tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14274046365638151252024-02-01T21:28:11.346-08:00The Elephant in the Hot Tub: Kink in ContextRussell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.comBlogger65125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-66109364625741480782021-03-15T19:07:00.003-07:002021-03-19T12:44:34.532-07:00<p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0phEhtG-wdj-bNR6sQAKOLPcJNJk24GyEaIH7KPzH_5bca_o7MbB6V9-rkapkwVO5fEU6G4AFxzkLn1QPoO-pT9fY6uk4gtu_phAiUY0HVKgJaAJ5BeHZNmyOARF7Q74eOI6BCD6gMKkG/s275/John+Boyega+in+Hyde+Park.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0phEhtG-wdj-bNR6sQAKOLPcJNJk24GyEaIH7KPzH_5bca_o7MbB6V9-rkapkwVO5fEU6G4AFxzkLn1QPoO-pT9fY6uk4gtu_phAiUY0HVKgJaAJ5BeHZNmyOARF7Q74eOI6BCD6gMKkG/w508-h338/John+Boyega+in+Hyde+Park.jpg" width="508" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Actor John Boyega speaking out for Black Lives Matter in Hyde Park, London <br />(soapbox not pictured)</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">t's soapbox time! Welcome to Hyde Park!</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">"Know thyself!" -- Delphic maxim.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">"Knowledge is Power"-- Inscription on the New York Psychoanalytic </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Institute</span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"In the long run, we are all dead!" John Maynard Keynes</span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">"Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so!" Hamlet, Act II scene 2.</span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #222222;">(For those of you who have not been following this blog forever, this essay builds on ideas articulated here at many points, but especially <a href="https://elephantinthehottub.com/2015/08/everything-you-know-is-wrong">Everything You Know is Wrong</a>, and <a href="https://elephantinthehottub.com/2019/09/the-folly-of-self-report">The Folly of Self-Reports</a>)</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I hear a lot about how kink, or sex might be healing.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">It might be.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXOk9lltr_UMmdMVe0yQnlJEFygKdy3o7v2tPjOi8qT749jix1doIP61v77RLSLC2FTjUudDw9ANIoWVEl8ZDu-V4aN-K-lp6GggRLtD6QPEpA2Bn0bB7FOfu6J2hNlX1rWHkamihId9Zz/s275/Andrew+Cuomo.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="363" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXOk9lltr_UMmdMVe0yQnlJEFygKdy3o7v2tPjOi8qT749jix1doIP61v77RLSLC2FTjUudDw9ANIoWVEl8ZDu-V4aN-K-lp6GggRLtD6QPEpA2Bn0bB7FOfu6J2hNlX1rWHkamihId9Zz/w545-h363/Andrew+Cuomo.jpg" width="545" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Not an icon of sexual healing:<br />New York Govenor Andrew Cuomo facing charges of sexaul harassment.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">But you will notice that lots of sex is not healing. Andrew Cuomo is experiencing that right now. Revealing that you find it arousing to coerce your workmates into sexual conversations with your political position is not healing to your career these days. Millions of sexual trauma survivors struggle with the fact that coercion isn't healing. It certainly can't be assumed that all manner of sex is healing in all contexts, even though hundreds of millions of people find it restorative and relaxing which certainly sounds lovely.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;">Medicine is intended to be healing. In my case it has been life sustaining, but it ain't necessarily so. My friend who fasted for six hours in prep for a scan and who was told she was the victim of a scheduling error didn't find the experience healing in the least. But it is not just expense and administrative error that interfere with healing in medicine. Anaphylactic shock is certainly unhealthy, yet a big enough risk of my COVID vaccination that everyone in my county is asked to wait around 15 minutes after their vaccination to preclude the very unlikely event that their protective shot might kill them!</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Psychotherapy is intended as healing. It very often is, and much in how we do therapy is explicitly intended to be healing. But you have seen people who have had years of therapy who do things that seem less than fully healed. We all have favorite examples. Healing ever happens, but there is a great deal that the healing metaphor fails to accurately predict or describe. At best, only 75-80% of psychotherapy patients get better in the bulk of evaluation studies, and many of those leave satisfied, but without all of their symptoms fully relieved. Anyone unclear about this need only look up the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Eysenck">Hans Eysenk</a>. Those of you who actually followed the link to "Everything You Know is Wrong' will find a classic case study of bias in social science in Eysenk's work on 'cancer personality, detailed in the Wikipedia thumbnail!</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv0ZiZfQI5vNvdnLz2yOpfn29_1Qmb4PFPO9jIjB8ZTrw-GIMp4aS4k0pRrwkUSZw3Sjiqe6Itg4cbzhJhXB4KVZvV4VB1Wtjs9qCVLg0H7nT9guM6lZ1qTZhTG_y3SKnUnYsrC-IVdDAC/s1920/IMG_20151020_091630.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1080" height="820" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv0ZiZfQI5vNvdnLz2yOpfn29_1Qmb4PFPO9jIjB8ZTrw-GIMp4aS4k0pRrwkUSZw3Sjiqe6Itg4cbzhJhXB4KVZvV4VB1Wtjs9qCVLg0H7nT9guM6lZ1qTZhTG_y3SKnUnYsrC-IVdDAC/w461-h820/IMG_20151020_091630.jpg" width="461" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The star patient getting a scan. "Although his cancer has responded remarkably well to treatment, the patient could never be healed from his delusion that medical procedures are an opportunity to practice his stand up routines."</span></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">On top of all my privileges which I brought to cancer treatment, I took away yet another by being a very challenging but successful case. My cancer treatment left a very expensive legacy of iatrogenic costs, but given the poor odds of my survival, those modest but significant disabilities pale in comparison with death, the ultimate diagnosis of ill-health. I can only imagine oncologists who see ninety percent of cases like mine die brighten when they read my chart and prepare to enter my consulting room. I remind them of why they get up for work every morning. I am 'healing' for them even as we consult to mitigate the consequences of my healing that are hard to live with. No wonder they all seem glad to see me!</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">'Healing' is a social construction designed to give hope, and help us dispose of uncomfortable ambiguities like these. As a social constructionist -- hopefully with your kind permission as a reader -- I use my time on the box to sadistically deconstruct that ideal. Healing, my friends, is not all its cracked up to be. Truth is what you need, but nevermind!</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Good sex, kinky or not, can certainly be gratifying and thrilling and silly and fun. Stripping away some of the heteronormative idealization with the entry of gay, trans, and kinky voices into the discourse has certainly broadened our understanding of what sex is. This is far from brand new! Sigmund Freud started that 135 years ago. So I am distrustful of discourse that says kink isn't sex. Looked at this way, a lot of sex isn't really all that sexy. We are way beyond the idea that all sex is reproductive, or coital, or even involves intromission, or all of that good biomechanics that Masters and Johnson were at pains to point out. So your two hour Shibari suspension in which neither you nor your rigger had an orgasm but you were transported to a blissful timeless space and he made a terrific promotional video is still probably sex in my book. Even if you prefer to do orgasms some other time and in a completely different context. If you drew a paycheck for it, most would call it sex work whether of not you would have done it for free. In kink, even sexual denial serves sexual purposes!</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6MgdNVw0tB629VluCjZCSbbS4mz6bf2r537nfZkl1UrruereNrkEoxi9BiTxcvi2fKQ_zUsi1BA6AskUIu2I0eADyp7Pw7Rpwe9qxXhWkuUCu5RXtx06sxaVYQbYzoC_ukPfIEZnK2O4Q/s231/male+chastity+device.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="231" data-original-width="218" height="477" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6MgdNVw0tB629VluCjZCSbbS4mz6bf2r537nfZkl1UrruereNrkEoxi9BiTxcvi2fKQ_zUsi1BA6AskUIu2I0eADyp7Pw7Rpwe9qxXhWkuUCu5RXtx06sxaVYQbYzoC_ukPfIEZnK2O4Q/w451-h477/male+chastity+device.jpg" width="451" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This is a sex toy despite the fact that its function is to allow a partner to deny the wearer orgasms.</span></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">If you can tolerate my broad and rather ambiguous definition of sex and my nasty deconstruction of healing, then perhaps you will better understand my challenge to the construction that kink might be healing. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I can only add that scientific evidence that psychotherapy is healing is somewhat ragged and ambiguous. Given that we have professionalized psychotherapy, medicalized it, and expect people to pay good money for it, it makes sense that we should demand some proof psychotherapy is healing. And science has provided quite a lot of evidence that psychotherapy is correlated with things we intellectually associate with healing, even if we are short of agreement on an what a good operational definition of healing ought to be.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Science has not done this evaluation for kink, or even very much for sex. Beverly Whipple et al have a chapter in her book "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Science-Orgasm-Barry-R-Komisaruk/dp/080188490X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+Science+of+Orgasm&qid=1616179974&sr=8-1">The Science of Orgasm</a>" of the health correlates of sexual activity. They are modest but real. Stigma, professional priorities, privacy and the rights of human subjects, problems of agreeing what sex is, prudishness, and romanticism have all posed significant obstacles to such a quixotic project for kink, so it is unsurprising to no one that there is a persistent paucity of scientific evidence that kink is healing. Therefore there is little counterweight to claims that it is.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">But I would push on into the vacuum provided by this lack of evidence with the claim that <b>it is sex negative bias to assert that kink needs the function of healing to be defensible activity in the first place! </b>As DJ Williams points out, kink has many of the positive values of other forms ow serious leisure.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;">Likewise, it is pure folly to think that Wartenberg wheels, duct tape, nipple clamps, latex hoods, diapers, furry costumes, or ballet boots that lace up all the way to your thighs are intrinsically healing. All the sexy fetishistic trappings of kink that rivet our attention are not intrinsically healing. Just between you and me, many of them were chosen because their associations are scary and as far from healing as our imaginations can get. Aren't ballet boots sexy because they are nearly impossible to walk in? If good health means good function, ballet boots are pathologically crippling. If Godzilla is attacking the city, no one says "Wait! I have to lace these ballet boots on before we run for our lives!" Indeed in response to the first draft of this essay, one of my more thoughtful respondents, Cyndi Darnell, offered, "the beautiful boots might be soothing, permission granting, liberating, validating which contribute to a sense of well-being." Surely these feelings are correlates of health, although I pause at the construction that such torturously constraining boots are intrinsically 'liberating.' One must work to make them so. To make Cyndi's construction work, an individual must do a great deal of shadow work to get to that place of liberation. In the meantime, the boots populate the runways and our extreme imaginations, not the athletic markets. Even professional ballerinas do not train in them.`</span><span style="color: #222222;"><span> </span> </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Yet we agree that they are symbols of power!</span> [See the first Comment by the author.]</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTHSy7ZWPSlSPM9nb-fqZERl97vI_lBMcMWnZqhU-WcOeyf2KF3CsGUe-XFSJhI8_H8sxjoL5C-4X9bYezUARekdtXGCgtCXhnZZcxXh6voz7NE_zgzp2TRqOa7536UPBfvRIAkKu8Xm4-/s263/ballet+Boots.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="263" data-original-width="192" height="715" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTHSy7ZWPSlSPM9nb-fqZERl97vI_lBMcMWnZqhU-WcOeyf2KF3CsGUe-XFSJhI8_H8sxjoL5C-4X9bYezUARekdtXGCgtCXhnZZcxXh6voz7NE_zgzp2TRqOa7536UPBfvRIAkKu8Xm4-/w521-h715/ballet+Boots.jpg" width="521" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ballet boots.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">If and when there is healing in kink, I assert that it resides in the context. It is often absent or invisible on Porn Hub, and our favorite works of kink erotica. It inheres instead in consent, communication, and acceptance, the not very glamorous side of the life. Much of this instruction you could get from a psychologist or a good business trainer as easily as from a good dominatrix.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">If, in kink, you can agree to anything and keep your agreement and trust others to do the same; if you can suspend your judgment about yourself and your partner(s) and accept their fraught relationship with the things they are most afraid of judgement about outside the bedroom or dungeon, then kink might be healing. If you can keep communicating long enough to hammer out relationships that cannot just be assumed into existence on the basis of stereotypes, kinky criteria can form healthier relationships than vanilla assumptions routinely provide. The inevitability of nonconsensual powerplays, slut shaming, rigid gender expectations, and human inadequacies that populate conventional daily life create the opportunities for kink to be healing. And, if they abound in daily life, how much healing can we expect kink to do?</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Janet Hardy suggested, quite properly, I think, that kink can provide training in handling intense stimulation. This is a somewhat extreme but useful form of teaching affect tolerance, a very common healing goal in psychotherapy that never goes anywhere near the Dance of Souls! Brad Sagarin's work at this event at South by Southwest Leatherfest is a seminal contribution to exploring the neurophysiology of sensation play. <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13691058.2016.1234648?journalCode=tchs20">Extreme Rituals in a BDSM Context:</a> ,<a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153126">Altered States of Consciousness in an Extreme Ritual</a> It is part of what Katherine Zitterbart is discussing in kink preparing her with skills for enduring chemotherapy for breast cancer. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;">Hardy also suggests that Dossie Easton's notion that shadow play is inherently therapeutic. As a therapist, I am neutral about this as a principle, but have seen persuasive specific instances. Certainly thoughtful kinksters like the late Bill Henig and Sybil Holiday have presented persuasively on this. The general argument is that expressing one's dark side is a crucial way of knowing it. Usually people making this argument refer to Jungian and Freudian psychoanalytic theories which refer to the unconscious. While the Freudian and Jungian ideas of the unconscious are quite different, and by training and personal experience, I am greatly biased towards the Freudian view, there is along therapeutic discourse that is quite distrustful of the idea that acting on unconscious ideas is crucial to understanding them . But part of that same discourse has been acutely stigmatizing of kink, and given the history pathologizing kink behaviors, the professional literature cannot be accepted uncritically. Often therapeutic arts have been dragooned into acting as agents of social control, a problem that still plagues the modern DSM-5. </span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;">It is hard to know how the term 'healing' applies when the DSM-5 characterizes nonconsensual paraphilias like pediophilia and sexual sadism which do not trouble the client but other people are harmed. These are criminal conduct, not diseases, especially given that problems abound in identifying their common etiologies and treatments. I will examine the criticisms of the paraphilia diagnosis further when I summarize the important works of Charles Moser, who has a considerable and persuasive body of work that has led to its moderation, but not removal, of the paraphila diagnosis from the DSM-5.</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;">Closely related is the work of Emily Prior, DJ Williams and Richard Sprott characterizing kink as 'serious leisure' analogous to rock climbing. This analogy applies best to the vanguard of people involved in the out and intellectually active dimension of the kink community such as are likely to be reading this essay. It is much less clear how it applies to the majority of kinksters who act on their fantasies without joining an on-line community, social group, or attending kink events, or learning from the extensive kink educational discourse. But it is certainly true that the kink intelligentsia learns techniques for playing more safely and effectively and it is easy to imagine that many of them know their limits and explore their preferences more deeply from participation in kink activities within their communities in a manner much like serious climbers do. The element of testing oneself, knowing one limits, managing risks, and self enhancement and discovery are very similar. So concerns that acting on one's impulses is a substitute for understanding them which have historically characterized the therapeutic community cannot be taken uncritically any more than self-reported data can.</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;">One of the reasons kink is decades ahead of the mundane world's operationalization of consent is that our daily lives do not explicitly function on consent. Much of our behavior is incentivized to the point of coercion. Much behavior is not accepted. Judgement is implicit. Ostracism is common and real. Often we cannot imagine freedom from judgement because we are active participants in judging ourselves an others in our attempts to negotiate social life. And nooses are left in classrooms and garages, slurs scratched on bathroom walls, tags stake out territory on walls and railway cars. Lots of things are NSFW. FB bans posts with sex in the title. Credit cards won't process your purchase from the wrong sites. What boundaries you can enforce is a function of your privilege. For many, our closest relationships are too precious to risk honestly asking for what we desire. Stigma is a social disease, albeit with very real effects on individuals, but it calls into question the any construction of the term 'healing; when the dis-ease is societal.</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">You will note that many of the ground rules of good psychotherapy: informed consent, honesty, suspension of judgment, learning about self and others, intimacy, and intense communication are the crucial ingredients of effective kinky relationships. So the question of whether kink might be healing might be the starting point of a sales job to get you to sign up for something you aren't ready for. Or it might just be true.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Be advised, therapy is hard work...</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;">And O's journey into sublime submission might be easier to write about than to actually do. Kinkyfolk are not readily dissuaded by the notion that kink might be hard sometimes. If kink is healing sometimes for some people, perhaps their choices are a little elss coerced in kink than in mundane living despite all the colorful trappings of power exchange.</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium; text-align: justify;">© Russell J Stambaugh, March, 2021, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222;"> </span></span></div>Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-22374690016558239912019-04-12T11:37:00.003-07:002019-04-14T08:51:48.283-07:00Why Fetish Matters<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKELoFVzkIQMYaJgWwuvm8obAh3PBDl2Un1HfjnQUgaqbWkKgpllpH21XEbYQ-0MG-NYaLERni8r0AnXBbkt_JoYHM0gogScW1h6pI0aQAMh5dJv2By9W91oCkAt8T9J7Bb5ot0E4AbVrv/s1600/Tom+of+Finland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="750" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKELoFVzkIQMYaJgWwuvm8obAh3PBDl2Un1HfjnQUgaqbWkKgpllpH21XEbYQ-0MG-NYaLERni8r0AnXBbkt_JoYHM0gogScW1h6pI0aQAMh5dJv2By9W91oCkAt8T9J7Bb5ot0E4AbVrv/s400/Tom+of+Finland.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A fetish illustration by Tom of Finland (Touko Valio Laaksonen 1920-1991)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The avowed goal of this blog is
to stop the othering of clients who practice altsex behaviors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fetishism is the archetypical altsex issue
because it is at the heart of how we define a sexual interest as deviant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
is going to require a great deal of historical context.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Social regulation of sexuality is a cultural
universal, although there is wide variability in which behaviors are regarded
as sexual and which are proscribed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As such, I
realize that this account is likely to under-represent non-Western discourses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will quote a disproportionate share of nineteenth and twentieth century white males who held the commanding heights of
sexological discourse during that period.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The meaning of fetish, and the
history of fetishism is intimately bound up with the history of things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Things as things, people as things, and even parts
of people as things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the insights
you get from this study is that Freud was right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If sex isn’t about everything, it surely is
about something a great deal broader than the immediacy of procreation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those are separate
ideas that can, but might not necessarily co-occur.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Invention of Sexual Fetishes.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEHE4P_7iKTItks_7ZeFSBnWMoTlrsu7iKduDebEvZErHF2r3_YtZtKaVQ-6eYq61n099RvICd1hhlGwPlIDim6R9p_e96bicqoWU_6u4m_Z0sRVDFyg_GmJCXULUddoG6rsBbIcQwLekN/s1600/Benin+Bronze+Head.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1403" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEHE4P_7iKTItks_7ZeFSBnWMoTlrsu7iKduDebEvZErHF2r3_YtZtKaVQ-6eYq61n099RvICd1hhlGwPlIDim6R9p_e96bicqoWU_6u4m_Z0sRVDFyg_GmJCXULUddoG6rsBbIcQwLekN/s400/Benin+Bronze+Head.jpg" width="340" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">16th Century Benin bronze head. <br />Originally representations of dead family members used in ancestor worship, <br />these became popular trade goods with the Portuguese.</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaS2by3xvq35XNPCpEGAHqzSgn2meC9WfD72-1gPm9KWPwpK1nvVvg_Ja9DxtM1MM5HOzH1OL_d_lNPawvlTPNmyZkbgJnk9RcmHRjQRAEG9sMJlINSA-AO1hqjgkP_vnRLgoXE44ML5a7/s1600/IMG_20180815_094715_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaS2by3xvq35XNPCpEGAHqzSgn2meC9WfD72-1gPm9KWPwpK1nvVvg_Ja9DxtM1MM5HOzH1OL_d_lNPawvlTPNmyZkbgJnk9RcmHRjQRAEG9sMJlINSA-AO1hqjgkP_vnRLgoXE44ML5a7/s400/IMG_20180815_094715_1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A lucky three-legged frog Japanese netsuke circa 1910. This fetish was carried to bring good fortune.<br />Photo by the author.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ9YCDS28KaaGxT5jpcKCLP3yTY3-EO_6_NfhJ9DCFAHVbgWIKytOsEKQHoGyB_yc9Ztj5BpnStulF0B7hrWEdD6tnnZMQp_hKEDbZ675-dTnpTVFz7taBtFJpqIPsYwO8qpuPQIgYTpOO/s1600/Alfred_Binet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1246" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ9YCDS28KaaGxT5jpcKCLP3yTY3-EO_6_NfhJ9DCFAHVbgWIKytOsEKQHoGyB_yc9Ztj5BpnStulF0B7hrWEdD6tnnZMQp_hKEDbZ675-dTnpTVFz7taBtFJpqIPsYwO8qpuPQIgYTpOO/s400/Alfred_Binet.jpg" width="311" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alfred Binet (1857-1911) French Associationist and a father of modern psychology.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as deliberate study could cause someone
to learn a language or skill, one could learn to become sexually attracted to
something or someone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A fetish was just
unfortunate learning as a result of chance experience. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of this was
advanced well before Ivan Pavlov won the 1904 Nobel Prize in physiology that
established the field of classical conditioning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiukpi72fc5nmrlT-diBjMi9m-FexelK4w8I4HJDm2wo-M5c2F5HkAOsrvx_B83DFXjc85kI_pX5AN2UlD8B8YQ_MiXL1x-8V3dgCTAqiTugj8Jwl-AntEhgYikxbgl0yhCpb1WCTvEonR5/s1600/Krafft-Ebing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="277" data-original-width="182" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiukpi72fc5nmrlT-diBjMi9m-FexelK4w8I4HJDm2wo-M5c2F5HkAOsrvx_B83DFXjc85kI_pX5AN2UlD8B8YQ_MiXL1x-8V3dgCTAqiTugj8Jwl-AntEhgYikxbgl0yhCpb1WCTvEonR5/s400/Krafft-Ebing.jpg" width="262" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) Austrian Sexologist.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This idea was expropriated by
Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his classic work<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">,
Psychopathia Sexualis </i>(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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Origin of
Species,</i> (1859).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anything which interfered
or redirected sexual desire away from sexual procreation was a medical
disorder, rather than a moral failing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, who wanted to be viewed as someone
too diseased to consummate procreative sexual relations?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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:<a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2016/01/richard-frieherr-von-krafft-ebing-1840.html">Richard Frieherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French novelist.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For anyone seeking a modern deconstruction of the relation between industry
and sexuality, I recommend Gustave Flaubert’s novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Madame Bovary</i> (1857) who’s protagonist is led to her destruction by
the erosion of the values of country life under the twin late 19<sup>th</sup>
century onslaughts of greater social mobility and consumerism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And Flaubert tautly draws our attention to the great problem poses by
the second industrial revolution:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>objectification, and he uses commercial fetishism as his argument.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7zuB1Ifuc-wp0nPwIcS1k06rWevLyxAbVowAs1XDWnXgSjXaa1RAKmAVQwTCnkgTYTizgcfJXeplYZ6qcZIvyqIhkKJ7EwDpjWbXdyH4ld9bPLtra3Xt2hOgV_623h-e9EBWkGu0X3sPu/s1600/S+Freud.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7zuB1Ifuc-wp0nPwIcS1k06rWevLyxAbVowAs1XDWnXgSjXaa1RAKmAVQwTCnkgTYTizgcfJXeplYZ6qcZIvyqIhkKJ7EwDpjWbXdyH4ld9bPLtra3Xt2hOgV_623h-e9EBWkGu0X3sPu/s400/S+Freud.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Austrian neurologist and father of psychoanalysis</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Three
Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Therein he declared that “every sexual aim has an object.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fetishism occurred when the object of that
sexual aim was an object in the world, rather than the partners’ genitals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7N6qJy5etn94kIUOUF9K9QgrInOs2UNc0XEZeTibX2CKMzePD6C7QEI-4jH4vywDle_NHobaFuZxUSUoNMV7pBeWiQancU-uygXtrQB-yFDRnBY4ffLKGEuq-J8SmYBEcckHeKXlGnVIB/s1600/IMG_20180814_174651.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7N6qJy5etn94kIUOUF9K9QgrInOs2UNc0XEZeTibX2CKMzePD6C7QEI-4jH4vywDle_NHobaFuZxUSUoNMV7pBeWiQancU-uygXtrQB-yFDRnBY4ffLKGEuq-J8SmYBEcckHeKXlGnVIB/s400/IMG_20180814_174651.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">How much can one really like a boot? Perhaps, quite a lot. <br />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.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Note this exposition of Freudian
theory modifies Krafft-Ebing’s explanation of fetishism and all sexuality in
several important ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
Krafft-Ebing, sex is behavior, and deviant behavior that is incompatible with
procreation is proof of genetic degeneracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For Freud, sexuality is unconscious motivation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So Krafft-Ebing would consider someone who
really liked boots a lot but had satisfactory relations with his wife as not
having a fetish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it would still be infantile and
regressive, since genital sexuality was firmly focused on higher generative
purposes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Three Contributions to a Theory of Sexuality </i>(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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Look in the
unconscious, suggested Dr Freud, and you will find weird stuff about everyone
because that is what the unconscious is:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the hidden socially unacceptable ideas that we all bury in the process
of making a somewhat successful adjustment to sociocultural demands of our
communities.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud’s role of sexuality as
underlying motivation also had profound implications for the idea of what an
object was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Krafft-Ebing and
Flaubert, an object was a thing in the world that was not instrumental for
sex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Freud’s use, the object was the
mental target of the sexual aim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freud
was working on a psycho-biological theory that explained human psychology in
mental terms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the brain, everything
was symbolic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This allowed him to see
the oral, anal, phallic or genital implications of anything, but it also meant
his objects were not material.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were
the objects of grammarians, not physical items in the real world. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, the meaning of symbols
becomes complicated as their cultural and individualistic context varies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>White is associated with mourning in some
cultures, black in others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Depending upon
and individuals’ associations, that boot fixation could represent a great
variety of different things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, Freud greatly
succeeded in furthering the medicalization of sexual variation that
Krafft-Ebing had begun.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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 19<sup>th</sup> century
psychology:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the nature-nurture
conflict.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The associationists’ and
later, the learning theorists’ and behaviorists’ position was that fetishism
constituted learned behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyone who
happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time could have a powerful
experience that caused a fixation of boots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This success was part of where he got the street
cred to remain the most important voice in sexology for 40 years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS5z161TcCtETQIAQQI17EwV28hEHD_hwgFHfcnnm7bU3ULCIkuhiq1c6fq3bGP2X-tfMM9JDjYgrdiXYInRY_nozVsIU7ocL7kQfmH7GilfdYwiAzSpQbvsoG9ISEnf9ojeDR-MCTHoIi/s1600/IMG_20151212_152058+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1188" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS5z161TcCtETQIAQQI17EwV28hEHD_hwgFHfcnnm7bU3ULCIkuhiq1c6fq3bGP2X-tfMM9JDjYgrdiXYInRY_nozVsIU7ocL7kQfmH7GilfdYwiAzSpQbvsoG9ISEnf9ojeDR-MCTHoIi/s640/IMG_20151212_152058+%25281%2529.jpg" width="473" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<br />Photo by the author, 2015</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But that authority was used only
sparingly to destigmatize sexual preferences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a though
experiment, try reframing your sexual fantasies such that procreation and only procreation
is the ultimate erotic reward! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Note also
that if I tried this thought experiment back in 1900, it might well have
failed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Robert
Stoller wrote a book <i>Splitting, A Case of Female Masculinity (1973) </i>the conclusion was
that the ‘perverse sexuality’ in that case was really a symptom of personality
disorder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Before that, a</span>ll 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! </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For more on Sigmund Freud: <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-psychotherapeutic-theories-of-kink.html">The Psychotherapeutic Theories about Kink: Myths and Realities about Sigmund Freud</a>, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsTIteoVx-I3y9UIcsDR9ZITdoybSkgcSdI3lId2TV23QEWnug7uDaJy669sML_1Wvf_Gl4TrappFLYgE2wUyv5chidu_3wzbqCQZpxk5bujZzupb0wu53813WBPkRzZhIbyEXMgdI27er/s1600/Hirschfeld-portrait-xlg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsTIteoVx-I3y9UIcsDR9ZITdoybSkgcSdI3lId2TV23QEWnug7uDaJy669sML_1Wvf_Gl4TrappFLYgE2wUyv5chidu_3wzbqCQZpxk5bujZzupb0wu53813WBPkRzZhIbyEXMgdI27er/s400/Hirschfeld-portrait-xlg.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) German physician)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition to
establishing the first Western organization for the study of sex, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Intitut f</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">ü</span>r
Sexualwissenschaft,</i> Hirschfeld was a prominent early advocate for public
acceptance of homosexuality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Hirschfeld thought that fetishistic behavior was common and little cause
for concern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This idea partially caught on, and it is
technically proper to refer to foot fetishism as foot partialism today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freud, however demurred.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hirschfeld died in 1936, and Freud in 1939,
but neither escaped the reaction from Nazism to scientific thinking about
sexuality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Later, Freud would be forced to flee Austria
due to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anschluss</i>, the political
reunification of Germany and Austria under the Nazis in 1938.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Setting the Stage for Fetish Culture:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXeVDFWh7S-1lZeIN3sshERDu66sjUf31-KYim8-SZsl4S8_PiroeGKkGMJzejXrNYxBOTHJdT9UHGZ7CnOQM-PbvcFMHkCOibVMN2UR0CiPoa3FgsNIqEpKI9L3payqWHIGG4JovDZQty/s1600/220px-Berkey-horse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="296" data-original-width="220" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXeVDFWh7S-1lZeIN3sshERDu66sjUf31-KYim8-SZsl4S8_PiroeGKkGMJzejXrNYxBOTHJdT9UHGZ7CnOQM-PbvcFMHkCOibVMN2UR0CiPoa3FgsNIqEpKI9L3payqWHIGG4JovDZQty/s400/220px-Berkey-horse.jpg" width="297" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Illustration of a whipping device used in 18th century English bordello culture.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Prior to World War II there was
no significant aboveground kink subculture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Starting in the 18<sup>th</sup> century,
practices we recognize as modern kink existed in bordello culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of this was surely kinky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The modern send up of this is the character
The Criminologist – An Expert in A Rocky Horror Picture Show. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the guise of medical treatises, the
publishers were able to avoid censorship.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUtA9ezaHWFtP4yGCdcZYRP508MathC5O9SjYQbwUWV-rkhN4QV6dtkoflghmgm5IQbKaJ13v8qZqbsQNpEZD-52gpLgCDTDXRFwxyXwsFCB3CF7BLTjMXPOGHxcKH2VHy4Noaedi_wpHm/s1600/Narrator+in+Rocky+Horror.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="182" data-original-width="277" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUtA9ezaHWFtP4yGCdcZYRP508MathC5O9SjYQbwUWV-rkhN4QV6dtkoflghmgm5IQbKaJ13v8qZqbsQNpEZD-52gpLgCDTDXRFwxyXwsFCB3CF7BLTjMXPOGHxcKH2VHy4Noaedi_wpHm/s400/Narrator+in+Rocky+Horror.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Charles Gray as The Criminologist in Rock Horror Picture Show (1975).</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bob Bienvenue will be at the <a href="https://e.sparxo.com/mote-con">Multiplicity of the Erotic Conference</a> May 23-25 in Chicago.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Changes coinciding with World War II:</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->The
death of Freud broadened psychoanalytic discourse. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->The
huge numbers of citizens under arms provoked changes in mental health
care.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->World
War II fostered the development of computers and of survey technology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Large
number of men and women were thrown together in wartime work groups and were
bonded by intense experiences in a single-gendered environment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Expansion
of the economy in wartime led to increased material wealth and availability of
consumer goods.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX8FGPs6XQ5qIVOj43vPJvftwoZ0pigJZUtZgQEvp3kWWM5jActIbVf_E_3zf7p1b-46NnqRlIWqa8-nEad6HVvq0J2d3Vk3veZQuYveW78ASJ9Wu4Cku-qK8d7OQwCXIVnqv9fKWKC3Zz/s1600/Zeppelin-Raid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="635" data-original-width="637" height="397" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX8FGPs6XQ5qIVOj43vPJvftwoZ0pigJZUtZgQEvp3kWWM5jActIbVf_E_3zf7p1b-46NnqRlIWqa8-nEad6HVvq0J2d3Vk3veZQuYveW78ASJ9Wu4Cku-qK8d7OQwCXIVnqv9fKWKC3Zz/s400/Zeppelin-Raid.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Was Britain's civil defense plan a reaction to huge airborne fetishes from World War I?<br />Partly!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud died of mouth cancer in the
first weeks of World War II.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
daughter, Anna took over as President of the International Psychoanalytic
Association.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anna was interested in
children, and in defense mechanisms, and in the immediate post war years psychoanalysis
broadened its theoretical scope.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1940, this
included banishing all British children from the urban areas that were expected
to be the focus of strategic air attack.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This proved fortunate, as starting in August of 1940 and continuing
through late 1944, British cities were the focus of intensive German air
attacks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Psychoanalysis stopped studying childhood development
primarily though the reports of adult patients and started looking at children
directly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Psychoanalysis also focused
less on trying to explain all psychic development on individualistic terms and
framed its hypotheses in increasingly interpersonal terms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of the most important
developments was D W Winnicott’s idea that fetishes served the same function as
teddy bears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Children soothed themselves
as their development took them outside of the orbit of maternal security.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Blankets, stuffed animals and dolls served to
provide something to love that the child could take with them when parental support
was not around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps fetishes served
to sooth anxieties that arose over the aggression and separation fears provoked
by sexuality?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheesu5_WPsygaFLeUKjnnoOTGwVchruZZsynHgUO95o4kmaAeyYIBXAHmbRhhSgTOj_Y4aWmBmK7kVHfQ-_rRGc5yNTEvRy1OJX26QDyR3AT6zP2IJ63i0v0OIKd3pQmBNl_4tpGDxdA8q/s1600/Teddy+Bear.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheesu5_WPsygaFLeUKjnnoOTGwVchruZZsynHgUO95o4kmaAeyYIBXAHmbRhhSgTOj_Y4aWmBmK7kVHfQ-_rRGc5yNTEvRy1OJX26QDyR3AT6zP2IJ63i0v0OIKd3pQmBNl_4tpGDxdA8q/s400/Teddy+Bear.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Is a teddy bear a lot like a fetish? <br />D W winnicott said they accomplished the same purpose psychologically!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Britain was not the only country
that suffered the privations of World War II.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With this change mental health began to face
challenges that it become more based upon scientific evidence.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkQWEPOVygk_dUd8lFpOuKKgmIuw3UoM7euio8_QWAtXNDu0dNh5kJtU3L3tM5dmUWNw0HPlXlH2PrZuc8MRgYPfl7v187mdyDuZeVAbr2N4slng_eTtEcKPqjak6Qrz-AvZvJf8eq6K8C/s1600/IMG_20190315_195552.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkQWEPOVygk_dUd8lFpOuKKgmIuw3UoM7euio8_QWAtXNDu0dNh5kJtU3L3tM5dmUWNw0HPlXlH2PrZuc8MRgYPfl7v187mdyDuZeVAbr2N4slng_eTtEcKPqjak6Qrz-AvZvJf8eq6K8C/s400/IMG_20190315_195552.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Your blog author is a product of the United States government's shift in the delivery of mental health services<br /> from physicians to clinical psychologists and clinical social workers.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A major manifestation of that
reform was military’s need for a systematic system for the classification of
mental disorders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1952, the brother
of the famous American psychoanalyst Karl Menninger, General William Menninger
was assigned the task of creating a standardized diagnostic system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under the influence of psychoanalysis, a
great number of different diagnostic systems had developed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Menninger reviewed over 100 of these prior to
mobilizing the American Psychiatric Association to create the first <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the
Mental Disorders </i>or<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> DSM.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was fifty mimeographed pages and sold for
50 cents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It listed Krafft-Ebing’s
system including fetishism, as a ‘sexual deviation’ without providing any
behavioral descriptions. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their main sexual concern had to do with homosexuality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5KZPxhYyyJhjmvTwC6JhzzZcLyBRQ7ZfROhy0e47d8o9WJ_90xZKVRXHNFntkVTTjDOa47t7edrfXySQz8aHFZMSSwens6HDiqFo5BAJTuWEDGzqDiO9-SqR0bGj0MrBGjEhmJu8QKfTj/s1600/William_Claire_Menninger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="435" data-original-width="406" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5KZPxhYyyJhjmvTwC6JhzzZcLyBRQ7ZfROhy0e47d8o9WJ_90xZKVRXHNFntkVTTjDOa47t7edrfXySQz8aHFZMSSwens6HDiqFo5BAJTuWEDGzqDiO9-SqR0bGj0MrBGjEhmJu8QKfTj/s400/William_Claire_Menninger.jpg" width="372" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> I never served that purpose. Following completion of the Manhattan project, it performed calculations on the feasibility of building a thermonuclear weapon. </span>The largely female workforce of ‘computers’
was replaced by a delicate and finicky machine that was mainly comprised of
vacuum tubes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It kept overheating and
shorting out when moths, which were attracted to the tubes, burned up and
shorted out exposed wiring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This led to
the term computer bugs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But computers
would provide the capacity to analyze large data sets and transform social
science, among many other things. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBN63rUAAvJnRC5QH1m4BuxTXg5HPnoyUbYBAWbyaupe_iUsjk-O8yOpguwt9DdqwdzQQAR8p0nIic8Brg_oiI3cKRZHQgeG0UoTHkIUfqpMjn3n12SpCias-1Wgxri1okMKD2n9MWqTuo/s1600/250px-Classic_shot_of_the_ENIAC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="181" data-original-width="250" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBN63rUAAvJnRC5QH1m4BuxTXg5HPnoyUbYBAWbyaupe_iUsjk-O8yOpguwt9DdqwdzQQAR8p0nIic8Brg_oiI3cKRZHQgeG0UoTHkIUfqpMjn3n12SpCias-1Wgxri1okMKD2n9MWqTuo/s400/250px-Classic_shot_of_the_ENIAC.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer in 1945</span>.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The first use of survey methodology
was done by Karl Marx, who is more famous for the invention of communist
ideology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He used surveys to predict
election results by doing political poling in his resident district in London
in the mid-nineteenth century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The end
of World War II saw the U. S. military repurposing survey technology to evaluate
the effectiveness of strategic bombing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB3z4p4yCQZG0kZcp25inG3x2NTn4n-dUi6eE_37K2jAviPHgKsTqgL_HMKfCmX5NQqWJSJCPa18q1ayQ-yJKEVFWNsm2yCmJ8YBPpscKOeJHoxXghdp9l5YsQogtQ3fJJt0Pz0Rv-DqXW/s1600/Alfred+Kinsey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="197" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB3z4p4yCQZG0kZcp25inG3x2NTn4n-dUi6eE_37K2jAviPHgKsTqgL_HMKfCmX5NQqWJSJCPa18q1ayQ-yJKEVFWNsm2yCmJ8YBPpscKOeJHoxXghdp9l5YsQogtQ3fJJt0Pz0Rv-DqXW/s400/Alfred+Kinsey.jpg" width="307" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) American entomologist and sex researcher<br />He discovered that American sexual behavior was much more variable than previously assumed.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although clinicians knew from their
consulting rooms that fetishism was very rare, Kinsey discovered fetish-like
interests were very common. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both the
clinicians and Kinsey were correct.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unless
a fetish was causing a painful marital problem or legal difficulty, people
seldom consulted a clinician about them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibVACeksUuI3XoSuVzq3GMwKl3QcexuYFOyovqAcCG1HXcUl_W248IIrOu5FKNkXJ1Jg-iSfdz6hOPCKbuPGdbkjaCxTJbUXYSNvp8BAol55Ka8wXkzB65itszElzVrDYX5wl6FT0opSgc/s1600/nose-art.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="413" data-original-width="550" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibVACeksUuI3XoSuVzq3GMwKl3QcexuYFOyovqAcCG1HXcUl_W248IIrOu5FKNkXJ1Jg-iSfdz6hOPCKbuPGdbkjaCxTJbUXYSNvp8BAol55Ka8wXkzB65itszElzVrDYX5wl6FT0opSgc/s400/nose-art.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">World War II era nose art.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The final development of World
War II was a change in how the public recognized and represented sexual
variation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its first manifestations were
underground, but gradually became more salient in the media and public life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
was true for Rosy the Riveter as well as for G I Joe. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lacking access to the opposite sex, many of
these people recognized a desire for same sex partners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Add to that the risk of sudden death, and
the illusions of conventional cis-gendered and heterosexual conventionality
began to fray at the edges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The gay motorcycle clubs that were pioneering practitioners of
sadomasochism existed before World War II, but greatly expanded as servicemen
mustered out. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This led to the rise in the
gay sadomasochistic motorcycle clubs that gave rise to modern Leathersex.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY-sL9bPTpJqgRH9KfKMjoDtWzm7p_7ls01hqP6AChTuoXltWmzkm602Jtsv1lbbqWuJFVMBcxLQE1ssszlLzK7Ie73bzM0WTP-HMOHE7rLjQuamWUZ6_CfoyZyTbMuz6_vCD9mGgUP0ji/s1600/leather04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="842" data-original-width="600" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY-sL9bPTpJqgRH9KfKMjoDtWzm7p_7ls01hqP6AChTuoXltWmzkm602Jtsv1lbbqWuJFVMBcxLQE1ssszlLzK7Ie73bzM0WTP-HMOHE7rLjQuamWUZ6_CfoyZyTbMuz6_vCD9mGgUP0ji/s400/leather04.jpg" width="285" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Classic modern Leathersex attire</span></td></tr>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bomber nose art is testimony to these erotic
arts. This enabled Hugh Hefner to started <i>Playboy</i> magazine to cater to those
tastes after the war was over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soon
there was a thriving above-ground discourse among partialists who preferred
legs, asses and breasts, the reigning pin-up idioms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Throughout the interwar period,
psychoanalysis dominated the discourse about mental health. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rise of pin-up culture, <i>Playboy</i> Magazine,
and the underground kink culture led to repressive reaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This, incidentally, led to my first encounter with fetish illustration,
when Time magazine covered the Klaw’s testimony before Kefauver’s
commission.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A major part of Klaw’s
businesses, Movie Star News and Nutrix Publications catered to photographs and
illustrations catering to kink interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The most famous of his talents was Betty Page.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kinsey research relied on a
snowball sample to get respondents, leading to valid criticism that he risked
overcounting outlier sexual interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, it would take until 1994 for the first survey of American sexual
behavior that employed a representative sample of Americans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUnuqyzCWX3CVV4NHMdWwPRSRz3t0VqlLA5ArKRdfbkKGpuGln-5iLBabRjBW8WBOvLIu-1gRznoW-R_d8v_muBtBW8k1gVvNrwBsCc76FL2opEqpTdeEcBS7uG_ykUEFiPuTtWcx7_VgF/s1600/070610a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="715" data-original-width="481" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUnuqyzCWX3CVV4NHMdWwPRSRz3t0VqlLA5ArKRdfbkKGpuGln-5iLBabRjBW8WBOvLIu-1gRznoW-R_d8v_muBtBW8k1gVvNrwBsCc76FL2opEqpTdeEcBS7uG_ykUEFiPuTtWcx7_VgF/s400/070610a.jpg" width="268" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Fetish Culture:<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvQuXAXYPAP_hIOLrErqw6WF3U7ninhvmNXGXQh2N2WJNVCrYwt8J4IIu97MNAQbslpMWQ5_AYWIegogJ9EMYusm9HmTRyfMKD0M4fDvH6AnMDcleD7Dmu_L1Ql9-EXplKKa9HwP-zTsOh/s1600/Alex_Comfort.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="185" data-original-width="200" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvQuXAXYPAP_hIOLrErqw6WF3U7ninhvmNXGXQh2N2WJNVCrYwt8J4IIu97MNAQbslpMWQ5_AYWIegogJ9EMYusm9HmTRyfMKD0M4fDvH6AnMDcleD7Dmu_L1Ql9-EXplKKa9HwP-zTsOh/s400/Alex_Comfort.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alex Comfort (1920-2000) British scientist and author of <i>The Joy of Sex</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A sea change in the discourse
about fetishism began in the wake of the social changes in the early 1960’s and
early 1970s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With the publication of the
first edition of The Joy of Sex, a new attitude was articulated by Alex Comfort,
PhD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead of a disabling obsession
that made healthy intimacy impossible, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Joy of Sex</i> most fetishistic interests took advantage of human
evolutionary tendencies to find analogue of our potential sexual partners
‘sexual releasers’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He compared these
interests to tying an effective fishing fly in trout fishing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In so doing, Comfort
implicitly rejected the idea that most variant interests were pre-Oedipal
substitutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His entry under disabling fetishes
reads a lot like a modern description of an anxiety disorder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would assert
that <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Joy of</span> <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Sex</span></i> constituted the implicit transition of the idea that a fetish
might just be a sexual preference, rather than a mental illness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By the 1960s and 1970s, the fight
between sexually expressive and repressive trend in western culture had
escalated into the ‘culture wars’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
birth control pill proved a much more efficient and reliable method than IUDs
and barrier methods, and the hedonism in popular culture increased.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1972, the first heterosexual kink groups
started to meet above ground, and gay crossdressers launched the Stonewall Riots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thereafter, there was an explicit gay
advocacy movement in the US.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hippies
advocated for free love, and communes sprang up practicing alternative
lifestyles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1972, the first two above
ground kink groups started to meet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Til Eulenspiegel Society (TES) began in New York in a church basement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Named after a mythic German trickster with a
scatological and masochistic imagination, TES was devoted to the outward
celebration of masochism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both continue to meet today joined by a huge
proliferation of local groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are
the Coalition Partners who are represented on the NCSF Board of Directors, today.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2LFC6uu26E4qxpO4oIzjUXfnda2sJoK4d_rA2b3UbEQ0DkQUluIM14dZQTw0Hl3Mg5unhXFWWrKvysEQiUVNnYAH4i_P8ELHVS32-XGBXJOoupaxMoV_eCWoo4wxLFnhnhr5Hif5aOg4_/s1600/cheque.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="292" data-original-width="445" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2LFC6uu26E4qxpO4oIzjUXfnda2sJoK4d_rA2b3UbEQ0DkQUluIM14dZQTw0Hl3Mg5unhXFWWrKvysEQiUVNnYAH4i_P8ELHVS32-XGBXJOoupaxMoV_eCWoo4wxLFnhnhr5Hif5aOg4_/s400/cheque.gif" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A somewhat unusual cheque made out to the Spanner Trust</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The rise of a kink above ground
subculture in the face of severe social stigma gave rise to the invention of
consent culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, kink
subcultures have much to teach the general society about consent in the age of
high college sexual assault statistics and <b>#metoo. </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For more about The development of kink groups and the culture of consent: <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/05/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html">Operation Spanner</a>, <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/05/slogans.html">Slogans</a>, <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/05/consent.html">Consent</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>The Assaults on the DSM:</b><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD4cDi_4Yj9oUgFV3_9Z0mqbLnUupWwjfcJX96C8jVdmPsqFqC50ZkH2ll7N9Lzcg9KvVpaIoyiz-BZxMkcni1I73MVqFA4BBYB4TtDySKT4uZRwbUhNC5h2sKDF7kkTxJlduZdqDNr75W/s1600/cabaret-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1440" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD4cDi_4Yj9oUgFV3_9Z0mqbLnUupWwjfcJX96C8jVdmPsqFqC50ZkH2ll7N9Lzcg9KvVpaIoyiz-BZxMkcni1I73MVqFA4BBYB4TtDySKT4uZRwbUhNC5h2sKDF7kkTxJlduZdqDNr75W/s400/cabaret-1.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Life is a cabaret, old boy!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The struggle to fight stigma in
kink mirrors and lags the struggle to fight stigma on homosexuality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mimeographed ink on the original DSM was
scarcely dry when the challenge began to remove homosexuality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1954, Christopher Isherwood, author of the
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Berlin Diaries</i> and noteworthy
Hollywood screenwriter challenged his neighbor, UCLA research psychologist
Evelyn Hooker, to design a study to challenge the idea that homosexuality was
pathological.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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: <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2017/06/kinks-evelyn-hooker-moment.html">Kink's Evelyn Hooker Moment</a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
new system was subjected to assessment of the ability of different raters to
make the same diagnoses and passed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most homosexuality had been de-pathologized.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kink was not so fortunate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new DSM – III included statistics,
including data that showed all paraphilias constituted about .06% of the entire
validation sample of mental health diagnoses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjELtNr2KhOaqoI92T76l3fPT9vbUUvaM-8CRFCjrIjmJJmCDmFA7jf5JCzNaR5_7X6GsYeSUdXoYfpnOTE2qjTpajeF00Wx2IwL8EosFj9trgk6TQ-vjOcH6-Lbk0gEWeMvzoAs4D3UbhL/s1600/ls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="250" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjELtNr2KhOaqoI92T76l3fPT9vbUUvaM-8CRFCjrIjmJJmCDmFA7jf5JCzNaR5_7X6GsYeSUdXoYfpnOTE2qjTpajeF00Wx2IwL8EosFj9trgk6TQ-vjOcH6-Lbk0gEWeMvzoAs4D3UbhL/s400/ls.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charles A Moser, (1952-present) american physician and DSM critic.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In a series of 20 papers, Moser
and his collaborators deconstructed the diagnostic concept behind the
DSMs.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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..</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Based upon the DSM – IVTR paraphilias
criteria, in 2013 Christian Joyal and Julie Carpentier conducted a representative
sample of the Quebe<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">ç</span>oise population and gathered the following data:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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</div>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoNormalTable" style="background: #141414; border-collapse: collapse; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 0in 0in; mso-yfti-tbllook: 1184;"><tbody>
<tr style="mso-yfti-firstrow: yes; mso-yfti-irow: 0;"><td style="border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Voyeurism<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext 1.0pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 60%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext 1.0pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 35%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 1;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext 1.0pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Exhibitionism<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 06%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 03%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 2;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext 1.0pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Fetishism<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 40%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 48%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 3;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext 1.0pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Frotteurism<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 34%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 31%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 4;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext 1.0pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sadism<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 09%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 05%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 5;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext 1.0pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Masochism<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 19%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 28%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 6;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext 1.0pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Transvestism<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 07%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 06%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 7; mso-yfti-lastrow: yes;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext 1.0pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sex with a child<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 01%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: white; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 00%<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Note that, after years of
psychoanalytic papers in which fetishism is the exclusive province of male
psychology, more Queb<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">ç</span>oises women than men report engaging in at least one
fetishistic behavior in their lifetimes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But today about 44% of Quebe<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">ç</span>oise’s
think they have done a fetishistic behavior! For more detail on representative sample statistics about kink: <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2018/08/debbie-herbenick-phd-in-july-of-last.html">AltSex Beahviors in Quebec and the US</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Note that the
paraphilias review got more public commentary that any section of the DSM
except that devoted to autism spectrum disorders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A great deal of the input was from attorneys
and forensic clinicians who required the concept in court, and from advocacy
groups. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For more detail on the DSM - 5: <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/05/arrival-of-deathstar.html">Arrival of the Deathstar</a>, <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/07/kenneth-zucker-phd-and-michael-first.html">Review of the DSM -5 Plenary at AASECT 2013</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Take Aways:</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What might readers conclude from
this story:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->The
meaning of terms like ‘fetish’ is a moving target.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->That
it is impossible to fully convey the significance of these terms without
discussing the social context in which they arose.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]-->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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0px;">©Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, Ann Arbor, April 2019 All rights reserved.</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<br />Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-54157372623187381832019-01-24T13:38:00.000-08:002019-01-25T06:43:48.280-08:00Resilience<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“I Can’t Drive 55” -- Sammy Hagar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“Anything worth doing is worth over-doing”! An anonymous wag<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“So put me on the highway, and show me a sign,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And we’ll take it to the limit one more time” -- Glen Frey,
Don Henley, and Randy Meisner<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsMvGle7-DEJefRQbAev6z-GeRR4c-fcq4f4Zo5Td8O2S_XzOAxe0jEyea6MQ7KqaRSNMtBJ3llgwqv4E4yX5CzIUPd3Kx8863E0hTdT3wNSCVeW8hPlakmyugxUcDYASg8TDMBBw1tHjL/s1600/Roads.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="164" data-original-width="308" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsMvGle7-DEJefRQbAev6z-GeRR4c-fcq4f4Zo5Td8O2S_XzOAxe0jEyea6MQ7KqaRSNMtBJ3llgwqv4E4yX5CzIUPd3Kx8863E0hTdT3wNSCVeW8hPlakmyugxUcDYASg8TDMBBw1tHjL/s400/Roads.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“Roads? Where we are
going, we don’t need roads”! -- Emmet Brown<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Limits,
and the Problem of Idealization:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrrYj5yoWniZ4eSiyhslAbVA_EU_bHFs6kHk5-x8fDrrcFw1izSPEmgfhA32I0ZJnUD-G5SjPPp71eMgEz_VmujjIKHYX5iBvEeE1fx8gy7IJjVrBL2N6YzC12aQwWgJ7FxMNyioLjlt3Q/s1600/Romeo+and+Juliette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrrYj5yoWniZ4eSiyhslAbVA_EU_bHFs6kHk5-x8fDrrcFw1izSPEmgfhA32I0ZJnUD-G5SjPPp71eMgEz_VmujjIKHYX5iBvEeE1fx8gy7IJjVrBL2N6YzC12aQwWgJ7FxMNyioLjlt3Q/s400/Romeo+and+Juliette.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Romeo and Juliette from the 1968 Franco Zefferelli production.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“But soft! What
light through yonder window breaks?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is the East, and Juliette is the sun.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Arise fair sun, and kill the envious moon<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Who is already sick and pale with grief,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Be not her maid, for she is envious.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Her vestal livery is but sick and green,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is my lady! Oh, it is my love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Oh, that she knew she were!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">She speaks, yet she says nothing! What of that?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Her eye discourses, I will answer it.----<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I am too bold. “Tis
not to me she speaks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Having some business do entreat her eyes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To twinkle in their sphere ‘til their return.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What if her eyes were there, they in her head?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The brightness of those cheeks would shame those stars<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As daylight doth a lamp.
