bottle.  Djinn gold  disappears with the sunrise, so spend it quickly if you are planning to rub that lamp!

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This provoked a further post from Dr Goodman addressing sex positive activist Roger Libby and myself but talking past us directly to the AASECT Membership.  He suggested that IITAP was much bigger than AASECT, that 1000’s of 12-step sex addiction groups met every week in the US and they must be helping or people wouldn’t come to them, and that the AASECT Position Statement reflected a desperate bid of AASECT, an organization in decline in numbers and relevance in the face of a veritable tsunami of public and political endorsement of the sex addiction model.  He urged AASECT readers to keep an open mind about sex addiction in the face of AASECT’s position statement.  I paraphrase here as it would be a violation of AASECT listserv guidelines to quote any post but my own. 

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Dr Goodman also posted this excellent link to the work of Dr Voon, which IITAP feels definitively validates the sex addiction model 

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I then responded:

First, the process for writing to individual members of this list is to back channel them to their private email accounts.  But Geoff is already aware of that.

Second, he lost most readers here on the ‘IITAP Decoding Statement’, or should have, when he suggested that AASECT and sexology had a long history of undifferentiated enthusiasm for all sex activity regardless of consequences or contexts.  He suggested maybe we are finally coming around now to right-thinking about sex addiction.  How many times we have heard this lame criticism from moral entrepreneurs in the past?  Aside from being just a trifle patronizing, its just not grounded in history.
AASECT and our sex researcher and mental health allies participated in the original efforts to define and treat hypersexuality out of belief that sometime sexual desire could be too much of a good thing. We could have simply stayed away from those initial joint meetings if we believed that too much sex couldn’t ever be troublesome.  
The addictionologists are the ones who broke up these efforts when they left the other mental health professionals working of hypersexuality over use of the unproven addiction terminology.  
Neither was it minimizing of our concerns about Problem Sexual Behavior to devote an entire 2016 Summer Institute to educate about how to treat it in ways that are less exploitive of social stigma and more empowering of clients than other treatments like 12-step groups and sexologically uninformed addiction programs that have been promoting shame for sexual variations for years.
IITAP, as you well know, has a pretty poor history, up to and including the present, of failing to expel reparative and conversion practitioners and certified addiction professionals who brazenly include advertisements for attempts to change homosexual orientation in their websites and publicity materials.  In the past, IITAP has graciously cooperated with the Family Resource Center, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an anti-gay hate group.  Likewise IITAP cooperate with the ridiculous Anti-FAP, Fight the New Drug, and Your Brain on Porn cultists who’s hyperbolic readings of the existing science are embarrassments to their field and to ours.  So these addiction certifying bodies and their paneyrists are in a poor position to lecture AASECT about our boundaries.
I am a Member of AASECT because it is an alternative to that kind of destructive mis-contexting and mis-conceptualization of the normal variability of human sexual behavior.
It surprises me to see that numbers argument, having just read AASECT President Debby Herbenick’s eloquent and ardent defense of quality studies and sound inference over citing quantities of publications and over-interpretation on this list.  Why would anyone would suggest the AASECT Position Statement — Sex Addiction is a response to the sheer numbers of people in our organization, or in IITAP?  The problem isn’t how many lemmings are out there, but whether they are going over the metaphorical cliff.  By now, you are all aware that lemmus lemmus does not actually hurtle over cliffs to their doom in the real world, but they are doing this constantly in polemics.  You’d almost mistake them for humans!  I cite this as just one more example of why science matters!
All of this reminds me of a great Gary Larson cartoon in which a desperate lobster is saying to an obdurate chef, while the pot steams in the background.  “Did I say three? I’ll grant you four wishes”!   This is not a popularity contest, the fighting for quality education and treatment for sexuality.  AASECT has always been a minority specialization, and it is our responsibility to know things most others have been discouraged from pursuing.  Our Membership is at the highest level since I joined back in the mid-1990’s, but that is beside the point.  Twenty-two hundred is a small portion of 320 million.