Her eye in heaven<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Would through the airy region stream so bright<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That birds would sing and think it were not night.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">See how she leans that cheek upon her hand.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That I might touch that cheek.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“What is in a name?
That which we call a rose<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">By any other name would smell as sweet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Retain that dear perfection that he owes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Without that title.
Romeo, doff thy name,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And for that name, which is no part of thee,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Take all myself! -- William Shakespeare, ‘Romeo and Juliette, Act II, scene 2’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlcCtApMpTf6ZG7H4Jk_qCBrEMNNBxAoqVn2VedcQW67JxgZP8TfFcQztPD4BJNTD_b1vokg9Xf45xkxvTXW0ylGMmmAsKepo0Lgx17F2p5P8Q-eagKG80DgB5kiPNwqlEvEgqR3URCKKb/s1600/Harem+scene.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="178" data-original-width="283" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlcCtApMpTf6ZG7H4Jk_qCBrEMNNBxAoqVn2VedcQW67JxgZP8TfFcQztPD4BJNTD_b1vokg9Xf45xkxvTXW0ylGMmmAsKepo0Lgx17F2p5P8Q-eagKG80DgB5kiPNwqlEvEgqR3URCKKb/s400/Harem+scene.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">'Harem Scene' J G Delincourt, an excellent example of 19th century French orientalism. <br />Harem life certainly seems to be going smoothly here!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2016/06/aasect16-consent-201-consent-and-its.html">Consent 201: Consent and Its Discontents</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">From
Consent Violations to Consent Incidents:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2016/06/aasect16-consent-201-consent-and-its.html">Consent and its Discontents</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>a priori </i>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Trauma
vs Resilience:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbo78dbC2UuJql0x9QO2Aez_p3KmZMmMfADsgY8AD8htS42_SxUVOcnQv8bUPNM5PWBwgbrtevDfIWZ12a09kt7D5RwdNyZY8DSoZKV39iC2ZO2nreHYCMH-NhWqmnNwaDItA6nvmdL_gX/s1600/hmmwv-humvee-08.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbo78dbC2UuJql0x9QO2Aez_p3KmZMmMfADsgY8AD8htS42_SxUVOcnQv8bUPNM5PWBwgbrtevDfIWZ12a09kt7D5RwdNyZY8DSoZKV39iC2ZO2nreHYCMH-NhWqmnNwaDItA6nvmdL_gX/s400/hmmwv-humvee-08.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A convoy of U. S. Army Humvees courtesy of Military.com</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The
goal of resilience training is to prepare ourselves for levels of stress that
might exceed our anticipations.</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>in italics</i> with
our suggestions from kinky life in in regular typeface<i>:</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Make</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> (and maintain)<i> connections. </i></span></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">
<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Avoid
seeing crises as insurmountable problems</span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">. 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.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Accept
that change is a part of living. </span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Move
toward your goals</span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">. 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”?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Take
decisive actions. </span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><i>
</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Look
for opportunities for self-discovery</span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">. 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.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Nurture
a positive view of yourself. </span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Developing confidence in your ability to
solve problems and trusting your instincts helps build resilience.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Keep
things in perspective</span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">. 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.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Maintain
a hopeful outlook. </span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Take
care of yourself. </span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Pay attention to your own needs and
feelings.<b> </b>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.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Additional
ways of strengthening your resilience may be helpful</span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">.
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. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The key is to identify ways
that are likely to work well for you as part of your personal strategy for
fostering resilience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Additional ways to work on
building your resilience:<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Work
on your dark side.</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Know
your hard boundaries from your soft ones</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">. 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Insist
on feedback</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">. 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Remember
that kink is highly embodied. </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For more on this see: Mistress Adobe’s Sub-drop tool kit (That link
is already in Elephant <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2015/12/coping-with-top-and-sub-drop.html">http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2015/12/coping-with-top-and-sub-drop.html</a>)<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">©Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, Ann Arbor, January 2019</span></span></div>
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<br />Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-32587870278596217802018-08-01T11:44:00.002-07:002018-08-09T07:08:46.603-07:00Sexual Behaviors in the United States and in Quebec: Looking at Sex Variation<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjod3CRkgl0XukjiDDtAp1BRPqKbay-ewU6SP-wrjqTAhSCGPVqY2H8AelSOcPjAd1WKPpQIaprbydXF9xQ1tLgCaHyiYMPYZWLzglWBJe4mRoF06RyrWINS1xew3rR7c4EzbnS_lghrxN8/s1600/Debby+Herbenick.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1125" data-original-width="900" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjod3CRkgl0XukjiDDtAp1BRPqKbay-ewU6SP-wrjqTAhSCGPVqY2H8AelSOcPjAd1WKPpQIaprbydXF9xQ1tLgCaHyiYMPYZWLzglWBJe4mRoF06RyrWINS1xew3rR7c4EzbnS_lghrxN8/s400/Debby+Herbenick.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Debbie Herbenick, PhD</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNnFJ0Og2Qvc9zTTLu37tsQPb3Mr65WYZMxSWNaeRVCPl_6HWFLaScfUL1hxRWbQ5T3wFLO5Bs3e5EdP3XTiLvfDP8ySmtXDy8JWUjEFCrq7RzXhxeMyOqmSFAlGVMv-wSL_huDBV8HRdQ/s1600/The+Social+Organization+of+Sexuality.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNnFJ0Og2Qvc9zTTLu37tsQPb3Mr65WYZMxSWNaeRVCPl_6HWFLaScfUL1hxRWbQ5T3wFLO5Bs3e5EdP3XTiLvfDP8ySmtXDy8JWUjEFCrq7RzXhxeMyOqmSFAlGVMv-wSL_huDBV8HRdQ/s320/The+Social+Organization+of+Sexuality.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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 <i>The
Social Organization of Sexuality</i> (1994)<i>
</i>and <i>Sex in America </i>(1995)<i> </i>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here is a very abbreviated
summary of the study results. These are lifetime percentages of the listed
behaviors for men and women:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Behavior<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 17.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">M%<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 17.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">F%<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 17.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.35pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Behavior <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 17.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.35pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">M%<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 17.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.35pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">F%<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 25.6pt; mso-yfti-irow: 1;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 25.6pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Vaginal intercourse:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">85<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 25.6pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">83<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 25.6pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Gave partner oral sex: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 25.6pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.35pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">83<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">82<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
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<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 19.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Received oral sex: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 19.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">85<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 19.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">85<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 19.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Insertive anal sex:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">46<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 19.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.35pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
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<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 24.75pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Received anal sex: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 24.75pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">09<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 24.75pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">37<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 24.75pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.1pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Worn sexy
underwear/lingerie: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 24.75pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.1pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">26<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">75<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
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<tr style="height: 19.5pt; mso-yfti-irow: 4;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 19.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Partnered sex in a public place:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">45<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 19.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">43<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 19.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.85pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Tied up partner, or been tied
up:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 19.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.85pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">26<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 19.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.85pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">22<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 26.5pt; mso-yfti-irow: 5;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 26.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Playfully whipped or been
whipped:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 26.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">16<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 26.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">14<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 26.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5.1pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Spanked or been spanked:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 26.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">30<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 26.5pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .45pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">34<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 18.85pt; mso-yfti-irow: 6;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 18.85pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Used vibrator/dildo:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 18.85pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">33<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 18.85pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">50<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 18.85pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Used an anal sex toy:
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 18.85pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">18<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 18.85pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">16<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: .25in; mso-yfti-irow: 7;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: .25in; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sex enhancement pills/herbal
supps: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: .25in; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">21<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: .25in; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">08<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: .25in; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 4.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Read erotic stories:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: .25in; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 4.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">57<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: .25in; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">57<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 22.0pt; mso-yfti-irow: 8;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sex guide or sex self-help book:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">32<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">34<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.85pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Used a phone app related to
sex:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">12<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">06<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 22.0pt; mso-yfti-irow: 9;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Looked at a sexually explicit
magazine:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">79<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">54<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 4.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sexually explicit video/‘porn’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">82<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 22.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">60<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 16.6pt; mso-yfti-irow: 10;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 16.6pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sex over Facetime/Skype:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 16.6pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">14<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 16.6pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">11<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 16.6pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 4.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Nude or semi-nude photo of
self:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 16.6pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">24<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 16.6pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">27<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 16.15pt; mso-yfti-irow: 11;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 16.15pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Received nude or semi-nude
photo:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 16.15pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">41<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 16.15pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">27<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 16.15pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.1pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Flirted with someone in
chat/SMS:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 16.15pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.2pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">40<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 16.15pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">36<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 20.65pt; mso-yfti-irow: 12;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 20.65pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Gone to a strip club:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 20.65pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">59<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 20.65pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">30<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 20.65pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Taken a class/workshop about sex:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 20.65pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">04<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 20.65pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">04<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 6.25pt; mso-yfti-irow: 13;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 6.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Had a threesome:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 6.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">18<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 6.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">10<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 6.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Had group sex:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 6.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">12<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 6.25pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">06<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 23.35pt; mso-yfti-irow: 14; mso-yfti-lastrow: yes;">
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 23.35pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 185.25pt;" valign="top" width="247"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Gone to a sex party or swingers
party: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 23.35pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 28.45pt;" valign="top" width="38"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">06<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 23.35pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.5pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">05<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 23.35pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 168.0pt;" valign="top" width="224"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Gone to a BDSM club or dungeon:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 23.35pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 29.8pt;" valign="top" width="40"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">04<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 23.35pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 25.25pt;" valign="top" width="34"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">03<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIOhRx2NbobOBRTQPWDl09r_VnH0yJYXxTawnm3o8lNz5utHShrydjtiH3R8qySiXmbZBC0chyphenhyphenRSpg_W7-q-BrRDkdz2by1G3Vma4AVwUg9qLzNqipdKxmE71mYz_4-WBB4mjuimgoHHWk/s1600/Christian+Joyal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIOhRx2NbobOBRTQPWDl09r_VnH0yJYXxTawnm3o8lNz5utHShrydjtiH3R8qySiXmbZBC0chyphenhyphenRSpg_W7-q-BrRDkdz2by1G3Vma4AVwUg9qLzNqipdKxmE71mYz_4-WBB4mjuimgoHHWk/s400/Christian+Joyal.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Christian Joyal, PhD</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoTableGrid" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-yfti-tbllook: 1184;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Voyeurism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 60%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 35%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Exhibitionism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 06%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 03%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Fetishism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 40%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 48%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Frotteurism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 34%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 31%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sadism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 09%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 05%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Masochism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .6pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 19%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 28%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Transvestism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 07%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 06%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 125.75pt;" valign="top" width="168"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sex with a child<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 81.0pt;" valign="top" width="108"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Men: 01%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 91.3pt;" valign="top" width="122"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Women: 00%<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It takes some reading between the
lines, but in many way, these figures look similar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">©Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, Ann
Arbor, August 2018</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-44771787219223105892018-03-07T15:40:00.001-08:002018-07-18T06:51:58.661-07:00Boundaries, Identity, and Transgression<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And spills the upper boulders in the sun,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And makes gaps even two can walk abreast.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The work of hunters is another thing:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I have come after them and made repair<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Where they have left not one stone on a stone,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But they would have the rabbit out of hiding<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To please the yelping dogs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The gaps I mean,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">No one has seen the made or heard them made,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But at spring mending-time we find them there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And on a day we meet and walk the line,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And set the wall between us once again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We keep the wall between us as we go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To each the boulders that have fallen to each.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And some are loaves and others so nearly balls.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We have to use a spell to make them balance:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We wear our fingers rough with handling them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">One on a side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
comes to little more:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There where it is we do not need a wall:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He is all pine, I am apple orchard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My apple trees will never get across<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Spring is the mischief in me and I wonder<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If I could put a notion in his head.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">‘Why do they make good neighbors?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Isn’t it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Where there are cows?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Here there are no cows.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What I was walling in or walling out,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And to whom I was like to give offense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That wants it down.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I could say ‘Elves’ to him,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But it’s not elves exactly and I’d rather<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He said it for himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I see him there,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In each hand like an old-stone savage armed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He moves in darkness as it seems to me,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Not of woods only and the shade of trees.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He will not go behind his father’s saying<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And he likes having thought of it so well<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Mending Wall, 1917<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Robert Frost</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkaMpA0xzAh4jF_Fc-86CHAikOoVF4Nx6ovRKombIbU5CU2jS6rq9oOf4rs5Wo6tQ-u-cpvHoGRX0tedSKC-VpCnrj_dWj3CKSJjfsTdD4dJ7VvUwxBRwqQZFAFZWo45JsGAT5wD_QpURb/s1600/Brene+Brown.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="162" data-original-width="310" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkaMpA0xzAh4jF_Fc-86CHAikOoVF4Nx6ovRKombIbU5CU2jS6rq9oOf4rs5Wo6tQ-u-cpvHoGRX0tedSKC-VpCnrj_dWj3CKSJjfsTdD4dJ7VvUwxBRwqQZFAFZWo45JsGAT5wD_QpURb/s400/Brene+Brown.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Brene Brown</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“Daring to set boundaries is
about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing
others.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Brene
Brown<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In it, he questions everything about boundaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this he recapitulates our
ambivalence about diversity:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that the
recognition of difference often requires tolerance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtdqpui-BNoYgxD3WF9DTsGsC14QoOhCDW6yvbNdQbW40a-2NdXnY1yupZP8QLAnIT__ZGfBomzklGSiOP91TKSx_S-psp7R4nYxIKC41fR1XguajKBl5anqBp43y5pvT0IltoKvZtIjog/s1600/woodrow-wilson-9534272-1-402.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtdqpui-BNoYgxD3WF9DTsGsC14QoOhCDW6yvbNdQbW40a-2NdXnY1yupZP8QLAnIT__ZGfBomzklGSiOP91TKSx_S-psp7R4nYxIKC41fR1XguajKBl5anqBp43y5pvT0IltoKvZtIjog/s400/woodrow-wilson-9534272-1-402.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>About a third of Americans were of German
origin, and sympathy for Germany was widespread. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another third, and many of our country’s
cultural traditions, came from Great Britain, one of Germany's opponents<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And yet we would all have to pull together when the Atlantic proved not
to be a boundary, but a battleground. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>German insistence on using unrestricted
submarine warfare sank American ships and killed American sailors, thus
dragging the US into the war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Uncomfortable with one another or not, Americans would fight together
despite their differing ethnic identifications and identities over this 'boundary issue.'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In psychotherapy, boundaries
are often viewed as a valued necessity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
my shorter quote, Brene Brown sees them as a concomitant of constructive
self-esteem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is emphasizing that we
cannot uphold our values if we cannot say ‘no’ to pressures from others to
compromise them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Parlous times make for rough
boundaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some are even proposing a
wall…</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ5Rnr_Kn0keVx-tq5erE7LBv7fZKA2AZNJHzlNvHHL7CUUJY_Lvybz3OjDRQXvsQTBuOyw14BD8DgDjTPecFv7kxbI5GPWlFWHwe2gJHwYF1yHq2H7sJRdjzGze8S_ikXSRQzVV1PzpJd/s1600/Great+Wall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ5Rnr_Kn0keVx-tq5erE7LBv7fZKA2AZNJHzlNvHHL7CUUJY_Lvybz3OjDRQXvsQTBuOyw14BD8DgDjTPecFv7kxbI5GPWlFWHwe2gJHwYF1yHq2H7sJRdjzGze8S_ikXSRQzVV1PzpJd/s400/Great+Wall.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Boundaries are an important
kind of psychological resource, and those who experience serious boundary
problems are vulnerable to many social ills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Community context,
subcultural values, client goals, and partner agreements must be thoroughly understood
to interpret the meanings associated with boundaries properly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Often, boundary problems are overdetermined,
influenced by many factors, and are not susceptible to simplistic solutions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Boundaries are often described
as an individual psychological skill or attribute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Often, they are not a simple contract between two parties, nor is the
responsibility for their maintenance clear or constant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.) </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFYKrNptzXw" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start;">Changing European Boundaries 1000AD to the Present</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In the previous essay on this
blog, <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2017/09/darkness.html">Darkness</a> I closed with the suggestion that consent was an important ethic, but
only the starting point for an ethical framework for BDSM.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Boundaries are an excellent example of how
consent cannot cover all the bases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Boundaries are often not a simple matter of agreement between two roughly
equal parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">One of the things I have often
heard from therapists about kinksters is that they have “poor boundaries.”</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">This is a very interesting comment, and it
does not do to immediately refute it.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">This is particularly true because we all know clients, kinky or not, who
do in some manner have poor boundaries.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">They are late for appointments, or they fail to pay their bills.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">They don’t do their therapeutic homework, or
interrupt us or their partners in session.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">They show off at inappropriate times, or hog the spotlight.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Sometimes they insist on being the identified
problem.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Other times, they refuse our
suggestion that they have any problem at all.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Some, in a meeting of G-7 participants, barge in front of the assembled
heads of state.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Oops, sorry, that is not
a kinky client, that’s the President of the United States!</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Good fences may make good neighbors”, but
there is a lot of boundary violation going around these days.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">In the electronic realm, we often do not
even know where the boundaries are.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Donald Trump
determines to build a 30-foot wall on the American/Mexican border at a point
when net migration from Mexico is zero.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And his conceptual boundaries decline to differentiate an American
citizen of Mexican descent from an undocumented migrant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These discussions of boundaries are
impregnated with issues of power.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyQmnXcF6LfkKNfvgBodWdExYMTmORRkvzFXLRnnfFWWMQoYjxjpzlJ7FScyVVtDe1prF5g1zfyJLr6QcVJf6BYeMk6nDKd2oUDrQznrjxTf9uRLvIJ0CvmYoLVQn1m-TYL4-NlgsiLauG/s1600/Syrain+Refugees.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="486" data-original-width="750" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyQmnXcF6LfkKNfvgBodWdExYMTmORRkvzFXLRnnfFWWMQoYjxjpzlJ7FScyVVtDe1prF5g1zfyJLr6QcVJf6BYeMk6nDKd2oUDrQznrjxTf9uRLvIJ0CvmYoLVQn1m-TYL4-NlgsiLauG/s400/Syrain+Refugees.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Syrian Refugees coming ashore on the Greek Island of Lesbos in 2016.</span></td></tr>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Boundaries are an important
part of social life, and transgressive values can be highly problematical with
these.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Often, therapeutic boundary
discussions are saturated with power dynamics that conflict with constructive
therapeutic goals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That may be appropriate sometimes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In kink, as in other walks of life, transgressive behavior can denote
insensitivity, hostility, and a readiness to harm others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But like those unwanted migrants, these
behaviors originated someplace else before they wash up on the shores of our
consulting rooms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It turns out, feeling like you can set your
own boundaries is often correlated with having high social privilege.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Therapeutic
Boundaries and Ethical Considerations:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The culture of psychotherapy
may share some fundamental values with the kink community, but the two cultures
diverge at many points.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of these key
differences is in how boundaries are understood. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In such circumstances, it is typical to feel
ambivalent and torn between competing values. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is often a consequence of social role
conflict, and competing values, not necessarily deep-rooted psychopathology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Some of these differences
emerge from the histories of the helping professions and of kink, which will be
briefly reviewed here. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These authors wrote and behaved in ways that
were very critical and defiant of the conventional social boundaries of their
times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Divine Marquis never saw a
socio-sexual boundary he did not wish to break.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He eroticized murder and disparaged the use of the guillotine for
bureaucratically decreed dispassionate executions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although these two writers did
not dictate the modern boundaries of BDSM, they did much to establish its
ethos.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is an ethos of violating
contemporary sensibilities about how sexuality is conducted between partners in
which conventional boundaries are ignored.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When kink began to organize as
a subculture, however, it developed boundaries of is own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
ensured that new members were fully indoctrinated in the group’s etiquette, as
well as discouraging anyone who was not serious or sincere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrcbQorIuLTCwmCElWTigi4syq9Eia9_yWnFnAzyxW1t-HN7URw77uG2j6v7mVMMR_aReUIlRCj-PTroYo4h3fgBoD5HmhTBtm2Z8-9n_8qIHvjAgxy54m2BbNv16Q2dscxFqz2O4eWh7_/s1600/HIPPA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="158" data-original-width="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrcbQorIuLTCwmCElWTigi4syq9Eia9_yWnFnAzyxW1t-HN7URw77uG2j6v7mVMMR_aReUIlRCj-PTroYo4h3fgBoD5HmhTBtm2Z8-9n_8qIHvjAgxy54m2BbNv16Q2dscxFqz2O4eWh7_/s1600/HIPPA.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Boundaries about doctor/patient confidentiality implemented by the United States Federal Government</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Doctors and psychotherapists
are also aware that many matters discussed with their clients are
stigmatized.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clients are afraid that
others will know if they have a disease, disability, or painful history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In an attempt to ensure that such matters are
fully shared in treatment, doctor-patient communications are confidential.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Laws like the Health Insurance Parity and
Portability Act (HIPPA) ensure that many aspects of a patient record remain
confidential.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In another chapter I discussed
the development of the Safe Sane and Consensual (<a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/05/slogans.html">Slogans</a>) 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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEdGqg609CZvWLfIq6LIQHvMxjLmiVs7paRMsutyQfW2YF_1zAQ8ksHZCniQsaTB7WIuTR0YQQVPpG1R-o9oTYWAAlz7txQ92iaNp3xyzDmX6IbMPtBmJVvlz23fdTjVtJvoj0_rU6prQU/s1600/Figaro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEdGqg609CZvWLfIq6LIQHvMxjLmiVs7paRMsutyQfW2YF_1zAQ8ksHZCniQsaTB7WIuTR0YQQVPpG1R-o9oTYWAAlz7txQ92iaNp3xyzDmX6IbMPtBmJVvlz23fdTjVtJvoj0_rU6prQU/s400/Figaro.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Figaro was a barber and a surgeon. Its all in the wrist, you know!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Therapists, proceeding from
their status as allied health professionals, learned about professional
boundaries from the professional ideologies of physicians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Physicians in turn, learned their professional
boundaries from their long emergence from quasi professional status in the
medieval period to alpha professionals today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Back in Galen’s time, “First do no harm” was their equivalent of “Safe,
Sane and Consensual”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember that melodious buffoon in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Marriage of Figaro</i>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wasn’t just a barber, but a surgeon, and
as such he was the object of much jest, but also considerable fear. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>With the emergence of medicine as a systematic science in the 19<sup>th</sup>
century, physicians and surgeons gained the social and commercial power to
dictate what good professional boundaries meant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The power balance
between physicians and clients has been decided by physicians, hospitals,
technological advances and medial insurers, with little input from their clients.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All of this was very far along
in practice in 1980 when I began training as a clinical psychologist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was a representative of my entire
profession, not just my personal values or therapeutic orientation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is equally true in
2018.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As an AASECT Certified Sex
Therapist, I promise to adhere to The AASECT Code of Ethical Conduct.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This set of guidelines was adopted with three
goals co-equally in mind:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>protection of
the public, protection of the profession, and protection of the individual practitioner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never mind that those lofty goods occasionally
conflict, and their interpretation was dependent upon time, place and changing
social context.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Boundary maintenance has a
central role in the in how we as therapists think about professional
ethics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We set appointment times not
only to regularize and regulate our own schedules, but to communicate our
stability, predictability and reliability to clients.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We keep the focus on their thoughts feelings
experiences and narratives as demonstration and fulfillment of our promise to
put their welfare first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, all manner of personal information and
contact outside of the therapeutic office became professional boundary issues
too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In June of 2017, AASECT put on
an Ethics Workshop in Las Vegas addressing professional boundary issues in
dealing with the alt sex communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ruby
Bouie Johnson, Angie Gunn, and I were moderated by Reece Malone and AASECT
Ethics Advisory Committee Chair, Dan Rosen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I went first and outlined some of the historical context I have
presented above.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She maintained that authenticity required
open expression of one’s gender and sexuality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Still, you could hear a collective gasp when she revealed that she
sometimes became nude with clients.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Debate about this echoed for several weeks on
the AASECT Listserv.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLlInuWDwAK0mpgH91XSq_lN2Wc5kh7a34_v4lKjnzosjIADEdyy7ncBX-n66HBVhxAswdDO8a_BtNWEoFyqAzKiNFjHq37Cq4Hy_aYVALu1-WDi9VoBFiA5rZGHPFlwKMfAzY_79_Uu2C/s1600/Flogging.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="720" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLlInuWDwAK0mpgH91XSq_lN2Wc5kh7a34_v4lKjnzosjIADEdyy7ncBX-n66HBVhxAswdDO8a_BtNWEoFyqAzKiNFjHq37Cq4Hy_aYVALu1-WDi9VoBFiA5rZGHPFlwKMfAzY_79_Uu2C/s400/Flogging.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Boundaries are not just about
what goes on within the psychotherapeutic consulting room, however. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many clients would not be
offended and have no basis for objecting to seeing their therapist expressing personal
sexualities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But AASECT itself, and the
other psychotherapeutic professions have serious and cogent objections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For myself I have
resolved this as follows:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">150
years of professional sexology have failed to reveal enduring scientific
principles about how people choose their preferred forms of sexual
behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In many cases, I refer clients to external sources
for their psychoeducation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the best data ever that some specific
historical factors might predispose a client to kinks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But even the biggest effect sizes accounted
for only a substantial minority of the variance between measures: about
30%.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">While
therapeutic transference has never been adequately demonstrated by properly
scientific means, it has been widely clinically understood for 130 years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For half of that period, it was seen as the
crucial factor in all treatment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In return for those powers, I must not demand of clients that they
assent to being exposed to my personal sexual choices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When advocates demand that I ‘check my
privilege’, this is how I interpret the checking in question is to be accomplished.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">6)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When that happens, the boundaries we need
will change, and therapists and clients might enjoy greater freedom of sexual
expression.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do not believe that day is
yet here, but this essay is a tiny piece of the work towards bringing it about.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; text-indent: 0px;">© Russell J Stambaugh, March, 2018, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-90948777300217966072017-09-12T16:01:00.003-07:002017-11-06T16:15:46.934-08:00Darkness<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Oh, you never turned around to see the frowns<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> On the jugglers and
the clowns when they all did tricks for you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You never understood that it ain’t no good,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Like a Rolling Stone” – B. Dylan<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAnEc0Rbe7jpauKEdymR8rvg46v20VGkOfgXbWcvqD8wyy9zFjz1STA8JrJUq5dzPOp_ZkqaSpidUk9pCs4bCBwhSnlJvHDKtuKSO5v1GO-GE38L7LYT-ua0rV0uYsHG6x3cXF42QrAScV/s1600/05BOOKGAITSKILL2-facebookJumbo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="811" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAnEc0Rbe7jpauKEdymR8rvg46v20VGkOfgXbWcvqD8wyy9zFjz1STA8JrJUq5dzPOp_ZkqaSpidUk9pCs4bCBwhSnlJvHDKtuKSO5v1GO-GE38L7LYT-ua0rV0uYsHG6x3cXF42QrAScV/s400/05BOOKGAITSKILL2-facebookJumbo.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Mary Gaitskill in 2017, courtesy of the New York Times</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Back in April, the New York Times printed a review of Mary
Gaitskill’s new book, “<i>Somebody with a
Little Hammer: Essays</i>”. 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, <i>The Secretary</i>. 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“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?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kink and the problem
of idealization:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZZwM-ZVZa-WakvL6YO6l0Dg3Lre4Eh0KUtBrS-Zg7CuVWOC_fPg6WtnNHXU5OGKVVCRiRG78HjDIw9Finzda1iG7iuAWVPDc-EHXEXfuAXzt_e9yIV0_-iFPA52jOFfTk3itHIkFlVVuO/s1600/secretary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZZwM-ZVZa-WakvL6YO6l0Dg3Lre4Eh0KUtBrS-Zg7CuVWOC_fPg6WtnNHXU5OGKVVCRiRG78HjDIw9Finzda1iG7iuAWVPDc-EHXEXfuAXzt_e9yIV0_-iFPA52jOFfTk3itHIkFlVVuO/s400/secretary.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Maggie Gyllenhaal in <i>The Secretary</i> (2002) Nice blouse!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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 <i>Dear Playboy</i> and <i>Penthouse Variations</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEmNynnFhX5n0_50yCvryw5P4R4u3m8uqe-lAk5eFxYz6XqmIVJC7OvJliZ-ZOll-CSfN9l0SQHxvqQ7Yg8cpnLJcSgYqYcJXuC6Imxj1ST5zw-YzJLs9cX4M2oh_xPPxEK-Y5doN-ZKAm/s1600/IMG_20170728_163257+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEmNynnFhX5n0_50yCvryw5P4R4u3m8uqe-lAk5eFxYz6XqmIVJC7OvJliZ-ZOll-CSfN9l0SQHxvqQ7Yg8cpnLJcSgYqYcJXuC6Imxj1ST5zw-YzJLs9cX4M2oh_xPPxEK-Y5doN-ZKAm/s400/IMG_20170728_163257+%25281%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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 <i>Analysis, Terminable and Interminable(1937)</i>,
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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOky6jNaHIxFag9f_d_om-7vSLYt3D4Llgm4Gy16VTRcpF3gtQDxxTjQL2eXF-IRnn0GRhggwvXURIKfL7FgrI-TlbdL6w7HWL9r6mb7jv5idfHi2IorpJ0bFsykr02KgmgOZthRsjc1w7/s1600/104172344-GettyImages-479224659.530x298.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="298" data-original-width="530" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOky6jNaHIxFag9f_d_om-7vSLYt3D4Llgm4Gy16VTRcpF3gtQDxxTjQL2eXF-IRnn0GRhggwvXURIKfL7FgrI-TlbdL6w7HWL9r6mb7jv5idfHi2IorpJ0bFsykr02KgmgOZthRsjc1w7/s400/104172344-GettyImages-479224659.530x298.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Vlad,'the Outer', Putin, <i>Kompromat</i> King, courtesy of Getty Images. "Your secret's safe with me"!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perhaps stigma can be blamed for this variant of MKIBTYC (My
Kink is Better than Your Kink)</span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> 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.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu_h8IwBS_dBNLLP_mN7cFONCRCOfy3M1uauIXFpgnbPSr2LGXa-KJNPk580dkGCTMoYVbf-fPUs7Q0OTt0mFJpYLyq-eSst5BZk0_qs5CC80pEP9VqHOhh0Y9rpNiXVsqmQf1hsgIhZoi/s1600/de103390ae3e0c6ce05fa7e6c6af9219.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="650" data-original-width="435" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu_h8IwBS_dBNLLP_mN7cFONCRCOfy3M1uauIXFpgnbPSr2LGXa-KJNPk580dkGCTMoYVbf-fPUs7Q0OTt0mFJpYLyq-eSst5BZk0_qs5CC80pEP9VqHOhh0Y9rpNiXVsqmQf1hsgIhZoi/s640/de103390ae3e0c6ce05fa7e6c6af9219.jpg" width="428" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Serious leisure can be arduous. Rhymes with sex work is real labor. </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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 19<sup>th</sup> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqPZWrKFMSspytJ_X_RBv8MXnEFQwV_A8d2eG7I6gi4mCb6krJBeU-hwjcW8_znAlTk67zQt2QFcZv8LuLW9Ox997t-bCaHbMt_1lhPfxlGmRGTStVF9c0A4KzuJX4JxeLDM4fiptv7Rfh/s1600/merovingian.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="269" data-original-width="650" height="165" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqPZWrKFMSspytJ_X_RBv8MXnEFQwV_A8d2eG7I6gi4mCb6krJBeU-hwjcW8_znAlTk67zQt2QFcZv8LuLW9Ox997t-bCaHbMt_1lhPfxlGmRGTStVF9c0A4KzuJX4JxeLDM4fiptv7Rfh/s400/merovingian.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Lambert Wilson as the chief Merovingian in the <i>Matrix Reloaded</i> (2003)<br />Well dressed, but what the heck is a Merovingian? The short answer: bad guys. <br />The long answer: an early Frankish dynasty (457-752) that established French rule of Gaul.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />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, <i>The Matrix</i>)! 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perversity,
creativity, and transgression:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEY3HwyvGhqmXpDjxiddzEtuEt0-zv8FwpJLzRhrypdw79muQLMO7K74wHZVfjcBq-_DvPdLZTjohU3E0wQZQSFCUJ4aayKcETrFg5ZeR44weshDQ68TyahDZQBcFUQKXgBHB55fIF-aRK/s1600/Un+Chien+Andalou.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="515" data-original-width="640" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEY3HwyvGhqmXpDjxiddzEtuEt0-zv8FwpJLzRhrypdw79muQLMO7K74wHZVfjcBq-_DvPdLZTjohU3E0wQZQSFCUJ4aayKcETrFg5ZeR44weshDQ68TyahDZQBcFUQKXgBHB55fIF-aRK/s400/Un+Chien+Andalou.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A still from the notorious razor/eye sequence from Un Chien Anadalou (1929), Luis Bunel's and Salvador Dali's surrealistic silent film.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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 <i>Performance,</i> 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 <i>Their
Satanic Majesties Request </i>on the hi-fi!<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoqGGV_jrXND86JKF_MMML7az_5HY0B-BftfNnNh85YP-pgsA-f2aNMXspO3ITnnfL3M3bGm6s0Q7Bn9uT1_z0SSRn_6CInjGvlPSVzXEsPTQPSBHWKtOjv1RpaRQp6oXhSyf16U4vhl8p/s1600/performance-3-vice-versa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="780" data-original-width="1024" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoqGGV_jrXND86JKF_MMML7az_5HY0B-BftfNnNh85YP-pgsA-f2aNMXspO3ITnnfL3M3bGm6s0Q7Bn9uT1_z0SSRn_6CInjGvlPSVzXEsPTQPSBHWKtOjv1RpaRQp6oXhSyf16U4vhl8p/s400/performance-3-vice-versa.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A promotional poster for the 1970 movie, Per</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In 1984, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel outlined this
relationship between perversion and the creation of new artistic paradigms in
her book, <i>Creativity and Perversion</i>. 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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaJwlhbwc8Rq5H4P2KfiSXmFmrbcH7FVF_uRHZIO7PvII9zydfOhunn5HWJBVaX7tEi2Ia3HUuf9m3epQUne6fecw-F1qHQQXBzQFwuQW5cz82xwEtB9Ii5xO7HtfLol3U00iR73WIxXei/s1600/AVT_Janine-Chasseguet-Smirgel_4167.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="163" data-original-width="309" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaJwlhbwc8Rq5H4P2KfiSXmFmrbcH7FVF_uRHZIO7PvII9zydfOhunn5HWJBVaX7tEi2Ia3HUuf9m3epQUne6fecw-F1qHQQXBzQFwuQW5cz82xwEtB9Ii5xO7HtfLol3U00iR73WIxXei/s400/AVT_Janine-Chasseguet-Smirgel_4167.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0Bs4k3NXDh6GjfqR52OcJq2Gy-fBIpal6ttzKEMMIfgVIR6vIHmj7mv2AU_CSXm3CQqBJmmPaz7PHbIEdB1_zQNGuiZFGtbL-cTFOewe4oPz4K3Cnf5PezXvDu3aECytuJgL79tQl0l0q/s1600/Becoming+a+Kink+Aware+Therapist.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="207" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0Bs4k3NXDh6GjfqR52OcJq2Gy-fBIpal6ttzKEMMIfgVIR6vIHmj7mv2AU_CSXm3CQqBJmmPaz7PHbIEdB1_zQNGuiZFGtbL-cTFOewe4oPz4K3Cnf5PezXvDu3aECytuJgL79tQl0l0q/s400/Becoming+a+Kink+Aware+Therapist.png" width="276" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_Hlk491019272"><br /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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!</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; text-align: justify;">© Russell J Stambaugh, September, 2017, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></div>
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Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-70925739416686193502017-06-30T13:27:00.001-07:002017-06-30T13:27:46.019-07:00Consent 301: Consent, It's Discontents and Safety<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span id="goog_1259295999"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_1259296000"></span><br /><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/x28xt2l2s1vwq1j/Consent%20Violations%20Survey-SSTAR%20Outlinev2.pptx?dl=0">Consent 301: Consent, It's Discontents, and Safety</a></span>Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-56303817827155743522017-06-27T18:58:00.000-07:002018-08-03T18:02:56.183-07:00Kink’s Evelyn Hooker Moment<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WpkkbRMNM8wHMDXfBrtgdYY_dy2pNVDKKYaeUMtAG32ww6fV12hx63QTzbXziC1c_ZKCsN1ZGBlJ8DHwzxxdD0XFLPBPSeBL7BNBFKE-uF7TxuhRSuegqwC6OiUixfO2sfXGCNcgwm5j/s1600/cabaret-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1440" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WpkkbRMNM8wHMDXfBrtgdYY_dy2pNVDKKYaeUMtAG32ww6fV12hx63QTzbXziC1c_ZKCsN1ZGBlJ8DHwzxxdD0XFLPBPSeBL7BNBFKE-uF7TxuhRSuegqwC6OiUixfO2sfXGCNcgwm5j/s400/cabaret-1.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cabaret</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />“Start by admitting from cradle to tomb<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It isn’t that long a stay.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Life is a cabaret, old chum <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Only a cabaret, old chum<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And I love a cabaret”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Fred Ebb and John Kandler<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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: .<a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2016/01/richard-frieherr-von-krafft-ebing-1840.html">Richard von Krafft-Ebing</a> 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: <i>Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the
Mental Disorders I</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!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSSOpp_S-TN8Hc4Yx38uiCNDCt53g0AFJc8hsf8Ig0JIHe6xuqUi1IRuke4V_pQXt8zVzPrckHINJ7w0sVOE1Bk9uiN-Jf5fY8CPlWsA4p9R_u8t2KVNMBHhdKT76Hnx_tvDsxIRDUyU3x/s1600/Kinsey+Report.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1117" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSSOpp_S-TN8Hc4Yx38uiCNDCt53g0AFJc8hsf8Ig0JIHe6xuqUi1IRuke4V_pQXt8zVzPrckHINJ7w0sVOE1Bk9uiN-Jf5fY8CPlWsA4p9R_u8t2KVNMBHhdKT76Hnx_tvDsxIRDUyU3x/s400/Kinsey+Report.jpg" width="278" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The second half of the <i>Kinsey Report</i> (1953) was a close contemporary of the <i>DSM - 1</i></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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, <i>The Loved One</i> 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 <i>The Lovers</i> (1958), which had played
there just a few years earlier and had been shut down as obscene, leading to the
Supreme Court Case <i>Jacobellis v Ohio</i>,
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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisXJkr0-mDNvON8RvIblTgpjxlSGpgIoa7qwmqi2OE1B_RkkU-b70fxEZit385YcbVdaWfiAa-CKpUY70ZEMZHmsyuj2DiS0INCk4NojORzDOJhp45ZkKF1N5AdStxwPt0XzpIp9Dpj2A-/s1600/Hooker_350dpi-768x768.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="768" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisXJkr0-mDNvON8RvIblTgpjxlSGpgIoa7qwmqi2OE1B_RkkU-b70fxEZit385YcbVdaWfiAa-CKpUY70ZEMZHmsyuj2DiS0INCk4NojORzDOJhp45ZkKF1N5AdStxwPt0XzpIp9Dpj2A-/s400/Hooker_350dpi-768x768.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Evelyn Hooker</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji4z33twnREDjt1-fAUF93-IrOCLwOpYngA0Ikt08D0d3FPmJxeWgI7bgnbf2M7eD3KQhep3ejxa7GaRTXxxE3kkg8pQ7uwamIchfnLxb9hMRNzSKJQgeVXB-gnuQTC1vqbfHtpEFZ0VZa/s1600/Christopher-Isherwood.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="765" data-original-width="1000" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji4z33twnREDjt1-fAUF93-IrOCLwOpYngA0Ikt08D0d3FPmJxeWgI7bgnbf2M7eD3KQhep3ejxa7GaRTXxxE3kkg8pQ7uwamIchfnLxb9hMRNzSKJQgeVXB-gnuQTC1vqbfHtpEFZ0VZa/s400/Christopher-Isherwood.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Christopher Isherwood</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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 <i>Cabaret</i>.