(C) by Gary Larson, used under fair use.
Well organized political minorities, many who are allies of organizations like IITAP, have militated successfully against broader implementation of sexual health programs against the wishes of a majority of Americans.  They have opposed women’s right to chose to carry their pregnancies to term.  They have opposed the right of America’s youth to have scientifically valid and emotionally honest sexual health instruction.  They are claiming there is a porn epidemic and it constitutes a health crisis on the basis of zero evidence beyond the fact that porn is widely available on-line.  They claim rising crime despite the fact that the best criminology data shows a 25 year long decline of 30-70% for most offenses.  And despite Diamond’s work strongly and repeatedly suggesting that the increased social availability of erotica is negatively correlated with sex crimes.  Yes, correlation is not causality.  But such statistical links as we have suggests masturbation is associated with health benefits, not harms, and erotica availability is associated with less crime, not more.
So anyone opining on this site about our history would be at an advantage to know it, and not just post material that suits the author.  
I am here to encourage you not just to keep an open mind, but to do it in the skeptical way that scientists do.  Not to just listen to some ad hoc concoction that suits your immediate personal interests.  Scientists read and review the best literature, and find the places where their skepticism can be tested.  They argue and discuss the best tests.  They develop their theories, then test against themselves, rejecting the hypothesis that they are wrong only when the evidence is too great to discard their pet theory.  They are as rigorous about their own theories as they are about those they disagree with.
Test not just with statistics, but with empathy, a knowledge of history, and with your sense of social justice.  Test with context.  Just as liking sex doesn’t make you a slut, rejecting somebody’s poor track record at setting boundaries doesn’t make you permissive.  That is just the same old slut shaming in new drag.
You want my personal decoding of the AASECT Position Statement?
1). No slut shaming.  Often people with problems only magnify them with shame.
2). Be scientifically rigorous and conservative.  Works great with sexological treatments and addiction treatments alike.
3).  Put the client first and don’t power play them, or let others power play you.
4).  The numbers that matter are in carefully constructed statistical tests, not popularity contests.  We just saw millions of voters be wrong.  Happens all the time.  Don’t let it happen to you!
Having overcome my heretofore unconscious fears of declining relevance, I’ll close here for the time being.
“Did I say four wishes?  I’ll grant you five wishes!  They used to feed lobsters to Confederate  prisoners, you know.  We’re highly over-rated.  Shrimp, now shrimp are very tasty…
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Whether we agree with their reading of the data or not, there is great resonance to the observation that sex addiction advocates are not going to simply abandon their models willingly.  Certainly the collective scientific judgments that reparative and conversion therapies are not just a human rights violation, but are ineffective has not prevented their proponents from advertising them.  They claim that If the public demands snake oil, it i it is their responsibility to provide it.  I find this a disingenuous argument for these outlier sex-addiction therapists to make.  They come from a tradition in which the unrealistic demands of clients are confronted, not gratified.  
But in truth, sex addiction therapists are not coming to AASECT because they are looking to find clients for conversion therapies.  They want to do effective, sexologically-informed work.  They take the reality that people have problems sexual behaviors so seriously they have made it their life’s work.  And the data suggest that, while sex addiction clients are mostly wealthy, white and male, and there is certainly defense of privilege involved in their selection of this method of treatment, our clients are often similar to theirs in race and class.  And the data show that, as of 2016, severe conflicts of desire have been difficult to treat since the inception of sex therapy.  
In this we are allied, and being scientifically open-minded means being respectful of the limits of our theoretical models and the effectiveness of our techniques.  It means subjecting our best techniques to rigorous evaluation even when it is expensive and hard to raise money for sex research. It is by no means clear that the sex addiction emperor is the only one with no clothes here.  The proof isn’t all that great for calling most sexual disorders diagnosable mental disorder in the first place.  Behavior needs context.  And in the current research environment, the hope is that neuroscience will overcome this truth.  Do not bet the farm on that assumption.  We have been wrong so many times before.