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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNf8rwCU7T8SZOrKDK6QwpkWt1sGLzJxzKdr0Gzy5hTmLK4L9z5w4LQupf8ks35xTgWPY2oine335t0-HoYbpxba664XArzKPZNUXe5VmiP3ChAmlQt96mzzMdS_D9ZV1XrJWFWVUr4-ll/s1600/female+submissive.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="461" data-original-width="346" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNf8rwCU7T8SZOrKDK6QwpkWt1sGLzJxzKdr0Gzy5hTmLK4L9z5w4LQupf8ks35xTgWPY2oine335t0-HoYbpxba664XArzKPZNUXe5VmiP3ChAmlQt96mzzMdS_D9ZV1XrJWFWVUr4-ll/s640/female+submissive.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Variant, perhaps, but far from statistically unusual!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm5tj76tA8VSFLBdA4xYN3bqh0zgx6DpH77iVARooYE8RHHHpK7anuUVa_OkuD1hyat_zZVwqxL7Lthpsj-wnG9nLRQ6YzuXl_CiiVPAEl0ZHb0usvq49uejgvmWVFD3-5n94yxjxA3typ/s1600/fols-08-master-slave-duo-covered-up.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm5tj76tA8VSFLBdA4xYN3bqh0zgx6DpH77iVARooYE8RHHHpK7anuUVa_OkuD1hyat_zZVwqxL7Lthpsj-wnG9nLRQ6YzuXl_CiiVPAEl0ZHb0usvq49uejgvmWVFD3-5n94yxjxA3typ/s400/fols-08-master-slave-duo-covered-up.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmN4cpk0IK7RO134D-QORVr32aqY8KNS6UYX2Fe8-Qdl5fjq_JhqgC0uSTJlkgN5Nct1sCIdH3BPuoXTVqqcuLa8ydgREGk4n0DSMSNFqmweOKCFERXWY8RD2nAu_SbSoIsOUaD14MdMI3/s1600/WHO+logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="203" data-original-width="249" height="326" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmN4cpk0IK7RO134D-QORVr32aqY8KNS6UYX2Fe8-Qdl5fjq_JhqgC0uSTJlkgN5Nct1sCIdH3BPuoXTVqqcuLa8ydgREGk4n0DSMSNFqmweOKCFERXWY8RD2nAu_SbSoIsOUaD14MdMI3/s400/WHO+logo.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ICD -11:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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. <a href="http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/revision/en/">WHO offical site for the ICD -11 revision</a> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">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. <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/07/kenneth-zucker-phd-and-michael-first.html">Ken Zucker and Michael First's DSM - 5 plenary at AASECT</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That moment has arrived. Much of the credit for the ICD – 11 change
rests with this research.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;">© Russell J Stambaugh, June 2017, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-45116684405687682112016-12-18T06:20:00.001-08:002016-12-18T06:20:44.995-08:00Further Discussion of the AASECT Position Statement<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The function of this post is to aggregate my further contributions to the discussion of this topic.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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:</span></div>
<br />
<a href="https://www.iitap.com/blog/2016/12/14/response-to-aasect-position-statement/"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">IITAP Response to the AASECT Position Statement</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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 </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I responded December 16, 2016:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">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.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">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. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">1) AASECT has not had a previous advocacy position on sex </span></span><span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px;">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 <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com&source=gmail&ust=1482153236790000&usg=AFQjCNEgjxXUO1ayaNLrKYh44nXg-C5DUw" href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">elephantinthehottub.blogspot.<wbr></wbr>com</a>. Individual AASECT Members, however, have often ardently opposed it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">2). It is pure fantasy that AASECT will change its position in the light of new data that hasn't come in yet. </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">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 </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">believed</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> 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 </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">twenty</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> years away now! </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">In fact, the existence of a similar </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">mechanism</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> for sex addiction and chemical addictions is a major </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">piece</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> of the puzzle neuroscientists need to achieve to make the analogy work. They more or less have that now. They must also </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">reliably</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> 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 </span></span></span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica neue, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">overlap</span></span><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> with other </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">colloquial</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> addictions in their conceptual model that addiction treatment is </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">appropriate</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> for the wide range of things they call addictions is correct.. </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">I am working on a blog post for Elephant that address this relatively high </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">conceptual</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> bar. To put it very briefly, to show that correlation is probably causality you must demonstrate that your measures are </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">reliable; </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">that they correlate with those things you </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">intend</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> 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 </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">meet that</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">standard</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> with the evaluation of other treatment methods, including our prefered models. But that is what you need to be able to do to </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">defeat</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> Roger Libby's awkward assertion that </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">behavior</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> is nearly impossible to interpret </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">outside</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> of its context. Please remember that, </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">reparative</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> 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+ </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">anecdotes</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> of reparative treatment success did not constitute scientific evidence sufficient to oppose banning them </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">altogether</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> at American </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">Psychiatric</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> Association) not just inhumane, and that the overall efficacy of sex offender programs, in which </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">treatment</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> must be focused on changing sexual </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">behavior</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">, 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 </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">behaviors</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> that are persistent enough to raise problems severe enough that they might be seen as powerful as chemical addictions.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px;">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. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">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 </span></span></span><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">concomitants.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">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.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">4). When working on this statement, we were focused on </span></span><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">principles</span></span><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">, 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 </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">sexologically-</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">informed treatment, not just that done by AASECT Certified professionals.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">It is my opinion that the term sex addiction is indefensible. If later proof validates the </span></span><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">concept</span></span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">, well, we can rethink that.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">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 </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">incorrect</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> construction. And with it has come problems of </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">labeling</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">, shame, blaming, flight form personal </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">responsibility</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">, and confused public discourse that make treatment more challenging rather than easier in many instances. Having resisted the term ineffectively, we are now </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">stuck</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> with the problem </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">discourse</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">. </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">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 </span></span><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">addiction</span></span><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">, perhaps there is a </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">perfectionist</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> 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 </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">prematurely</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">labeled</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> as having the </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">identified</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> problem. Those are the hoped for benefits of putting this sex addiction Djinn back in the bottle. Djinn gold </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">disappears</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> with the sunrise, so spend it quickly if you are planning to rub that lamp!</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">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 </span></span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">reflected</span></span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> a desperate bid of AASECT, an organization in decline in numbers and relevance in the face of a veritable tsunami of public and political </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12px;">endorsement</span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> of the sex addiction model. He urged AASECT readers to keep an open mind about sex </span></span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-size: 12px;">addiction</span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> in the face of AASECT's </span></span><span style="font-size: 12px;">position</span><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> statement. I paraphrase here as it would be a violation of AASECT listserv guidelines to quote any post but my own. </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">Dr Goodman also posted this excellent link to the work of Dr Voon, which IITAP feels definitively validates the sex addiction model </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/brain-activity-in-sex-addiction-mirrors-that-of-drug-addiction">Valerie Voon, et al's Research</a></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f7f9;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">I then responded:</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">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.</span><div dir="auto" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
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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.</div>
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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. </div>
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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. </div>
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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.</div>
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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.</div>
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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.</div>
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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!</div>
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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.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgllB5FwkfqEtGPLYMqbX-RkRg-rGXfNJe20rLwBUr93l60AsPPH9bkiaJvhVfHwTNcbC2YD5cUMqtTuKRObYDuYiSOcVHXuz4PxZU3PqPFo_BaFnXrrnP4O8MG2tjhB3zqDaCpUFfl32ko/s1600/Gary+Larson%2527s+Desperate+Lobster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgllB5FwkfqEtGPLYMqbX-RkRg-rGXfNJe20rLwBUr93l60AsPPH9bkiaJvhVfHwTNcbC2YD5cUMqtTuKRObYDuYiSOcVHXuz4PxZU3PqPFo_BaFnXrrnP4O8MG2tjhB3zqDaCpUFfl32ko/s640/Gary+Larson%2527s+Desperate+Lobster.jpg" width="489" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(C) by Gary Larson, used under fair use.</span></td></tr>
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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.</div>
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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. </div>
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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.</div>
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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.</div>
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You want my personal decoding of the AASECT Position Statement?</div>
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1). No slut shaming. Often people with problems only magnify them with shame.</div>
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2). Be scientifically rigorous and conservative. Works great with sexological treatments and addiction treatments alike.</div>
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3). Put the client first and don't power play them, or let others power play you.</div>
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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!</div>
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Having overcome my heretofore unconscious fears of declining relevance, I'll close here for the time being.</div>
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"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...</div>
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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. </div>
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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. </div>
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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.</div>
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Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-68252072510642048072016-12-06T06:45:00.001-08:002016-12-06T09:08:33.536-08:00The AASECT Position Statement on Sex Addiction<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Last week, AASECT announced a new
advocacy position regarding sex addiction passed by the its Board of Directors
at their Fall Meeting on November 15 in Chicago. That
statement reads:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">AASECT Position Statement — Sex Addiction<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Founded in 1967, the American Association of Sexuality
Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) is devoted to the promotion of
sexual health by the development and advancement of the fields of sexual
education, counseling and therapy. With this mission, AASECT accepts the
responsibility of training, certifying and advancing high standards in the
practice of sexuality education services, counseling and therapy. When
contentious topics and cultural conflicts impede sexual education and health
care, AASECT may publish position statements to clarify standards to
protect consumer sexual health and sexual rights.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">AASECT recognizes that people may experience significant
physical, psychological, spiritual and sexual health consequences related to
their sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors. <i>AASECT recommends that its
members utilize models that do not unduly pathologize consensual sexual
problems. AASECT 1) does not find sufficient empirical evidence to support the
classification of sex addiction or porn addiction as a mental health
disorder, </i><i>and 2) does not find
the sexual addiction training and treatment methods and educational pedagogies
to be adequately informed by accurate human sexuality knowledge.</i> <i>Therefore,
it is the position of AASECT that linking problems related to sexual urges,
thoughts or behaviors to a porn/sexual addiction process cannot be advanced by
AASECT as a standard of practice for sexuality education delivery, counseling
or therapy.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">AASECT advocates for a collaborative movement to establish
standards of care supported by science, public health consensus and the
rigorous protection of sexual rights for consumers seeking treatment for
problems related to consensual sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This position statement is, in my
view, a crucial and inevitable step AASECT has taken at the time given the
characteristics of the clinical and social environment. This, indeed, is why I agreed to participate
with Michael Aaron, Doug-Braun-Harvey, and Michael Vigorito, in creating it at
the behest of Ian Kerner, the AASECT Public Relations, Media, and Advocacy
Steering Committee Chair. The statement
purposes are also consistent with my work as Kink-Aware Professionals Advocate
for The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, (NCSF) a position I accepted
shortly before receiving the invitation to participate in constructing the
statement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Context:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Elephant is all about context,
and like kink, therapy, and so many other things in social life, it is easy to
misunderstand this statement without appreciating the context from which it
arose. So that is going to require
excursions into organizational history, some discussion of the contemporary socio-political
landscape, and AASECT’s history as an advocacy organization for fuller
understanding. But let’s talk a little
bit about what the statement might or might not be intended to accomplish.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One important caveat: While I
speak as an author, and the document I helped create was adopted by AASECT, I do
not speak for AASECT, or even the other members of the task force that created
this language. The history I shall
present is as factual as I can make it, but the views are my own. I am urging readers to view my observations
critically in the interest of better therapy and social policy towards sexual
variability, but it would be naïve to assume that all readers will share the
values and assumptions that characterize this blog.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The AASECT Position Statement is
an assertion that the best scientific studies do not currently support the
theory that sex can be an addiction directly analogous to cocaine, heroin,
alcohol or nicotine. That similar neural
pathways may sometimes be shared by sexuality and other sources of pleasure and
reward, including those involved in true addictions, reflects correlation, but
does not establish causation. The
scientific evidence is also weak that one will lose erectile function or
partner desire from over-use of erotica.
These claims are the modern equivalent the 1880’s shibboleths that one
will grow hair on one’s palms or go blind from masturbation. Just last month a new study was reported that
failed to replicate the long-touted study that partners who used high levels of
erotica were more likely to divorce than those who did not. The evidence is clear that clients sometime
have problems with excessive and non-consensual sex behaviors, but <b>not</b> that they are ‘addicted’ to sex.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The statement is also an attempt
to reframe the inept social language that defines sex problems such as excessive
use of erotica or intimacy difficulties as ‘addictions’ because they are best
treated by the same techniques as alcohol and recreational drug dependencies. Neither is there scientific basis for claiming
we are in a public health crisis caused by erotica use that requires emergency
governmental intervention.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The position statement also
states that it is not reasonable for the public to expect high quality
treatment for sexuality problems from addiction specialists certified by
addiction specialty organizations unless those professionals also have special
training and certification in professional sexology. The clear majority of sexual problems do not
belong to the class of addictions, but are in the domain of the human sexuality
professionals.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The position statement does
confront the practice of using shame as a mechanism of social control for human
sexuality generally, and specifically and directly opposes it as a therapeutic
technique to attempt to change sexual behavior.
We made this statement confidently and assertively given the poor
scientific track record of therapies relying on shaming techniques and the
ubiquity of sexual shame in society generally which greatly risks over
diagnosis of sex as the root cause underlying presenting complaints about a
client’s sexual and intimate relations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Thus, the position statement is
not a blanket condemnation of all certified addiction specialists, some of whom
already have, and others who are seeking, advanced competence in treating the
problems of human sexuality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While it is criticizing the use
of the term ‘sex addiction’, it is not a blanket condemnation of all ‘sex
addiction’ treatments. Therapists, both
sex therapists and so-called sex addiction therapists, use a great variety of
techniques, and there is overlap between what good therapists of differing
theoretical orientations do. In fact, we
are confronting the use of shaming and the uncritical defense of sexual
conventionality, not specific theoretical orientations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Neither is it an attack on other
certifying organizations, especially SASH and IITAP, which are nowhere
mentioned in the document, except in so far as they teach their memberships
based upon unsound scientific principles, and fail to require adequate human
sexuality training, or advocate for under-trained individuals to practice as if
they were certified and licensed professionals.
It is anticipated that our opposition to the use of shaming behavior in
therapy would be a bone of contention for some members of other organizations
that deem shame to be condign.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is not an attempt to expel
persons seeking expertise in the field of human sexuality from our AASECT
community because they hold certification in other organizations whose ideology
we do not share. That not only includes
professional organizations like AAMFT, IITAP, or SASH, but religious
organizations, or diverse minority communities some of whom hold sexual views
with which we might disagree.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Immediate Context:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The immediate impetus to the
AASECT PRMA Steering Committee soliciting this advocacy document and passing it
was two-fold. AASECT evaluates the
educational programs of other organizations in the field to determine which of
our education requirements outside providers might fulfil. This work is conducted by the CE Approval
Committee led ably by Sally Valentine, which, late last year, stopped approving
sex addiction programs because they were not adequately sexologically
grounded. This raised the issue that if
we had a principled reason to this, we had an educational responsibility to
communicate to the Membership and public about it. At
around the same time, Susan Stiritz chair of the, AASECT Summer Institutes Committee, decided
that years of controversy on the AASECT listserv about sex addiction might
indicate an excellent programing opportunity. If Members wanted to talk about it so much on
the list, maybe they would pay to attend quality intensive training about
it. This simultaneously made for
excellent opportunity to teach about the change in the CE Approval policy. The Summer Institutes Committee assembled such
a great line up, I coughed up the money to go and it was the best AASECT
program I have ever attended. PRMA Steering
was moved to action because of discussion generated by the resultant program: ‘Revisiting
“Sex Addiction”: Transformative Ways to Address Out of Control Sexual Behavior’. It included a wide slice of AASECT
participants, including many who held SASH and IITAP memberships. Presenters included Eli Coleman, Joe Kort,
David Ley, Nicole Prause, Rory Reid, Neil Cannon, Ruth Cohn, Dalychia Saah and
Rafaella Smith-Fiallo, Michael Vigorito, Doug Braun-Harvey and Susan Stiritz. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://cs.aasect.org/tags/summer-institute">Program Announcement to the AASECT 2016 Summer Institute</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Also influential in the timing of
this position statement was the deteriorating social discourse associated with
the then-current US Presidential Campaign.
Comment trolls and political flaming did not originate with this
campaign, but it is highly significant that in it, blatantly false discourse
and the promotion of strongly-held opinions as the equivalent of facts crossed
the line from internet anonymity to daily public speeches by the candidates
before thousands of partisans. In this
climate, organizations like “Fight the New Drug” have been spreading ideology
that porn is the equivalent of heroin.
The Republican National Committee put a plank in their platform that
erotica constitutes a public health crisis in defiance of STI rates, unequal
access of poor and ethnic minorities to sexual healthcare, and sexual
transmission of the Zika virus which constitute genuine public health crises. It is the professional responsibility of
AASECT to defend the practice environment in which quality sexuality education,
counseling and therapy might take place.
The position statement is part of AASECT’s response.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghsCJndprgWe94vuLiplE91atQlthVdUY7Eci1eW_VvhFUb2FZzPemDLDzM0gz4CTMZJMRbzwhtI9JR7IklRqvX0_OFYMQZWvqrlr3ELQo4dKO4E5o8inHa1Yk81vWiwR2LkvJRibkORFl/s1600/Trump+Lying.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghsCJndprgWe94vuLiplE91atQlthVdUY7Eci1eW_VvhFUb2FZzPemDLDzM0gz4CTMZJMRbzwhtI9JR7IklRqvX0_OFYMQZWvqrlr3ELQo4dKO4E5o8inHa1Yk81vWiwR2LkvJRibkORFl/s400/Trump+Lying.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">How big was the lie, Donald? "It was this big. You should have seen the one that got away"!</span></td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">AASECT History:</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgve5QbA1bMNiChpY1xWeaoKHXPgOFDO3LfjHCHtxMyJ_cYpmWgpBMc0oYCfZ1BdOxFIJnhFSw0sQeRyAvXAOUP_kCcJKRb66zshv9OFF2eyJeEUaJzZd8-ScZNsryX0UcYu-Pr9jgsPhNK/s1600/Patricia+Schiller.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgve5QbA1bMNiChpY1xWeaoKHXPgOFDO3LfjHCHtxMyJ_cYpmWgpBMc0oYCfZ1BdOxFIJnhFSw0sQeRyAvXAOUP_kCcJKRb66zshv9OFF2eyJeEUaJzZd8-ScZNsryX0UcYu-Pr9jgsPhNK/s400/Patricia+Schiller.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">AASECT Founder Patricia Schiller, JD. Photo taken by AASECT around 2008.</td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This year AASECT will celebrate
its 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary. It was founded by Patricia Schiller with the
express goal of supporting high standards in the field of sexuality
education. It was not until 5 years
later that AASECT’s mission was expanded to cover training psychotherapists and
physicians in sex therapy. Schiller
founded AASECT because, despite social changes in the 1960’s that made for increased
social discourse about human sexuality, academic institutions failed to provide
adequate graduate and undergraduate programs to train in human sexuality. The contemporary political environment made
it extremely hard for colleges and universities to secure funding and
legislative support for academic programs involving sex. That sad reality remains true even today
despite a handful of quality programs at Morehouse University, University of
Minnesota, University of Michigan, Guelph and Widener University. Sexuality education, sexuality counseling and
sex therapy remain post graduate specialties to this day, and are marginalized
and diminished as academic disciplines relative to supply chain management and
forestry because of social stigma surrounding human sexuality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So AASECT took up the task of
certifying competence in the sexual health professions outside of traditional
medicine. This is the basis for its Continuing
Education Approval Committee needing to make decisions about what programing
has AASECT-approved sexuality content.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ2UAJrmHUjFmZpZ5pBd8rj8GPPxOhYQ5thlTT_UVgdYtMvxMVcvwS_8kJHRv5ZRI-B8Dh0FucvkZwYPjvuGy_ITAyX1tcPpJWDa1DjU-04doeSc3BikWcA5EKKRc_TakxVrOkGrS2zcp3/s1600/ERA+Protests.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ2UAJrmHUjFmZpZ5pBd8rj8GPPxOhYQ5thlTT_UVgdYtMvxMVcvwS_8kJHRv5ZRI-B8Dh0FucvkZwYPjvuGy_ITAyX1tcPpJWDa1DjU-04doeSc3BikWcA5EKKRc_TakxVrOkGrS2zcp3/s400/ERA+Protests.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Although ratified by 35 states, the Equal Rights Amendment failed in 1979 sparking debate in AASECT about boycotting Colorado. No permanent advocacy mission was established in AASECT until 2004.</span></td></tr>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Until 2004, AASECT had no official
advocacy function. Great controversy had
attended AASECT’s decision to hold a conference in Denver Colorado about the
time of the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1979. But efforts to officially incorporate an advocacy
function were deterred by three factors. Tax-exempt educational associations like
AASECT are strictly limited in their ability to lobby governmental officials,
and cannot generally afford to do so and simultaneously fulfil their other
responsibilities to their memberships. Because of those regulations, AASECT existed
in an agreement to carve up the domain of professional sexology with three
other organizations. The Society for the
Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) handled research, The Sexuality
Information and Education Council of the United States (SEICUS) handled
advocacy, the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality did fundraising,
and AASECT was responsible for certification of professionals. In that arrangement, advocacy was another
organization’s job. Third, these
arrangements were mostly fine with sex therapists, who made up most voting
members in AASECT and were reluctant to advocate, seeing it as a role conflict
with their clinical work and a diffusion of scarce organizational resources. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVERS8jjnyCJ9CJgtJSYN_ZQ1ta-MILJWBBId9CTIQj76b6MPe2GczyboEb-WAPqoLuQvORmNudeW6sQ0PqbTyGXmOHFnZPJy6sZidqJ5nn-HhP8HIm3PpfIVZw9NlbAfJsPXAhgYlTnWl/s1600/Act+UP+at+NIH.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVERS8jjnyCJ9CJgtJSYN_ZQ1ta-MILJWBBId9CTIQj76b6MPe2GczyboEb-WAPqoLuQvORmNudeW6sQ0PqbTyGXmOHFnZPJy6sZidqJ5nn-HhP8HIm3PpfIVZw9NlbAfJsPXAhgYlTnWl/s400/Act+UP+at+NIH.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The ACT UP die-in at The National Institutes of Health over experimental treatments for AIDS.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But in the late 1990’s NCSF
formed and, along with the Victoria Woodhull Foundation, started exhibiting at
AASECT Conferences, gently advocating for kink and consensual
non-monogamy. GLBT members became increasingly
influential in AASECT Membership. Many
had learned that collective action and advocacy were essential to surviving the
HIV epidemic. And the practice
environments of sex educators were steadily deteriorating due to the onslaught
of abstinence-only education funded by the states and federal government. At about this time, the World Health
Organization and World Congress of Sexology (now named The World Association of Sexual Health) adopted advocacy platforms,
legitimating the argument that AASECT should advocate for sexual health too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.worldsexology.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/declaration_of_sexual_rights_sep03_2014.pdf">World Association of Sexual Health Declaration</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In this new environment, Barnaby
B Barrett, then AASECT President-elect, persuaded the 2004 AASECT Board of
Directors to create a Public Relations, Media, and Advocacy Committee with the
tasks of amending the AASECT Mission to permit sexual health advocacy, and writing
the AASECT Vision of Sexual Health. In
2006, the Board was reorganized and the advocacy function was made a permanent Board-level
position to support other initiatives that fell within the scope of the AASECT
Vision of Sexual Health. Since then, AASECT
has passed statements opposing abstinence-only education, opposing reparative
and conversion therapies, and supporting scientifically sound ideas of healthy
sexual variability. Because sex
addiction therapies have been used reparatively against gay, lesbian,
gender-nonconforming and kinky clients, these efforts involved intense
discussion whether sex addiction should be specifically named in our statements
against conversion therapies. I opposed
this as misplacing our focus: we are
against reparative therapies because they are a violation of human rights and
scientifically ineffective regardless of the treatment methods involved. But these earlier advocacy efforts were yet
another source of impetus for AASECT to address sex addiction explicitly. The formation of the AASECT AltSex Special
Interest Group in 2009 became yet another focus for some of this advocacy
discussion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Hypersexuality , Sex Addiction, OCSB or Problem Sexual Behavior?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I will not review here the long
history of the various theoretical constructs that have been offered to the American
Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual revision
efforts. Back in the 1960’s with the
publications of DSM – II, one set, ‘nymphomania’ and ‘satyriasis’, were
mentioned in DSM – II. Hypersexuality
also had standing in the manual as a research diagnosis or component of the
catch-all diagnosis; Psychosexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (NOS). But AASECT is not alone in resolutely
regarding the scientific evidence for ‘sex addiction’ to be too weak and pejorative
to serve as a diagnosis. Eli Coleman has
long championed work to make some form of excessive sexual behavior a billable
diagnostic code, but his efforts had foundered in a thicket of competing
terminologies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Back in the 1980’s, the
addictionologists and the sexology community worked together in the effort to
research, define and treat excessive sexual behavior. In their second year of joint meetings, they
even conducted mini-SAR’s to spread sophistication about sexual variability
among the two communities, but starting in the third year of regular meetings,
the addiction community decided on meeting separately and insisted on their own
terminology, much bolstered by the success of Patrick Carnes book “Out of the
Shadows”. Over time, the addiction
community became self-certifying, yet failed to incorporate sexual
science-based sexual criteria in their certification standards.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I have written extensively on
this blog about the 2014 publishing of the DSM – 5 with scant mention of
hyoersexuality and the problems this has posed for the addictions
community. For those interested, here the links follow this paragraph. But
AASECT is neither premature, nor is it taking a radical position to assert
that, even though the neuroscience is still coming in, sex addiction is not an
appropriate clinical definition of most sexual problems involving high
frequency or variant consensual sexual problems.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/05/arrival-of-deathstar.html">Arrival of the Death Star</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/05/out-of-shadows.html">Out of the Shadows</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/07/kenneth-zucker-phd-and-michael-first.html">Kevin Zucker, PhD, and Michael First's MD's DSM - 5 Plenary at AASECT</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2015/09/porn-addiction-study-and-dsm-5-debate.html"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Porn Addiction Study and the DSM - 5 Debate on Hypersexuality</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, I chose to cooperate
with Doug Braun-Harvey and Michael Vigorito on this effort because of a crucial
concept in their writing that I believe constitutes a cornerstone of good
clinical work. Although every effort
should be made by all practitioners to ground their work in the best science,
the long history of clinical ideas illustrates that we have been providing good
quality psychotherapy with inadequate, scientifically weak, but widely
practiced treatment models. Between
Krafft-Ebing’s first modern attempt at nosology in 1886 and today, we spent the
first 66 years with no classification system at all, and almost a hundred years
without one based upon defined and observable symptoms. So modesty about our methods and care not to
abuse our clinical authority in treatment is exceeding important. Sex addiction therapy is not client-centered,
even if the client comes in with intense, ego syntonic shame and needs no urging
to adopt self-shaming labels like ‘sex addict’.
David Ley has emphasized the risk to a client’s sense of agency regarding
their sexual behavior through adoption of such labels. And overstating the power of sexual urges
feeds the shaming social discourses that underlie many clinical problems we as
sexology clinicians see presenting for treatment. Terms like out of control sexual behavior and
problem sexual behavior are appropriately atheoretical, less stigmatizing, and
appropriately modest about what science knows right now. It is an ethical cornerstone of diversity-sensitive
practice that we not employ terms that imply that we know more than we do
simply because they constitute effective marketing techniques. Such behavior is objectionable because it puts
our welfare before that of our clients.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In Summary:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This discussion of AASECT’s
Position Statement on Sex Addiction emphasizes organizational histories and
missions, changing social forces, with emphasis on the changing social
environment in which sex is practiced and discussed and in which quality
sexuality education and therapy are conducted.
This is not because gifted individuals do not deserve recognition for
their efforts to promote sexual health.
There are many heroes. But none
of these people would have been successful if their efforts were not supported
by others, and didn’t take advantage of the opportunities their times afforded
them. In the actual event, the impulse
to take a position on sex addiction came from AASECT’s program accreditation function,
their own educational programs, their commitment to supporting good educational
and clinical work for alternative sexualities, the opening of AASECT to
increasingly diverse Members and exhibitors, and AASECT’s responsibilities to
support a constructive practice environment. Ultimately, it is within AASECT's primary mission to protect the field and the public.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I participated because I believed
this is the correct step at the correct time in a long history, and I thank all
my colleagues for their support in this effort.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">© Russell J Stambaugh, PhD,</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Ann Arbor Michigan, December 2016. All rights reserved.</span></div>
Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-34494190195417262232016-07-01T05:27:00.001-07:002016-07-01T06:23:24.660-07:00AASECT Position Statements on Sex and Gender Diversity and Reparative Therapy<div class="MsoNormal">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKw6KRPaT_ZRKoNVtEbEkpT1vvRmtSvQ1JOh54nhX4dYNV4UGjCrj-jTaS-c2J2rlDBnyLAh37n8IbSKLaWCdzsREVrU_C-aNG35fZg3j2E_KuaZBi3BS98mDfXjY9LmwPdEII6SOtnbyF/s1600/aasect.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKw6KRPaT_ZRKoNVtEbEkpT1vvRmtSvQ1JOh54nhX4dYNV4UGjCrj-jTaS-c2J2rlDBnyLAh37n8IbSKLaWCdzsREVrU_C-aNG35fZg3j2E_KuaZBi3BS98mDfXjY9LmwPdEII6SOtnbyF/s400/aasect.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On June 9, 2016 at its board meeting in San Juan, Puerto
Rico, AASECT unanimously adopted two position statements authored by other
organizations. The first was initiated
primarily by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, stimulated by AASECT’s
Position on Sexual Expression, including Orientation and Identity adopted in
November of 2015, and available here: <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2015/11/aasect-position-on-sexual-expression.html">AASECT Position on Sexual Expression</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">NCSF required a statement that explicitly named activities
that were subjected to discriminatory court cases and devised this language as
congruent with parts of the Position on Sexual Expression:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Sexual Freedom Resolution<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Working within the position of social justice and human
rights, we support the right of freedom of sexual expression among consenting
adults. We affirm that sexual expression
is integral to the human experience, that this right is central to overall
health and well-being, and that this right must be honored. We support the right to be free from
discrimination, oppression, exploitation and violence due to one’s sexual
expression.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The best contemporary scientific evidence finds that consenting
adults that practice BDSM, fetishism, cross dressing and non-monogamy can be
presumed healthy as a group. We believe that
any sexuality education of therapies that treat sexualities must avoid
stigmatizing or pathologizing these sexual expressions among fully informed
consenting adults.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As professionals in the field of sexuality and sexual health,
we actively seek to destigmatize consensual sexual expression and consensual
practices among consenting adults, as well as to help create and maintain safe
space for those who have been traditionally marginalized.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Signed:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">National Coalition for Sexual Freedom<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">AASECT (American Association for Sexuality Educators,
Counselors and Therpists)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">CARAS (Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative
Sexualities)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Center for Positive Sexuality<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Institute fir Sexuality Education and Enlightenment<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Projects Advancing Sexual Diversity<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Science of BDSM Research Team<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">TASHRA (The Alternative Sexualities Health Research
Alliance)”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSFreedom.org)
continues to solicit organizational signers for this document. Arrangements can be made either through
contacting them through their website, or by leaving a comment here on
Elephant.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The second position statement originated from the American
Psychiatric Associations United States Joint Statement work group.with ties to
working communities in the American Medical Association, The American
Psychological Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the National
Association of Social Workers, and other national organizations. It has already been adopted by the several
organizations listed in the ‘Action Paper’ below:</span><o:p></o:p><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“Joint
Statement on Conversion Therapy in the U.S.</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This statement is a framework for values and action to
address issues raised by conversion therapy (also known as reorientation
therapy, sexual orientation change efforts, ex-gay therapy, or reparative
therapy). This statement expresses a shared commitment of two core principles
of ethical mental health services: 1) facilitate individual self-determination
and 2) do no harm.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The ethical principle of self-determination requires that
each individual is seen as a whole person supported in their right to explore,
define, articulate, and live out their own identity. For this reason, it is
essential for clinicians to acknowledge the broad spectrum of sexual
orientations and gender identities/expressions. In order to do so, it is
necessary to have an equal understanding of and respect for sexual and gender
minorities as well as the religious, spiritual, and other ideological values of
individuals, families, and communities.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To ensure all healthcare providers do no harm, it is
essential to recognize that a person is not mentally ill or developmentally
delayed because they experience same-sex attractions or a nontraditional gender
identity or expression. The focus of treatment must not be to convert an
individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. The signatories
share a commitment to protecting the public from the harms of conversion
therapy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is no intention in this statement to deny those with
conflicted feelings around sexuality or gender identity from seeking qualified
and appropriate help. Nothing in this statement is intended to preclude ethical
research relative to gender identity or sexual orientation.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u>Background</u><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="h.gjdgxs"></a>Historically, research findings and clinical expertise have
found that variations in sexual orientation and gender identity are within the
normal range of human development, and that conversion therapy or other efforts
to make sexual orientation or gender identity/expression conform to specific
standards and expectations are not effective, are not appropriate therapeutic
practices, are not ethical, and are harmful.<sup>1, 2, 3 </sup>Many professional associations already
have position statements relative to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender,
Questioning, of Gender NonConforming (LGBTQ/GNC) health and/or the
ineffectiveness of efforts to change sexual orientation and/or the potential
harms of conversion therapy for sexual orientation.<sup>4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15</sup><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u>Goals and
Objectives</u><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Given the
harm associated with conversion therapy efforts, other affirmative behavioral,
psychological, and emotional health interventions are recommended for
individual or family distress associated with sexual orientation and gender
identity/expression. We commit ourselves to ensure that:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->The public is informed about the research on
conversion therapy and the risks thereof;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Healthcare professionals are made aware of the
ethical issues relating to conversion therapy;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->New and existing healthcare providers are
appropriately trained to competently deal with requests for conversion therapy
and to provide appropriate support to clients in distress over their sexual
orientation and/or gender identity/expression;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Healthcare professionals from various
disciplines work together to promote the public interest in addressing
conversion therapy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u>Roles and
Responsibilities</u><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
This
statement does not define a list of actions which every organization will carry
out. It sets out a framework for how organizations will respond to the issue in
areas where they have responsibilities.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Each organization will review its codes of
ethical conduct for members and consider the need for the creation of specific
amendments to those codes;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Professional associations will ensure their
members have access to the latest information regarding the ineffectiveness and
harms of conversion therapy;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Professional associations will endeavor to make
continuing professional development events available to further providers'
understanding and cultural competence in working with lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, questioning and gender nonconforming (LGBTQ/GNC) clients;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Organizations will work together to create a
shared information resource on the ineffectiveness and harms of conversion
therapy to help and support both members of the public and professionals,
including sets of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs);<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="h.30j0zll"></a><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->Those
with a responsibility for clinical and academic training will work to ensure
that such programs provide mental and behavioral health providers with a
sufficient degree of cultural competence to work effectively with LGBTQ/GNC
clients;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Clinicians who are not sufficiently trained
around issues of sexual orientation and/or gender identity/expression will make
every effort to seek appropriate training or consultation or to connect
patients with clinicians or agencies who are trained to provide appropriate
clinical care;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="h.1fob9te"></a><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]-->Auditing
and accrediting organizations will review their current guidelines and policies
for individual practitioners and training organizations to assess the need for
more specific standards to demonstrate awareness of and compliance with
policies regarding conversion therapy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Beyond ending potentially harmful practices, it is important
to also build greater social acceptance of people of all gender identities,
gender expressions, and sexual orientations, including lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, questioning, and gender nonconforming people of all ages; to adopt
appropriate and supportive therapies; and to provide current, targeted and
accurate resources and information for all patients and their families.
Building better supportive environments and working to eliminate negative
social attitudes will reduce health disparities and improve the health and
well-being of all LGBTQ/GNC people.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u>Review</u><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
undersigned organizations will review the statement 12 months after
publication.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u>Mutual
Understanding</u><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
This
memorandum is signed in recognition of a shared professional responsibility to
improve the support and help available to those at risk from conversion
therapy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Notes</u><o:p></o:p></div>
<ol start="1" style="margin-top: 0in;" type="1">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/UKCP_Documents/policy/MoU-conversiontherapy.pdf">http://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/UKCP_Documents/policy/MoU-conversiontherapy.pdf</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://store.samhsa.gov/product/Ending-Conversion-Therapy-Supporting-and-Affirming-LGBTQ-Youth/All-New-Products/SMA15-4928">http://store.samhsa.gov/product/Ending-Conversion-Therapy-Supporting-and-Affirming-LGBTQ-Youth/All-New-Products/SMA15-4928</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6803%3A2012-therapies-change-sexual-orientation-lack-medical-justification-threaten-health&catid=740%3Anews-press-releases&Itemid=1926&lang=en">http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6803%3A2012-therapies-change-sexual-orientation-lack-medical-justification-threaten-health&catid=740%3Anews-press-releases&Itemid=1926&lang=en</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/about-ama/our-people/member-groups-sections/glbt-advisory-committee/ama-policy-regarding-sexual-orientation.page">http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/about-ama/our-people/member-groups-sections/glbt-advisory-committee/ama-policy-regarding-sexual-orientation.page</a>?<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.apa.org/about/policy/sexual-orientation.aspx">http://www.apa.org/about/policy/sexual-orientation.aspx</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.socialworkers.org/diversity/new/documents/hria_pro_18315_soce_june_2015.pdf">http://www.socialworkers.org/diversity/new/documents/hria_pro_18315_soce_june_2015.pdf</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.psychiatry.org/file%20library/about-apa/organization-documents-policies/policies/position-2013-homosexuality.pdf">http://www.psychiatry.org/file%20library/about-apa/organization-documents-policies/policies/position-2013-homosexuality.pdf</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.guideline.gov/content.aspx?id=38417#Section420">http://www.guideline.gov/content.aspx?id=38417#Section420</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.aamft.org/iMIS15/AAMFT/Content/about_aamft/position_on_couples.aspx">http://www.aamft.org/iMIS15/AAMFT/Content/about_aamft/position_on_couples.aspx</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2292051">http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2292051</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.counseling.org/news/updates/2013/01/16/ethical-issues-related-to-conversion-or-reparative-therapy">http://www.counseling.org/news/updates/2013/01/16/ethical-issues-related-to-conversion-or-reparative-therapy</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.apsa.org/content/2012-position-statement-attempts-change-sexual-orientation-gender-identity-or-gender">http://www.apsa.org/content/2012-position-statement-attempts-change-sexual-orientation-gender-identity-or-gender</a><o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="http://www.schoolcounselor.org/asca/media/asca/PositionStatements/PS_LGBTQ.pdf">http://www.schoolcounselor.org/asca/media/asca/PositionStatements/PS_LGBTQ.pdf</a><o:p></o:p></li>
</ol>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->14.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]--><a href="http://www.cswe.org/File.aspx?id=85010">http://www.cswe.org/File.aspx?id=85010</a><o:p></o:p></div>
<ol start="15" style="margin-top: 0in;" type="1">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">http://www.wpanet.org/detail.php?section_id=7&content_id=1807<o:p></o:p></li>
</ol>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
ACTION PAPER<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
TITLE: <b>US Joint Statement on Conversion Therapy</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Whereas: </b>In December
of 1998, the Board of Trustees issued a position statement that the American
Psychiatric Association opposes any psychiatric treatment, such as
"reparative" or conversion therapy, which is based upon the
assumption that homosexuality <i>per se</i>
is a mental disorder or based upon the a priori assumption that a patient
should change his/her sexual homosexual orientation,<b> <o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Whereas: </b> In December 2013 the Board of
Trustees issued a position statement that the American Psychiatric Association
believes that the causes of sexual orientation (whether homosexual or
heterosexual) are not known at this time and likely are multifactorial
including biological and behavioral roots which may vary between different
individuals and may even vary over time.
The American Psychiatric Association does not believe that same-sex
orientation should or needs to be changed, and efforts to do so represent a
significant risk of harm by subjecting individuals to forms of treatment which
have not been scientifically validated and by undermining self-esteem when
sexual orientation fails to change. No
credible evidence exists that any mental health intervention can reliably and
safely change sexual orientation; nor, from a mental health perspective does
sexual orientation need to be changed,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Whereas: </b>The World
Psychiatric Association has taken the position that gender identity is not seen
as pathological <i>and “the provision of any
intervention proposed to’ treat’ something that is not a disorder is wholly
unethical,“<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Whereas: </b>The American
Academy of Nursing, the American Counseling Association, the American Medical
Student Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, AGLP The
Association of LGBTQ Psychiatrists, the Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender Issues in Counseling, the Clinical Social Work Association, GMLA:
the Health Professionals Advancing LGBT Equality, and the World Professional
Association for Transgender Health have signed on to the US Joint Statement on
Conversion Therapy; and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation and PFLAG International
have endorsed the US Joint Statement on Conversion Therapy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Be it Resolved: </b>That the American Psychiatric Association sign on as a signatory to the US Joint Statement on conversion Therapy which cautions mental Health Professionals that conversion or change therapies for Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgendered patients are unethical and emboday a risk of harm to those patients.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">AASECT would thus be added to the list of organizations under the fourth 'Whereas' in the 'Action Paper'.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Joint Statement was started independently by the American Psychiatric Association work group, but AASECT's decision to become a signatory grows naturally both from the <a href="https://www.aasect.org/vision-sexual-health">AASECT Vision of Sexual Health</a>, and from the aforementioned Position on Sexual Expression adopted last November. The ripples of that decision, and AASECT's earlier decisions to undertake systematic advocacy with the formation of its Public Relations, Media, and Advocacy Committee in 2004 and its adoption of the AASECT Vision of Sexual Health in 2006, continue to wash up on shores then undreamed of. Elephant in the Hot Tub: Kink in Context is yet another unanticipated consequence of those decisions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCcHOf1wELH5_Zr51wuq6GKdccZbf39MJTMOpzAKCeSR2KK1XZubbAOcci3p-21X6YmSlU2M4FdGACNkSaGEcbmeVi7X3Gft7GkJb1PSyBP9TKY263gtHlRvyyOiB_iWZpmFO4rKn61gSk/s1600/TEITHT_Header.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCcHOf1wELH5_Zr51wuq6GKdccZbf39MJTMOpzAKCeSR2KK1XZubbAOcci3p-21X6YmSlU2M4FdGACNkSaGEcbmeVi7X3Gft7GkJb1PSyBP9TKY263gtHlRvyyOiB_iWZpmFO4rKn61gSk/s400/TEITHT_Header.png" width="370" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even those of modest height can see farther when standing on the shoulders of giants, Sir Isaac!</span><br />
<br /></div>
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Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-74574329263342165382016-06-20T05:33:00.002-07:002016-06-20T05:37:21.638-07:00The Social Psychology of Kink Safety<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This post is dedicated
to the dead, wounded and traumatized in the Pulse nightclub shooting and all
those who love them. It is also
dedicated to those who sense of safety has been diminished by this horrific
act. Potentially, that is a lot of
people, including the author. Although gay,
lesbian, queer, trans, and gender fluid people know less safety than many of
us, all of us are correct to feel that the realities of terrorism,
anti-homosexual ideology, and toxic masculinity make us less safe than we may
have previously imagined. Finally, I
want to particularly spotlight Eli Green, AASECT Annual Conference Co-Chairs
Melissa Keyes DiGioia, and Mariotta Gary-Smith who worked so hard to promote
safety at AASECT16 when we were threatened by a lesser invasion that was only
made more disturbing by the Pulse shooting.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDqF7SypIx-fLlZqK9PeRAhxbGdwurwrJUjbuOAC9ZCUAtUYY7j-jGZhQ2_uhuTg0uLvj-fHfez2c4phjjGKUestJo4FR0ObxAn0BTvZMzTBHC_l8vTdo31AGu4pU-8T-fIZqDsreKlRwn/s1600/Pulse+Disco.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDqF7SypIx-fLlZqK9PeRAhxbGdwurwrJUjbuOAC9ZCUAtUYY7j-jGZhQ2_uhuTg0uLvj-fHfez2c4phjjGKUestJo4FR0ObxAn0BTvZMzTBHC_l8vTdo31AGu4pU-8T-fIZqDsreKlRwn/s400/Pulse+Disco.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kinksters are very concerned about safety. It is possible to be an outsider with relatively
low levels of stigma, but when you know that your sexuality is judged as
threatening and crazy by others, you carry stigma about it even when you are
not out, and when there is no immediate threat. All kinky people are vulnerable to some social
stigma, and, depending on their preferred practices, many are vulnerable to legal
prosecution as described in previous posts on <i>Elephant.</i> Even before
learning about kink communities, potential members learned to conceal their
sexual desires, to manage double lives, to handle internal and external stigma,
and to control as much as they can how others perceive them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Social Participation:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil9M52dc99QgL13lesWGkuf4_jjNnbqoQ8ApFQn_i5PnoKHUMFh1OTORbtSTWSfKxGVxJKY7nEWxiJ3H6FWBaRh-sccORjeso5W2Ah4futw1tmE-yPY8J0MbHzW73Fr5dKNddI6eG719co/s1600/Danger+Keep+Out.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil9M52dc99QgL13lesWGkuf4_jjNnbqoQ8ApFQn_i5PnoKHUMFh1OTORbtSTWSfKxGVxJKY7nEWxiJ3H6FWBaRh-sccORjeso5W2Ah4futw1tmE-yPY8J0MbHzW73Fr5dKNddI6eG719co/s1600/Danger+Keep+Out.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Is it safer to be out or not? It depends on which risks are important to you.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So the first line of kinksters’ defense in the struggle for
safety is <b>not being out</b>. In the 2014 Consent Violations Survey, 70%
said they were not out to someone. We
didn’t ask, but there is a large but unknown number of kinky people who have
never been out to anyone. They were not
likely to have been in our sample. These
are people who learned their desires were forbidden before they ever had the
opportunity to express them. They may be
so afraid they do not act on them ever.
Why I periodically take issue with the ‘sex addiction’ discourse here on
Elephant is that some children and adolescents fear to masturbate to their
fantasies for fear of becoming addicted and losing control of how other people
perceive them. They internalize stigma
and feel shame and hatred of their desires.
So for the fearful, the price in judgment of knowing themselves can be
enforced celibacy and lonely secrecy. Is
it any wonder that out kinksters are often counterphobic? To own their sexuality, they have no
alternative to facing their fears.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Because <b>sexuality is
a private matter</b> in conventional public life, one does not need to lead a
double life to be kinky. An unknown
number of kinky couples exist out in the world who read books, or respond to
movies or other media, or are introduced to kink by a partner and take to it
like a duck to water. They recognize that they have kinky desires, and reveal
their kinks only to a few willing partners and achieve safety through appearing
conventional in everyday social life and doing as they please in bed. They hide their toys from the kids, and lock
up everything when guests come to stay for a few days. For these people, safety may feel routine and
pose modest psychological burdens. The
more polyamorous one is, the harder this is to pull off, because it is harder
to conceal multiple partnerships under the cloak of hetrro-normativity. For most gender fluid clients it is
impossible, and for gay clients, so-called marriage equality holds out some
hope that they too can avoid stigma through maintaining sexual privacy that previously
was available only to heterosexuals. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEDMqR0IOAr-xznCIsnsg7grVHxH_v8kfgz6hXqDlAF61zgn0F3KNiWkN8VzM6sLvtqcGYBDZIB-Atgnas_lTmwGHh9kbIL6QEOfqwRqjSGBYi6cPy7kjmntDnrd3PjWpyS-2tt3_fWd2m/s1600/quote-i-hope-you-have-not-been-leading-a-double-life-pretending-to-be-wicked-and-being-really-good-all-oscar-wilde-278230.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEDMqR0IOAr-xznCIsnsg7grVHxH_v8kfgz6hXqDlAF61zgn0F3KNiWkN8VzM6sLvtqcGYBDZIB-Atgnas_lTmwGHh9kbIL6QEOfqwRqjSGBYi6cPy7kjmntDnrd3PjWpyS-2tt3_fWd2m/s400/quote-i-hope-you-have-not-been-leading-a-double-life-pretending-to-be-wicked-and-being-really-good-all-oscar-wilde-278230.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A wise words from Oscar Wilde. Come to think of it,though, didn't he do time for being out!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For others, the inability to tell significant others about
their desires leads to behaviors we would consider risky. They chose to lead <b>double lives</b>. They contact
other people through personal ads and express their kink outside of their primary
relationships. They decide the fears of
relationship loss are the lesser of the evils relative to never discussing
their desires. We often interpret the
resulting secrecy and duplicity as proof that they do not value their
relationships, but it would be equally true that they value them too much to
risk speaking of their kinks! (Lest you credit
me with this gem, know that I learned it first from Ether Perel’s work on affairs!)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Leading double lives can be elaborate, and sometimes the
rituals of doing this become eroticized.
Contacting new partners who might accept you and share your excitements
can be hot. So can doing something illicit. So
swiping the correct direction can feel like rolling the dice, and you may feel
a rush when the object of your intense interest responds with an encouraging
text message. In the past, kinksters
chose <b>aliases</b> and wrote away to <b>re-mail services.</b> Sometimes letters arrived saturated in
perfume, and filled with sexy pictures.
Now mostly this happens electronically.</span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxGPXjEOPWPBd0M8Q_5PgMhQgZzRHcjYmqauTJTy5KnIRwRUnfICvSlPLn7mNdAZDrUyga9sZaanUlvW1qU3kZ_VWavBagE0t6LsKkGxm4LtNmsm-1h5hth-Ehplr5j3axo7wMDbIFFUvN/s1600/The+Red+Room.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxGPXjEOPWPBd0M8Q_5PgMhQgZzRHcjYmqauTJTy5KnIRwRUnfICvSlPLn7mNdAZDrUyga9sZaanUlvW1qU3kZ_VWavBagE0t6LsKkGxm4LtNmsm-1h5hth-Ehplr5j3axo7wMDbIFFUvN/s400/The+Red+Room.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Did someone say "Red Room of Pain'? This is actually from a bondage B&B in Edinburgh</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Wealthy people build secret dungeons equivalent to Christian
Grey’s Red Room, and hold private parties by invitation only. Despite the intimacy of play, they may not
know one another’s real names, occupations or marital statuses. At CARAS every year a therapist discussion
group is held for kinky therapists who worry about managing their caseloads of
kinksters in the incestuous environment of their local scene, and worry that if
they play anywhere 300 miles from the office that a client’s therapy will be
damaged by an unplanned social meeting at a kink event. So the sources of unsafety, and the
complexity of solutions when a double life is undertaken, can vary tremendously
and require a huge amount of attention and energy. When the burdens of maintain
these arrangements become too great, safety is often sought in therapy, as
kinky clients worry that the burdens of dealing with stigma constitute proof
that their kinks are ‘pathological’.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Of course, double lives can provide one kind of safety at
the expense of other dangers. Lying and
deception can sour the relationship with the primary partner and destroy
trust. Partners that might have lovingly
faced their own fears and judgments about kink might lack the trust to make the
attempt if they discover yours only after learning about a prolonged
deception. All the things one sought to
protect with deception can be precipitously damaged when deception fails. Therapists long experience with secrets
suggest secrets and confidences tend to slip out more frequently in times of
acute stress, conflict and crisis, such that damage can be very hard to contain
and repair. Therapists as a community
tend to be pro intimacy and pro honesty and to question the benefits of double
life behaviors, so people using these face psychological risks of being confronted
about their relationship strategies in therapy.
Kink-aware therapists can be expected to handle these situations in
non-directive and client-centered ways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Informed Consent as a
source of safety:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Negotiation and
contracting</b> are the foundations of kink safety. In their ideal form they operationalize
informed consent. Ideally, they work
best if the following conditions are maintained continuously:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Equality:</i> The parties in the negotiation come to the
negotiation form a place of <i>existential
equality</i> and negotiate freely as equals.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Honesty:</i> Each participant has good communications
skills and negotiates honestly about what they do and do not want.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Empathy:</i> Each participant has a high degree of empathy
for the other parties in the negotiation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Limited but Shared Interests:</i> The parties negotiate with a flexible acceptance
that negotiation partners have not only interest that align, but also
differences that do not, and they are prepared to be accepting of the
irreducible differences.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Self-Discipline:</i> Each participation maintains discipline about
their expectations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Risk tolerance:</i> Each
participant is aware and tolerant of the risks of negotiation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Explicit agreement:</i> The negotiation is explicit and limited in
its specifications of what is to be agreed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The negotiation contains serious considerations of what
might go wrong, and has a <i>safety plan </i>for
dealing with potential problems if everything agreed to does not proceed
smoothly and expectable difficulties arise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is important that the above description is my ideal
statement of negotiation for informed consent.
In actual practice, actual negotiations rarely maintain ideal standards
on all of these dimensions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXrIcyKuKuTVZXdjQUPkk3IOKwc3SPnNaJ_RVGdcmmQ4EcwT6YTR5xWYHgtPDoZPc47VlTKhiK1i_i73bUJEoRS-hitq2TiX7etCl24WmiMLXdpB5vimTurIadpXbd0nL0-qUYjzcTbmtt/s1600/Hard+limits.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXrIcyKuKuTVZXdjQUPkk3IOKwc3SPnNaJ_RVGdcmmQ4EcwT6YTR5xWYHgtPDoZPc47VlTKhiK1i_i73bUJEoRS-hitq2TiX7etCl24WmiMLXdpB5vimTurIadpXbd0nL0-qUYjzcTbmtt/s400/Hard+limits.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This Your E-Card is a great example of how <i>50 Shades of Grey</i> has altered the conversation about kink.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Contacts often lead to the expression of <b>hard and soft limits. </b>Hard limits are activities that you do
not want to do under any circumstances. If
you have breathing difficulties, that might mean no gags, ever. A fear of spiders may mean no role playing
Little Miss Muffett. If you have a
prominent public position, that may mean no pictures, or no scenes where you
are locked outside the hotel room naked for the excruciating thrill of
humiliation. Soft limits are limits you
are prepared to relax under special circumstances. Examples might include no public play unless
we are a safe distance from home, or unless you are masked and hooded. Someone who was afraid of her potential for
angry reactions might only agree to sensation play when she’s securely bound so
she doesn’t hit back. Or some behavior which
was extremely hot and anxiety provoking might be OK in private play, but never
OK in a group scene. Using negotiation,
hard limits and soft limits, kinksters can titrate their fears and desires and
their desire for risk and adventure with their needs for safety into scenes
that have the best chance of being fun and sexy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy3ikqqADDEb6xqj067sOFdNEz8hoiKbqPwlqSwZfZHDbDK4cc5NZwvTgrL6nJm5mleyfoTLgLHIcSMgQu-C3-JGGNXWfaMhgMnCfXWdW8FnI_Gyt736yfi_9PGcN5PRmJIvEs4KdbCC0y/s1600/bettersafethansafeword.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy3ikqqADDEb6xqj067sOFdNEz8hoiKbqPwlqSwZfZHDbDK4cc5NZwvTgrL6nJm5mleyfoTLgLHIcSMgQu-C3-JGGNXWfaMhgMnCfXWdW8FnI_Gyt736yfi_9PGcN5PRmJIvEs4KdbCC0y/s400/bettersafethansafeword.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From Niiad.com This one hit a little too close to home; our cat's name is Khatzie! So sue me!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Safewords</b> and
contracts are about safety. Although it
may be hot to imagine that you are helpless at the hands of a sexy sadist, cramps,
sudden illness, an accident, or emotional triggering can all lead to dangerous
situations in which ending the scene immediately is imperative. Often kinksters play with making safewords
less safe, by making them long or difficult to say, or by imposing penalties
for using them. Also, submissives often try
to avoid using their safewords under the theory that good role players don’t do
such things, or the top might be hurt or inconvenienced. These are a dangerous ideas, but also
illustrate one of the key safety principles of kink: that one never has to be any safer than they
want to be. Much safety in kink just
about doing your best to make an informed choice about exactly the level of
safety you want, and about the human fallibility of getting it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Aftercare</b> is
partly about safety. Getting emotional
support and processing your experiences are important parts of getting safety
both through sharing understanding of your experiences, processing any problems
that arose, and consolidating possible new learnings about yourself from play.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Community Safety Resources:<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Please note that the photo and links immediately below are from commercial sites, and some videos may require you to pay a fee and/or subscribe. By way of personal disclosure, some videos may be by personal friends and professional colleagues of the author. I have received no fee or other commercial consideration for using these examples.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw0lXLf41Pfkh5WNgWmfNzAX1p2KI_1dtw4f5gR9nGtOrGA9wk0MJieNhpTWXuzYi4W5X146uuHj0p8xD_LTme54TaikHDRMmQHlVycf1t8z1goL-rNryklIBvm2LxwsXvEcM-KALy7E-4/s1600/50+Skills+of+Grey.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw0lXLf41Pfkh5WNgWmfNzAX1p2KI_1dtw4f5gR9nGtOrGA9wk0MJieNhpTWXuzYi4W5X146uuHj0p8xD_LTme54TaikHDRMmQHlVycf1t8z1goL-rNryklIBvm2LxwsXvEcM-KALy7E-4/s400/50+Skills+of+Grey.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What? There are only 50 skills? This piece of shrewd marketing to newbies is from KinkUniversity at Kink.com, an excellent source of on-line kink training videos. Kink Academy.com is also recomended.</span></td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.kinkacademy.com/">Kink Academy</a></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.kink.com/channel/kinkuniversity?">Kink.com Kink University</a></span></b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxnbI70lPpVU4Qbor0qAGEJ8BbPbei0DoD_Mqfk_AFlUmvDzVnSpBfxB0Xw8BVFIEap3FrJ0WyRTwMRvJtOrZpqfylGQOv6LndiuPLaRPfV7YS7yxdM-QMD8ecEs5dDaJ2NtY9RQBoYqHx/s1600/TES.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxnbI70lPpVU4Qbor0qAGEJ8BbPbei0DoD_Mqfk_AFlUmvDzVnSpBfxB0Xw8BVFIEap3FrJ0WyRTwMRvJtOrZpqfylGQOv6LndiuPLaRPfV7YS7yxdM-QMD8ecEs5dDaJ2NtY9RQBoYqHx/s400/TES.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The logo of The Eugenspiegel Society in New York City. The United States first aboveground kink social group founded in 1972<br /></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWW2Np3LVqinCB-0DlgeYKfADQXYGOubI53xqdg8Dkc-t5p6P2oUBg0IAXPQ3CBC1AY-COo2GhLsyMamslQuLdXwEQp6ldFWs7x53Qxm6B5P7iH27AuWy-VCiTAgeNqRL8jWycH7wnnJja/s1600/SOJ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWW2Np3LVqinCB-0DlgeYKfADQXYGOubI53xqdg8Dkc-t5p6P2oUBg0IAXPQ3CBC1AY-COo2GhLsyMamslQuLdXwEQp6ldFWs7x53Qxm6B5P7iH27AuWy-VCiTAgeNqRL8jWycH7wnnJja/s400/SOJ.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Society of Janus, the second oldest kink social group, marching in the San Francisco Pride Parade.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There are now a great many local BDSM social communities in medium and large cities and many university campuses. The best palce to locate a local group is on FetLife.com</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Joining a kink community can have risks, like being more ‘out’,
but often puts people in touch with many new sources of safety. Kink communities endlessly educate, and
safety is very often a main theme of kink </span><b style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">educational
sessions</b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. Kink groups often provide </span><b style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">mentoring programs</b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> for new
members. In mentoring programs, safety
is learned directly by processing one’s own emotional reactions with
experienced players. Mentors can help
you decide what new things you are ready to try and under what conditions you
are most likely to enjoy them. They can
serve as sounding boards that help you understand what your actual play partner
might be thinking and feeling when they are doing new things with you. Good mentors check on your safety techniques
to help make sure they are working as you intend and as they are intended to
work in the community you are joining. Direct
instruction can teach about safewords, safe play methods, the physiological consequences
of different techniques and behaviors.
It is a typical feature of mentoring programs that mentors do not play
with their charges. This makes it easier
for mentees to keep clear that sexual self-interest is not coloring the mentor’s
advice.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Often, kinksters chose close confidants to be their ‘<b>safeties</b>’ from within their local
communities. A safety is a person who
serves as a spotter for you when you are playing. They are similar to people who help keep you
safe when you are practicing trampoline or diving. They can observe while you contract and watch
with neutral eyes while you play.
Sometimes another pair of eyes will serve to deter someone who would go
beyond their agreement with you because such behavior would make them look bad
in the eyes of the community. Safeties
can stop play, or question it, if something appears to be going amiss, even if
you are in top or subspace. When you
make explicit arrangements to visit a private party or other venue, you can
arrange to text your safety with where you are and when you plan to report in
so that someone else knows you are safe and can call for help if you fail to
check in. Safeties don’t just deter
other people who might not be careful or scrupulous enough not to harm you, but
also can serve as an experienced and neutral source of judgment in helping you
to keep from taking greater risks in the heat of desire than you intend to. Safeties differ from mentors in that they are
often relative equals, and often they are in the same roles you prefer to
explore in the community. Different
people can play the role of safety for you at different times, where as a
mentoring relationship is usually filled by just one person and for a
prearranged period.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Friends</b> can serve
as support for discussion and understanding what you have experienced. Those in the scene are a valuable source of
information about norms and community history.
Just as Elephant in the Hot Tub is often about context, <b>knowing and influencing the context</b> of
where you play and who you play with can be an important source of safety
information and risk. Friends can help
with those efforts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Actual <b>playing
technique</b> is often a source of safety.
Many things you see on Porn Hub and kinky illustrations are either artistic
license, or scenes carefully crafted by unique and highly experienced models. Just because you can fantasize doing
something and get off on it does not necessarily mean you can do it safely. Educational sessions can keep you from
practices that might lead to injury or worse if done without instruction. For example, many kinksters lack partners and
engage in self-bondage. If it is
important to you to be genuinely helpless, it is a real risk that if you tie
yourself up that you will be unable to free yourself. Furthermore, positions that are hot for short
periods can become highly uncomfortable or dangerous if circulation gets cut
off or cramps ensue. Learning ways to
free yourself may seem self-defeating, but may spare you the embarrassment of
calling the authorities, or neighbors to get free, or suffering genuine injury.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqCK6H54mZ4oL-MN5dgVmpEunVU1tnKxmJcKZunGwaV1ptgq9ooIKJpeOYRD73ncM-xpsOa4gpwHbGpXIOGZAgtb6Dli5ItSozlVZUGAW_LibZBt1_-lwYg_NNpsofue1aO8Qo9bYWqNLX/s1600/Gary_Gygax.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqCK6H54mZ4oL-MN5dgVmpEunVU1tnKxmJcKZunGwaV1ptgq9ooIKJpeOYRD73ncM-xpsOa4gpwHbGpXIOGZAgtb6Dli5ItSozlVZUGAW_LibZBt1_-lwYg_NNpsofue1aO8Qo9bYWqNLX/s400/Gary_Gygax.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">E Gary Gygax makes an animated guest appearance on <i>Futurama</i> as a Dungeon Master.<br />This is not the kind of Dungeon Master we'er looking for.! It is another one of those wonderful multi-cultural double entendres like CBT. The term Dungeon Master arose independently and nearly simultaneously in the 1970's in D&D and BDSM sub-cultures.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In group playing situations, <b>Dungeon Masters </b>operate to ensure that group rules about play and
personal conduct are observed. Those of
you who attended the Taste of Kink event in Minneapolis last June saw both
safeties from AASECT and Dungeon Masters from the demonstrating local group in
operation. Play groups and BDSM social
organizations always have policies.
Alcohol and drugs may be banned, both to protect players’ states of mind
and to ensure that authorities do not have an excuse to raid playspaces. Personal touch and touching of others’
equipment is generally prohibited, in part because people with past histories
of boundary violations have been known to test limits like these and such rules
bring their attention to group leaders.
Photos and recording are prohibited to protect group members’ anonymity
and privacy. Dungeon masters are generally
senior and high status members of the community who have a broad familiarity
with techniques, and can observe that play is safe and have full authority to
stop it.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Groups also often have <b>reporting
policies</b> in the event that people make complaints about a group member’s
behavior. Often there is considerable
dispute about the ways that communities regulate play, and what rules the
community should adopt. A climate of
anarchic radical personal responsibility prevails. But leathersex traditions and histories of community
violators have led most to have them.
Therapists of new community members should ask them to enquire of their
kink social organization about what the response procedures are if something
untoward happens.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is common practice in kink social organizations for new
members to ask for <b>references</b> when
playing with someone for the first time, and this is especially true when
playing outside the group playspace.
References are far from infallible, but using them to rule out problem
players is a really good idea. In the
2014 Consent Violations Survey, references were not always sought, but when
they were, 74% of reported violations were committed by someone with a good or
excellent rating, so references are not infallible protection. They are mostly useful to weed out known
unsafe players.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj88ZcIsdyTx17nEFdtERvIG87fXH3wtbu6XdBwDPjSwNuqQDYJJoEtXgsCoUyVXBbM8kEZVqo3oaWV4fYbfdhgB3v86IflDu05IBvM97P1VkQ4RLCFSxlWup8DLatz02PeS_6A7H3wteUe/s1600/Folsom+Street+Fair+Dress+Codes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj88ZcIsdyTx17nEFdtERvIG87fXH3wtbu6XdBwDPjSwNuqQDYJJoEtXgsCoUyVXBbM8kEZVqo3oaWV4fYbfdhgB3v86IflDu05IBvM97P1VkQ4RLCFSxlWup8DLatz02PeS_6A7H3wteUe/s400/Folsom+Street+Fair+Dress+Codes.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A group photo of participants from the Folsom Street Fair (FSF) ironically serves to illustrate dress codes. Ironic because FSF is a rare event with no dress code, and no prohibition against photography. You automatically consent to being photographed, and that is why I often select it for stock photos. Although black is not required, yet it is very prevalent. </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Dress codes</b> are
often enforced at kink events. These
offer the relatively weak protection that the people who attend kink events are
actually kinky, not passing tourists or voyeurs who do not share group norms
and commitments. Depending on the group,
these dress codes can be pretty broad, and offer rather little additional
safety.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Trigger warnings and
trauma safety:</b> Some kinksters play
despite trauma histories. It may seem
surprising, but some explicitly play with past traumas. Many kinky social groups are already familiar
with this possibility, and they may have members who are trained and familiar with
trauma, and systematic efforts are made to make sure not only that participants
are aware when intense experiences are planned, but they also have support if a
participant or observer reacts unexpectedly.
If you know your vulnerabilities, it is good to share them before you
play and have a support plan prepared ahead of time. Informed consent is not just important for
you, but for those who play with you.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Munches</b> are
social meetings where kink is discussed, but there is no play. Meetings are generally in local
restaurants. The fact that they are in
public space with no play scheduled makes them safe from physical boundary
violations, but may be uncomfortable for people who do not want to be observed
discussing BDSM in public. Munches
generally do not have dress codes so that new members are not outed by hanging
out with leather clad ‘undesirables’.
Sometimes people go off and play together from munches after sizing each
other up in safe space, a practice commonly practiced in all forms of on-line
dating. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Obviously if you leave a munch
with someone you like, you have the potential for privacy, but loose the
protections of public space. Munches
provide a great way for new members to size up the people in the group, and to
make judgments about how much they would like to share of themselves with group
members. Many people who are attracted
to kink are not comfortable with playing in public, so it is quite likely that
those who join kink social organizations and play together are among the more
adventurous for whom the voyeurism, exhibitionism, and group processes are not barriers
to entry.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Attitudes, Values,
and Process that Produce Safety: <o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Gradualism</b> is a characteristic
of safety strategy in which new recruits to any sub-culture gather information,
try out new behaviors, test their assumptions against experience, and develop
new commitments, identifications, and even sexual orientations. It provides the time and information to bring
feelings and knowledge into integration, and allows the building of new
relationships that support social participation in the sub-culture. Munches are a deliberate part of this plan,
and they exist also for asexuals, old friends, and newbies to meet together
where the possible pressures of sexual excitement are less, and friends can
interact at whatever level of participation they prefer. The social rules in play groups are more
strict, and munches can be a relief from some of these. Sometimes psychological safety means being
protected from your own desire and the desire of others, and a relaxing of
social roles that are otherwise very exciting to play out.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">An attempt has been made here to be exhaustive about the kinds
and sources of safety in the kink community, and to discuss both generic and
arcane aspects of kinky communities that help people manage their risk taking
behavior. Obviously, a truly
comprehensive list is impossible, and for all these efforts, safety is never
complete. I strongly encourage readers to
add additional examples of safety to this thread using the comments section. Eventually, many people who do not know the conventions
of the kink communities will read this article and profit from consideration of
your commentary.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This week’s horrifying attack on the Pulse Disco in Florida
is a shattering demonstration that, despite the fact that terrorism constitutes
a very modest threat to American citizens—you are in much greater danger from
falling in your bath tub, let alone negative health consequence’s for your diet,
lifestyle or traffic accidents—safety is never complete, and kink involves
deliberate risk taking. This article
eschews the usual kink slogans of SSC or RACK, but love and sex and spiritual
pursuits all entail risk. The kink
communities know this, accept it, plan for risk and for things to go wrong
despite everyone’s best efforts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Not everyone is benign.
Not all players are skilled in all things. Highly skilled people still make errors. Even those of us who strive continuously for
self-knowledge have limitations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Prevailing community attitudes produce safety: A general ethos prevails in BDSM of radical
personal responsibility. Radical in
that, in the face of laws and norms that may make some kink activities illegal,
many kinksters make up their minds to do them anyway. But the responsibility for risk taking until
laws and social attitudes can be changed remain theirs. This attitude may assume some risks, but is
inclined to see responsibility for one’s safety as primarily one’s own responsibility. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In that spirit, when assuming responsibility for your own
emotional safety, aftercare with your play partners is important, but it is
also necessary to plan for your own self-care when trouble disrupts your plan
to receive care from others who may become unavailable. It is in precisely that spirit, that this
blog provided the link to an excellent sub and top drop safety kit:<a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2015/12/coping-with-top-and-sub-drop.html">Top and Sub Drop Safety Kit</a><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHZTAqGShyuItb3hvGQ3z53tjzbroDH3V40NoXBBZN5ZsXhYdZn0HqecXtfhyRfedR6sDAewh-7FyMOl8YdpvPUJH1PJGSBJhOw5mL6kj5bTAgXQVc-2qCMX8xPne76_0T4HSKRwTz7iEz/s1600/Rock+climbing.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHZTAqGShyuItb3hvGQ3z53tjzbroDH3V40NoXBBZN5ZsXhYdZn0HqecXtfhyRfedR6sDAewh-7FyMOl8YdpvPUJH1PJGSBJhOw5mL6kj5bTAgXQVc-2qCMX8xPne76_0T4HSKRwTz7iEz/s400/Rock+climbing.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Analogous to kink? Serious leisure.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kink has provided all these safety tools and resources
because we live in a word where complete safety is not always desirable, and
the panoply of different kink loves, activities, needs, and risks is so great. Kink demands communication because any given
partner’s knowledge and skill in the midst of this diversity cannot be assumed. Although many dating sites have tried kink
activity checklists as a place to begin discussions with potential partners,
they are not a very big start. There is
a lot of safety to talk about and lots to learn. Emily Prior and DJ Williams have likened kink
to extreme sports; a kind of serious leisure in which participants become
partially professionalized. Skills
offset risks, and ideology embraces planful risky behavior. Unlike extreme sports governed by the logic
of athleticism and competition, kink embraces unreasoned passion as a primary
motive for play, so the serious leisure analogy isn’t perfect. Whether you accept their sociological analogy or
not, kink requires lots of safety. But
many people have faced the same safety problems before you have, and they have
a large history of solutions. </span> <o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">© Russell J Stambaugh, June, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></div>
Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-15345201099341203362016-06-14T19:19:00.001-07:002016-06-18T13:22:33.996-07:00#AASECT16--Consent 201: Consent and Its Discontents<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Susan Wright and I presented a 90-minute program at AASECT's 48th Annual Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico entitled Consent 201: Consent and its Discontents on June 9, 2016. At the end of that presentation, Susan and I promised to mount the slides and notes on FetLife under the Consent Counts discussion thread, and here on Elephant. The posting is delayed until Sunday, June 19 while I get an upgrade to my tech skills! </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sorry for the delay!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6CinisB5pyTR0xfa3ZUZS01VFU">Consent 201: Consent and its Discontents</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here are some of the takeaways I think this presentation about complex and ambiguous consent and the 2014 consent violations survey offers:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">1) While there are many costs to confronting stigma and being 'othered', outsiders have insights their unique histories and contexts can offer us. We can learn from them, or just learn the hard way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">2) Consent is not simple and will not work by rote for kinky folk or for conventional ones. Kink has a long history of what consent can and can't do. Communication lessens the dangers, but does not fully ameliorate power imbalances.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">3) Community offers powerful protections, but we only achieve them if we are not only inclusive, but show vigilance for our most vulnerable members and fully socialize them.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">4) Even in counter cultures like kink, the cultural weaknesses of our larger cultural context bleed through. Kink is egalitarian, but not fully equal. Males, heterosexuals, tops, and those with clear gender boundaries are less likely to report consent violations than women, submissives, queer, and fluid folk.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">5) There are serious risks of over-victimizing consent violations in our efforts to decrease them. Half are not serious, bumps and bruises are to be expected from risky play, and we dare not decrease the agency of all participants. The passion to share risk creates the opportunity for understanding our shadow and our vulnerability. Safety training and aftercare need to operate not just between immediate players, but within the larger communities they play in. 2014 Consent Violations Survey is part of a long history of community commitment to that care. So is posting these results for others to learn form them and apply them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Enjoy, learn, play safely, and lead with empathy, not conflict.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">© Russell J Stambaugh, June, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></div>
Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-3046293937680813482016-06-04T16:37:00.001-07:002016-06-05T04:54:57.596-07:00The Psychotherapeutic Theories of Kink: Myths and Realities about Sigmund Freud<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sigmund Freud is the towering figure in the invention of
psychotherapy and is one of the most important thinkers to contribute to
Western notions of modernity. Born in Moravia
(now part of the Czech Republic) in 1856, Freud’s Jewish father was a
moderately successful textile salesman who brought his family to Vienna and
paid for his son’s education at the gymnasium, thus qualifying Sigmund to enter
the University of Vienna. Sigmund
studied first medicine, then neurology, training with some of the most famous
Swiss and French neurologists of his day and became a lecturer at the
University of Vienna. Throughout his
tenure there, Freud was very much split between teaching, his private practice
as a psychotherapist, and his prolific career as a writer. An inveterate publicist and promoter of his
ideas, he invented psychoanalysis, organized it as a clinical and academic
discipline, and wrote seemingly tirelessly about its clinical technique,
theory, and larger societal implications.
Although Freud was not religious and never practiced as a Jew, he was a
pillar of the Viennese social community and married Martha Bernays, the
daughter of a prominent rabbi from <st1:place w:st="on">Hamburg</st1:place>. From 1902, he held continuous weekly meetings
about psychoanalytic topics, and in 1905, he founded the International
Psychoanalytic Association. The so
called <b><i>Standard Edition</i></b> of his works translated into English by James
Strachey runs 24 volumes and thousands of pages.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjeM5wUNiFtkz1b5pZ1DLc5raJF6UTeGi92xVomvjved0GIIM3VR3uOCCVQh7ibwtn1P2qlf9_AKu2D_7uh-TkT1Y-kpYKT2jm1N7fxK_T5eB3up0zTV6FuesxD_4YZ_w8vdxRUu7xLJzy/s1600/Freud%2527s+inner+circle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjeM5wUNiFtkz1b5pZ1DLc5raJF6UTeGi92xVomvjved0GIIM3VR3uOCCVQh7ibwtn1P2qlf9_AKu2D_7uh-TkT1Y-kpYKT2jm1N7fxK_T5eB3up0zTV6FuesxD_4YZ_w8vdxRUu7xLJzy/s400/Freud%2527s+inner+circle.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud's inner circle circa 1920: Top, left to right: Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Ernest Jones<br />Bottom: Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi and Hans Sachs. <br />By this time, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Wilhelm Stekel were already gone.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;"> </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Between the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in
1901 and his departure from Vienna in 1938, Freud’s psychoanalytic circle
anointed all the greatest thinking about therapy. Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Sandor
Ferenczi, Karen Horney, Marie Bonaparte, Erich Fromm, Lou Andreas Salome, Harry
Stack Sullivan, Wilhelm Reich were all pillars of the International
Psychoanalytic Association at one point or another. In his later years, Freud increasingly turned
his attention to social phenomena like religion, education, and the
relationship between society and repression.
Just after the Anschluss in which Austria was absorbed by Nazi Germany,
the Freud family emigrated first to Paris, and then to London, by June 4,
1938. By the time he left Vienna, he
had suffered from the effects of mouth cancer for more than 15 years, the
disease was initially diagnosed in 1923 and Freud went through a long and
difficult history of treatment. In
September of 1939, without further treatment options and in the face of
weakness and chronic pain, Freud arranged for legal physician-assisted suicide
on September 23, 1939 at his new home in Hampstead, London.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWZ6HYIh9vdPUI7MDSbuNTpmKgflNs1HmtWLsub8y1FMbaQinavMfIMaclldcPbzFZRl05M_RJqJPvAT_LdUxbdDAqh7dNZnTfaP-rqhIUJDSbjGMDKKQbFlYNK13AnR0NrZxL65cRef25/s1600/Freud+with+cigar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWZ6HYIh9vdPUI7MDSbuNTpmKgflNs1HmtWLsub8y1FMbaQinavMfIMaclldcPbzFZRl05M_RJqJPvAT_LdUxbdDAqh7dNZnTfaP-rqhIUJDSbjGMDKKQbFlYNK13AnR0NrZxL65cRef25/s400/Freud+with+cigar.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud poses with a cigar. He famously said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."when asked if his habitual cigars were phallic symbols. Actually, cigars are never just cigars. Sometimes, they are a cause of mouth cancer.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Anna Freud, who assumed the intellectual leadership of
psychoanalysis after her father’s death, was so embittered that she did not
return to Vienna even for visit until 1972. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Because of that and difficulties associated with his emigration from
Vienna and the death of Sigmund’s four sisters in Nazi concentration camps
during the war, Freud’s extensive library, archeological artifacts, and
clinical consulting room were recreated and kept in London and never
repatriated to Vienna after his death.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIfG0G6-BH_9xxzt2MNfNmkG7qbwA3TMc59ZIWbHK85pNpv1WBvbbST1UeeIIOrHwYie_e6HlTAk6B2Aw15st1IPmT5kgQ_zRiISOgFHCN6d_IbJsER-a19BNEMu2-xbL1jvzJuIEjRMws/s1600/Anna_Freud_1957.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIfG0G6-BH_9xxzt2MNfNmkG7qbwA3TMc59ZIWbHK85pNpv1WBvbbST1UeeIIOrHwYie_e6HlTAk6B2Aw15st1IPmT5kgQ_zRiISOgFHCN6d_IbJsER-a19BNEMu2-xbL1jvzJuIEjRMws/s400/Anna_Freud_1957.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anna Freud (1895-1982), in 1957.<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;"> </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud not only invented psychoanalysis, he was a prominent
mythologizer of the field. He constantly
portrayed psychoanalysis as victimized by the very forces of repression that he
was striving to overcome through psychoanalytic insight. As a consequence, of this dramatic struggle, the
popular imagination about Freud is plagued by a variety of hyperboles and
exaggerations about Freud’s already immense role in modern thinking. I will proceed to break a few of these down,
and try to put his real contributions into a larger perspective:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Myth #1. Freud Invented Talk Therapy:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Physicians had been talking to their patients for years and
already realized that reassuring conversation, non-medical advice, patriarchal
solicitousness, and even placebos, could have powerful effects on patient
health. Mesmer and Charcot had already
demonstrated powerful effects from talking interventions like hypnotism. Freud invented <b><i>psychoanalysis</i></b>, the <u>term</u>
he used for his particular theoretical and technical rationale about what made
the talking cure work. So Freud did much
to popularize and refine the talking cure, but did not invent it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Myth #2. Freud Set Out to Invent Talk Therapy:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud thought of himself as a neurologist, and imagined that
the clinical phenomena he was seeing in therapeutic conversations with patients
were neurological, not psychological phenomena.
Until 1900, Freud was engaged in an elaborate and failed study, the
Project for a Scientific Psychology, in which attempted to describe mental
phenomena in neurological terms. This
effort was premature and awaited technological breakthroughs, including the
identification of neurotransmitters and CT, PET, and fMRI imagining techniques
that were not developed until long after his death. Were Freud working today, he’d probably be
seeking NIMH grants for brain studies using the latest scanning technology!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiQezaFKKVECUd5J-Z-AZ7b9fmBmGCDcPTGqvFl43DcswZSKCljk1nNo5xO5VuKAQ58qA5l0ixhrvO4HY3JyEQeC6sITlAa6XCIvD4ukzaHET4XrnYKQ_uzAViQ7wFlvc7eBRWgY2nzpzZ/s1600/MRI+with+couch+of+Freud.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiQezaFKKVECUd5J-Z-AZ7b9fmBmGCDcPTGqvFl43DcswZSKCljk1nNo5xO5VuKAQ58qA5l0ixhrvO4HY3JyEQeC6sITlAa6XCIvD4ukzaHET4XrnYKQ_uzAViQ7wFlvc7eBRWgY2nzpzZ/s400/MRI+with+couch+of+Freud.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud's couch ready for it's scan. It could happen!</span></td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Myth #3. Freud Was a Cocaine Addict and His Work Was
Nonsense Because of Chronic Intoxication:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjImzrRTalsydXRTJi-HP_8U9x_kmPKYoGIt4KkW49VCYX-n8VUjrhLITD42ol-S4eIR_uD43Zn4By2nEOW52ABXGoTGtKJrRIQBUb3bJMHMZaSCGD88WhTM7pea16aHFLU-NWnJDjR2aIZ/s1600/.07+solution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjImzrRTalsydXRTJi-HP_8U9x_kmPKYoGIt4KkW49VCYX-n8VUjrhLITD42ol-S4eIR_uD43Zn4By2nEOW52ABXGoTGtKJrRIQBUb3bJMHMZaSCGD88WhTM7pea16aHFLU-NWnJDjR2aIZ/s400/.07+solution.jpg" width="209" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Turn of the century apparatus for administering the 7% solution of cocaine. 93% was saline.<br />In 1974, Nicholas Meyer penned a novel that threw Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud together on a case.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud was an enthusiastic early user of cocaine and wrote
rhapsodically about its stimulating effects.
At the time (late 1800’s) its addictive properties were not known, and
laws had yet to be passed against its use.
Freud’s extensive body of writing has withstood the test of time, and
while some of it is clearly wrong, it is much more limited by his times and the
extant medical knowledge and social conventions, than by the researcher’s use
of psycho-active drugs. It should be noted
that Freud’s cocaine use was conventional in his time, but would constitute
impaired professionalism in the modern context.
Recognition of the dangers that opiates and cocaine posed led to the
Harrison Act of 1911 in <st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place>. That legislation established non-medical uses
as illegal, commenced limited regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, and
self-prescription would eventually be forbidden. European countries passed similar laws around
this time as well. It is estimated that
around the turn of the century, 1 in 20 Americans was addicted to patent
medicines that contained alcohol, opiate derivatives, and/or cocaine. Freud may have remained vulnerable to
self-prescription due to cocaine’s analgesic effects it most likely had on the
pain associated with advancing mouth cancer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigK5PNtqtqknR7eMDLCMIwrEO6jreMg2VVzrAlNK30vWLN9voWB_4-2nAcdxfukoLEFbiO-WvYRlLlmGlPmD4sp34sN7U2NUqijP2sA9WMayfMM83U9fREHp8qcHxOPhvAj0XvjEUoGEHU/s1600/Snake-oil-300x200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigK5PNtqtqknR7eMDLCMIwrEO6jreMg2VVzrAlNK30vWLN9voWB_4-2nAcdxfukoLEFbiO-WvYRlLlmGlPmD4sp34sN7U2NUqijP2sA9WMayfMM83U9fREHp8qcHxOPhvAj0XvjEUoGEHU/s400/Snake-oil-300x200.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Snake oil. Yes, it sometimes contained the oil from freshly squeezed snakes! <br />The active ingredients, however, were cocaine, alcohol, and opioids.</span></td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Myth #4. Freud Invented the Idea of the Unconscious:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaIxaDR0U-WjSGQREmSYTJW_xbdOlAsfJRXGxw-qH7jFXTFpt2TFHyPvHDuvSdkY4Gqjy1pLffMsXRlwF5hcBXXOZ-AD3iD4acZGT6r6lfo0-FYXkvieAtKShzuumQ68s7js4T-fJE-7Gz/s1600/Charcot+on+hysteria.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaIxaDR0U-WjSGQREmSYTJW_xbdOlAsfJRXGxw-qH7jFXTFpt2TFHyPvHDuvSdkY4Gqjy1pLffMsXRlwF5hcBXXOZ-AD3iD4acZGT6r6lfo0-FYXkvieAtKShzuumQ68s7js4T-fJE-7Gz/s400/Charcot+on+hysteria.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Jean Martin Charcot presents on hysteria circa 1870.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Actually, the idea of the unconscious pre-dated Freud’s work
and the idea that people were not fully aware of what they were thinking was in
common currency during Freud’s training as a neurologist and the staple of
early learning theorists. Franz Mesmer’s
ideas of animal magnetism were known to be involved in hypnotism and, relied on
the existence of an unconscious.
Similarly, Jean Martin Charcot, the founding father of modern neurology,
came to believe that repression was involved in hysteria and he demonstrated
how memories could be lost and recovered from the unconscious under
hypnosis. Freud did, however, invent
and popularize the idea of the <b><i>dynamic unconscious</i></b> as a mental
agency in which socially intolerable instinctual impulses were kept from
consciousness lest we think badly of ourselves and violate social rules. It is <u>the Freudian model of the
unconscious</u> that undergirds popular thinking today about our mental lives
and self-concepts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Myth #5. Freud Thought Everything Was About Sex:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi7bq7U5Slf0gjVTfkFh6xxs7sTPfZAdEndS07fWgoEzVOXAQhYcsQmIUZT0mSz2urYbtRPbocofSOTf60fY9Hxm2zjPtySZeyHTWHVctvj1kF7_24WQuO2ul286EQIahFt8jRiHWopVqd/s1600/Austrian+Trenches.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi7bq7U5Slf0gjVTfkFh6xxs7sTPfZAdEndS07fWgoEzVOXAQhYcsQmIUZT0mSz2urYbtRPbocofSOTf60fY9Hxm2zjPtySZeyHTWHVctvj1kF7_24WQuO2ul286EQIahFt8jRiHWopVqd/s400/Austrian+Trenches.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Austro-Hungarian machine gunners in World War I. Freud served his country during that war, and saw the psychological consequences of industrialized combat. Maybe not everything was about sex.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Although this myth seems difficult to refute, it is
important to realize that even in its most extreme form, Freud’s position was
more nuanced. In his initial theorizing,
sex played an exclusive explanatory role, but Freud was not speaking of
foreplay, intercourse, or suspension bondage.
For Freud, <b><i>sex</i></b> was an underlying human motivation derived from direct but
largely unconscious instinctual expression.
It was a natural consequence of our Darwinian animal nature and our
evolutionary purpose to pass our genes on to the next generation of human
beings. <b><i>Libido</i></b>, that natural
biological energy that sometimes resulted in direct mating behavior, got
sublimated into all other social acts like going to school, attending church,
everyday labor and social interaction.
So for Freud, behaviors that didn’t look sexy at all were energized by
underlying sexual motives. Later, Freud
also hypothesized a <b><i>death instinct</i></b> which was equally mutable and unconscious. Most writers after him have preferred to
translate his <b><i>death instinct</i></b> as ‘<b><i>aggression</i></b>.’ Both of these instinctual drives were
balanced in their social expression by the conscious abilities of the person,
and their internalizations of social rules, norms, ideas and values, so libido
was only expressed in directly sexual ways a small percentage of the time, even
for the sexually preoccupied.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Myth #6. Freud First Recognized the Importance of
Infantile Sexuality: <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwxpPetDHmI1Qc1JgVzc2aRlRMmc7TlzAQ-ap0Tf4yohA7PQ_uBm7n6JiJk7L220fJ2I8ZG-5NeTFpHV1aOGxtMeGcsDG5cWQ1GO8tz3VcdE0GksvuOsuitpmG1-YKSBYzkvzXNROUxcsx/s1600/Kellogg-Sanitorium.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwxpPetDHmI1Qc1JgVzc2aRlRMmc7TlzAQ-ap0Tf4yohA7PQ_uBm7n6JiJk7L220fJ2I8ZG-5NeTFpHV1aOGxtMeGcsDG5cWQ1GO8tz3VcdE0GksvuOsuitpmG1-YKSBYzkvzXNROUxcsx/s400/Kellogg-Sanitorium.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Victorian urban life was crowded and unhealthy. John Harvey Kellogg was a great popularizer of hygiene that included anti-masturbatory messages. Childhood sexuality was denied even as massive prevention efforts were undertaken. Its enough to give 'repression' a bad name! The flakes aren't bad, though.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This myth partially depends on what you believe the
importance of infantile sexuality really was, but it is certainly true that the
Victorians, including their physicians, did not recognize that children
experienced sexual feelings and did not recognize childhood behaviors as sexual
in nature. In fact, the Victorians
didn’t recognize that people were sexual throughout the life span, dramatically
understated female sexuality, and struggled to accept Darwinian ideas. Thank heavens we are all past that
today! Victorian physicians who operated
vibration clinics as a way to release stress in women would not have been able
to do so, had the full sexual nature of the relaxation response been properly
recognized for what it was! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVCfEc5Lllxmdo_EXgejP3SXoUfpDVeJLlh1ZO3T53F6dZEFhBZeuBf9l_S1Vh72R7G4GQ9pNfoN85k_16melGch7uqdU85FS061n3oqqKPvhGGlLGq0fadnuDucCDqghFFAs999DrZ1Jx/s1600/Moll.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVCfEc5Lllxmdo_EXgejP3SXoUfpDVeJLlh1ZO3T53F6dZEFhBZeuBf9l_S1Vh72R7G4GQ9pNfoN85k_16melGch7uqdU85FS061n3oqqKPvhGGlLGq0fadnuDucCDqghFFAs999DrZ1Jx/s400/Moll.jpg" width="246" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Albert Moll (1862-1939) German psychiatrist and among the first to recognize childhood sexuality.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Albert Moll was the turn of the century sexologist who was
first in advocating for the recognition of childhood sexuality. When Freud advanced his own developmental
theory that suggested the sucking, defecation, urination, and Oedipal behaviors
were all manifestations of infantile libidinal expression, this idea was
revolutionary. But you have to think the
proliferation of anti-onanistic interventions and ideology, from sports
advocacy to gender-segregated education to aphorisms like ‘Idle hands are the
devil’s playground!’ reflected some Victorian suspicion that children weren’t
all that innocent. Even today, the role
of direct sexual expression in childhood is largely under-recognized, and this
underlies social phobias around comprehensive sexuality education in the United
States.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Myth #7. Freud Was the First to Recognize the
Importance of Bisexuality:</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6oLk1jm2N4fCe-rpe4Ns-IYxz2ydA3eB7ypOLJTwRrBdx5SnN7qxXKxOBLD-1CKpi_VrIz6XxdpB0xXsBXV_LBqBtQcdTF7iWUoalnRPlxOTTT8aT5_F_VBD3rPMbFWse3kiOMu4XDNMr/s1600/threesomepng.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6oLk1jm2N4fCe-rpe4Ns-IYxz2ydA3eB7ypOLJTwRrBdx5SnN7qxXKxOBLD-1CKpi_VrIz6XxdpB0xXsBXV_LBqBtQcdTF7iWUoalnRPlxOTTT8aT5_F_VBD3rPMbFWse3kiOMu4XDNMr/s400/threesomepng.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sorry! This is not the kind of bisexuality Freud meant in his theory.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud probably learned about the concept of libido and its
bisexual nature first from Charles Darwin.
It certainly figured prominently in Freud’s early theories of sexuality
that libido was bisexual in that a child could feel love for both the same and
opposite gendered parent. If Freud had
encountered the idea of gender fluidity, he would doubtless have endorsed that
love could be expressed by people of any gender towards any other. However, Freud operated in a bi-gendered
social world, and his theory had to account for the obvious clinical
observations that children loved both parents and were in conflict about
it. However, if Darwin came first with
the theory that libido could be expressed across gendered lines, Freud’s theory
did not really address behaviorally bisexual sexual behavior, which he would
doubtless have categorized as homosexual behavior and seen as further proof of
his theory. Freud did not really write
about bisexuality in the way that we use the term today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud did accomplish some great things that are probably
under-recognized, notwithstanding his role as the most prominent clinical
writer in psychology.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud broke the philosophical stalemate between
Krafft-Ebing’s excessively constitutional theory, that claimed sexual deviance
was largely an expression of constitutional degeneracy, and the early learning
theorists, or ‘associationists’ like Alfred Binet, who claimed that all sexual
behavior was learned. Freud’s theory
allowed for a middle ground that allowed roles for instinctual and learned
factors.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud is best known for his model of what makes talk therapy
effective. He did not think that benign
paternalistic discussion cured hysterics of their pseudo blindness or
paralysis. Rather, he believed these
patients inflexibly refocused their infantile sexual conflicts on the therapist
and felt towards him as they did towards their fathers. Their guilty ambivalence about loving their
fathers and feeling guilty about wanting to supplant their mothers and to do
socially inappropriate things with fathers, led to the personal disempowerment
seen in their terrible symptoms. By
helping the clients to recognize and refocus these transference feelings in the
therapy, normalizing them, and seeing that the feelings need not be harmful,
the hysterical clients could give up their symptoms. This is the Freudian description of the <b><i>transference
cure. </i></b>Did it work? At least sometimes, but it was far from
infallible. Considering the severity of
disability from such symptoms as paralysis and blindness, it could be a big
help.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud is also associated with a rather extreme version of
analytic neutrality that many patients and practitioners regard as emotionally
depriving. A look at today’s austere
psychotherapy offices suggests the pervasive influence of fears that betraying
any portion of the therapist’s personality might become a distraction and
interference with the process of transference.
After all, if the therapist displays masculine qualities, for example,
this kind of reasoning might expect interference with the patient’s possible
need to experience maternal transference feelings. If the therapist appears gay, perhaps the
client will be reluctant to express heterosexual feelings.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixAOylEPD4czpQatYULpG-f3_DLyw15qR-9ySLxX9gpEQYZT63tkPbZMVVxdAc2RxQ-zI2LS2CzZ7H5uQS76bo6JHTvILlKOVq48pvOVELLT1tl0vr95AVcanofe_8y4IhR01iDc0O0w3r/s1600/Girl-Before-A-Mirror-By-Pablo-Picasso.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixAOylEPD4czpQatYULpG-f3_DLyw15qR-9ySLxX9gpEQYZT63tkPbZMVVxdAc2RxQ-zI2LS2CzZ7H5uQS76bo6JHTvILlKOVq48pvOVELLT1tl0vr95AVcanofe_8y4IhR01iDc0O0w3r/s400/Girl-Before-A-Mirror-By-Pablo-Picasso.jpg" width="322" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Girl Before a Mirror </i>(1932)<i> </i>by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) This was definitely not the original in our anecdote. It hangs in The Museum of Modern Art in New York City I chose this for thematic contrast with Titian's <i>Venus with a Mirror</i> in the first von sacher-Masoch essay.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;"> </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is no idle concern.
When I was in graduate training, there was a famous supervising analyst
who was extremely proud of his original and expensive Picasso, which hung
prominently in the consulting room in which he saw is clients and supervised
his mostly rather impoverished graduate students. The analyst’s presumed need for phallic
display was much discussed, and evidence marshalled for his excessive
egotism. It was my fortune to never
have actually met this person, so I never had the chance to assess any of this
for myself, but it is certainly true that his deviation from presumed orthodoxy
had a big impact on his reputation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjucLQzCZob225pZvTLwhMQZWuGeE_bFa-54A6G6mDMUWeKlMLgwHeB77AVq2G0C7OHpSIkYlu2ktOJOTwU_rBOOXu9Y3Zi83bda6ujqGE_eQv6dZ4hwGPnQ3_aW80OPWO610mgQ3c8TBXz/s1600/220px-Berggasse_Vienna_March_2007_002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjucLQzCZob225pZvTLwhMQZWuGeE_bFa-54A6G6mDMUWeKlMLgwHeB77AVq2G0C7OHpSIkYlu2ktOJOTwU_rBOOXu9Y3Zi83bda6ujqGE_eQv6dZ4hwGPnQ3_aW80OPWO610mgQ3c8TBXz/s400/220px-Berggasse_Vienna_March_2007_002.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud's Vienna home and office at Berggasse 19, now a museum. The sign is a recent addition!<br />(stock photo)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Late last year, I had the opportunity to visit Vienna for
the first time. Despite the fact that
our tour did not include a stop at the museum that had been made of Freud’s
home and consulting room -- are contiguous on the second floor of Berggasse 19
on the edge of the Old Jewish section of Vienna -- I arranged for a private
tour. I knew that Freud had amassed a
large number of artifacts collected in the early twentieth century heyday of
classical archeology, and had heard these were displayed profusely in his
office and consulting room. I was nearly
disappointed. Most of his collection had
been removed to London after the famous French analyst, Marie Bonaparte, generously
donated the rapacious emigration fees the Nazis required of Jews before they
would allow them to flee the country prior to the beginning of World War
II. Only a handful of Freud’s artifacts
were available in Vienna for display, and only the actual waiting room was
furnished. But with a keen eye for
history, Freud had hired a photographer to make a record of his rooms before
his furniture and collections were shipped away. The pictures showed a dense Edwardian riot of
pictures and artifacts! Short of
stiffly lying on the analytic couch and staring resolutely at the ceiling,
Freud’s clients were surrounded by a surfeit of visual stimulation. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbdA_95o5Ph83SIxkGkBY4S-TIW-A79dNJY782NgKt9_GLDK5qZt2kdFAl7CywvOIynRFF6UCSpANore5kYljI1iQc0emDAcOCdRmu7B1zkgm8D43S7S5QwbrUm9tr2DB0aWdDdnw6_FUQ/s1600/Freud%2527s+consulting+room.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbdA_95o5Ph83SIxkGkBY4S-TIW-A79dNJY782NgKt9_GLDK5qZt2kdFAl7CywvOIynRFF6UCSpANore5kYljI1iQc0emDAcOCdRmu7B1zkgm8D43S7S5QwbrUm9tr2DB0aWdDdnw6_FUQ/s400/Freud%2527s+consulting+room.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The consulting room, replete with artifacts. Yep, that's the couch back from the fMRI! (stock)</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd8-XkjFRGs9UCJ7xJsJ3c1J-bEFPSCxS0_vFnnx9N31bjsW6dX7DC6Y3FyuVVvFXAs6GxdG4G3zD6WDFfk1Oeqh7_AP2Ul9gFoxEQM6FFgj58KfNZXJwEPQRqVEhg7yc82ezJt9tG1mUr/s1600/IMG_20151212_152058.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd8-XkjFRGs9UCJ7xJsJ3c1J-bEFPSCxS0_vFnnx9N31bjsW6dX7DC6Y3FyuVVvFXAs6GxdG4G3zD6WDFfk1Oeqh7_AP2Ul9gFoxEQM6FFgj58KfNZXJwEPQRqVEhg7yc82ezJt9tG1mUr/s400/IMG_20151212_152058.jpg" width="296" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A tiny fraction of Freud's collection left behind in 1938 (photo by author)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9zqsEJICT9daFv3pDUgOuSsGyGVdcXG3lDGpeznpSRtbyRv65Hsi01e-dbJOWqpKWOqtcoRebjkuxyvE146OAzUK4vKtwtD_aKQsJGyJNogKEZ3iw8zDnt2WKVRZzWKGsC8-otOiLjQJa/s1600/IMG_20151212_152149.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9zqsEJICT9daFv3pDUgOuSsGyGVdcXG3lDGpeznpSRtbyRv65Hsi01e-dbJOWqpKWOqtcoRebjkuxyvE146OAzUK4vKtwtD_aKQsJGyJNogKEZ3iw8zDnt2WKVRZzWKGsC8-otOiLjQJa/s400/IMG_20151212_152149.jpg" width="296" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sometime a clay penis is just a penis! (photo by author)</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxCiWxX5Xh5soANvt55lXe7K712nRvwgsqxwgXPXDD6zMV44HuAcfhqk8LcwIJ4_2q_Ej1o6D6lelp3OQJt155tS7Mzngv4WwveyxCq7rndjrmDCz75HLSumC1KSYbz0ABZj4liInmctfG/s1600/IMG_20151212_152400.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxCiWxX5Xh5soANvt55lXe7K712nRvwgsqxwgXPXDD6zMV44HuAcfhqk8LcwIJ4_2q_Ej1o6D6lelp3OQJt155tS7Mzngv4WwveyxCq7rndjrmDCz75HLSumC1KSYbz0ABZj4liInmctfG/s400/IMG_20151212_152400.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This drawing hung in his waiting room (photo by author)</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzczFrSvGX0W1R9v16YkVT0FBn68t1XmLbqEthiZ7Onw2oZgdaM0wWsoo0j4N2efpLiEjOIojd3Lsn1hWIrCDB8vg-2AGIejC99P4WK-5LL_S-x4C77CRNq4iE6T6Zx0onhueR4N2IltFA/s1600/IMG_20151212_152250.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzczFrSvGX0W1R9v16YkVT0FBn68t1XmLbqEthiZ7Onw2oZgdaM0wWsoo0j4N2efpLiEjOIojd3Lsn1hWIrCDB8vg-2AGIejC99P4WK-5LL_S-x4C77CRNq4iE6T6Zx0onhueR4N2IltFA/s400/IMG_20151212_152250.jpg" width="296" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud's Vienna waiting room (photo by author)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Freud’s consulting and waiting rooms were anything but a
modern study in bland neutrality. One
can only wonder at the ways in which Freud telegraphed his areas of interest to
his clients amid 19<sup>th</sup> century drawings of swooning classical nudes,
every imaginable combination of mythic imagery, and his collection of phallic
objects from cultures around the world.
Either Freud was completely awash in repression of how all his interests
impacted his patients, or he operated on the idea that for transference to be
the powerful force that unified every therapy under the aegis of his
recommended techniques, it must be so strong that the client imported it
willy-nilly into all situations, largely regardless of context, and that
propensity made it powerful and neurotic enough to require analysis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the next post, I will start to turn to the discussion of
Freud’s specific theories about sexuality as they affected thinking about
sexual variation. Freud has the
reputation of being very judgmental, and Freudians get much blame for the patholigization
of kink. Some of this is well-founded,
but it would be well to remember that Freud believed that everyone had a
dynamic unconscious, had ways in which they were reluctant to completely grow
up, and that most under-sublimated expressions of libido were peccadilloes, not
pathologies. Kind of like kinks, it the
pre-idiomatic sense of that term before it came to be applied to sex
variations. We will look at how Freud
might have come to be mistaken for judgmental by his successors, despite his
demonstrated flexibility and acceptance as a writer. And we will see that in many ways, his
critics were correct.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p> </o:p><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px; text-align: justify;">© Russell J Stambaugh, June, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></div>
<br />Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-84593249209571580272016-06-02T20:09:00.000-07:002016-06-02T20:22:13.151-07:00Sadism and the Marquis de Sade<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd2vRht2fO3jlU1hNLYO2_jocl7yEOHSa1qVhBs3PR0jkvEa2S25wCp7wwvs8VxWrJLsvMk3TXTYqcd7e_lkZfaRlAI2iQMR4o_B_iRaPuDis0uJLTvN41GJDuti2qA3poUjhHH1n5xgxa/s1600/Marquis_de_Sade_portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="392" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd2vRht2fO3jlU1hNLYO2_jocl7yEOHSa1qVhBs3PR0jkvEa2S25wCp7wwvs8VxWrJLsvMk3TXTYqcd7e_lkZfaRlAI2iQMR4o_B_iRaPuDis0uJLTvN41GJDuti2qA3poUjhHH1n5xgxa/s400/Marquis_de_Sade_portrait.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alphonse Donatien Francoise, Comte de Sade. (1740-1814) <br />Alternating senior de Sades use 'Comte' or 'Marquis', and posterity has decided on Marquis.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On this day, 276 years ago, Donatien Alphonse Francoise was
born in Paris to a French diplomat and his wife who were not getting along any
too well… I would wish him a Happy Birthday
today, but his singular achievement seems to have left Western philosophy in a
bit of a bind about what kind of happiness we should want to have! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Richard von Krafft-Ebing chose as his poster boy for the
paraesthesia for sexual satisfaction in the infliction of pain, degradation and
suffering a far more famous and imposing figure than Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. He selected the most notorious libertine, the
Marquis de Sade. De Sade is an imposing
figure of the Age of Reason because, relative to the company of social,
political and economic giants, he was the only one dead set against
reason. Despite spending nearly half his
adult life jailed, he is remembered today precisely for his demand for absolute
freedom and rejection of reason and law.
He was acutely ironic figure, for he particularly detested religion even
as the age’s greatest philosophers were coming up with new discourse justifying
it even as it was declining in power, yet he was heavily persecuted for
religious reasons. Whatever he didn’t
like about authority, he was utterly inept at resisting it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Because de Sade’s influence on modern thought greatly
exceeds von Sacher-Masoch’s, it will not be possible to be encyclopedic about
his life and influence in a short essay.
Born 100 years before von Sacher-Masoch, he had already been subjected
to much more analysis and discourse than Von Krafft-Ebing’s other
exemplar. The psychiatrist was far from
the first to use the term ‘sadism’ which was <i>courant</i> long before <i>Psychopathia
Sexualis</i>. But de Sade influenced Nietzsche,
Apollinaire, Barthes, Genet, Breton, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Bakunin and
especially, Sigmund Freud. Through them,
he goes to the core of our notions of modernity, freedom of expression and
individualism, even those of us that find him repellant.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">How did such an impulsive, defiant, and aggressive man
become so important in Western thought?
That requires a good deal of historical context. de Sade came along at a juncture of Western civilization in which social change was altering traditional ideas about the relationship
between the individual and society and the sources of institutional legitimacy:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLFWpcc6Bb89-zhHlhCKID5qWqvpTHNIqsKFrNq4DaXiif_43ls4OSLfVTwkBs6EWdd0OOejIc8_sfXqnZi6jA8ebLkWC8IWmtaXm1cZpIVStFE4NvpIbqooowH0IdBhq16upsHuxqXsb0/s1600/Raffael_040.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLFWpcc6Bb89-zhHlhCKID5qWqvpTHNIqsKFrNq4DaXiif_43ls4OSLfVTwkBs6EWdd0OOejIc8_sfXqnZi6jA8ebLkWC8IWmtaXm1cZpIVStFE4NvpIbqooowH0IdBhq16upsHuxqXsb0/s400/Raffael_040.jpg" width="315" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pope Leo X (1475-1521), by Raphael <br />Pope Leo failed to reach accommodation with German princes and Martin Luther, <br />precipitating the 30 Years War and Wars of Religion. </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Religious absolutism was
being challenged</b>: Prior to the
Enlightenment, the Roman Catholic Church had the power to dictate what reality
was. Then Protestantism arose to
challenge for that power. Recoiling from
the ferocious and devastating Wars of the Reformation, Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism had battled to a standstill.
The Western thinkers were looking for reasons to stop fighting, and one
of the solutions was reason itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ1-3IsVCic41iPduQ2KNWrM_-mdjsbsdRBDKsLLiD8Hwne9MX4OBdvBDqMbVuYjNTokDIDzyU5Go3zkeHC6Ib4XAmdzQefWTYKf5mT4xBjV1ILc2clIRG_dYgQItGcVY5G8RUhkLcbUnf/s1600/2-anton-van-leeuwenhoek-granger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ1-3IsVCic41iPduQ2KNWrM_-mdjsbsdRBDKsLLiD8Hwne9MX4OBdvBDqMbVuYjNTokDIDzyU5Go3zkeHC6Ib4XAmdzQefWTYKf5mT4xBjV1ILc2clIRG_dYgQItGcVY5G8RUhkLcbUnf/s400/2-anton-van-leeuwenhoek-granger.jpg" width="321" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Anton Van Leuwenhoek (1632-1723), a tradesman who specialized in optics and invented the first microscope.<br />He thereby discovered cellular life and human red corpuscles in his own blood. He makes a great example of scientific change, being neither clergy, nor noble.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>New scientific
breakthroughs</b> and the beginnings of industrialization and spreading
literacy were democratizing the discourse about how government should work and
how knowledge about the world could be gained. Newton discovered gravity, Galileo observed
its workings on the ground and in the heavens.
The science of optics was invented, human cells observed for the first
time, and maps profited from the Cartesian coordinate system and navigation
based physical principles. Direct
observation of the natural world was yielding scientific breakthroughs and
challenging religious authority.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrn5oTFsuTxpbZkieNfqqMjzxdq6XAlOpNKZzhMW39SYYpXuKlxzNtnsSUQt22AHbBuiJ-I9YBsE3mZyVcMIbuYJRbQ_KLaBBGt8_Bdn-AGBnRHpXoI3RTPJz0av7SZKjgJKcydX_9nMBX/s1600/Voltaire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrn5oTFsuTxpbZkieNfqqMjzxdq6XAlOpNKZzhMW39SYYpXuKlxzNtnsSUQt22AHbBuiJ-I9YBsE3mZyVcMIbuYJRbQ_KLaBBGt8_Bdn-AGBnRHpXoI3RTPJz0av7SZKjgJKcydX_9nMBX/s400/Voltaire.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Francoise-Marie Arouet (1694-1778) You are more likely to know him as Voltaire. <br />Like de Sade, he was an ardent critic of the Roman Catholic Church.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Redefinition of
politics:</b> Europe and the colonies in America were in a discussion about
reason as an alternative to faith. At a
time when every major European country had an official state religion, the
nascent United States of America would simultaneously bring about
constitutional protections for religion, but also protect government from official
religious affiliation. Soon, that
thinking was going to infect France. de
Sade was a powerful voice in the context of that time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7Fg07B5wg-BLQ9TmQUOOW-gqYxT995BQmZrrMbFFD1u0posd0XRjwKEmO8SlBxgKdxHEyZ-iyoz2-HUO31Q5ZV2NXkOB3HQsCLB63g13Nuc8c0NmOIDJRK2to9I3vf3D9GjGafWbD8u1y/s1600/Louis_XIV_of_France.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7Fg07B5wg-BLQ9TmQUOOW-gqYxT995BQmZrrMbFFD1u0posd0XRjwKEmO8SlBxgKdxHEyZ-iyoz2-HUO31Q5ZV2NXkOB3HQsCLB63g13Nuc8c0NmOIDJRK2to9I3vf3D9GjGafWbD8u1y/s400/Louis_XIV_of_France.jpg" width="281" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Louis XIV of France (1638-1715) "I am the state."</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Louis XIV had marked the high water mark of absolutism. He had uttered the famous dictum “<i>L’etat, c’est moi</i>”, literally “The
state, that’s me!” and he had the
leadership ability to pull off so grandiose a claim. But his heirs were not nearly as able, nor as
long lived, nor as fortunate as Louis XIV had been. The state that seemed to function so well
under Louis XIV that it was the envy of all Europe lacked sufficient system of
public finance, and, following the expulsion of the Protestant Huguenots, had a
depleted merchant class just when commerce was becoming crucial to state finance. When
he died in 1715, the proper functions of government were tilting towards
greater democracy and individualism because absolutism was failing. Epicureanism, republicanism, and freedom of
thought preoccupied philosophy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Libertinage:<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghJNoD2YNI7XYyNwgELNuGPenpd80Ft5H01rc6szZaPRlE8cUkMCrJWTfQONma4eINiCpqop40UPw-wKfbEg2fSTXr_psdOfceLLq80ewmxADc_tL-SqyoLNIPaE8m8fCo3-RB4Y0Rxruv/s1600/John+Calvin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghJNoD2YNI7XYyNwgELNuGPenpd80Ft5H01rc6szZaPRlE8cUkMCrJWTfQONma4eINiCpqop40UPw-wKfbEg2fSTXr_psdOfceLLq80ewmxADc_tL-SqyoLNIPaE8m8fCo3-RB4Y0Rxruv/s400/John+Calvin.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">John Calvin (1509-1564) As Calvinism spread, Libertines were originally reacting against his determinism.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Libertinage</i> arose
from the conflicts between the prominent Protestant John Calvin and French
Catholicism. Calvin preached religious
absolutism in Geneva in opposition to the militant Catholicism that later revoked
the Edict of Nantes (1598, revoked 1685) and drove the Protestants out of
France. Distaste for Protestant
determinism led philosophers to questioning whether Catholic and Protestant doctrines
might both be incorrect. Libertines were
people who stuck up for the right to consider the possibilities that neither
faith was the ultimate truth. Initially,
libertinage had nothing to do with sexual freedom, it was about freedom to
rethink doctrine. Free-thinking would
influence philosophy in many ways, not the least the philosophical justifications
for the American Revolution; states governed for the benefit of the people, by
the consent of the people, and dedicated to life, liberty -there it is now-and
the pursuit of happiness. The happiness
referred to here that government is instituted among men to pursue is a rational
happiness. It fits well with the unruly
political actors of Hobbes and Locke, the self-interested economic actors of Adam
Smith and the separation of powers of Montesquieu. All of this would thrive under people who,
freed from original sin by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s insight that people were born
good until corrupted by bad institutions, could best govern themselves. If people are born innocent and capable of
making their own political decisions, then perhaps their sexual choices should
be free and are inherently good too!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">De Sade was far from the only Libertine to have seized the
license to pursue his selfish sexual interests.
It didn’t take long for people to recognize that if they were free to
reject religious doctrine, they could be freed from religious notions of sexual
restraint. But Sade insisted on his
right to indulge all of his passions without restraint, and maintained that no
other criteria, not reason, law, or even the consent of others should stand in
his way. Sade bought Rousseau’s notion
that man was the sum of his passions, but declined to restrain himself to that
which was socially licensed as good.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is a fascinating twist on Rousseau, whose defense of
passion was actually performed in the service of defending religion. Rousseau saw reason as partly antithetical to
spirituality. If science was vastly more
capable than previously thought of explaining the natural world that God had
created, and people were born innocent, what was the proper basis of religious belief? Rousseau’s answer was that passion was the
basis for faith. De Sade, who’d seen the
passion to inflict harm and to dominate in religion was not giving Rousseau a
free pass to conjure up a modern idyll grounded on idealizations of innocence. In doing this, de Sade rubbed Rousseau’s nose
in the problem of power. Perhaps because
the Comte de Sade never recovered from exactly that same demonstration when it
was perpetrated upon him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">de Sade’s life:<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEh088E2DGilu-A4AulFMmYsuy1Y5UJjd7_aVbT7IhgXsEHlIoZAiKIhP1JZDXlXbmbKPYBwkfQawP33hKR2sdhNqtuhJ3yCV8NBw9W9H1DeNL5dKte0n63py6Z8IbNwYRjJJ5n4ZGeVy_/s1600/Corporal+punishment.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEh088E2DGilu-A4AulFMmYsuy1Y5UJjd7_aVbT7IhgXsEHlIoZAiKIhP1JZDXlXbmbKPYBwkfQawP33hKR2sdhNqtuhJ3yCV8NBw9W9H1DeNL5dKte0n63py6Z8IbNwYRjJJ5n4ZGeVy_/s400/Corporal+punishment.jpg" width="250" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">18th century corporal punishment was not just practiced upon children.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">De Sade was born in Paris in 1740. Although de Sade was his parents’ only
surviving child, his father abandoned the family, his mother joined a
convent. de Sade was raised by an
indulgent uncle and was soon widely regarded as spoiled even as an aristocratic
child. Sent to an abbey for his early
education, he was subjected to the severe corporal punishment that was
characteristic of Jesuit education of the age. The Jesuits in the 1740’s had not yet gotten Rousseau’s
message that children were born innocent! It is easy to imagine the intensity with which
the Brothers and Sisters attempted to whip the Devil out of de Sade. de Sade became obsessed with corporal
punishment even before he was out of his teenage years and developed a
passionate hatred of the Church. At age
14 he was sent to military school, and then entered military service and rose
to the rank of colonel in the dragoons in time to participate in the 7 Years
War ending in 1763. Military service had
agreed with him well enough, he had risen rapidly through the ranks despite the
fact that France did poorly, and war debt would be a factor in the coming
French Revolution.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZfE-NAAdJMuYb4EtkWeG4wsB900TFJUOG9KrGyCFXx1kAC5vBlNZTIWP9l64reirnY5FxV55EZQrnjzUgIL07TW_vgdtbdkh5tELX5Pk8ifUiyVuBZbqL082EEHPoQ7FrCzydr8yIDoUS/s1600/Chateau+Lacoste.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZfE-NAAdJMuYb4EtkWeG4wsB900TFJUOG9KrGyCFXx1kAC5vBlNZTIWP9l64reirnY5FxV55EZQrnjzUgIL07TW_vgdtbdkh5tELX5Pk8ifUiyVuBZbqL082EEHPoQ7FrCzydr8yIDoUS/s400/Chateau+Lacoste.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Chateau Lacoste today, with a statue commemorating the Marquis's incarcerations and defiance.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The young colonel mustered out in 1763 and lived near Paris
where he got into several altercations with prostitutes (he insisted in
incorporating crucifixes in his sexual acts which offended the prostitutes and
was regarded at the time as the serious crime of blasphemy) and was briefly
imprisoned. The family forced de Sade
to marry, in hopes this might end his embarrassing activities, but there is
little to suggest this restrained him.
By 1768 he had been banished to his family’s estate Chateau Lacoste, in
Provence and far from Paris. Shortly
thereafter he lured a beggar woman, Rose Keller to his property with the
promise of employment, then launched on a campaign on nonconsensual behaviors
including tying her up, making incisions on her and pouring hot wax in
them. After hours of this abuse she
escaped by jumping from a second story window.
De Sade’s mother-in-law became involved in the ensuing criminal matter and
obtained a <i>lettre-de-cachet</i> from
Louis XVI to have de Sade imprisoned without the need for a trial. She was a devout religious person, and de Sade
and she loathed one another, no doubt in part due to complaints from de Sade’s
wife. Eventually, De Sade was banished
or escaped to Italy in the company of his wife’s sister (yes, they had an
incestuous relationship), where he was again incarcerated and escaped. He returned to Lacoste, where he hid for a
time and became involved in a prosecution for sodomy with several prostitutes
and his manservant. Although sodomy was widely
practiced and tolerated among the aristocracy in pre-revolutionary France, de Sade’s
mother-in-law saw to it that he was fully prosecuted. Eventually de Sade was lured to Paris on the
pretext that his mother was dying. There
he was arrested and incarcerated for about a decade in the prison at
Vincennes. De Sade also spent time in
the Bastille, where he was far from a model prisoner. On July 8, 1789 he was heard yelling to a
gathering mob that the authorities were killing all the prisoners. On July 14, 1789, the mob stormed the
Bastille, the symbolic opening of the French Revolution, but two days too late
to liberate the Marquis, who was relocated to <i>La Conciegerie</i>. In fact, the
authorities had not executed anyone, but all but seven of the prisoners were
removed before the prison was liberated by the people. Nonetheless, in the French mythology of the Revolution,
de Sade practically started it!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">During his incarceration, de Sade became a prolific writer. And this is the source of his protracted
influence on Western philosophy. I am
not a huge fan of his work, but de Sade wrote compulsively. He could be an incisive and provocative
social critic. His sexual writings dwell
heavily on corrupting others, hatred of church and other officials who inflict
atrocities on the helpless, and compulsive escalating scenarios in which his
characters top themselves by repeatedly doing more extreme, intense, cruel and
numerous abuses.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If inflicting pain and degradation are not your thing, and
blasphemous descriptions of venal churchmen don’t tickle your transgressive
funny bone, you are in danger of finding his work boring and very repetitive. Two stars!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ0R5wsn_ry5J_zYpgTgkhDLzGqQusLPUVctdcsMALTkfZhGXQ7jJdnpsykc125MOuKYI0wQHEaRUNIUtCGSE5OdOVrGzLJ-KzSd8xoOxe3ZgGmwK3OSC05Kh8UCbgBYUE0tVR8rZz1WrM/s1600/marquis-de-sade-scroll.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ0R5wsn_ry5J_zYpgTgkhDLzGqQusLPUVctdcsMALTkfZhGXQ7jJdnpsykc125MOuKYI0wQHEaRUNIUtCGSE5OdOVrGzLJ-KzSd8xoOxe3ZgGmwK3OSC05Kh8UCbgBYUE0tVR8rZz1WrM/s400/marquis-de-sade-scroll.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The manuscript of <i>120 Days of Sodom</i> preserved by Iwan Bloch, now in French hands within the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But on another level, de Sade’s drive to express himself is
that of any writer, and he was nothing if not urgent about his need to
speak. While incarcerated in the
Bastille, he was deprived of pen and ink and wrote the manuscript for <i>120 Days of Sodom</i> in ‘blood and
excrement’ on a huge role of paper smuggled in one square at a time and the
glued together. It was hidden, and re-found
and published by the pioneering sexologist Iwan Bloch at the beginning of the
20<sup>th</sup> Century. Some critics
claim that the plot is derived from the life exploits of Gilles de Rais, a
famous lieutenant of Jean D’Arc who is notorious as a serial murderer of
children, and Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian serial murderess of young girls. <i>120
Days of Sodom</i> is a categorization of all of de Sade’s fantasies of
penetrating, torturing and killing young people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE-htFbPFLnJ5nNKm5YMJxq2MPynIFEzui8o6Z-5altJknG_aBu2D2XfzSDxLqmqAWpcn_51rrOBWvMtkee_XTL8rJ7qtIFgYjRqA_aMhrMm0V134KiMpS0zKwpCKSjgLCgzO4I4k0I-Rr/s1600/Storming+the+Bastille.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE-htFbPFLnJ5nNKm5YMJxq2MPynIFEzui8o6Z-5altJknG_aBu2D2XfzSDxLqmqAWpcn_51rrOBWvMtkee_XTL8rJ7qtIFgYjRqA_aMhrMm0V134KiMpS0zKwpCKSjgLCgzO4I4k0I-Rr/s400/Storming+the+Bastille.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Storming the Bastille, July 14, 1789.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One might have imagined that, with the removal of de Sade
from the Bastille, his incarceration would have continued. However, in the early days for the French
Revolution, the practice of <i>lettres-de-cachet</i>
was abolished and, despite his aristocratic heritage, he was freed, and even
given a seat as a deputy to the national convention that sought to draw up a
new French constitution. In 1790 he was
out of prison and trying to get his works published anonymously. He was a member of the radical left,
advocating against elites and for common people. As the Revolution entered its paranoid phase
and devolved into the Reign of Terror, de Sade opposed it. He even intervened to preserve the life of
his hated mother-in-law! When his son
deserted the French Army, besieged as it was on all fronts by anti-revolutionary
forces, de Sade narrowly avoided execution himself. As it was, when Maximillian Robespierre took
power, de Sade was imprisoned for ‘moderatism’.
This is probably the first and only time he was ever accused of
that. But de Sade was so oppositional
that he played a dangerous game. He went
so far as to criticize the guillotines in the Pace de la Concorde as offensive
for executing people for bureaucratic and civil reasons rather than out of pure
passion. He was lucky to have escaped
with a mere year in prision when over a thousand lost their lives. He was released in 1794 with the death of Robespierre,
who eventually fed the maw of the guillotine he had unleashed. For the next several years de Sade was
largely destitute, and lived in Paris, his Chateau Lacoste having been sacked
earlier in the revolution.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">During his period of penury, de Sade was able to get two his
novels, <i>Justine</i> and <i>Juliette</i> published. They tell the stories of two sisters who are separated
young and make diametrically opposite choices.
Juliette embraces vice early on, gets drawn into perversions such as
papal orgies but thereby is able to live a comfortable life and turn towards
virtue. Justine is made of sterner stuff
and fixes her star rigidly on virtue from the start, only to careen from one
terrible misfortune to another and inadvertently cause great harm to
others. Justine turns to the church, to
the wealthy, and to the courts for justice only to be violated and exploited
every time until she is finally rescued by her sister. No sooner is she freed by Juliette than she
is struck dead by lightning. Unlike <i>120 Days of Sodom</i>,<i> Justine</i> and <i>Juliette </i>are
not mere catalogs of vice, but an active indictment of the futility of trying
to live virtuously, and of the classic sources of authority.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6yGf1Du01FVcIeQ5Fv-mEujKpK4es63Me2-SY2U-6LBwfGw5_6KE2T6POQNyc89rHSOLl-g-xPi-9w09-Duvpneh19d6uKLFXtbRMxZi4X6AI6yuhfrRtZIHu0C-DCDej4gh7q09gLP12/s1600/Jean_Auguste_Dominique_Ingres%252C_Portrait_de_Napol%25C3%25A9on_Bonaparte_en_premier_consul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6yGf1Du01FVcIeQ5Fv-mEujKpK4es63Me2-SY2U-6LBwfGw5_6KE2T6POQNyc89rHSOLl-g-xPi-9w09-Duvpneh19d6uKLFXtbRMxZi4X6AI6yuhfrRtZIHu0C-DCDej4gh7q09gLP12/s640/Jean_Auguste_Dominique_Ingres%252C_Portrait_de_Napol%25C3%25A9on_Bonaparte_en_premier_consul.jpg" width="412" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte came to power following his
impressive military victories in Italy in war against Austria. He read<i>
Justine</i> and<i> Juliette</i>, and
pronounced <i>Juliette</i> “the most
abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination.” Napoleon signed the order personally to have
its anonymous author imprisoned without trial.
Later entreaties from his family removed de Sade to the French insane
asylum in Charenton where he spent the final 13 years of his life. In Charenton, the Marquis’ reading and
writing were mostly encouraged. He did
write plays that were produced by the local populace outside the asylum, but
not, as has been written in popular representations since, using the inmates as
his actors. On Dec 2, 1814, de Sade died
in Charenton.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Cultural Significance:<o:p></o:p></span></span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Marquis de Sade’s primary cultural significance is as a <i>bête noire</i> or bogeyman. He is a cautionary tale about the depravity
and tragedy that will befall us if we give ourselves over to our innermost
natures. This role was already well
established by the late 19<sup>th</sup> century when Richard von Krafft-Ebing
took him up as the exemplar and the name for his perversion of sexual
satisfaction at the suffering and degradation of others. But, aside from Freud, most depictions of de
Sade represent his general satisfaction at making others suffer, rather than
his sexual response. So the term sadism
in common usage has lost its explicitly sexual origin. de Sade and his acolytes remain staples of
modern horror mythology.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">De Sade considered his depictions of sex as naturalistic,
just as Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ was a description of man’s natural
condition. de Sade opposed supernaturalism,
and thereby considered himself a kind of natural philosopher of human
sexuality. This idea would be affirmed
by Iwan Bloch and the early sexologists, who saw in his work a kind of
encyclopedia of perversions. Freud would
incorporate this idea into his notion of the id, much taken by de Sade’s
conflict with authority. Freud’s eternal
conflict between our inner morality and instinctual impulses owes something to
de Sade. Likewise, Andrè Breton, one of
the founding fathers of the surrealist movement took up this Sadean unconscious
as the goal of surrealistic representation, and images of suffering,
dismemberment and decay in Salvador Dali owe a little to de Sade. For more of this than you can take, take as
much of a look as you can at the opening eye sequence in <i>Un Chien Andalou, </i>Breton’s classic of surrealist cinema. Breton is responsible for referring to him as
“the Divine Marquis” in celebration of his ability to see into the same inner truth
of our natures that the surrealists were at pains to depict. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNgYixZmh0VAdpdzD3qEzmVIKoDorY3lPfl6mum-eftF1-TBSNNy3CUHV2e43Y0Feyge2BdOEU9QKfeFe8hYa8p9sCfKx_EAL-qy5wolDrOijMF3c84t5QD4XpdBL6VMxrv0oo31DBZDgo/s1600/Simone-de-Beauvoir-016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNgYixZmh0VAdpdzD3qEzmVIKoDorY3lPfl6mum-eftF1-TBSNNy3CUHV2e43Y0Feyge2BdOEU9QKfeFe8hYa8p9sCfKx_EAL-qy5wolDrOijMF3c84t5QD4XpdBL6VMxrv0oo31DBZDgo/s400/Simone-de-Beauvoir-016.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Simone de Beauvoir, author of the <i>The Second Sex,</i> and ardent opponent of censorship.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">de Sade also retains huge influence today as a symbol in the
struggles between artists and censors. In 1957, the French government came into
possession of the original manuscript of <i>120
Days of Sodom</i>, and debated destroying it.
Simone de Beauvoir, the famous French existentialist and author of <i>The Second Sex</i> wrote and important anti-censorship
essay <i>Must We Burn Sade?</i> That essay grounds existential authenticity
in passion, not principles, and de Beauvoir defends Sade as the existentially
authentic despite his crimes, basing all of this on his criticism of
institutional murder during the Reign of Terror. It is difficult today to imagine the
resonance of such an argument for a country that had been occupied by hated
German oppressors, and had forced to collaborate in the transportation of
dissidents and Jews to the death camps of 1940-45. For modern free-thinkers de Beauvoir and Sartre,
de Sade’s hatred of privilege and institutional power were important corollaries
to personal responsibility, even if his behaviors were crimes. Ultimately, the manuscript of <i>120 Days of Sodom</i> was not burned and is
treated as a national icon, although its acquisition and display lagged the
famous essay by 50 years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8iM9CcVHGUlXS27iUaiWmMBZ1JekiuMfHCwULZqq80ypGflSBa_c5oY9Cr9oNUoc2lSH-Vjfpoo10evlwM7yEFcgvzn0j3yu1SvecUjk9wXWzaUSNpfldqEn6JtBCooJgZBTZbGOMaV7I/s1600/quills-m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8iM9CcVHGUlXS27iUaiWmMBZ1JekiuMfHCwULZqq80ypGflSBa_c5oY9Cr9oNUoc2lSH-Vjfpoo10evlwM7yEFcgvzn0j3yu1SvecUjk9wXWzaUSNpfldqEn6JtBCooJgZBTZbGOMaV7I/s400/quills-m.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Geoffrey Rush as the Divine Marquis in<i> Quills</i> (2000) </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The other great exploration of de Sade as resistance to
repression is Doug Wright’s <i>Quills</i>, a
meditation on art and censorship. Played
fearlessly by Geoffrey Rush in the 2000 film adaptation, Rush was nominated for
an Oscar. The manic, chronically
provocative de Sade is locked in mortal combat with an enlightened doctor who
has been sent by Napoleon to ‘cure’ the madman who wrote <i>Justine</i>. While the play and
movie take considerable liberties with history, they capture de Sade’s struggle
against authority and repression brilliantly. There is a good chance you are looking at
decent approximation of the ‘real’ Marquis de Sade in Rush’s performance. De Sade never sat for a proper portrait, so
we have only a rather effete and beautified engraving of his likeness. It does not do historians any good that his
humiliated family destroyed many of his writings and did their best to minimize
the damage he did to the family name by eradicating his history. He was
never discussed among the family for five generations, and many of his writings
were destroyed. It is safe to say that
if his portrait had ever hung in the family gallery, it had long since been
taken down.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">de Sade’s hatred of authority influenced the 19<sup>th</sup>
century nihilists who claimed that power was too corrupted to serve as a
constructive source of meaning. Had de
Sade lived to debate this, I suspect he would have denied this conclusion, claiming
instead that meaning lies in the natural expression of his passions, but would
have taken delight in the trouble nihilism was to cause. Had he lived, de Sade would have been
panicked by the rise in state power that followed the Second Industrial Revolution
and World War I.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The Divine Marquis and Kink</span></b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">:<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Were Alphonse Donatien Francoise alive today, there is a good
chance he’d be in jail, but he would be endlessly celebrating modern kink. That he might have inspired others to
debauchery over two hundred years after his death would delight him. But he is a highly ambivalent figure for modern
kinksters. We have come to accept the Freudian
insight that we are inherently ambivalent in a way that de Sade strove to avoid
with his flamboyant acting out. De
Sade’s natural man may well have been murderous, but he was not
ambivalent. He would have had no tolerance
for our ambivalence about him!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">de Sade regarded consnet as a token concession to authority,
which by its very nature, existed to privilege some to have their desires and
to deliver others up to them. So modern
kink has had to disavow de Sade, even in the face of elements of the community
who have argued against the doctrines of Safe, Sane and Consensual for just
this reason. Sade negotiated nothing,
and regretted nothing in his writings. This is why von Sacher-Masoch had the
opportunity to introduce the ideas of consent, negotiation and contract 75
years later. And resistance remains to
any need to negotiate one’s impulses because it lessens the perceeived power of
toping and pure freedom of bottoming.
But only a self-destructive few are so wedded to their fantasies of
extreme surrender that they are willing to knowingly dispense with the need for
consent. When John Wayne Gacy advertised
on Alt.com and lured gay men to their deaths,
de Sade would have seen integrity and authenticity where we see only
tragedy and murder. Modern kinksters
don’t really worship at the altars of Bathory and de Rais. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjptREexKGLPSu2lbjHC1sMcPtLkVr7e8_S-LPDc-6YhREW5U7rrnpjnGgFetvkP3tjQYLM3Rue0LmU38JnmWF66u5yyPorkUYNQjCivUugDp_63-F51iQkBwDsw2sndJX838_T1PDXdvPZ/s1600/secretary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjptREexKGLPSu2lbjHC1sMcPtLkVr7e8_S-LPDc-6YhREW5U7rrnpjnGgFetvkP3tjQYLM3Rue0LmU38JnmWF66u5yyPorkUYNQjCivUugDp_63-F51iQkBwDsw2sndJX838_T1PDXdvPZ/s400/secretary.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Maggie Gyllenhaal in <i>The Secretary. </i>Its not really about routine office power relations, is it?</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kinksters bemoan the social confabulation of sexual sadism
with the routine sublimated joys of degrading others. Plenty of opportunity exists in
organizational life for routine dominance and submission, and part of what makes
kink exotic and special is counter-cultural lust to take dominance and
submission out of the desexualized, prosaic, and mundane contexts in which we
all ordinarily have to do these things. That
is the fun of <i>The Secretary</i> in which
Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader infuse their professional relationship with
lusty kink despite no explicit sexual relations. This dynamic often applies
even of those who claim that their primary satisfactions from kink are not ‘sexual’. Perhaps not, but they are even more emphatically
not mundane or utilitarian. de Sade was already known to have applauded this as
we saw in de Beauvoir’s essay. Indeed,
part of what made de Sade shocking in the 18<sup>th</sup> century was that he
used lust, not utilitarianism, to justify his protagonsits’ behaviors. The same treatment of slaves was in many places
not even criminal. So modern kink and de
Sade are strongly allied in making kink passioante, not utilatiarian, in its ultimate
motives. Although de Sade distrusted
religion, I believe he would have applauded those who seek spirituality in
sensation play as long as it did not conform to institutionalized religious
power structures.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">De Sade never saw power as exchanged. He desired to corrupt others by inciting and
shaping their desire. That struggle has
been displaced in modern kink to obtain consent under conditions of
ambivalence. Power is experienced in getting
the ambivalent so excited that they face their fears when highly afraid! De Sade was never satisfied that he had had
all the fun he could until dozens were destroyed. So the modern irony is that kinksters love to
play out imitations of de Sade, while fearing to encounter a ‘real’ one. And no matter how glamorous his ideas may
seem, de Sade was a rapist. When
feminists and conventional moralists attack kink as violence, it is this image
of de Sade that makes BDSM’s discussion of consent seem like superficial
rationalization to them no matter what de Beauvoir wrote.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Marquis and the DSM:<o:p></o:p></span></span></b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If the Marquis de Sade were alive today, no Krafft-Ebing or
DSM would be needed to diagnose him anymore than the forerunners of psychiatry were
needed at the turn of the 19<sup>th</sup> century. The real de Sade broke countless laws, and
his modern counterpart would do the same.
If called upon to diagnose him, the emphasis would be on which
personality disorder was needed to describe him. Was he borderline, narcissistic, or just antisocial? Ultimately, antisocial personality disorder
better describes de Sade than sexual sadism, which he also had (and pedophilia,
hebephillia, voyeurism and exhibitionism.
But all in the service of defying our norms and laws about how
individual power must be limited. For de
Sade was not compulsive about which sexual behaviors he preferred, but that
they be transgressive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There is a superficial similarity between the childhood life
stories of de Sade and von Sacher-Masoch.
Both are raised Roman Catholic.
Both are subjected to harsh corporal punishment, and both become
feverish writers of kink. Both become
manifestly self-defeating. But this
simple equation belies a much more complicated and mysterious picture about the
relationship between childhood corporal punishment and subsequent kink. Although the cultural contexts of mid-eighteenth
French and mid-nineteenth Austrian cultures had many similarities, both widely
license corporal punishment for children, yet these cultures produced few de
Sades and Sacher-Masochs, even allowing for singular genius in their aptitudes
for writing. We can imagine von
Sacher-Masoch discovering ecstasy in the adrenaline/endorphin rush that
accompanied beatings he was forced to experience, but surely many similar child
victims of beatings experienced this without the intensity of connection that
imprinted this particular gifted boy. De
Sade, rather than reveling in the sensuality of his neurochemicals, identified
with the power to force and degrade others. In this, he is the perfect case study for
Alfred Adler, whom we will take up much later<a href="file:///C:/Users/rstambaugh/Documents/EITHT%20de%20Sade.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>. Was he somehow able to activate his
adrenaline and endorphins by identifying with the exquisite suffering of his
victims? We know that he occasionally
had himself whipped during sex, an idea that is as old as time itself and
certainly familiar to well-read libertines.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But the superficiality of von Sacher-Masoch’s and de Sade’s
early experiences with corporal punishment did not account for their
differences. De Sade, for all his
extolling of the virtues of unlimited power over others, was strikingly intolerant
of being on the receiving end of such abuse.
Yet he did not start getting into real trouble throughout his army
career, where discipline was no less tight than in Jesuit education. Note, however, de Sade had ever increasing
power as a rising cavalry commander, which he did not have as a student in the abbey,
nor after he mustered out aristocrat in Paris.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ultimately, we do not know why these two life histories took
such different turns. Early history of
corporal punishment may have loaded the dice, but did not dictate their
outcomes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For a time, the DSM flirted with the diagnosis
self-defeating personality disorder.
Although this had nothing to do with his professed ideology, but when
one examines Alphonse Donatien Françoise’s life history, de Sade seems to have
allowed himself a rather limited expression of his natural instincts so vividly
and compulsively displayed in his writing.
Despite the privilege of his rank in pre-revolutionary France, he got
prosecuted for a string of fairly minor (relative to his writings) sex crimes. Despite a passionate sympathy for the
revolution, he got himself incarcerated by Robespierre for being too
moderate. Despite being allowed to write
and produce plays for the citizens of Charenton, he got forbidden to write for
a time. And he had no trouble so offending
Napoleon that he was imprisoned merely for writing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuBu-Xp2PTsIx9R8-u3pTwBPJhWbtJm_lINwOgPUkStVj-ST5KY6Nf12fk-OI-LIXyN-91lu_n_aVUiKy92tMWqBdGSY5rJm1rSf8M8E3FpApHqSAkby6xmeRikd7pMBBL6mJF-MBIvEkC/s1600/Napoleon+crowns+himself.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuBu-Xp2PTsIx9R8-u3pTwBPJhWbtJm_lINwOgPUkStVj-ST5KY6Nf12fk-OI-LIXyN-91lu_n_aVUiKy92tMWqBdGSY5rJm1rSf8M8E3FpApHqSAkby6xmeRikd7pMBBL6mJF-MBIvEkC/s400/Napoleon+crowns+himself.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Napoleon crowns himself while the Pope watches in Bonaparte's 1804 coronation as Emperor of France. Detail from <i>The Coronation of Napoleon</i> by Jacques-Louis David (1808)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And this makes for a stunning contrast. Napoleon Bonaparte, then the French First
Consul, thought so highly of himself as the ultimate new revolutionary man
that, three years later, he would not allow the Pope to crown him, and instead
crowned himself Emperor of the French December 2, 1904; and de Sade, a man who
repeatedly assaulted a poor washer woman, gave too much Spanish fly to a
prostitute, and had sex with his manservant, squared off against one another other. Napoleon was the most brilliant military mind
of his time whose behavior, directly and indirectly, led to the 4.1 million
deaths of the Napoleonic Wars. I am
rather glad that neither is my next door neighbor, but please do not ever imagine for
a moment that the Marquis de Sade is everybody’s ultimate boogeyman and
Napoleon is just a great general from the past because it suits the
legitimization of institutional power to tell the story that way. The Marquis de Sade is no hero. But he bemoaned the routine destruction of
life to enforce the power elite, while Napoleon spent lives liberally to
sustain and enhance his power. de Sade
may not be my idea of a healthy person or a hero, but he comes off pretty well
in comparison with the French Emperor who jailed him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div>
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</span><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
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<br />
<div id="edn1">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/rstambaugh/Documents/EITHT%20de%20Sade.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Alfred
Adler was an early Freudian who came to disagree with Freud about centrality of
the Oedipus Complex. Adler thought power
was a key underlying motive, and came up with the theory of masculine protest,
and the still current idea of identification with the aggressor. He would have argued that de Sade became obsessed
with taking on the powerful role of the punishing religious teachers who had disciplined
him as a youth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px; text-align: justify;">© Russell J Stambaugh, June, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></div>
</div>
Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-41074406304065903662016-06-01T07:48:00.005-07:002016-06-01T08:50:31.866-07:00Book Review: Sex with Shakespeare by Jillian Keenan<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi08UNwrvKdto-7F0Ra-d_fsmCFN3siIEb1GMFV4XNTz4jGzKZtRqM8cIhetam44pPf6_cc5nUTG9jpU5iF6uRw-OYQF_5g2zFW4-ufUsBe4FGluxs04z7JfCiPGifD10I9TdlCW7ODero2/s1600/Sex+with+Shakespeare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi08UNwrvKdto-7F0Ra-d_fsmCFN3siIEb1GMFV4XNTz4jGzKZtRqM8cIhetam44pPf6_cc5nUTG9jpU5iF6uRw-OYQF_5g2zFW4-ufUsBe4FGluxs04z7JfCiPGifD10I9TdlCW7ODero2/s400/Sex+with+Shakespeare.jpg" width="262" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I just posted the following review of amazon.com:</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"The myth of conventional relationships is a great deal like
Leo Tolstoy’s famous quote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family
is unhappy in its own way”. The beauty
of Jill Keenan’s brilliant little book is that she shows that, if relationship
happiness is not as effortlessly forthcoming as advertised, there are a lot of
different ways to get there, and she shows you hers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"Starting with an intense spanking fetish from her preadolescence,
she arrives at the ingenious solution of understanding her kink, herself, and
how to have a good life using the words of William Shakespeare. Never mind that he is dead 400 years ago,
dead even before his works were written down, and that as Jillian rightly
points out, his plays were meant to be enacted and were never intended as
literature. There is a good chance that
if you found the Bard dry in high school or college, you will find him juicier
here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"If you are already into spanking, you are going to learn a
lot about Shakespeare. If you are
already into Shakespeare, you are going to learn a great deal more about
kink. But the greater learning here
requires abstraction beyond the specifics of Jillian’s journey to how it is we
learn about ourselves, and how we negotiate the complexities of being an
outsider.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"No one grows up with a fetish without recognizing that they
are unconventional. In addition to
negotiating stigma, they must learn to fit their satisfaction into a
relationship with people who do not fully, sometimes not even remotely,
understand their desires. There are
thousands of different kinks, like Tolstoy’s families, and each successful
relationship requires blazing one’s own trail, despite therapists, FetLife, or countless
self-help books. I would suggest this
may be true of conventional relationships, too.
Those trails have hidden perils: isolation, deeper vulnerabilities, inaccessibility
of social supports, hurts that go deeper, and the need to accept risks we might
prefer not to take.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"But such trails involve learnings other people can’t
reach: Shakespeare as a bridge between
Western and Omani sexualities, how to sneak into a prison, or where the gay
bars are in countries that outlaw homosexuality. In this book you are likely to lean what ‘spankos’
are, new uses for ginger rhizomes, and a brand new perspective on what ‘nothing’
means. You will become sensitive to the
slightest changes in iambic pentameter, and what they tell you about the
heart. You travel to the limit of
literary analysis to the edge of the world we can know from the analysis of an
author’s words. And how everything we
learn with our heads cannot protect us from taking a ‘trust fall’ with our
hearts. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"Jillian is the perfect example of using the communications
skills you have to understand yourself and build the relationship you need. She doesn’t lecture; she enacts her story. It is the perfect antidote to the fantasy
that porn or romance novels can be imitated on the straight and narrow pathway
to a satisfying love life."</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For those of you who are sex therapists and sexuality educators, there is often a call for books that depict the lives of people struggling with outsider identities. <i>Sex with Shakespeare</i> is particularly good for this purpose. It is a short read, is well written, and moves quickly. Some may have a little trouble with the Shakespeare. There are also brief moments of magical realism in which Shakespearean characters come to life in subways and taxis. And as a trigger warning to clients surviving abuse histories, there are episode in which childhood sex abuse is recounted.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">© Russell J Stambaugh, June, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></div>
Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-60204374750255914222016-05-22T19:15:00.002-07:002016-05-22T19:17:43.289-07:00von Sacher-Masoch and Modern Psychiatry<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Note: This post assumes you have read
biographical information from the immediately preceding post: <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">For all of
these firsts described in the previous post, only some of which were fully articulated by Richard von
Krafft-Ebing, von Sacher-Masoch was a very particular and idiosyncratic case
from which to generalize and spin a psychiatric diagnosis. If von Krafft-Ebing had seen many more cases,
would he have drawn up the criteria for sexual masochism any differently? Surely we would do so today, but our context
is dramatically different now. At least
four different modern kink behaviors were described by von Sacher-Masoch and
categorized in von Krafft-Ebing’s <i>Psychopathia
Sexualis.</i> In Sacher-Masoch’s case
they co-occurred, but it is not clear they make a syndrome. These are:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOUd5JTdmRMe17OLYYLXoEZQytRd3DULJDJ-Z8qX4_5oTp7Uy0aojIU2D6l8Oz__vNqb6M5JTxRVbG9X-p_fmavx7x7p6IvQBqoWgh56IvqiXn14gwvWO1RiXfyVK16DU8uLWPlngaYT2m/s1600/Fur+Fetishism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOUd5JTdmRMe17OLYYLXoEZQytRd3DULJDJ-Z8qX4_5oTp7Uy0aojIU2D6l8Oz__vNqb6M5JTxRVbG9X-p_fmavx7x7p6IvQBqoWgh56IvqiXn14gwvWO1RiXfyVK16DU8uLWPlngaYT2m/s400/Fur+Fetishism.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A preference for fur among women is often called 'fashion'. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In a fashion magazine, this photo isn't kinky.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Fur Fetishism:</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">
von Sacher-Masoch had enjoyed erotic fantasies in response to statues
and artistic imagery prior to a severe episode of punishment at the hands of
his Aunt in early adolescence. Few
non-Slavic readers recognize the name Olga as that of a local noblewoman
prominent in Ukranian history for her brutal torture of her husband’s assassins. But Leopold was an ardent historian at an
early age, and had shown obsessive interest in history and especially in tales
of torture and cruelty prior to this episode.
He told Aurora that he had had a similar experience to Severin’s punishment
by an aunt. Leopold’s real aunt was
prone to wearing furs, and was very aristocratic, but was dear to him, not resented
and authoritarian as Severin’s was described to be. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Interestingly,
later psychiatric writers had no trouble separating the fur fetishism from
other aspects of von Sacher-Masoch’s presentation. Masochism does not always co-occur with
fetishism, but that is pretty common.
Does the fact that we can differentiate fetishism and masochism really
mean they are different things, or are they all dimensions of some larger
syndrome? Krafft-Ebing had died before
Von Rumelin’s confessions revealed that Leopold’s aunt was not named Olga, and
was adored, not reviled, and like so many aspects of the Sacher-Masoch story,
the dividing line between fact and fantasy was blurred over 100 years ago and
has not become clearer with time. But we
cannot rule out that von Sacher-Masoch had imprinted on fur, and maybe on pain,
on or before age 12 as described in John Money’s <i>Lovemaps. </i>That is a common story, but not a universal one. Some people learn kinks and new behaviors
later in life much as they pick up a foreign language or a new sport. If kink education didn’t teach people new
kinks, and better ways of doing old ones, there would be no point in arranging
educational programs.<i> </i><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz4U4yrNBZRPWZdfPrNfkuwbO6BIEhygk1OKT_zIbxCVufKYXsjVYGKnsVuG_gGSdJa8WztwHfyGahiEEmSclM_XGYQQGplExdXwSR16m7XI7XmIrc9IlrOjBjGfzxqbsiNgsO3MEJXMp_/s1600/Pinhead.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz4U4yrNBZRPWZdfPrNfkuwbO6BIEhygk1OKT_zIbxCVufKYXsjVYGKnsVuG_gGSdJa8WztwHfyGahiEEmSclM_XGYQQGplExdXwSR16m7XI7XmIrc9IlrOjBjGfzxqbsiNgsO3MEJXMp_/s400/Pinhead.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pinhead from Clive Barker's <i>Hellraise</i>r movies. Notice that auteur Barker designed Pinhead so that his acceptance of chronic pain is very frightening to viewers. This same phenomenon makes us shun people with diseases and disabilities.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Sex Desire for Physical Pain:</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">
In this early adolescent whipping incident, and in his creative writing,
von Sacher-Masoch describes transcendent, ‘suprasensualist’ feelings in
response to severe pain. It is easy to
imagine that thoughtful academic writers who had not experienced such transcendence,
and found orgasm to be their own peak experience might have conflated von
Sacher-Masoch’s descriptions with orgasm. Although we do not really know today what ‘sub
space’ is, we do know a great deal more about endorphins, enkephalins and
adrenaline than was understood in von Krafft-Ebing’s time. von Sacher-Masoch
does not describe orgasm as an ultimate symbol of pleasure as is nearly universal
in modern pornography, and in romantic erotica, and never waxes upon the
superiority of beating to orgasm, but clearly seems to prefer it. He had coitus with partners before proceeding
to whippings, and describes relationships where whipping happened first. In his marriage, it appears to have cemented
his intention to marry, yet he continued to demand whipping even after coitus
had resulted in Aurora having multiple pregnancies. So Aurora’s account of her sex life with von
Sacher-Masoch disconfirms Von Krafft-Ebing’s hypothesis about paraphilias that
kinks interfere with reproductive agency..
But he was died in 1902 before these details became public. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> How blurred are the concepts of pain and humiliation? When I Googled 'masochism' I got a list of pics including old Pinhead, and the following disambiguation list: 'Art'. 'Make', 'Women', 'Extreme', 'Disorder', 'Japanese', 'Self', 'Love', 'Humiliation', 'Emotional', and 'Tango'. Tango? Point about blurring of the meanings effectively made!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Just because
orgasm or possible feelings of transcendence during whipping happened
frequently does not mean that Sacher-Masoch was satisfied by his kink. Very few people, conventional or kinky have a
peak erotic experience and then declare “been there and done that!” and stop
trying to get additional pleasure.
Leopold was ultimately a romantic writer whose dissatisfaction in
pursuit of his obsessions persisted in part because the realities of what he
could live up to in action never quite overcame his ambivalence or his robust
imagination. He could always imagine
better than he could achieve. Not fully
submissive, he never had a mistress who could limit his demands for more and
better betrayal, even when they were ready to beat him as he desired or
actually enacted betrayal scenarios he requested. The novella <i>Venus in Furs </i>conforms better to Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s
degenerative theory than von Sacher-Masoch;s actual life history.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5-ioWm-qbmsIyvsRrd-i6tkAJ3Hb_IwRxp4eqpwIzUpFeXiPiw9IoMOtChfc8GudSDmH-CVK4swEv3WJ6gXeq-6Jgj3uT2Tcnpb0poR9EHwi_ZE6f9wrwoQdRinxDpvXt71lYFZpg-OaK/s1600/submission-gift-we-offer2+%25281%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5-ioWm-qbmsIyvsRrd-i6tkAJ3Hb_IwRxp4eqpwIzUpFeXiPiw9IoMOtChfc8GudSDmH-CVK4swEv3WJ6gXeq-6Jgj3uT2Tcnpb0poR9EHwi_ZE6f9wrwoQdRinxDpvXt71lYFZpg-OaK/s400/submission-gift-we-offer2+%25281%2529.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Oh, you thought sexual submission was reserved for the kinky? Not exactly. This is a picture of normophilic sexual submission</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Sex desire for submission, humiliation,
social abasement and emotional pain: </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">von Sacher-Masoch’s story can be viewed
as an attempt to control the fear of abandonment and Severin’s clear
understanding of his painful vulnerability to the woman he desires. Social, racial and erotic humiliation are a
crucial part of his description. Unlike <i>The Story of O</i>, in which the protagonist
elevates herself into a detached object of awe and power through submission,
Severin seeks abasement. One wonders how
Leopold ‘knew; that abasement might conquer his fears of loos? von Krafft-Ebing reads the desire for
physical pain and social subjugation as the same desire. We now know that these often co-occur, but
are not the same thing. Leopold and Aurora
extensively explore pain and restraint, but can never agree about sexual
betrayal. She is too middle class and
legally vulnerable to charges of adultery to comply willingly. He is unceasing in his demands that Aurora do
a better betrayal.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUpvpL8K0oH_mke0fqNBwiMnLb571cDntK0xIWTegnzUTNERxsaqxe4A8oNUs1NkGyDHG8yh9iesnmmnhsydS-mvoD1crrMRmhUJa-kp86LD7IistkfIHNnXPRgSb6-ggye1nGbryVZKB_/s1600/Female+Domination.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUpvpL8K0oH_mke0fqNBwiMnLb571cDntK0xIWTegnzUTNERxsaqxe4A8oNUs1NkGyDHG8yh9iesnmmnhsydS-mvoD1crrMRmhUJa-kp86LD7IistkfIHNnXPRgSb6-ggye1nGbryVZKB_/s640/Female+Domination.jpg" width="425" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">High fashion female domination: Just von Sacher-Masoch's style.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Female sexual domination:</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">
This is a crucial part of von Sacher-Masoch’s story that does not make
it into the diagnosis. Like fur
fetishism, which was determined to be a different preference, that he seeks
domination by a woman is taken as evidence of his desire for social submission,
but is not regarded as crucial to the kink.
One of the things von Krafft-Ebing and subsequent psychiatry get right
is that power exchange could be gendered, but it does not have to be.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Non-Kinky
Symptoms:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Then there are
some non-kinky idiosyncrasies that might draw a modern clinical diagnosis:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYVxXPXaTie03wG_7YYwrO7Qx6wtP4ycTvMabqhDpfnm1iOnHkKQ-ICHnsUljZbCElGS__LxgN56vIOGI-Bh3Qz2bbMpFmYZja_fVMFqCM2ZgepY4ZV98qJ3_QMq6qiV2UpnIx-qvWPeWh/s1600/self-destructive-behavior.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYVxXPXaTie03wG_7YYwrO7Qx6wtP4ycTvMabqhDpfnm1iOnHkKQ-ICHnsUljZbCElGS__LxgN56vIOGI-Bh3Qz2bbMpFmYZja_fVMFqCM2ZgepY4ZV98qJ3_QMq6qiV2UpnIx-qvWPeWh/s400/self-destructive-behavior.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">How confabulated are kink and self-destructive wishes: this was among the first ten pics</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Self-destructive urges:</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">
It says everything about the social context of von Krafft-Ebing’s times
that sexual desire for social submission, emotional pain, humiliation, and
sexual pain were lumped together in the diagnosis, but that fetishism,
adulation of powerful women and social role play were not intrinsic and
essential to the syndrome. Over time,
the idea that one would pursue lower social status for erotic purposes, or
place sexual desire above the desire for productivity or higher social status
would become confabulated with self-destructiveness. Since DSM III, mental health professionals
would know these pathologies not just for their overt behaviors, but for the
disruptive social and work and relationship consequences of voluntarily
accepting the consequences of social stigma that healthy people would
presumably resist. Eventual, ‘self-destructive’
and ‘masochistic’ would become synonymous, a confabulation analysis of
Severin’s behavior clearly invites in his second contract in which he vows to
suicide.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The idea that a
lover would hold feelings for a paramour above life itself is not viewed in
Western thought as automatically proof of self-destructiveness. Sometimes it is viewed as impulsive and immature,
as in <i>Romeo and Juliette</i>. Sometimes it is ennobling and
self-sacrificial as in Sydney Carton in <i>Tale
of Two Cities</i>. Sometimes it is proof
of the chivalry, as in the medieval romances.
In Christianity, it is proof of God’s love and the ultimate demonstration
of the power of forgiveness. So it is
hard to avoid the idea that in Western thought, sex is not a privileged reason
for self-sacrifice, but love is. This is
a symptom of Augustinian sex negativity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The thing that
unites these different preferences and made them kinky was, for Krafft-Ebing,
intended to be defiance of the biological order. But the unification of these ideas and
labeling them as components of masochism is social construction at work, and
our readiness to view them differently is greatly facilitated by social changes
since the 19<sup>th</sup> century. Von
Krafft-Ebing and von Sacher-Masoch died before World War I; before modern
feminism; before relativity theory; before the 20<sup>th</sup> century
revisions of the role of the state and individual; before Foucault’s
deconstruction of the professionalization of sexuality; and before
instantaneous global networking. It
shouldn’t surprise us much that their some of these ideas have undergone
radical revision. But just as Richard
von Krafft-Ebing’s nosology of sexual disorders had remained largely intact
well into an era of much greater sexual liberation and acceptance of sexual
variation, von Sacher-Masoch’s description of power dynamics, role play, pain
and idealization remain surprisingly current.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpOhbg0iySfu6F_JDIrn68OexLWNKsA_8UCqBK2Hzcp1ExSaXajZZx5XI_M8PVKZY70RHXWm2mZp1r-_PuuocupjIZDLig6Nv3iIvJ_IJsgHCBNWv343zVNKP8Y6MzN299_oT4CvOK0oDP/s1600/Obsessive+thoughts.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpOhbg0iySfu6F_JDIrn68OexLWNKsA_8UCqBK2Hzcp1ExSaXajZZx5XI_M8PVKZY70RHXWm2mZp1r-_PuuocupjIZDLig6Nv3iIvJ_IJsgHCBNWv343zVNKP8Y6MzN299_oT4CvOK0oDP/s1600/Obsessive+thoughts.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Fill in the same thought bubbles.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Obsessional symptoms:</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> von Sacher-Masoch was not just sexually
aroused by furs and betrayal, he couldn’t stop bringing them up. Whenever he saw an attractive woman, he would
say “She’d look good in furs.” regardless of context. Likewise, he chose his
folk tales and stories of rural life so as to very frequently include allusions
to tyrannical physically aggressive and dominating women. It would be fair to
say he was heavily preoccupied with these thoughts. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEgFkf8ZxJwO4NuEJnhFVHTDO_oOYptOWMnwgVlBvzAE-2dqUwAQ6xbTGhzYsHYGq9pv6AvsQzcd50_5xwonF9uPWN58MzTUtXplxW4OeyPZg-HX-2ThCer5HF4oBEXNseTG3Dfc9X1hgw/s1600/impulsive.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEgFkf8ZxJwO4NuEJnhFVHTDO_oOYptOWMnwgVlBvzAE-2dqUwAQ6xbTGhzYsHYGq9pv6AvsQzcd50_5xwonF9uPWN58MzTUtXplxW4OeyPZg-HX-2ThCer5HF4oBEXNseTG3Dfc9X1hgw/s1600/impulsive.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Impulsiveness: </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">von
Sacher-Masoch was unable to manage his money, and would overspend on his
interests, and then lead a hand-to-mouth existence between writing
successes. Because we mainly have his
story of domestic life from a materialistic wife who was unhappy with their
financial stability and lifestyle, there is some possibility this is her
judgment, not good clinical description.
However, Aurora von Rumelin’s and Leopold’s frequent changes of
residence and poor housing probably describe a real problem above and beyond
Aurora’s judgments.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPVnBEPzkwh_A1ar5sVSZPveS0VA69hrTj_2nx7m0G8vvjYjpp9bfnT9yIg6ckdty05XxbndJt8-5Nvvq_wUBHqD5pFcURQccnGmGSFrsQ6-Cn44JmlZlptJZb6xnVYHthsHCn-uROuEAH/s1600/o-DEPRESSION-facebook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPVnBEPzkwh_A1ar5sVSZPveS0VA69hrTj_2nx7m0G8vvjYjpp9bfnT9yIg6ckdty05XxbndJt8-5Nvvq_wUBHqD5pFcURQccnGmGSFrsQ6-Cn44JmlZlptJZb6xnVYHthsHCn-uROuEAH/s400/o-DEPRESSION-facebook.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Depression and Grief: </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">von
Sacher Masoch’s writing was highly variable, both in quality and productivity. Later in life, he seems to have written his
fair share of hack melodramas at times to make ends meet, and stopped working
for prolonged periods due to relationship conflicts, the loss of his sister at
age 14, his son Sacha when he divorced Aurora, and at other times. At one point in his marriage, he was
psychologically immobilized for six months over the death of his cat. Sometimes
success in acting out his fantasies buoyed him and a prolonged period of
increased productivity would buoy his work.
Immediately before his hospitalization he was morose.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi091swI3vfv7WVmqLJ8Fg8T4Djf32Wa_-0L68yVbAlLRFcmDm8LbuVo3gJeAZ24GY7ehT3wGD9nTVK_1UB6jbk15-EU-UCyX0kLo28dJe01Xu6N8dq1_wCymf5yBdn7cZbJlyAIwhBS_9Z/s1600/the-scream-just-sold-for-a-record-breaking-119-million.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi091swI3vfv7WVmqLJ8Fg8T4Djf32Wa_-0L68yVbAlLRFcmDm8LbuVo3gJeAZ24GY7ehT3wGD9nTVK_1UB6jbk15-EU-UCyX0kLo28dJe01Xu6N8dq1_wCymf5yBdn7cZbJlyAIwhBS_9Z/s400/the-scream-just-sold-for-a-record-breaking-119-million.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Edvard Munch's classic expressionist painting <i>The Scream</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Psychotic Symptoms: </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">von
Sacher-Masoch was prone to occasional hallucinations, and sometimes others
thought his obsessions bordered on delusions.
In an incident that provoked his hospitalization, he killed a kitten,
and threatened to kill his second wife when she suggested he had gone mad. Inevitably, the tragedy of his declining
mental health framed the implications of his paraphilia. Since Sacher-Masoch, the vast majority of
people who sexually respond to pain have not suffered from concomitant hallucinations
or delusions. On the other hand, as most
mentally healthy people systematically avoid pain, it was easy to mistake
sexual response to it as crazy, and this tendency would become all the greater
with the rise of experimental and behavioral psychology. After the publication of <i>Psychopathia Sexualis</i>, it was even easier. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">It is
unthinkable today that Leopold would have been put in a mental hospital for potentially
over ten years for a psychotic episode in which he murdered his pet cat, but he
might well have been placed in extended care for dementia.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR_BSRTKPonkWvk_6eURtCsKfmfiQMf8A_QF9j2YtAwmQzcM5hNA0GW-U66oKxp5Yx2yFr94_W7SY5uQLIQztPustor-ZiPO0Mxap2G_rH0yJqX72MStSkxJZ2fPr4Oh6DtTHFSIFpBxSM/s1600/Venus+in+Fur.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR_BSRTKPonkWvk_6eURtCsKfmfiQMf8A_QF9j2YtAwmQzcM5hNA0GW-U66oKxp5Yx2yFr94_W7SY5uQLIQztPustor-ZiPO0Mxap2G_rH0yJqX72MStSkxJZ2fPr4Oh6DtTHFSIFpBxSM/s400/Venus+in+Fur.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Would Leopold von Sacher-Masoch have resembled the modern director in Venus in Fur? Yes, and no.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">von Sacher-Masoch today: </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Whatever
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s reception was in his own time, it is difficult to
imagine him receiving a diagnosis today despite a fairly broad array of diverse
behaviors. There is no record of his
having sought a psychiatric consultation voluntarily during his lifetime until
the incident with the cat. His bitter correspondence
with von Krafft-Ebing already alienated him from that profession, which had
rather less legitimacy at the time than modern psychiatry enjoys in the
present. Such minimal description of his
psychosis is provided in his biography that it is quite difficult to tell how
his hospitalization became chronic, but it would be easy to imagine
Krafft-Ebing’s work facilitated that.
Now he might have been kept under observation for several days, provided
with antipsychotic medicine and released.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If von
Sacher-Masoch presented for outpatient treatment today, there is ample evidence
that he meets the criteria for the paraphilias of sexual masochism and
fetishism. There is a pretty good bet that
most diagnosticians would cite adequate evidence of disruption in life and occupational
functioning to call his variations a paraphilic disorder bolstering their
diagnosis with evidence of preoccupations interfering with his work and the
demands for sexual betrayal destabilizing his marriage. If he consulted most sex addiction
practitioners, he would certainly have been labelled a sex addict. Twelve step groups did not exist in his day,
even for alcohol treatment or widespread use of opiates and cocaine, which did
not start becoming regulated until after 1910.
He is likely to have been resistant to religious based treatment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Despite Richard
von Krafft-Ebing’s diagnosis of masochism, it was in the <i>Belle Époque </i>that kink began to emerge from the brothels and became
a <i>demi-monde</i>. The study of the diagnosis of masochism is
the perfect case study for Michel Foucault’s analysis that the colonization of sexuality
by medical professionalism was not about controlling actual sexual behavior,
but about controlling the discourse so as to legitimate the professions roles
in that conversation. Krafft-Ebing, then
Freud, then Freud’s followers did not decrease conversation about sex, or
increase societal prosecution of it. Rather they
facilitated a huge increase in the conversation on their own terms.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhto38srR79b0HN8TSoZDQVoMWVfVjUMVt2LiR6XLwcuuouqvCpv92Lgkx_nvmmJ2vFiu3Aig_gLOEWhUK8yX-LoLPNqVcCV1mYZVVJhDNwU4Hn2io-_jkvCURQBd6XENlJqPB62sT9VIKn/s1600/Mastermind+of+Mars.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhto38srR79b0HN8TSoZDQVoMWVfVjUMVt2LiR6XLwcuuouqvCpv92Lgkx_nvmmJ2vFiu3Aig_gLOEWhUK8yX-LoLPNqVcCV1mYZVVJhDNwU4Hn2io-_jkvCURQBd6XENlJqPB62sT9VIKn/s400/Mastermind+of+Mars.jpg" width="253" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Brain transplants across genders, female domination, and plenty of action pluss skimpy costumes. Oh my! Written in 1928</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Photography begat bordello photography and
private pornography. This in turn created
commercial demand for cabarets, stage productions and the hand fabrication,
then the mass production of kinky paraphernalia. Krafft-Ebing’s serious psychiatric analysis
begat faux psychiatric books filled with titillating case studies designed to
arouse. At the same time, penny
dreadfuls, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Boroughs wrote pulps that dealt
in sexualized and kinky themes. The cover of fairy stories and folk tales was
no longer needed. Books and magazines
were mass produced and became sufficiently inexpensive than many more people
could afford them. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
was a man ahead of his time. His power
as a titled gentleman and his fame as an author afforded him kinky
opportunities that less privileged members of his society would have missed. His obsession and gifts as a writer gave him a
chance to discuss them. But he lived at a time when he had to make a lot of his
own opportunities. Today, we have
products, social groups, social support, ideologies, and improving
psychotherapy services for a much broader diversity of sexual interests. Von Sacher-Masoch paid a price for being out
of step with his time, but he helped frame the discussion of which this blog is
a tiny part 145 years ago. That is a
very long time ago given the speed of social change we have recorded in the
interim. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Resources: </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The
book <i>Venus in Furs </i>(1870<i>)</i>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Venus-Furs-Leopold-von-Sacher-Masoch/dp/1604501294">Venus in Furs book</a> and the Polanski movie <i>Venus in Fur</i> (2012) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Venus-Fur-Mathieu-Amalric/dp/B00LTKTHZE">Venus in Fur (20120 movie</a> are easily found on
Amazon. Given the book’s history,
various illustrated and early edition versions can be found from antiquarian
book sellers. There are also numerous
previous film versions of <i>Venus in Furs</i>,
including <i>Seduction: The Cruel Woman</i>
(1995) S<a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dmovies-tv&field-keywords=Seduction+%3AThe+Cruel+woman+Treut&rh=n%3A2625373011%2Ck%3ASeduction+%3AThe+Cruel+woman+Treut">eduction: The Cruel Woman</a> directed by Monika Treut, and other productions in 1967, and two
different European productions in 1969.
Clips from the David Ives’s production are on YouTube, but I did not see
a video production of the entire Broadway play.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">For atmosphere,
the Velvet Underground song <i>Venus in Furs
</i>was on their debut album in 1967.
Written by Lou Reed and produced by John Cage. Sherman, set the Way-Back machine for Greenwich
Village, NYC in the summer of ’67. On
the Left coast it was the Summer of Love.
On the right coast, Velvet Underground served as the house band for Andy
Warhol’s Factory and was a direct forerunner of punk rock music. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiaAfd0_EdM">Venus in Fur by the Velvet Underground</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Psychopathia Sexualis</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> (1886) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Psychopathia-Sexualis-Richard-Krafft-Ebing/dp/1147062137">Psychopathia Sexualis (book)</a> is also available from Amazon,
and in a variety of editions from antiquarian booksellers </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The Confessions of Wanda von
Sacher-Masoch</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> (1992) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dmovies-tv&field-keywords=Confessions+of+Wanda+von+Sacher+Masoch&rh=n%3A2625373011%2Ck%3AConfessions+of+Wanda+von+Sacher+Masoch">The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch</a> is
also available on Amazon in the secondary seller market. It is currently out of print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The First Masochist: A Biography of
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">
by James Cleugh (1967) Stein and Day, NYC <a href="http://www.amazon.com/First-Masochist-biography-Leopold-Sacher-Masoch/dp/B0000CNEE3/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1463969583&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=The+first+masochist">The First Masochist</a> is available on the secondary
market. It is not a great read, but is
valuable for its review of his many writings that were not translated into English.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Lovemaps</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> by John Money <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lovemaps-John-Money/dp/0879754567/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463969697&sr=1-1&keywords=Lovemaps">Lovemaps</a> is available from Amazon.
Do not confuse it with the novel <i>Love Maps</i> or a host of blogs that sound
similar and offer relationship advice on unknown provenance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px; text-align: justify;">© Russell J Stambaugh, May, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-27929826317406020902016-05-21T15:49:00.001-07:002016-05-22T19:17:28.770-07:00Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaBauKxoh4yIIKt-1-rSDEknumUEafMBkSUGZ3IDTErLluHHpQeObsLYvYVtKka3M0dcop4Pl09kaXQVs1l90FlvckSel0gFElU5LIeJG34WzTJEkMzcLhmypyO0n1BSSl_u_7UoehYzQD/s1600/220px-Leopold_von_Sacher-Masoch%252C_portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaBauKxoh4yIIKt-1-rSDEknumUEafMBkSUGZ3IDTErLluHHpQeObsLYvYVtKka3M0dcop4Pl09kaXQVs1l90FlvckSel0gFElU5LIeJG34WzTJEkMzcLhmypyO0n1BSSl_u_7UoehYzQD/s640/220px-Leopold_von_Sacher-Masoch%252C_portrait.jpg" width="418" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1905?) Austrian uuthor of <i>Venus in Furs.</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Nowadays, if
you have ever heard of the Austrian man of letters and novelist Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch, you know that he wrote the scandalous novella <i>Venus in Fur(s) </i>(1870), which in 2011
became a hit Broadway play by David Ives and was made into a movie by the
notorious and highly kinky auteur Roman Polanski in 2012. In 2012, Nina Arianda won the Tony for Best
Actress in the lead role of Vanda Jordan.
In 2014 it was the most performed title across the US in repertory
theaters. Dead for over 100 years, von
Sacher-Masoch has been enjoying a bit of a comeback.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwO1YDvV9FIWyrlebXR-1iik2sHhtaNX_BO-eCnOmPCXlf3l0boPhdMRw_hwTCpvSasaIGCxVyOErxthS7zGyyQz_rf0KAeIhDMdP_JDUl-4jOUmfDbPuwQR1ZR7u125rY83gKV-qoQMjH/s1600/arianda+and+Dancy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwO1YDvV9FIWyrlebXR-1iik2sHhtaNX_BO-eCnOmPCXlf3l0boPhdMRw_hwTCpvSasaIGCxVyOErxthS7zGyyQz_rf0KAeIhDMdP_JDUl-4jOUmfDbPuwQR1ZR7u125rY83gKV-qoQMjH/s400/arianda+and+Dancy.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Nina Arianda <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">and Hugh Dancy in the 2011-12 Broadway production of David Ives' </span></span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Venus in Fur.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If you know two
things, you know that Richard von-Krafft-Ebing decided to name his clinical
diagnosis—masochism--for sexual arousal to pain and humiliation, after
Sacher-Masoch. This has given Leopold a
good deal more than his standard allotment of 15 minutes of fame, and made ‘masochism’
a dirty word for over 130 years, and led to considerable fuzzy thinking about
what exactly we are dealing with when we encounter kinkery that involves pain
and submission.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgthMKXCG9MP4ota_N4Ow_-q54aav3HqwYL3njHFdogu2VOdDYucHMvnBYb9CVTTq2ApHWBzYYGRlRBW0ZEorEkC3LyoY8sh3o4-mUToibdw_wDVhQFm5jRRlvqlZLl6BgoQ_OgSIlz9PGE/s1600/baba.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgthMKXCG9MP4ota_N4Ow_-q54aav3HqwYL3njHFdogu2VOdDYucHMvnBYb9CVTTq2ApHWBzYYGRlRBW0ZEorEkC3LyoY8sh3o4-mUToibdw_wDVhQFm5jRRlvqlZLl6BgoQ_OgSIlz9PGE/s400/baba.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A depiction of Baba-Yaga's hut. Consultations with the crone are not for the faint of heart. If you don't know your slavic folk tales, you probably know Baba-Yaga's hut from the game <i>Dungeons and Dragon</i>s! It first appeared in the <i>Eldritch Wizardry</i> expansion back in 1974.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">You probably
don’t know that Sacher-Masoch was a prominent professor and writer of Slavic
folktales which are in and of themselves a repository for plenty of dark
themes. Think Baba-Yaga, the mysterious but capricious
and powerful crone who could help or hinder the innocent. Or witches that cooked greedy little children
in ovens. Or Little Red Riding Hood
saved only when she was cut from the wolf’s stomach after getting eaten. Pretty Grimm stuff! Sacher-Masoch anthologized folktales from
German, Jewish, Slavic and Polish traditions before writing two novels. Only <i>Venus
in Furs</i> was translated into English.
Any examination of his collected works reveals that von Sacher-Masoch
was obsessed with tyrannical punishing women and he seems to have scoured
central European mythologies for examples.
Suffice it to say, such tales were there to be found, and that
Sacher-Masoch passionately needed to tell them!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">This post is
about von Sacher-Masoch’s contributions to kink. Another post will follow
shortly discussing his psychiatric symptoms in more detail. Although he never intended to lead anyone, and
fought having his name used, he has had a strong influence on people who
practice kink, and on those who study it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Young Leopold
was born in Lemburg, Austria Hungary, now Lviv in the western Ukraine, in
1836. He grew up in time to be greatly affected
the second industrial revolution and the formation of a powerful German
State. A Catholic born son of an Austria-Hungarian
civil servant and a mother who was the last heir of the noble von Sacher
family, Leopold was the first to be born with the hyphenated Sacher-Masoch
name. Despite noble blood, Leopold was
sympathetic with socialist and feminist thinking of his day. He was ardently opposed to antisemitism and
wrote compelling stories of Jewish life in his region. It is likely that the young Leopold grew up
in a household with conflicts attending recent accession to the nobility. It is pure speculation on my part that his mother’s
nobility may have upset the prevailing patriarchal dynamics in young Sacher-Masoch’s
household and may have had a role in his interest in powerful women. But his mother was not a powerful and
punishing figure as so often appears in his literature. His father was no slouch, having been Chief of
Police in Lemburg, Prauge, and Graz, all parts of the Austria-Hungarian Empire
at the time. His father acquired the
title of knight, which passed to Leopold later in life when his father died.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">He was educated
in Graz, Austria, where he was an excellent student; his passion was the study
of folktales and history quickly overtook his original training in law, which
he never practiced. He soon returned to
Lemberg and became a professor of history, but tired of academic lecturing and he
returned to Graz to devote all of his time to writing. He then began publishing his ambitious
collection of stories, <i>The Legacy of Cain</i>,
in 1869 of which <i>Venus in Furs</i> is the
only work routinely translated into English.
He would eventually complete one other volume, <i>The Mother of God</i>. But outside
of Slavic languages and literature scholarship, Sacher-Masoch’s legacy lies
entirely within his contributions to kink and clinical theory. This legacy comes from three sources. First is from his novel, which came to be
seen as autobiographical, the second is through Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s <i>Psychopatha Sexualis</i>, and the third is
from his first wife’s memoirs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>Venus in Furs </i><o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></b>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib9a-9fBr0BYzmbaVY52xqQa-6i1SfL7vVrumPoFMPag7eK7SobPjvS4GDfaU1UjaQL6tbWtz1nVvsCr1XT7iorvEKg2jIuZQ2FuZBbGjTZMs29HuM0p9afkg997ZglRisC5LSDdBZ5uy8/s1600/4273541-venus-in-furs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib9a-9fBr0BYzmbaVY52xqQa-6i1SfL7vVrumPoFMPag7eK7SobPjvS4GDfaU1UjaQL6tbWtz1nVvsCr1XT7iorvEKg2jIuZQ2FuZBbGjTZMs29HuM0p9afkg997ZglRisC5LSDdBZ5uy8/s640/4273541-venus-in-furs.jpg" width="424" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Venus in Furs (1870) The lovely Gustav Klimt illustration was added later.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The novel was begun
sometime in the mid 1860’s and completed in 1869. It is set as a tale within a tale, as one man
attempts a kind of kink reparative psychotherapy on another who, following a
meditation on Titian’s painting <i>Venus
with a Mirror</i>, falls into a dream of speaking to the goddess and develops a
mania for subjecting himself to the mercies of a cruel women. The main plot of this cautionary story
concerns protagonist Severin von Kusiemski, who, as a child discovers that he
is a ‘suprasensualist’, and as an adolescent is severely whipped by his aunt, a
noblewoman who habitually wears furs, and is deliberately intent on punishing
him so brutally that he learns the pleasures of being beaten. He indeed finds himself overwhelmed with
sensuous feelings associated with the punishment and craves to repeat it. As a grown man, Severin falls in love with a
woman, Wanda von Donajew, who becomes his mistress. Severin ardently desires to become Wanda’s
slave and for her to wear furs and beat him.
He broaches the idea of becoming submissive to her, and she is initially
resistant, but agrees to try it out, only to progressively recognize the advantages. Severin proposes and Wanda draws up a legal
contract for him to become her abject slave, and in a textbook example of
seduced consent, she terrorizes him about the potential harshness of the
arrangement. She rejects the submission
of traditional marriage for the empowerment in Severin’s proposed contract. Confronted with the apotheosis of all his
fantasies, he tremblingly signs his life away… literally, as late in the
novella, he contracts to suicide in accordance with his plans to have Wanda
sexually betray him with another man. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixya2aCTg4Nt-KSQs3pMaAris4An8M9jqNklRsEDRFnYPdE-m8wYSBiSTGWTjXqmTgowni6SschqP4dK1YYssTKMmKhOI9PSQi7a83mzzEK68SZVHlrsfqMuLSTeLP0nKrziNfguVw3lmd/s1600/titian_venus_mirror.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixya2aCTg4Nt-KSQs3pMaAris4An8M9jqNklRsEDRFnYPdE-m8wYSBiSTGWTjXqmTgowni6SschqP4dK1YYssTKMmKhOI9PSQi7a83mzzEK68SZVHlrsfqMuLSTeLP0nKrziNfguVw3lmd/s640/titian_venus_mirror.jpg" width="520" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Titian's (1588-1676) <i>Venus with a Mirror, </i>which mesmerizes von Sacher-Masoch's protagonist in </span><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Venus in Furs</span>.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">They then
travel to Florence where they can pursue their contract away from their
respective social circles. Per the
contract, Severin takes the name ‘Gregor’, that of a common servant, and
travels third class while Wanda rides in luxury. In Florence he wears the livery of a servant,
and adheres to the contract, serving her in all ways, as she grows
progressively crueler and her love and fascination transform into contempt. Eventually Wanda exploits the full measure of
her power over Severin, and ties him up, and leaves him for a real man, a
handsome Greek who will dominate her. Rather
than whip him as he ardently desires, she has the beautiful new paramour
perform the beating. She has come to
despise Severin for his weakness even as she enjoyed dominating him. The climax
of the novel is this beating and Wanda’s departure. The contracted suicide is merely implied.
This tragic outcome should thus serve as warning to the framing story’s
protagonist of the perils of sexual submission of the male. For despite all niceties to the contrary,
women must either be men’s despots or their slaves, and men who crave
submission court their own destruction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Venus in Furs</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">, which would seem to be an exciting
story about love of dominant women is in fact set up as a warning about female
weakness and their inevitably abandoning ways, and similar themes in his other
stories have provoked many critics to regard Sacher-Masoch’s work as misogynist. In his writing on contemporary and historical
matters, Sacher-Masoch was a feminist, socialist, and advocate for women’s
suffrage. In his fiction, women come off
as vain, craven, selfish, and ultimately weak.
As much as he craves submission to them, he regards himself as morally
superior, a peculiar and problematical position from which to submit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>Psychopathia Sexualis</i><o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></b>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi__nxMsVtfPlB8Hwugo6rLks-tofwTCZ4HxmV9dAX9IGhVCiQTawXpWDyjZdmC8IRhzaHQZKykOEM-kSt0RUiEa1VVyWHoE_z67koHmp-QYSd_aIQgJZiFSY7Nd9Qlnit8tngvrEzWKkDi/s1600/psychopathia-sexualisbook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi__nxMsVtfPlB8Hwugo6rLks-tofwTCZ4HxmV9dAX9IGhVCiQTawXpWDyjZdmC8IRhzaHQZKykOEM-kSt0RUiEa1VVyWHoE_z67koHmp-QYSd_aIQgJZiFSY7Nd9Qlnit8tngvrEzWKkDi/s640/psychopathia-sexualisbook.jpg" width="430" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Psychopathia Sexualis</i> (1886) The John Willie illustration was added later. Krafft-Ebbing would never have approved. He wrote much of his book in Latin for fear of corrupting lay readers. Bondage illustrator and <i>Bizarre Magazine</i> (1946-56) publisher John Coutts had no such compunctions.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">When
Psychopathia Sexualis was first published in 1886, <i>Venus in Furs</i> had been in print for 16 years and had had an impact
not unlike the <i>50 Shades</i> series in
2011. It was published in a society in
which reading novels was a very common form of entertainment. It brought von Sacher-Masoch a great deal of
notoriety precisely because it stood out against the prevailing ideologies of
the times. Industrializing central Europe was being pulled in nationalist,
socialist, ethnocentric and liberalizing directions. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was losing its
grip on restive minorities, women were pressing for social equality, and
science was challenging religious traditions of Catholicism and Protestantism
alike. <i>Venus in Furs</i> did not spark the wave of sexual experimentalism that
<i>50 Shades</i> has, but this is the era in
which vibrators were first used to relieve women’s sexual tensions, Psychoanalysis
was used to treat an epidemic of hysterical conversion reactions, and sexual
hypocrisy was a widespread response to Victorian moralism. Spencer’s social Darwinism was gaining wide
credence, and warfare was thought to be manly pursuit that would strengthen a country
by short decisive wars that established national superiority. Austria’s bid to unite the German states had
been crushed in 1866 by the Prussians in the Austro-Hungarian War. In 1870-71, the North German Confederation
formed around Prussia after its victory over Austria decisively defeated
France, resulting in the unification of Modern Germany. These events seemed an obvious validation of
Spencer and Darwin. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3sHc-Fa5aoWaegn0pqtZYpuiNvoyEH8KZRLD8J9sqMQPiH3nhcWBCiZ7hz_9nUN67jIQiVKj6k5djFktiD2lFwP7unzSR8TBSo6VoFaMffiI2G9uhlMOed-W-MNMYuqQhGaEbtQq4weVf/s1600/Herbert_Spencer_by_John_Bagnold_Burgess.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3sHc-Fa5aoWaegn0pqtZYpuiNvoyEH8KZRLD8J9sqMQPiH3nhcWBCiZ7hz_9nUN67jIQiVKj6k5djFktiD2lFwP7unzSR8TBSo6VoFaMffiI2G9uhlMOed-W-MNMYuqQhGaEbtQq4weVf/s400/Herbert_Spencer_by_John_Bagnold_Burgess.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) British Philosopher and leading proponent of Social Darwinism, although he was closer to a Lamarkian. Still, scratch a Neocon today, and you find a modern veneer over Social Darwinism.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">This was the
context in which the <i>Belle Époque</i>
emerged and in which <i>Venus in Furs</i>, <i>Psychopathia Sexualis</i>, and Freudian
psychoanalysis became crucial symbols. Readers
who recall the previous post on Richard Krafft-Ebing will have little trouble
recognizing that the details of <i>Venus in
Furs</i> play directly into the Viennese psychiatrist’s theories that aberrant
sexual desires reflect degenerative impulses contrary to evolution’s
reproductive purposes. Severin fails to
impregnate Wanda, fails to cement his relationship with her, and is eventually
abandoned for a reproductively fit male.
In fact, Sacher-Masoch’s tale hints at Severin’s sexual attraction to
this fine male specimen, and that is precisely in line with von Krafft-Ebing’s
theories on sexual inversion (homosexuality).
That the story also exploits conventional ideas of class only serves to
underscore the doctor’s point about sexual superiority of normophilic sex. It seems entirely natural that Krafft-Ebing,
given his theoretical perspective and the prevailing cultural context, would
name his paraesthenia for desire for sexual pain and humiliation
‘masochism’.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">When von Sacher-Masoch
learned he had been made the poster boy and namesake of the sexual perversion
for arousal from sexualized pain, a contentious correspondence ensued. von Sacher-Masoch feared identification with
the diagnosis would damage his credibility as a writer. But Krafft-Ebing seized the professional high
ground, claiming that the novelist could have no objection to the use of a
neutral medical term that implied no moral taint and was a simple scientific
description. We might be more inclined
today toward empathy with Sacher-Masoch’s point, but as <i>Psychopathia Sexualis</i> became the dominant psychiatric work in the
paraphilia discourse and the Freudians picked up the term masochism,
Sacher-Masoch’s attempts to get out from underneath the label were
fruitless.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In his 50’s
Sacher-Masoch’s mental health severely deteriorated and he was placed in an
asylum. There is some dispute about when
he died, but he stopped writing and was in no condition to defend himself. Although this correspondence with Krafft-Ebing
clearly began before Sacher-Masoch became ill, I do not know how, if at all,
this dispute may have affected his condition.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>“Confessions”</i></span><o:p></o:p></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRk4DKgV4mXAqRBsBUehGHnZOkC601FqHDNr0j3mYnHfuPQbQov9oWW4smmV7702w6TI6ZlmMdn_JQWKSarFfZ9UkiwzLdTyLZXa3FFUA0pKQdy4vlwEzw1boaHc-BoPLBrMqu34LpnSTM/s1600/wanda26.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRk4DKgV4mXAqRBsBUehGHnZOkC601FqHDNr0j3mYnHfuPQbQov9oWW4smmV7702w6TI6ZlmMdn_JQWKSarFfZ9UkiwzLdTyLZXa3FFUA0pKQdy4vlwEzw1boaHc-BoPLBrMqu34LpnSTM/s640/wanda26.gif" width="357" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Aurora von Rumelin, Sacher-Masoch's first wife and author of <i>Confessions</i>, as Leopold would have preferred her, limned with furs.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Much of what we
‘know’ about Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s personal life is provocative, but comes primarily
from the memoirs that are attributed to his first wife, Aurora von
Rumelin. A certain professional
skepticism would seem to be justified by this tale, which came to light after
his death, and in the context of the considerable social stigma attending his
name being lent to the disorder.
Conditions of the sales and marketing of this story also exploit the salacious
quality of the material. The original
version of <i>Meine Lebensbeicht</i> was
published in German in 1906, and in French the following year as <i>Confession de Ma Vie</i> under the name
Wanda von Donajew, Severin’s fictional paramour. It was then published in English in 1991 by
RE/search and Rip Off Press in 1991 under the title <i>Confessions of Wanda Sacher-Masoch</i>.
Despite the ‘von’ as evidence of her nobility, Aurora was not from a
noble family, and then there is the opprobrium attendant her partnering with
Leopold and his scandalous behaviors to contend with. So critical readers of <i>Confessions</i> have been at pains to deconstruct her point of view.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In these memoirs, Leopold is described as fascinated by history form an early age. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The turbulent times of central Europe and deeply affected him, he was given to creating puppet shows inspired by a bloody peasants revolt in Poland in 1846, and the Revolution of 1848 that swept much of Europe. his father, as chief of Police was posted to Prague during these chaotic times, had an active hand in supressing the revolution, and brought home stories. But even asa pre-adolescent, Leopold was drawn to creating and recalling narratives in which he is atthe mercy of cruel female rulers. After Prague, his father was posted to the quiet town of Graz where Leopold became a stand out student. He entered the University of Graz and had earned his law degree by age 19. He lectured there in history, and later moved to Lemberg as a professor. It wass during this period he began formally publishing tales of rural and ethnic life.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Within the Romanticism current in his day, von Sacher-Masoch's tales were well received. Although later critics would comment on his tendency to dwell on certain themes that were the core of his obsessions, his accounts were by and large sympathetic, nuanced and vivid. Only occasionally did his work descend into melodrama. He wrote sympathetically of ethnicities and nationalities that were not always accepting of one another. When not emotionally unsettled by conflict or upset by his obsessions, he made a decent living as a writer. His stability was much marred by by a general impulsivity with money, and his obsession with furs was expensive. He wound up moving frequently. He was easily manipulated and went through his money quickly when he had any. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Leopold's first sexual affair was with Anna von Kottewitz a beautiful woman 10 years his senior who was fine with his desire to be beaten, but gradually became disenchanted when his demands for whipping and for betrayal with another lover became excessive. She seems to have mainly been drawn to the aristocratic lifestyle and notoriety that came from romancing a successful author. Leopold was very productive during this relationship, writing in an attempt to keep her in the style she preferred. Their relationship eventually collapsed after she grew tired of his efforts to get him to betray him with another man. After several years one of these characters proved to have a criminal history and gave her syphilis, which was then incurable so the prolonged affair had to be ended in some embarrassment.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Leopold then had a brief affair with a French actress. Mademoiselle Clairemont she bore him one daughter, Lina. While he enjoyed their relationship and she was reputedly very beautiful, he was dissatisfied with her lack of aristocratic bearing and refinement he really craved, and their relationship collapsed after less than one year.</span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0fSHqmWJebpPlfRbWqGhiEeLXpHanP53tQXY2Mms-xG8aIkIWSuK4amBqBxNR-SIxeJZLZY3A2nYUJECsR0fi0ImFlJi2eZ72wLJhcvjfYU1gwAUd2d2L_p2dmTeYusW8kpek03B9kisa/s1600/leopold_von_sacher-masoch_with_fannie.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0fSHqmWJebpPlfRbWqGhiEeLXpHanP53tQXY2Mms-xG8aIkIWSuK4amBqBxNR-SIxeJZLZY3A2nYUJECsR0fi0ImFlJi2eZ72wLJhcvjfYU1gwAUd2d2L_p2dmTeYusW8kpek03B9kisa/s400/leopold_von_sacher-masoch_with_fannie.gif" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Fanny Pistor and Leopold share a quiet moment.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In 1869 and by then a writer of some reputation, von Sacher-Masoch met Fanny Pistor who sought his help with her own writing career. They quickly turned their attentions to matters romantic, and he arranged the following sadomasochistic contract with her just like the one that Severin agreed to with Wanda von Donajew:</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"<i>Her Leopold von Sacher-Masoch gives his word of honor to Frau Pistor to become her slave and to comply unreservedly for a period of six months with every one of her desires and commands.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>For her part, Frau Pistor is not to extract from him the performance of any action contrary to honor, i.e. which would dishonor him as a man or as a citizen. She is also to allow him to devote six hours a day to his professional work and agrees never to read either his correspondence or his literary compositions.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>The Mistress (Fanny Pistor) has the right to punish her Salve (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch) in any way she thinks fit for all errors, carelessness or crimes of </i></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><i>Lèse-majesté</i></span><i style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"> on his part.</i><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>In short, her subject, Gregor, must accord his mistress a wholly servile obedience and accept as an exquisite condescension any favorable treatment she extend to him. He recognizes that he has no claim upon her love and he renounces all rights whatsoever to a lover's privileges.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>Fanny Pistor, on her side, promises to wear furs as often as possible, especially when she is in a cruel mood.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>This period of servitude is to be considered at an end after six months and no serious allusion to it will be permitted at the expiration of the period.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>Everything that may have happened must be forgotten. The original love-relationship will then be resumed.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>This six months need not run continuously. They may be interrupted for long periods, which will begin and end whenever the Mistress chooses. this pact is hereby put into force by the signatures of the contracting parties."</i></span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">He signs this on
Dec 9, 1869, shortly before the publishing of </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Venus in Furs. </i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> It is clear
that significant portions of Venus in Furs are strongly autobiographical. He
travels third class, assumes the name “Gregor”, and wears the livery of her
servant, just as Severin does in the novel. Following an exciting period in
Italy, Frau Pistor and Von Sacher-Masoch decline to renew the contract after
rather less than the full six months and go there seperate ways.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The success of
that novel led to a number of young women who wrote anonymously to von
Sacher-Masoch about the titillating themes of the book. In (1873) Aurora von Rumelin, after a
prolonged exchange of provocative letters, met Leopold under a streetlamp in
Graz, heavily veiled and under the pretense of recovering compromising missives
sent by a friend, and Leopold is seduced into striking up a relationship. In their first meeting alone, she beat him
with a whip and he agreed shortly thereafter to a private wedding in which he
wore a white coat and tails and she was dressed in furs. This wedding was later followed by a public
wedding as befit his noble station, but Aurora and Leopold could not
consolidate a stable marriage and their years together were not happy. Aurora especially disliked Leopold’s mania
for arranging sexual betrayals for her with men. and despite frequent pregnancies,
the couple had three children together and two painful losses, Leopold was
obsessive, did not stay satisfied for long, and they were not sexually happy
despite his enjoyment of beatings. For her
part, Aurora who had ardently desired the aristocratic life, was never
satisfied with the reality she was able to achieve with Leopold. In 1879, following the death of his adored
older son, he divorced Aurora for his assistant Hilda Meister. Hilda struggled with Leopold’s declining
mental health, and in the late 1880’s he was hospitalized in an asylum. He was officially declared dead in 1895, but
is alleged to have lived on in the asylum for another decade. Actually, his
death remains somewhat murky.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">As described by
von Rumelin, Leopold was not a man to stay satisfied, and even had she not been
terrified that his moody instability would leave the family penniless, she was
dominated by her husband’s social and professional status and could never fully
trust his demands that she betray him with other men given the prevailing
divorce laws of the period. Much of her
account in <i>Confessions</i> emphasizes his
agency over hers. Although she went to
elaborate lengths to seduce him, given his writings, it would be hard for any
reader to doubt that he was the driving force for kink in their relationship. He pursued it with a rigidity that was tiring
to all of his partners. And Leopold
might have originated the idea of ‘topping from the bottom.’ As hard as it might be for a highly educated
and titled aristocrat to permanently surrender power to his less educated
female partner in the later half of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, he didn’t seem
to accept the fate he had bargained for very well. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">von Sacher-Masoch’s
legacy for kink:<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Aside from
lending his name to the diagnosis of masochism and the sex practice itself, von
Masoch can also be seen as the source of the idea of contracting, and laying
the foundations for consent in modern BDSM.
In publicizing his enthusiasms, he also inspired the kink practice of cuckolding,
and he started a complicated conversation about the relationship between power
and control in masochism, a problem that is still very lively in kink’s
discussions today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Contracting and Consent:<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">For von
Sacher-Masoch, who cared very much what he said and wrote, and who had trained
in law, the contract is crucial to the reality of sexual submission. He used this strategy with Fanny and Aurora
and others. Unlike de Sade, who in
writing and in deed inflicted his sexuality without boundaries, consent
established the boundaries of his submission, even if ultimately he badgered
his way around them. Although consent
did not become a discourse in kink until 1982, von Sacher-Masoch left
contracting as a legacy 100 years before there were above-ground kink
organizations.:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Power and Control: <o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The
appropriation of contracts did not solve all problems, however. In <i>Venus
in Furs</i>, later readers are greatly troubled by implications of the conflict
between dominance and control in this contract.
While the idea for the contract is Severin’s, and the actual contract
proposed is Wanda’s, agreed to with only a little negotiation with Severin,
Severin’s ultimate goal in signing the contract is to get Wanda to give up
control of her freedom to leave him. Yet
when he loses his free agency to worship her and his objectification by
contract renders his desire for her irrelevant, she is no longer constrained by
her desire to be freely worshiped, loses her desire for him, and eventual, she
leaves. Ultimately, she would rather
surrender to her desire than be constrained by the contract. Von Sacher-Masoch writes, and his later
critics deconstruct, this contract as if the inherent asymmetries in male and
female biology, and as embodied in the sexual inequality of male and female
social roles, are inevitable and the contract is doomed to failure. The von Sacher-Masoch’s chronic marital
unhappiness does little to undermine this impression.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAoXz9OgTeOamU6JvROY_O-eDlOjd90eiwTEKuE_ph1_s6ruvUs0Ek6Z1GqAaazrlWTPHphb4SkaaBMLIPbLR9V1dImEUMUs_WOL1TVT5hFzFmCamBw2doiw8GT_OTKzPQbKuhnodoiY1r/s1600/Economic+slavery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAoXz9OgTeOamU6JvROY_O-eDlOjd90eiwTEKuE_ph1_s6ruvUs0Ek6Z1GqAaazrlWTPHphb4SkaaBMLIPbLR9V1dImEUMUs_WOL1TVT5hFzFmCamBw2doiw8GT_OTKzPQbKuhnodoiY1r/s400/Economic+slavery.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Economic slavery, to which consent is irrelevant.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Historically,
people have not held slaves because their masters desire them, but because
slave holders desire their labor. On
occasion, masters have fallen in love with slaves, and even more frequently,
the labor of slaves has included responsibility for sexually servicing their
owners. But Wanda desires control over
Severin’s worship and adoration, which slave owners do not ordinarily care about
or value. Neither did slaves often have
to fear abandonment as long as their labor was useful. The definition of slavery in the masochistic
contract really hinges on the vulnerabilities lovers feel in the face of their
own desires. von Sacher-Masoch’s life
history would seem to show that masochism shows little prospect for permanently
overcoming that ambivalence. As desirous
of being a slave as he might have been, his marriage to von Rumelin was
dominating of her. Coitus and parenting
provided him little reassurance and did not provide ultimate stability for his
fear of abandonment. The contract to be
her slave could not overcome the social context in which he as a male and
aristocrat was dominant over her as a commoner and a woman. Eventually, Leopold left Aurora.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7z9I_ggB5SeOgn2fsFSdnOfobrCD6pQlYkrlXWK_aV66FDf_csrnqqp9LeT3haDE-1dnDJcM2k7CFf2X0ugtgzncRkafWmryrwOoAc6ypSt4uOiGIfGIiiWlTaJK9q4xdj0gjYxspeMRV/s1600/ambivalent-homer-simpson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7z9I_ggB5SeOgn2fsFSdnOfobrCD6pQlYkrlXWK_aV66FDf_csrnqqp9LeT3haDE-1dnDJcM2k7CFf2X0ugtgzncRkafWmryrwOoAc6ypSt4uOiGIfGIiiWlTaJK9q4xdj0gjYxspeMRV/s400/ambivalent-homer-simpson.jpg" width="336" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Matt Groening's depiction of ambivalence. If Freud had drawn Homer Simpson, instinct would have occupied one shoulder and social rules would occupy the other, instead of angels and devils</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Freud would go on
to make great capital of the ambivalence while ignoring the power dynamics. The struggle between moral ideas of the super
ego and the lusts of the id was essentially ambivalent. His neurotics were slaves not to desire, but
to their inability to recognize the inevitable conflicts and accept their
ambivalent nature, egged on as they were by excessive social repression. von Sacher-Masoch’s relationship history is
fertile ground for Freud’s explanations, the writer is repeatedly unable to
consolidate a stable and satisfying love life no matter how his partners
attempt to comply.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_lwvCaKBm75Zsnw-iyUmyp_hsHh2_ttB-ROR0fge2gC1PIMzUvB4lNQeke5PnljyrlHp7BHe1OZiWUQFKeTcHzb4XBj-lpi3rI5gGnyiI0WOerjJUHfZCu4vOCkz0Pdr8G9FVLFtFZRBB/s1600/movies-venus-in-fur.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_lwvCaKBm75Zsnw-iyUmyp_hsHh2_ttB-ROR0fge2gC1PIMzUvB4lNQeke5PnljyrlHp7BHe1OZiWUQFKeTcHzb4XBj-lpi3rI5gGnyiI0WOerjJUHfZCu4vOCkz0Pdr8G9FVLFtFZRBB/s400/movies-venus-in-fur.png" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Emmanuel Sevigny and Mathieu Amalric in Roman Polanski's version of David Ives' <i>Venus in Fur</i> (2012).<br />Roman Polanski made diabolical films even before the tragic Tate/La Bianca killings in 1969 and his prosecution for sex with an 13 year old and flight from the US in 1977. Sevigny is now his wife. In this version, Sevigny;s character is an actual goddess. </span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">It might be
argued that <i>Venus in Furs</i> is only
role play, and the David Ives’s play would seem to highlight exactly this
aspect. Vanda Jordan comes in late out
of the rain eager to play the part of Wanda von Donajew. But the power in that play highlights a
crucial insight about von Sacher-Masoch’s desire, that the slavery contract
render his new status anything but a social role that might under mundane
circumstances be discarded and return him to power. In the play, Vanda stops auditioning for a
role and becomes a goddess with the power to dominate, and to abandon, that no
bargain can overcome. The feminist
objection to Venus in Furs to von Sacher-Masoch is overcome with magical
realism, in fact, the argument that Wanda might not really have the power in
their relationship is precisely mentioned by Vanda in the play! Ives and Polanski insist that she does.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">But modern kink
has come to recognize that the desire for submission and dominance is a kind of
figure/ ground illusion. The political
requirements of consent, stemming as they do from inherent democratic equality,
mean that even in 24/7 sexual slavery, Master and slave begin negotiation from
a position of equivalent agency. Take
way physical freedom, safewords, the opportunity to own property or phone home,
the slave still agrees to the role of slavery, and ultimately must come up for
air, if only to renew the contract. For
in actual slavery, no contract is needed, and the slave has no power, no
personhood, and no essential value whatsoever, only the value of service. This is pure utilitarianism, the opposite of
lust a point on whch von Sacher-Masoch and De Sade, his apparent opposite
number, would agree. Real slave owners
took the control of the slave as proof of their own agency, but could not
further elevate themselves relative to an audience of their peers by exercising
rights already assumed. Sadism was
already privileged. It was mundane, not
exoctic; utilitarian, not romantic. de
Sade would have been most disapproving of the strategy of trying to solve this
problem with any sort of contract!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Female Dominance:<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Venus in Furs </span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">is not only the founding document of
masochism and the origin of the sadomasochistic contract and the problem of
consent, but it is a founding document of female dominance. In a Western social context of rising female
equality, its timing and placement are significant. For all of von Sacher-Masoch’s liberalism,
the idea that females are too vain and weak to be dominant without destroying
their partners seems shockingly retrograde.
<i>Venus in Furs</i> is not an
endorsement of genuine female empowerment.
This is true even in Polanski’s modern revision, in which the fumbling
aspiring actress Vanda Jordan ultimately becomes terrifyingly powerful
personification of cruel female divinity.
No true equality seems possible, only a game in which dominance is played
at, and powerful men temporarily surrender their power for a little recreation
with the gracious assurance they will still control their tech start ups at Monday
morning executive committee meeting. Vanda
must be a terrifying goddess incarnate, or fall back into the desperate
audition for an acting role before a powerful director.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Modern
criticisms of this retrograde depiction of female dominance abound. But there is still great transgressive power
in the feverish excitement Wanda and Severin enjoy as they fail their
negotiation. The novella shows that lust
can dwell in female empowerment, even if Goethe and Kant and Spencer have
warned the right relation with women is subservient, Richard von Krafft-Ebing
was eager to ratify it, and Freud would go on to describe women’s sexual
satisfaction as inherently masochistic. His
error was his lack of empathy to imagine that penetration might be anything
other than painful.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbHiscxAjgTM5uIPwxqvngdR3U1Ooqu1brIQ_uuCejSp7rQj_PT35gHAyHaHGi0UU43Kn_2g2i4Dhe6SjbyPQexrRXRplIwc4rbR9aNsrWiachykWIQCQg3h-Lbtc1oAhd3ena-daF4K_W/s1600/Women%2527s+suffrage+as+female+domination.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="387" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbHiscxAjgTM5uIPwxqvngdR3U1Ooqu1brIQ_uuCejSp7rQj_PT35gHAyHaHGi0UU43Kn_2g2i4Dhe6SjbyPQexrRXRplIwc4rbR9aNsrWiachykWIQCQg3h-Lbtc1oAhd3ena-daF4K_W/s400/Women%2527s+suffrage+as+female+domination.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anti-suffragette propaganda was already presenting themes of female domination outside of the bordello.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I would argue
that Krafft-Ebing had no chance of recognizing masochism as a perversion had he
not found its doctrine articulated by a man, and that not only women’s
subservience but women’s desire for subservience was so normalized in the
context of the <i>Belle Époque</i> that only
a man’s endorsement of masochism could be regarded as deviant and thus as proof
of pathology. After all, men needed to submit to men all the time in an
aristocratic society. But men need never
submit to women. Neither should we be surprised that the existence of female
kinky desires awaited the doctrines of female liberalization and psychologizing
of the 1960s and 70s. There are as many
kinky women in BDSM social organizations today as males, but for sexology’s
first 100 years following Krafft-Ebing, only men were thought to be kinky.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNWO18hGxKn30Kj6g18XoFjDJqXcK2MjRnoUyrgeJCwGv0YCzHysHuC9eAXBN8HpKs6HPEqZ6JMXm3vSCtC0sIYTICyO1XNMjDyICutsscofr5vPFMWJIvNCzY-G3-zkQKQ3sCdQfcC7be/s1600/Late+1800%2527s+lesbian+bondage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNWO18hGxKn30Kj6g18XoFjDJqXcK2MjRnoUyrgeJCwGv0YCzHysHuC9eAXBN8HpKs6HPEqZ6JMXm3vSCtC0sIYTICyO1XNMjDyICutsscofr5vPFMWJIvNCzY-G3-zkQKQ3sCdQfcC7be/s400/Late+1800%2527s+lesbian+bondage.jpg" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Late 1800's Lesbian sadomasochistic erotica. Sacher-Masoch was far from the only artist presenting these themes in European culture.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In fact,
professional domination became the reigning metaphor throughout the period
after <i>Venus in Furs</i> for men who were
excited to enact their submissive kinks.
Certainly it was there in the discourse about women’s suffrage. It is highly likely, given the role of
prostitution, the changing roles of women, and the reactive religious moralism
that accompanies those changes that the role of dominatirx would had to have
been invented if von Sacher-Masoch hadn’t articulated it. In fact, it has existed in bordello culture
for perhaps a couple hundred years before it became popularized by changes in
gender role expression. But efforts to declare
prostitutes or dominatircies as proof of female kinks foundered on the grounds
of pragmatism. If kinks were really
crazy expressions of sex desire that were contrary to reproductive success,
prostitution was constructive, albeit amoral economic behavior. Those opposing prostitution urged
criminalization to raise its costs as a rational economic strategy, and decried
the exploitation of women by claiming the morally degraded status of the role
of prostitutes victimized women far more than any earnings could
compensate. In this climate, the idea
that a woman could be truly dominant as a sex worker eluded social recognition
for over a century, and remains very much in social dispute today. The idea that sexual domination might be an
expression of a woman’s sexual desire, rather than a submission to male desire,
is still widely under recognized. This
denial is remarkable in the face of a steady string of exposes by prostitutes
in which they honestly described their reasons for being in the life, and
despite the Freudian recognition that people chose their social roles,
including their occupations for over-determined and unconscious reasons. But these arguments went unrecognized and
were discounted because they conflicted with conventional discourse on gender
roles.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvMin-i8LJlDDwv4NmdTs3Ue2frGLQuR9GKmdNHaqMCLuphmQgkt-sK9WwveWKFuxU0hXcJMljdxXKKb1clW6jJi6KdjlaS9F9hiUSgtvWkj5PH2RgpiWFMh71doAbZqkMAWSBX_NMP8rL/s1600/Boedello+gender+play.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvMin-i8LJlDDwv4NmdTs3Ue2frGLQuR9GKmdNHaqMCLuphmQgkt-sK9WwveWKFuxU0hXcJMljdxXKKb1clW6jJi6KdjlaS9F9hiUSgtvWkj5PH2RgpiWFMh71doAbZqkMAWSBX_NMP8rL/s400/Boedello+gender+play.jpg" width="278" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Photography meant consumer's that did not dare enter a bordello could partake of themes that were explored there. "Photography is the new drug.org!"</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Cuckolding and
Key Holding:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Likewise, <i>Venus in Furs</i> is a foundation document
in cuckolding and key holding. Van
Sacher-Masoch does not dwell on coitus, orgasm control or on the agonies and
pleasures of sexual withholding, which are at the core of this modern
kink. But Severin’s readiness to give up
coitus, and von Rumelin’s complaints about her sex life with Von Sacher-Masoch have
suggested to later readers that masochism is desexualized. This would only be tangentially challenged by
Freud when he argued that feminine masochism was at the core of biologically
driven female desire. This mistake, as
well as laws against prostitution may have led to mistaken ideas that masochism
is not about sex, only about pain and submission. Reading the historical record as closely as I
can, Sacher-Masoch, although weakened as a writer by excessive fixations on his
obsessions, was not a good example of Krafft-Ebing’s degenerative and
desexualized masochist. Coitus remained
an important part of his sexual expression throughout, and he fathered at least
6 children with his various partners, including one with a French actress
before Fanny Pistor, three with Aurora von Remelin, and 2 Hilda. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">But Freud was
correct that Sacher-Masoch’s work was not dyadic. Wanda beats Severin, but arranges for black
servants to participate, and in the climax of the story, has her Greek lover perform
the ultimate beating. <i>Venus in Furs</i> is a triangular story,
both in its relation to the framing story, and in Severin and Wanda enacting
their relationship in relation to others, be it the law, servants, the audience
that perceives his social abasement as a servant in third class during their
travel on the train, or in the need to flee to Venice to evade their social circle.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">This is also
the essential structure of cuckolding play, that thrives upon not only the
power of orgasm control, but in the enactment of the preference of the key
holder for a “bull’, who is submissive to her desire to inflict humiliation on
the cuckold both by seeing her enjoy her sexual release with a more masculine
man, but also her domination of the bull in penetration of the feminized cuckold.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Coda:<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkrPlWGMS0vbTeY6N49oREmHcp7blWpsGPQMGHZRHciBAlBfb9B2fDjRbORg3VAwKCp-KTGHg10TKk4f9j1iz9MmhERwpm4ZPCxDMVmPEvf8aEgtMe2TqfhNL8CXaRBEHJYGvS8xhKW066/s1600/sacher-masoch+statue.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkrPlWGMS0vbTeY6N49oREmHcp7blWpsGPQMGHZRHciBAlBfb9B2fDjRbORg3VAwKCp-KTGHg10TKk4f9j1iz9MmhERwpm4ZPCxDMVmPEvf8aEgtMe2TqfhNL8CXaRBEHJYGvS8xhKW066/s400/sacher-masoch+statue.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's statue in Lviv is a great opportunity for photo ops! Oh, a collar! How convenient!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Back in Lviv,
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch remains a local boy who made good. His folktales are a robust validation of Ukrainian
identity in region of dangerous political fluidity. They play down the ambiguous ending of his
life in madness. There is a statue
commemorating the author, and a restaurant, the Masoch Café, done up in dungeon
accoutrements. For those with retrograde
conventional tendencies, they boast the best fondue in town. For those who prefer cuisine <i>a l’outrance</i>, try the bull’s testicles
and menu with sadomasochistic illustrations.
For an aperitif, the female wait staff provides free whippings. Perhaps this would be a good time and place
to consider your requests and tipping strategy carefully.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDaPD88pjDj6jP6PpyNHCAZ5x3weKYT4fPqVSYGXogYM3w4vEVwqviSphs_Uf40ol381q_Es9EuFeL6BKDrdwofwBXPT5EAvoyxkABxNjAVtJ6ral5PIuyUmn0-HhNMr8gAMr8bW6e3Tx_/s1600/Masoch+Cafe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDaPD88pjDj6jP6PpyNHCAZ5x3weKYT4fPqVSYGXogYM3w4vEVwqviSphs_Uf40ol381q_Es9EuFeL6BKDrdwofwBXPT5EAvoyxkABxNjAVtJ6ral5PIuyUmn0-HhNMr8gAMr8bW6e3Tx_/s400/Masoch+Cafe.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Red and black, er, dominate the decor of Cafe Masoch in Lviv.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
</div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Part II of this essay on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch will include the imapct of his case on psychiatry, and references for these essays.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px; text-align: justify;">© Russell J Stambaugh, May, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></span></div>
Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-12102834715373075932016-05-02T07:16:00.001-07:002016-05-02T17:02:35.721-07:00The First New York City AltSex Conference, April 22, 2016<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The First NYC
AltSex Conference was held at the Jerry Orbach Theater in Midtown Manhattan on
Friday April 20, 2016. It was the work
of AASECT Certified Sex Therapist Michael Aaron, PhD and Dulcinea Pitagora, MA,
LMSW. About 150 mental health
professionals and kink and poly community members attended in person, and about
a dozen participated electronically.
Your intrepid reporter made the trip to the Big Apple to attend in
person following favorable medical testing in Houston earlier that week. It was difficult to tell just how many
professionals vs community members attended.
Only one person attended in a business suit, looking like he had
wandered in off of Wall Street. Embarrassing, really! However a number of
prominent AASECT Members presented or were in attendance including Joe Winn, LICSW, CST-S, Lori Michaels, LMFT, CST, and AASECT AltSex Special Interest Group
Chair, Kate Bornstein, Chris Farrington from the Community-Academic Consortium
for Alternative Sexualities (CARAS), Carol Meeker from National Coalition for
Sexual Freedom (NCSF), Sabitha Pillai, PhD, CST from Widener University with a group
of her students, Jassy Timberlake, LMFT, CSSP, Director of Northampton Sex
Therapy Associates, and other luminaries I missed in the rather dark
venue. Sorry if I missed you!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">This is, to my
knowledge, the first professional event devoted entirely to Alt Sex Since
AASECT’s 2006 Conference on BDSM put on by Richard Sprott in San
Francisco. It was extremely encouraging
to see that, in the age of social media, the event had been well publicized and
was so well attended. Proceeds were
donated to CARAS, and at the end of the meeting Chris announced a $1500 award
for a research project investigating swinging, even as he disclosed that CARAS
meetings were moving to a biannual schedule coordinated with the International
Mister Leather event in Chicago. That
means the meeting in San Francisco scheduled the day before the Folsom Street
Fair this year has been cancelled.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I will proceed
to provide brief summaries of the presentations. The event had no break outs, so we plowed
through six presentations and a closing Q&A session together.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">‘Kink is Good: Kink, Consensual Non-Monogamy and New Models of
Sex and Gender Variance’ by Margie Nichols, PhD, DST.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf29ll-rGYQyQ6H0sZWoM1Sx-hBALNpWYs82RcpBHbWOD86_CDCxXIh2TgMJ3ntkpBagIpIfEsGA3kfcB551wC8pexBUj2ReklJCZhD28bRpQBxWoewgplb336ZuMYglY-AVdUbeASq3EM/s1600/MargieNichols3a-150x150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf29ll-rGYQyQ6H0sZWoM1Sx-hBALNpWYs82RcpBHbWOD86_CDCxXIh2TgMJ3ntkpBagIpIfEsGA3kfcB551wC8pexBUj2ReklJCZhD28bRpQBxWoewgplb336ZuMYglY-AVdUbeASq3EM/s400/MargieNichols3a-150x150.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Margie Nichols</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Margie began by
challenging the historically pathology-based mental health model of kink and
gender diversity. Citing queer historian Gayle Rubin, changes in the DSM,
social constructionist social science, and queer theory, she argued for a ‘big
tent’ conception of gender diversity, kink and relationship expression. She showed that the queer community had led
the charge for greater acceptance of gender and sexual expression, and duly
noted that there had been an historical tension between acceptance and
exclusion of kink from the fight for sexual diversity, including the
marginalization of Leathersex and SAMOIS.
But she showed that new models proceed more from growing acceptance
among the variant communities than from the tensions among them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">A strong aspect
of her presentation included the lessons variant communities offer the
therapist community in treating heterosexual and cis-gendered clients. These insights include nonjudgmental
tolerance of sexual tastes, clear negotiation skills, emphasis on good
technique, the power of sexual vulnerability to deepen intimacy and connection,
sex as a direct expression of spirituality, the importance of honesty and good
boundary setting, management of jealousy, the role of autonomy in effective
relationships, and the non-sexual benefits of alternative relationships
structures in social, community and child rearing activities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Margie raised
for me important questions in the fight against stigmatization. How important is it to be ‘out’? How are identity politics to be managed, and
just how similar and different are people’s identifications? If all these communities can be seen as one,
what unifies them besides the stigma they face from conventional society? Are alternative sexualities subcultures, or
counter cultures? Since electronic
communication has become so important, most communities are fragmenting. Her presentation effectively showed that
identity had moved in the direction of greater variability and fluidity, and
she emphasized the way marginalized communities had tended towards greater
tolerance today than might have been the case decades earlier. Despite the history of this dance, therapists
and others are in a better position to consume the insights of the AltSex
communities in their work with all clients than they were twenty years ago. For Margie, the personal has always been
political, and this is just as true for her today as when coming out was a much
riskier leap of faith.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">A special treat
was seeing Margie get to present in front of one of her personal heroes, Kate Bornstein, who has lived out the fight for autonomy and diversity in her
personal gender expression and served as a role model to many long before the
Caitlin Jenner story became a riveting national discourse. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS7DHyM5KYgitvY69j0AWgbMhSpU3S_fUPHDLrVyoz6NkNuZumWwRUdnHBEXwy9Ys6VScWBBSqSLJ7BuH1PpNcuK_dldVZrV6DZAL37YGFsCZY3YWONZoQs_YICyJ60NuI5cjs1quB6wUw/s1600/Kare+Ornstein+and+Margie+Nichols.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="385" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS7DHyM5KYgitvY69j0AWgbMhSpU3S_fUPHDLrVyoz6NkNuZumWwRUdnHBEXwy9Ys6VScWBBSqSLJ7BuH1PpNcuK_dldVZrV6DZAL37YGFsCZY3YWONZoQs_YICyJ60NuI5cjs1quB6wUw/s400/Kare+Ornstein+and+Margie+Nichols.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Margie Nichols and Kate Bornstein (photo probably by Barbara Carrellas)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Myths and Realities of Consensual
Non-Monogamy by Zhana Vrangalova, PhD.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAzA5OwLR4hjWLyBgT_4E1mJ-IlQ0bfRh6DDVqN2NMk0InpPBsOF9Me8am-B4C9keIWIeoeCEM2VI6PORsRVtZzpSIddhhdlXqSOAZaDQaLHib9QSrcuA_lCvd2qUkxeeLmyc16g4vWg_q/s1600/ZhanaVrangalova-150x150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAzA5OwLR4hjWLyBgT_4E1mJ-IlQ0bfRh6DDVqN2NMk0InpPBsOF9Me8am-B4C9keIWIeoeCEM2VI6PORsRVtZzpSIddhhdlXqSOAZaDQaLHib9QSrcuA_lCvd2qUkxeeLmyc16g4vWg_q/s400/ZhanaVrangalova-150x150.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Zhana Vrangalova</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Zhana began by
defining monogamy and non-monogamy.
Crucial in the studies she presents is how these concepts are
operationalized as there is great tension in Western society between monogamy
as ideology and as behavior. Taking the
Center for Disease Control definition, sexual monogamy is “You agree to be
sexually active with only one person and that person has agreed to be only
active with you.” By that definition, a
great many people avow monogamy, but by their forties, only about 10% of men
and 20% of women have had only a single sexual partner. American infidelity rates range from 20% to
75% and only about 15% of 1230 societies in a cross-cultural database avow
monogamy as their prevailing ideal marital style. As a social constructionist, I must warn that
monogamy is very vague concept given its ideological prominence in Western
culture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Some of Zhana’s
most compelling data showed the degree to which CNM was socially
stigmatized. Across 22 variables, both
conventionals and CNMists alike perceived CNM as inferior to monogamy on 20 of
them. CNM was most disparaged for
‘preventing STI’s’ and ‘being morally superior.’, and was perceived as
marginally better than monogamy only for ‘prevents boredom’ and ‘allows
independence’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Nevertheless,
CNMists were more liberal. less religious, more educated, had higher incomes, endorsed
less sexist, racist and heterosexist attitudes, less heterosexual, more open to
new experience, and higher sensation seeking than the non-CNM comparison
populations. She reported data from
Fleckenstein and Cox showing that CNMs over 55 were physically healthier and
happier than their conventional age mates in the General Social Survey sample,
but were not mentally healthier.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Zhana also
reported evidence from J Lehmiller that, contrary to conventional wisdom,
consensual non-monogamy, as currently practiced, is not riskier for STI
transmission than serial monogamy. This
effect relies primarily on the data that suggest CNMists are a good deal more
conscientious about condom use, that their pursuit of multiple simultaneous
liaisons motivates them to use barrier protection longer, and that monogamists
tend to cease using barrier protection when they decide the relationship is
serious irrespective of the gestation times of STIs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Bottom line,
CNM relationships are actually riskier than monogamy only with respect to
social stigma, not to sexual health, relationship quality, sexual satisfaction,
or psychological well-being.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">My chief
question arising from this presentation was, what, if experienced CNMists and
conventionals shared similar ideas about the inferiority of CNM, was needed to
dispel the stigma? Apparently the
presumption that monogamy is better is not based on experience, and is not
dispelled by perceived success at CNM.
In fact, the practicing CNMists do moderate their negative ratings of
poly relationships somewhat on the basis of their actual experience. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Zhana closed
her presentation with brand new research hot of the presses indicating that
about 21% of people in two representative US samples (from the Kinsey Sexual
Health and Behavior Survey) had had some form of CNM. The 21% figure was not correlated with typical
predictors such as age, income, education, religion, political affiliation (all
reported above!) but was higher for people who were male and those who were
non-heterosexual in preference. (M Haupert et al, Indiana University, 2016).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The Kink-Poly Confluence: Community Intersections and Clinical
Approaches</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> <b>by Dulcinea Pitagora and Michael Aaron <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjr2VrxJQXfom1muyRQQbUA5NAQ42Q8mjtwzGwNXXOjto8aN2J26Tk5OORYvioN6-QfmZxB2c586oGHMpd1tnJa7zHxuvqXkWRaZ3aen41cOo58DAkQT6K8TzA5lGIVbGnUuUF2Ej_OAgd/s1600/DAP-150x150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjr2VrxJQXfom1muyRQQbUA5NAQ42Q8mjtwzGwNXXOjto8aN2J26Tk5OORYvioN6-QfmZxB2c586oGHMpd1tnJa7zHxuvqXkWRaZ3aen41cOo58DAkQT6K8TzA5lGIVbGnUuUF2Ej_OAgd/s400/DAP-150x150.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Dulcinea Pitagora</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Dulcinea began
with some fairly standard definitions of BDSM and Poly. She then proceeded to explain the finding
that about 40% of the kink community engages in CNM, about 40% of the CNM community
does some kink. I would add that about
40% of the queer/gender fluid community does some kink too, but I am less clear
how many kinksters are doing gender play.
Partly this depends on how you identify gender play. But Dulcinea’s point is that certain shared
ideologies promote interpenetration of these communities. Examples of her shared ideologies include:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Transparency<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Communication<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Negotiation/renegotiation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Consent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Cultivating
connection<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Challenging
social norms<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Personal growth<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Interpenetration
of these communities on FetLife, and shared experiences with social
stigmatization also promote contact and shared values across these
communities. A huge fly in the ointment
in assessing just how much interpenetration there is hinges on how one defines
the kink and poly communities. If one is
speaking of out kinksters who attend public play parties, the nature of these
events promotes open relationships because of play and demonstration ethics
that prevail there. Shy, introverted,
jealous, and exclusive people who do not have the values to be out are harder
to identify in the community and in surveys.
This is important when comparing how many people do kink from good representative
studies like Ritchie et al, which found between 1.4 and 2.1 Percent of
Australians were into BDSM, with results like Haupert et al that suggest around
1 in 5 have done some sort of kink and/or CNM.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I would also
note that that list of shared ideologies overlaps kinksters with the therapist
community despite the latter’s history of pathologizing kink and CNM!<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">And Dulcinea
showed that shared adversities, such as pathologization, discrimination, fear
of being outed, concealable stigmatized identities, and internalized stigma
were held in common by kink and poly folk but are often not experienced by
therapists who are not themselves kinky.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Dulcinea then
debunked several myths about kink and poly, including that kink was primarily
caused by childhood abuse experiences; that kink leads to out of control and
escalating sensation-seeking and risk-taking behaviors; that poly folk were
promiscuous – true for some but by no means all – and that, as Lehmiller’s work
as cited by Zhana had shown, STI’s are not more common among the CNM
communities as popularly assumed.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Dulcinea
identified several common presenting complaints that are prevalent among kink
and poly clients presenting for treatment:
Problems with newbie identification and coming out to self, partners or
others about emerging identity, relationship issues in the lifestyle context,
and the typical array of mental health issues unrelated to identification or
sex behaviors.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Finally,
Dulcinea covered three clinical process issues commonly faced by
therapists: Normalizing alternative sex behaviors
and lifestyles; confronting transference and counter-transference issues
related to alternative practices; and challenges of self-education, supervision
and referral for clients that are outside a therapist’s cultural
competence. And cultural competence
remains a huge issue for the general community of therapists. In a survey by Kelsey in 2013, 76% of
therapists responding had encountered at least one AltSex client and less than
half had felt adequately informed about the topic. Dulcinea noted that there is a huge gap in
training on alternative sexualities in mental health training generally, to
which I would only add that this falls within the huge gap in sexuality
training for the same fields. Kind of
like a donut hole in the middle of a donut hole!<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Facing Your Shadow: Psychological Edge Play by Michael Aaron<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhreQY-NG6-9Hk7W7taHV0G4H_hg4Js8LVvs9sFOPo0Y9Zztz0fsIoKKdUg7UEX5Zy8lkuM7VXzBITGphLbMKq7ndi1_EE_LOpX0aKMZzOe5-PcpX-O8NO6guY3pG3VOChJUpPQgXrLLbig/s1600/MichaelAaron-150x150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhreQY-NG6-9Hk7W7taHV0G4H_hg4Js8LVvs9sFOPo0Y9Zztz0fsIoKKdUg7UEX5Zy8lkuM7VXzBITGphLbMKq7ndi1_EE_LOpX0aKMZzOe5-PcpX-O8NO6guY3pG3VOChJUpPQgXrLLbig/s400/MichaelAaron-150x150.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Michael Aaron</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Michael gave three
reasons for edge play: exploration of
the self, healing past hurts, and adrenaline rush. To explain those, he provided a brief history
of what was meant by shadow, starting with the Marquis de Sade, and his
influence on psychology through Freud and Jung.
The latter two thinkers were united in their belief in the important
role that the dark side of human psychology was crucial to understanding the
function of the unconscious, but they divided over what the unconscious
was. Freud though Jung’s view was
dangerously social, and insufficiently idiosyncratic for each patient. Jung thought Freud’s view was too biological,
and failed to account for the universals in inner experience. But however the unconscious was viewed, it
involved our intolerance for negative emotions.
Two of Michael’s quotes from Carl Jung are illustrative:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Everyone
carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in an individual’s conscious
life, the blacker and denser it is.” <i>Psychology and Religion</i> (1938)<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“The shadow is
the seat of creativity… represents the true spirit of life against the arid
scholar.” <i>Memories, Dreams and Reflections</i> (1963)<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">With respect to
the negative emotions of shadow, Michael presented the typology of Sylvan
Tomkins [<i>Affect Imagery</i> (1962)] in
which Tomkins reduced all negative emotions to combinations of shame and humiliation;
distress and anguish; disgust; fear and terror; anger and rage; and dissmell
(reactions to really bad smells).
Michael argued that it was these unsettling feelings that could be
brought to awareness with shadow or edge play.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">To do so
required the establishment of safety, boundaries and trust, which are embodied
in the BDSM concepts of consent and negotiation. These established the conditions for constructive
self-exploration.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">With respect to
healing past hurts, Michael began with the now familiar empirical evidence that
BDSM interests are not caused by historical trauma, but went on to emphasize
that that some people in the world of kink were quite deliberately healing trauma
through BDSM activity. Michael
presented theories of kink from Robert Stoller <i>-- Perversion: the Erotic form of Hatred</i> (1975) and John Money -- <i>Lovemaps </i>(1986) as examples of
alternative theories of kink causation.
(My quick summary: To grossly oversimplify, Stoller was a long time
student of gender, and reframed Freudian theories of perversion into threats to
the paraphilic’s gender identity. Money
synthesized observations from ethology with Freudian ideas about the
unconscious to explain how sexual preferences might be caused by preconscious
interactions in early life.) Michael
then used opponent process theory to explain how a kind of mastery over past
hurts could be achieved through enactments in contemporary life.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Finally, with
respect to adrenaline rush, Michael cited the theories of Jack Morin, -- <i>The Erotic Mind</i> (1996) -who is noted for
his insight that special erotic intensity attends sexual activities that are
founded on obstacles to sexual expression based on negative emotions. Morin thought that some sex therapy properly
focused on removing barriers like performance anxiety and inhibitions to
achieve freer sexual expression. But
erotic intensity could be enhanced by presenting and overcoming barriers that
were in a Goldilocks zone of being formidable enough to overcome without being either
trivial or overwhelming. Given the
relationship between fear and adrenaline, Morin’s ideas seem tailor made for
some kinky erotic expression. Other
sources of intensity: longing and
anticipation as in edging and orgasm denial; violating prohibitions through
transgressive behaviors; the experience of power itself; and overcoming
ambivalence. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">One of the
strengths of Michael’s presentation was that it overcomes the common problem of
defining edge play in terms of some domain of specific activities. Implicit in this model is that what is on the
edge for one person is not on the edge for another, and that the edge is
necessarily time and context dependent.
If real self-discovery is happening, the edge moves as one gains
experiences. What is in shadow at one
time comes into the light, and may later return to shadow. But notice that the healing and
self-discovery models have different implications. If one is learning new things about oneself,
the edge will move. New shadows are cast
and discovered. If Jack Morin is
correct, one returns to the same obstacles over and over because that is where
the fear is and where the adrenaline rush can be generated in overcoming them. Play is likely to become ritualized. A fear that is overcome becomes old hat, and
loses its adrenaline rush.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Metamorphosis: Braving Transitions in
Polyamorous Relationships by Rosalyn Dischiavo EdD, MA CSES of the Institute
for Sexuality Education (ISEE)<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4k7jg739MUD3BR54unPYI7ZM4KdLIhKxSbthNWm9K74UGWDM3AA4y9HFNcoGwPn_ffRFVidlrJVruGebKJ8Y4CDSvmJFw7Se7QSzibARS-qslIJDUFh7SKV-K8lDHMd1_97swkLRuPIlE/s1600/RozDischiavo-150x150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4k7jg739MUD3BR54unPYI7ZM4KdLIhKxSbthNWm9K74UGWDM3AA4y9HFNcoGwPn_ffRFVidlrJVruGebKJ8Y4CDSvmJFw7Se7QSzibARS-qslIJDUFh7SKV-K8lDHMd1_97swkLRuPIlE/s400/RozDischiavo-150x150.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Roz Dischiavo</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Roz’s
presentation is the first application of a model from family systems theory
originally articulated by Papernow in 1993 for use with blended families, to
the new application of helping polyamorous ‘families’ understand certain
transitions in poly life and troublesome enough that they are very commonly
encountered among poly clients who come to therapy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Roz began with
explanations of various transitions in polyamorous life, giving examples of a
couple changing from swinging to poly lifestyle, or from couples-based poly to
egalitarian poly, or the dread ‘replacement’ in which a poly couple dissolves and
one of the partners is replaced by a metamour.
But a common source of therapy referrals generated by couples is the transition
from monogamous pairs to a poly family, and this is the work to which Papernow’s
model is most closely analogous. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Paparenow’s
model has seven stages: <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Fantasy<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Immersion<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Awareness<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Mobilization<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Action<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Contact<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Resolution<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In <b>Fantasy</b>, the participants each have
their preconceived ideas and ideologies about how the blended family is going to
work. In blended families, that may mean
ideas by the biological parent about how great the step parent will be, or
ideas and fears that the kids may have about how the step will try to replace
their ‘real’ parent. In poly, this often
means the love felt for the metamour and untested ideas about how the metamour
will get along in relation to the newly poly couple. Often it does not include realities about how
finances are going to be managed, space shared or chores divvied up. I would add that it is useful to note the
similarities between Roz’s model here and the work of Esther Perel who identifies
romantic idealization as a frequent obstacle to satisfying sexual relationships
for many couples, not just kinky ones. Aspects
of Roz’s model may often apply to the social context of resolving other
intimacy concerns.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In<b> Immersion</b>, both in blended families
and in poly, the illusions held when fantasies are untested tend to get shattered.
The step parent proves far less
invested, or perhaps over-invested in parenting. The metamour proves surprisingly intolerant
of all the video gaming, hates Game of Thrones, didn’t realize how hard it is
to live day-to-day with a gluten-free diet, or doesn’t want to leave and go
back to his house at everyone’s bedtime. If nothing works, chaos or failure may ensue,
but assuming the shattering is not too severe, the systems proceed to…<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Awareness</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> of the realistic problems that need to
be overcome to accomplish the originally wished for goods that were articulated
in fantasy. The participants confront
the new realities that cause their fantasies to fail to work out as planned and
struggle with the confusion about that tension between expectations and results.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Mobilization</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> occurs when participants try to adjust
to the new realities. Conflict is often
high, negotiations are attempted, expectations are revised, sometimes
brutally. Perhaps at this stage, the
blended family fails and kids go to the other parent or the step partner
returns to their own residence. In poly,
perhaps the original couple abandons the attempt to transition. Often, new strategies are mutually arrived
at, and go forward on a more realistic basis than was attempted during
immersion.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Action</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> synthesizes these new efforts with new, and often more
broadly participatory agreements. The
new relationship structures go forward on a more solid foundation. Participants start to have positive experiences
with the transition where the adjustments have been successful.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Contact</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> results from the accumulation of
positive experiences at bonding, conflict resolution, and redefined roles that
emerged in Mobilization and Action. If
things weren’t fixed, the blend or transition may have failed, but usually
successful Action results in increased trust and conflicts when they occur here
are routine and managed, rather than scary, new and threatening to the new
structure.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Resolution</span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> occurs when adjustments have stabilized
to the new relationship structures.
These may not all be positive, for example the teen who opposed step mom
moving in and controlling everything is spending more time away from home at
friends now and is less involved with the family, but everyone is accepting of
the new order and coping strategies are in place for the routine rough spots it
entails.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Papernow’s
family systems approach looks at these steps in terms of their participants’
different fantasies, roles, expectations, and the resources and rules by which
the resources are allocated to manage conflicts and transitions. Different families have different contexts, histories
and traditions, even if they more or less confront these steps. This model does not make the process of
transition primarily dependent on explanations involving individual
psychopathology, which is a huge advantage in terms of making therapy a place
where stigma is not inadvertently perpetuated against nontraditional participants
and their experiences.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I would add
that in so far as coming out kinky or gay can also involve a process very much
like this one, particularly for people who see their variant status not just as
an intrapsychic issue of personal identity, but who require certain reactions
from a larger social system in which they are embedded. We are not just mental health professionals,
kinky, cancer patients, or church elders for ourselves, but in terms of their
effects on others. So this model can be
important when others are involved in decisions that are nevertheless primarily
viewed as personal. But as a family
systems model, it can only work with intimately involved participants. It might help when coming out to your partner
or family of origin, but is going to be difficult to use with your employer, bowling
league, or church group, even though their reactions are important to you.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">A salient strength
of Roz’s application of Papernow is that it provides an understandable context
for the often disruptive feelings that accompany transitions. It normalizes anxieties, losses, and
conflicts that are commonly encountered. It is terrific at destigmatizing the rough
spots of transition, and this is particularly important for people who may
already be gun shy because of the history of stigma CNMs and kinksters face in
the general society. And the model
itself is inherently destigmatizing for a general audience by making clear that
it many ways, for all their colorful and titillating differences, AltSex folk
confront understandable conflicts with which we are all familiar. Men aren’t from Mars, women from Venus, trans
folk from the asteroid belt and kinksters from Uranus (sorry, couldn’t
resist!). We are all from earth, and
subject to many of the same influences despite our differences.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>Age Play: Eros, Practicality, and Walking the Edge by
David Ortmann, LCSW</b><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7V0Wj_jveXPGqvOR6eJkvf57Aa2pB88aP5uSPW1poOaJ6QVq1GcrqiRDgnwj4VAWvVKJCrO33emBUF06OWsvZiofQOdBYz2HgmEi_KQ9rObpDcZQ9fFAicGpS9M_3xpgxvgkKqQVR0Jux/s1600/DO1-150x150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7V0Wj_jveXPGqvOR6eJkvf57Aa2pB88aP5uSPW1poOaJ6QVq1GcrqiRDgnwj4VAWvVKJCrO33emBUF06OWsvZiofQOdBYz2HgmEi_KQ9rObpDcZQ9fFAicGpS9M_3xpgxvgkKqQVR0Jux/s400/DO1-150x150.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">David Ortmann</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Perhaps the
bravest presentation was David’s exposition of how age play might be a creative
outlet for the sexual expression of pedophilic desires. While this is a common sense idea, it flies
in the face of a great deal of political theory that suggests that consensual
AltSex groups stay away from any content as socially poisonous as an analogy
between adult kinky activity and pedophilia. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Age play is a
form of erotic role play in which participants take roles that emphasize
differences from their chronological age.
Often this has a strongly regressive component and adults assume the
roles of teens, children, toddlers and infants.
When one partner is the adult, they are the ‘big’, and the partner who
plays a child is the ‘little’. A certain
amount of this goes on in non-kinky relationships when we call our partner ‘baby’
or ‘daddy’. In age play, partners may assume
caretaking functions that are far removed from adult/adult activities such as
diapering, toilette training, spanking and discipline, feeding, suckling, and just
about anything that turns them on. As
age and childhood status are heavily saturated with power dynamics, there is
plenty of opportunity for age related D/s, and enactment of incestuous and
seductive dynamics.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Given these
issues, the kink community has made strenuous efforts to differentiate age play
from attraction to under age people as sexual objects. That boundary rests on several ideas. First, kinks is stigmatized enough as it is,
and kinksters do not wish to blur the public perceptions about who is in their
communities. Second, consent is
fundamental to kink community ideology, so discussion of any activity that does
not involve fully consenting adults is anathema. Third, pedophiles, as arguably the most
stigmatized sexual variation of them all, do not exactly make safe political
bedfellows. And perhaps most important
of all, the science about the relationship between sex desire and behavior is
so poor, we have no idea how many people with pedophilic desire refrain from
ever committing illegal behaviors despite those desires. Such people are powerfully disincentivized to
come forward and admit to desires that are, in some legal venues, illegal to
even articulate. There are some states
that require therapists to report client disclosures of any contact with child
porn, and these laws are always intended to make state officials, rather than
the therapist community, responsible for deciding what the boundaries are to
tolerated personal expression.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">So David’s
suggestion that age play might be a safe outlet for people with pedophilic
desires is not easy to listen to for kinksters, the mental health community, or
the larger society which, despite solid scientific evidence to the contrary, is
so afraid of sexual differences that they expect transgendered people to assault
them in public restrooms. At this point
I would also remind the reader of Margie’s history, in which female sadomasochists
were excluded by mainstream feminists, lesbians initially excluded from the
Leathersex community, and kinky folk generally marginalized by conventional
society despite Kinsey’s evidence that sexual variability is typical. If the treatment of pedophiles who don’t
offend is left to forensic psychologists, what chance do non-offending people
have of getting the healing power of social connections and the opportunity to
tell their stories in a context where they might expect a sympathetic hearing?<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">David’s
argument is a rational one. If otherwise
cis-gendered or gay kinksters can get sexual satisfaction from playing at being
bigs and littles, why shouldn’t some pedophiles be able to sublimate their
desires into legally unobjectionable role play with adults assuming the roles
of children?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In the present
environment, scarcely any group is motivated to appropriate money to make an
investigation of so-called ‘virtuous’ (non-offending) pedophiles. Present practice is to attempt to force the
label pedophile on anyone who admits to such desires. What we do know about pedophiles is almost
entirely through the study of people who have been criminally prosecuted. The US vigorously prosecutes child porn, even
when it is kept on foreign servers in jurisdictions that do not criminalize
these behaviors or do not share any of our varying State laws about the age of
consent.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">David presented
his conclusions from 12 cases that fantasy could be used constructively to
manage pedophilic impulses, and reported only one case where serious problems
were encountered with such work. It is
certainly true that a great deal of shadow play goes on in the kink community,
much of it benign or constructive, but problems are occasionally reported. But as data goes, this is folk wisdom, not
yet science.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">We have heard
from others at NYC AltSex 2016 that there is insight to be had by moving toward
our fears. David has done a great job of
modeling exactly that. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>Miscellanea:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm0VPa7k1HSNH44b01O-DaJ0OXBxy4LpyxRzHHeY7i0ykvcOEf4ELh8ykMxEIwRNVLoQMi3CPo56CvCury4J4YieJ1ab2w5PuYcBUjlUJXZyNiyQKzFXVVijDrtEb3ZyQ0yVzpFrPIHb9c/s1600/AltSex2016-happy-hour.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm0VPa7k1HSNH44b01O-DaJ0OXBxy4LpyxRzHHeY7i0ykvcOEf4ELh8ykMxEIwRNVLoQMi3CPo56CvCury4J4YieJ1ab2w5PuYcBUjlUJXZyNiyQKzFXVVijDrtEb3ZyQ0yVzpFrPIHb9c/s400/AltSex2016-happy-hour.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The afterparty: left-to-right: Lydia Leinsdorf, Dulcinea Pitagora, Michael Aaron, attendee, Zhana Vrangalova, and Russell Stambaugh</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The conference included a Q&A with all the presenters, which I will decline to summarize, and a social gathering in a Lower East Side watering hole attended by the conference organizers, volunteers, and a few of the attendees. All-in-all, it was a very well put together event. Perhaps the organizers will brag here about how much money was raised for CARAS.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">A sure sign of success is that the event will be repeated in <b>NYC AltSex 2017 scheduled for April 28, 2017</b>. Congratulations to everyone who made it so successful!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Credits: While the work of the presenters is their own, the summaries and some commentary are the responsibility of the blog author. I am solely responsible for any errors, and will cheerfully correct them. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">All presentations had slides except David's. Requests for slides or references are for the presenters, please.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Photos here, except as noted, are submissions from the presenters and stolen by the author. The afterparty photo is the work of the NYC AltSex 2016 Conference photographer. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Within all those caveats:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px; text-align: justify;">© Russell J Stambaugh, May, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span>Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-55792268730670684142016-04-12T13:44:00.000-07:002016-04-23T08:54:37.470-07:00This is Your Brain on Romanticism: Porn Stars Talk About Porn Sex vs Real Sex<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdnuy_FgK895Gw-AIWEQm5th3_MiHWMNtDPjmC1fwa1CLqv4sDvJdap-zX9uj_ZJbabGZqFKgklVwFH1ITgk2u8gb_Rrrf4DPLjTVt4j9qBKGjA5rq3XskklYvPbF9_9VDojhD7Z3_JJkM/s1600/Otto+Von+Bismarck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdnuy_FgK895Gw-AIWEQm5th3_MiHWMNtDPjmC1fwa1CLqv4sDvJdap-zX9uj_ZJbabGZqFKgklVwFH1ITgk2u8gb_Rrrf4DPLjTVt4j9qBKGjA5rq3XskklYvPbF9_9VDojhD7Z3_JJkM/s400/Otto+Von+Bismarck.jpg" width="291" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Otto von Bismark (1815-1898) First Prussian, then German Chancellor, (1862-1890) <br />Not noted for his contributions to erotica, he was a hard-headed political realist.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Laws are like sausages; it is
better not to see them being made.” Otto
von Bismarck<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For those of you who are a little
light on your 19<sup>th</sup> century European history, Otto von Bismarck is
the father of modern Germany. He
brilliantly isolated first Austria in 1866 and then France in 1870-71 and Prussia
defeated them in short, efficient wars, unifying Germany around a nucleus of
Prussia and the Rhineland. Before then,
the country we know today as Germany was made up of dozens of little states
that were ethnically German, but had been ruled independently for hundreds of
years. Bismarck’s plans were nearly
undone when Frederick Victor Albert von Preussen of House Hohenzollern was made
Kaiser of the newly unified German state. Kaiser Wilhelm
II’s intense military romanticism plunged Germany into a campaign of overreach
that eventually required two world wars to quell. Despite those cataclysms, almost 150 years
later, the Germany Bismarck created is still the economic and political nucleus
of a partially unified Europe.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbAam9dybmycAuP2cu1u6R_IZzm3Xys3J9l0z1nXt646IU7USJbveTcwMoJQINsuIHjZ-ovScAYod2tEg4Dj684gyKrSiBA-sbadoBF7IjJMVXR0JKKFzA_zcdn63meGWWV4-iQmwvZO_h/s1600/Kissinger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbAam9dybmycAuP2cu1u6R_IZzm3Xys3J9l0z1nXt646IU7USJbveTcwMoJQINsuIHjZ-ovScAYod2tEg4Dj684gyKrSiBA-sbadoBF7IjJMVXR0JKKFzA_zcdn63meGWWV4-iQmwvZO_h/s400/Kissinger.jpg" width="324" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Henry Kissinger (1923 - ) American Secretary of State during the Nixon Administration.<br />Also not known for his erotica, Kissinger was a controversial proponent of Bismark's <i>realpolitik</i>.</span> </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bismarck is the father of the
diplomatic school <i>realpolitik, </i>which
holds that a country should act only in its direct interests. The most famous modern American advocate of
this position is Henry Kissinger. <i>Realpolitik</i> is continually controversial
because of its ruthless emphasis on self-interest, and its continual conflicts
with the romantic ideals of Western liberalism which hold that a country has an
obligation to spread its values into the larger world community. How controversial? In 1973 Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize for negotiating the end of the Vietnam War. Two members of the awards committee walked
out in protest. The debate between <i>realpolitik</i> and romanticism remains as lively today as when Bismarck
unified Germany.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But that’s not important
now.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Let’s talk about something more
salacious.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">How about porn stars speaking
about porn?</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But first, a word from our
sponsors…</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">To my knowledge, neither
Kissinger nor Bismarck ever wrote anything about porn, but those of us in sex
education and therapy have talked ourselves blue in the face about the ways in
which porn sex differs from ‘real’ sex.
Yes, I am perfectly aware that real sex is more various than we imagine
it to be, and that there is endless variety in porn. And yet there are stubborn principles of porn
economics and viewer preferences that make the processes by which porn is
constructed, marketed, sold and consumed that are anything but romantic.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Porn is not inherently addictive, although one can use it 'too much', or in violation of one's own standards, and in self-destructive ways. It is rather uncommon for most people to have explicit discussions about whether the use of porn or sex toys constitutes a relationship violation. If you pay for it, you might spend too much, and if you only use free porn, you may be exploiting artists and professionals. But mostly, porn is harmless to users, and just fine for getting off, as long as you do not mistake it for sexual education or c</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; line-height: 22.4px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>inéma vérité.</i></span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But that’s enough of the same old story from
me. Let’s hear what some brave porn
stars have to say…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://elitedaily.com/social-news/porn-stars-get-real/1447802/">Ask a Porn Star Porn Sex Vs Real Sex</a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The take away here is only part
of the story: actresses in porn are not typically
feeling anything like our fantasies about great sex, they’re usually having
thoughts about work. But there are a
host of other ideas in porn that create unrealistic ideas about sex. Because this is a blog about alternative
sexualities, I will address a few of these here, giving BDSM examples. For those who want a more generic treatment
should read Michael Castleman’s excellent article: The Real Problem with
Pornography: It's Bad for Sex<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://greatsexguidance.com/article/the-real-problem-with-pornography-its-bad-for-sex/">Michael Castleman: The Real Problem with Pornography</a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKe7QuzS18PeS9esID-Ta2VbNuSoKYdjCPqZHLuzdyJsyjk4vY8591jFqa_V9379m8LLdSxwZ7U6wYkcY19ccmTb15GJ4aOfyeEretGkqqTFGBtSBDq5rbXOxspi9fleP1V3llfAI0huX-/s1600/TEITHT_Header.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKe7QuzS18PeS9esID-Ta2VbNuSoKYdjCPqZHLuzdyJsyjk4vY8591jFqa_V9379m8LLdSxwZ7U6wYkcY19ccmTb15GJ4aOfyeEretGkqqTFGBtSBDq5rbXOxspi9fleP1V3llfAI0huX-/s400/TEITHT_Header.png" width="370" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">1). Good BDSM begins with a solid
negotiation in which limits, preferences and ground rules are discussed in
detail. Sometimes that negotiation is
itself fairly erotic, but often the need to give up cherished fantasies, or to
make compromises, or differences in how things are fantasized about beforehand
and experienced in the heat of play mean that some losses and disappointments
need to be tolerated. Most guys get off
on porn in 7 minutes, which is often a lot shorter than most negotiations between
seasoned partners. So any hot porn clip
that elides this part of the process is already very different from most good
BDSM sex.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">2). Closely related to the first
point, a great deal of BDSM is about anticipation and influencing partners' mental states. Seven minutes is enough
time for a headlong rush to orgasm, but that is only one small dimension of
play that real partners are likely to find satisfying. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">3). Much real BDSM play is a great
deal less about sex than porn sex is. Porn tropes that show people getting off do
not look the same way that many people who are getting off in BDSM look. Some activity, like reaching ecstatic states
such as subspace, may not involve wild displays of satisfaction, but dreamy
inner experience that is hard to recognize if you do not know the submissive
well. Most porn looks like it was
designed by Captain Obvious. In real
life, good sex often looks more nuanced.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_0RnXMBu70d4F7U1sT72r_qcpIVhJDukK-FaJy3qEXaAiFEWJONf87cMFdGaJy0-xmfZ19pMvcuWNbAJ5yvBSIjD50dNTwzvcL8WUrtZd6dEEDnGDItDwHqBfoBpW74mNJUEJEZh-FI3K/s1600/Captain+Obvious.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_0RnXMBu70d4F7U1sT72r_qcpIVhJDukK-FaJy3qEXaAiFEWJONf87cMFdGaJy0-xmfZ19pMvcuWNbAJ5yvBSIjD50dNTwzvcL8WUrtZd6dEEDnGDItDwHqBfoBpW74mNJUEJEZh-FI3K/s400/Captain+Obvious.jpg" width="299" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Captain Obvious is fictional character. <br />While he is not know for designing erotica, his spirit is often evoked in the porn aesthetic.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">4). Porn often tries to elide
context, and thrives on the fantasy that passion is so hot that space, relationship,
location, and/or the presence of others doesn’t matter. You or potential partners may not find safety
or eroticism in such tropes, even though you can get very excited and satisfied
in the context which is right for you.
Or porn goes to the opposite extreme and provides ideal fantasy
space. Good BDSM sex can be had even if
you do not have a built-in St. Andrew's cross that rotates at home. And I have never seen a porn clip in which
the needs of children intrude. Actually,
that’s because it would be illegal to make them. Your home life may vary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie7Mv-SdD0JnrNtI15TN5RBzpix2afRctI39kzLkZtLMiFSI1C-BQqrZbWrjME1b7RmYwH7WPCZKGRddnLFgENwuJDtNGqMplZhWOfVpbrrstL7Ffax8eDuANYnGBt94NTlvIRcQoNZGB7/s1600/secret-dungeon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie7Mv-SdD0JnrNtI15TN5RBzpix2afRctI39kzLkZtLMiFSI1C-BQqrZbWrjME1b7RmYwH7WPCZKGRddnLFgENwuJDtNGqMplZhWOfVpbrrstL7Ffax8eDuANYnGBt94NTlvIRcQoNZGB7/s400/secret-dungeon.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A dungeon B&B catering to kinky visitors. <br />Nice, but hopefully not indispensable to good sex.<br />Doesn't look like this St Andrew's cross rotates, either!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">5). Porn idealizes sex for the typical
genre viewer. So models are likely to be
thinner and attractive, younger, or at least, archetypal for their genre than
ordinary partners are likely to be. In
porn designed for heterosexual submissive crossdressers, fabulously attractive Domina’s
are the rule. In BDSM social groups or
on-line, real life potential partners may be uncommon. By paying money, porn producers can secure
the talent they need to make any number of porn clips. The frequency and availability of their
material speaks to consumer preferences, not the demographics of what real
kinky people prefer to do.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">6). Sex is often a transaction. In most porn, sex is often a free-flowing
expression of impulses. In the real
world, pizza delivery boys who stop for a half-hour sex session during
deliveries lose their jobs. In porn,
there are never negative consequences.
If a porn star makes a mistake with the single-tail and panics or injures
his sub, the scene is re-shot after the cleanup is over. In real life, the handling of these mistakes
makes or breaks relationships. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Castleman’s observation that porn
is fantasy, not good sex education, unites all the porn stars’ comments, and
all of mine.</b> That’s as true for kink as
it is for any other porn genre. I’ll let
Bob Dylan have the last word, even if it’s a little harsh for folks who seek
solace in autoeroticism when social stigma makes the price of seeking a
relationship too high:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“You never turned around to see
the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When they all did tricks for you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You never understood that it ain’t
no good,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You shouldn’t let other people
get your kicks for you.” <i>Like A Rolling Stone</i> – B. Dylan<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perhaps you can think of other
important differences between sex as depicted in typical porn, and good sex
with a partner. Feel free to leave them
in the Comments Section.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Also welcome: sites that offer porn that avoids these tropes, and provide relatively realistic depictions of BDSM play.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">© Russell J Stambaugh, April 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></span></div>
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<br />Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-11577277468031700462016-03-21T07:54:00.002-07:002016-04-23T09:02:09.696-07:00The Psychotherapeutic Theories of Kink: Introduction<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg79xTIeyFupagYXUY4e5P3N0MM2VugeaqfUs6cESH0UtenIdiB63LZLzbZBSokV-T8KwVTmz89ylQC_2UDq44Nh8sqqZrFed07fEjskyRdRho3NywySnJfSX_Fo965bSdZ6S9b2XkDy17w/s1600/TEITHT_Header.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg79xTIeyFupagYXUY4e5P3N0MM2VugeaqfUs6cESH0UtenIdiB63LZLzbZBSokV-T8KwVTmz89ylQC_2UDq44Nh8sqqZrFed07fEjskyRdRho3NywySnJfSX_Fo965bSdZ6S9b2XkDy17w/s400/TEITHT_Header.png" width="370" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“History is more or less bunk!” Henry Ford<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” George Santayana<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"Those who do learn history are doomed to repeat it anyway. It's enough to give the repetition compulsion a bad name!" Russell Stambaugh</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"That hardly bears repeating!" An anonymous wag</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This section of Elephant in the Hot Tub: Kink in Context is
about the many theories of kink, and some of the great contributions that past
theoreticians have made to the clinical discourse on sexual variation. This discussion requires a little setting up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjp3gN5Z8SqU3qM6PTzGDt7tFKbGc5qIl4TFdJmt8yKBI28DsbeyIkaMrUxMCO87SDKR8C5Lu5on3djpFNvkkXwxipwFDjNJMbQg63kp7Te7YGAzMEemBbuX0bbQxMj-NiWKSdMt1ly1De/s1600/Van+Ghogh%2527s+Rhone+at+Arles.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjp3gN5Z8SqU3qM6PTzGDt7tFKbGc5qIl4TFdJmt8yKBI28DsbeyIkaMrUxMCO87SDKR8C5Lu5on3djpFNvkkXwxipwFDjNJMbQg63kp7Te7YGAzMEemBbuX0bbQxMj-NiWKSdMt1ly1De/s400/Van+Ghogh%2527s+Rhone+at+Arles.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Starry Night, (1888) by Vincnet van Gogh. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In this period, clinical research had only case-study methodology to rely on.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After Krafft-Ebing, very few clinical writers
decided to stake their professional careers on sexual variation alone. As we explore this survey, an important theme
will be: why did this writer address sexual variation? And what were his
professional purposes and clinical goals in so doing? How might it have been persuasive at the
time? Sexual variation began to be
seriously studied partly as a consequence of several important aspects of
medical and academic sociology and illustrates how knowledge is created,
disseminated and construed:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">First, when medicine and psychology became professionalized, social discourse about sexuality, and particularly sexual
variation, was greatly stigmatized. Although
the stigma surrounding sexuality is less today than in the past, addressing sexual
variation has never been easy, particularly profitable or glamorous over the
course of the last 130 years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Second, sexual variation was
primarily addressed not for its own sake, but because it illustrated some
crucial point of theory or practice that was important, illustrative, or
unavoidable to a theoretician’s larger argument. For example, the Associationists weren’t
especially interested in sexual variation when they borrowed the term 'fetishism' from anthropology in suggesting that attraction to strange objects was learned
behavior. They were making the argument
that chance encounters could result in durable learned changes in behavior, and
glamorizing their scientific theory by choosing an example that could make
magic understandable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Third, sexual variation was
discussed from a detached professional point of view in order to legitimize as
much as possible the professional conversation about it. In this sense, remarks already quoted in this
blog from M. Foucault remain highly relevant.
<a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/05/michel-foucault-and-history-of-sexuality.html">http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/05/michel-foucault-and-history-of-sexuality.html</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb89cSvHxVd8oSfkrPUWpDW28tD1wclzpuYyDyoryQce2RCDbv6aY-rEEw2Lr4uoEE5v9ybkIoffLljo4ztX1yrrtSS5aFQhX88X78VZKhusMHhCEjMhsdaI4kDLuQMDuqC2ByBjI8PyaB/s1600/erotica1800s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb89cSvHxVd8oSfkrPUWpDW28tD1wclzpuYyDyoryQce2RCDbv6aY-rEEw2Lr4uoEE5v9ybkIoffLljo4ztX1yrrtSS5aFQhX88X78VZKhusMHhCEjMhsdaI4kDLuQMDuqC2ByBjI8PyaB/s400/erotica1800s.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">'"You want to write your dissertation on what!?</span>"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Erotic literature and porn existed
throughout this period, but only a little of it entered the clinical and
academic discourse about sexual variation. Likewise, the non-clinical variants that were
known tended to involve gay men, and even that was only occasionally entered
into the clinical literature.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Theoreticians often had undisclosed
private agendas that contributed to their willingness to fight stigma and
undergo the hazards and travails of swimming upstream against social and
professional disapproval.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The professional language about sex variation itself was toxic, including terms like 'perversion', 'sexual deviation', 'abnormal', 'immorality', and the general social discourse did not offer non-judgmental alternatives. Social unconventionality was often regarded as proof of inferiority.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Relatively few sexually variant
clients came into treatment. Most weren’t
suffering, and stigma was a huge barrier.
It was not safe for a depressed or anxious sexual variant to disclose
their kinks for fear of judgment. Unlike other suffering populations like
depressives, conversion hysterics, or post-traumatic stress victims, who were
regarded as individual sufferers, most sexual variations were framed as moral,
legal and societal problems by non-clients like law enforcement officials,
educators, or journalists. Often clinicians were offering extrapolations from what little experience they had. It should not
be surprising that there was not a rich source of presenting patients and a
large stream of clinical data about sex variations. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Most professional papers were
written about single cases of sexual variation, often explored at considerable
depth. In instances where these clients
were compellingly or even accurately described, the case study methodology that
dominated the first 65 years of the history of psychotherapy provided rich ground
for over-generalization. It took the
invention of data gathering methods, statistical and analytic techniques, and
the de-legitimization of accepted knowledge-production standards to supplant
case-study methodology as the primary means of knowing about sexual variation.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6HSGSXhpcnDqq5n7joa0MR7LZ0farGJSKfMRay7ogWP6w-2opDibVFlP5hZo-gPtdjTghTsA7LbpPd-xHtw7p1CZrZtfERyGeDbq5ueB1vxMtiaQ_zR1ScHKEDZtbBBsnnZHthjSSaVv6/s1600/PDP-11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6HSGSXhpcnDqq5n7joa0MR7LZ0farGJSKfMRay7ogWP6w-2opDibVFlP5hZo-gPtdjTghTsA7LbpPd-xHtw7p1CZrZtfERyGeDbq5ueB1vxMtiaQ_zR1ScHKEDZtbBBsnnZHthjSSaVv6/s400/PDP-11.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A PDP-11: computing in the age when your author began his training.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This monster lurked in the nether regions of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It was kept in carefully air conditioned comfort, hand fed by legions of technicians in white lab coats.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The newer methods, like social
surveys and controlled clinical studies were expensive and difficult to execute. They required fundamentally different funding
models and training and had methodological problems and limitations all their
own, even when the theory and technology became available to conduct them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, as in most psychological
research done over that period, what we know was based on research created by almost
exclusively European males, mostly upper-middle class professionals, they were mostly cis-gendered and heteronormative. At
first, these are the only people who had access to the social legitimacy that
clinical and academic positions conferred.
Whatever criticism you prefer to make about psychoanalysis, which could
be very hidebound at times, this was one of the first places which admitted women
to the discourse, even when their male colleagues had trouble listening to the
insights women had to contribute.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With such a rich source of caveats about the sources of
error and limitations of early work on sexual variation, the reader would be
fully justified in demanding why this history is worth one’s time. There are very good reasons for making this
effort, and they are similar to the reasons I have provided a superficial
overview of non-clinical thinking about sexual variation and deviance over the
previous centuries of Western civilization:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Social constructionism emphasizes
the importance of varying contexts in what is construed as knowledge. As the social context in which clinicians
work and the sexually variant present for treatment continues to change,
sophistication about the role of context is crucial, and remains continuously
relevant. History is a great way to
teach that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Although the art of psychotherapy
is rife with trends, fads and fashions, there remains a community of clinicians
out there practicing almost every theoretical perspective and they continue to
contribute to the discourse. Old clinical
communities never die, there merely fragment!
The more history and theory you know; the better critic of new thinking
you will be.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The smart clinicians who made some
of these mistakes are excellent reminders and role models for us, and keep us
mindful that today’s insights are impermanent and will also not stand the test
of time. It is entirely possible that
clinicians whose theories we currently regard as outmoded today were right
about the patients they saw in their time, or that they were more right then
because of context then that is different from the context now. And the worst mistakes might teach us
humility. Many were made by the leading
thinkers of their times. We are not
immune.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">A
richer variety of hypotheses entertained from all sources is helpful in the
here and now. That includes good ones
that are viable today, and studying the problems of bad ones that are no longer
viable.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Uf-IlUakjkxWTvrPGI17TVFs9N1PXdCZREhOIIPMy9zNHHoLPFrI_wsJJBnyV320qUmoHyyQgD3yyK82XFsqwrdtj4DFyQl1u59m7glE6Uk0cXFSflxpzpmqhyphenhyphen5OvJEexK6PvllwA1J8/s1600/Vegies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Uf-IlUakjkxWTvrPGI17TVFs9N1PXdCZREhOIIPMy9zNHHoLPFrI_wsJJBnyV320qUmoHyyQgD3yyK82XFsqwrdtj4DFyQl1u59m7glE6Uk0cXFSflxpzpmqhyphenhyphen5OvJEexK6PvllwA1J8/s400/Vegies.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If history is analogous to eating your vegetables, hopefully I have prepared them tastefully.<br /><i>Bon appetit!</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">© Russell J Stambaugh, January 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></span></span>
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Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-48463035065184970162016-03-18T07:48:00.001-07:002016-03-21T08:53:45.940-07:00Client-Centered Therapy<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIZGmKWNKLUNfvEUThoxVN2lDPhiTqnbLszCDbMrrRfssVQuL881fchZF_MBj3FNM1DzWK6dR4rxwxcMk7q1hOCEjRbH3vmIEzc39joywFXNwt83sZWaUZkpNJsOk5LX4d4zZb27LU-d0d/s1600/morpheus-matrix.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIZGmKWNKLUNfvEUThoxVN2lDPhiTqnbLszCDbMrrRfssVQuL881fchZF_MBj3FNM1DzWK6dR4rxwxcMk7q1hOCEjRbH3vmIEzc39joywFXNwt83sZWaUZkpNJsOk5LX4d4zZb27LU-d0d/s400/morpheus-matrix.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Mobius offers two pills, in The Matrix (1999): Can a cure for PTSD be achieved by MDMA? <br />Perhaps that is a matter of the client's choice!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After 130 years of systematic
talk therapy a broad variety of psychotherapies has arisen. Some have been shown to work well, others
show little promise, and many new ones have not been rigorously tested. A friend of mine who just returned from
Boulder, Colorado, raved about his experience there using experimental
MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. If I had been asked in advance, I would not
have immediately recommended experimental therapy with professionally
administered doses of the recreational drug ecstasy, especially for anyone with
a strong recreational drug history. It
has only been a few weeks since he completed the protocol, but he is much
relieved. There is strong basis for
thinking that massive pharmacological intervention on serotonin, norepinephrine
and oxytocin systems that regulate anxiety, depression, and attachment might
impact PTSD, but this is far from proven with MDMA. So it is not as if he is looking under the
wrong rock. But with thousands of
different psychotherapy techniques, how to evaluate them could be a pressing
question if you might be in the market for a therapist.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrQ6HLaUlKyeh8Y_ZiaEfRH_K-Lo3SEiVjdf-lPW4r-ERVUBQ9aptOT660m_zrtiyPLz8A5azucHZnsBmAq9g3XtuWUwB-Y9XfyKdpwF7fP6CJRHV3Ar4Hw3JL_DqdphyXPMQiDR7sdubF/s1600/Hans+Eyesenk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrQ6HLaUlKyeh8Y_ZiaEfRH_K-Lo3SEiVjdf-lPW4r-ERVUBQ9aptOT660m_zrtiyPLz8A5azucHZnsBmAq9g3XtuWUwB-Y9XfyKdpwF7fP6CJRHV3Ar4Hw3JL_DqdphyXPMQiDR7sdubF/s400/Hans+Eyesenk.jpg" width="377" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Hans Eyesenk( 1916-97) He was a famous critic of psychotherapy <br />Nevertheless, psychotherapy has been very extensively tested and it usually works.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The answer to that question about
how to evaluate them is: vigorously and frequently, and it’s a lot harder than
you might think! Even by the 1990’s,
over a thousand studies had been conducted which collectively demonstrated that
psychotherapy works. Not infallibly, or
for every imaginable purpose, but for the average patient, there is a very
strong probability that there will be at least moderate symptom relief. The problems in this happy research picture
are two-fold. First, not everyone is
helped, and there is only weak evidence that more therapy is better. If 10 sessions are good, it does not follow
that 100 sessions will be ten times better.
Almost all types of psychotherapy are good. Back in the 1960’s Hans Eyesenk, an important
critic of psychotherapy, was able to show that untrained counselors were as
effective as seasoned professionals in brief psychotherapies! While there is an
emerging consensus that cognitive behavioral therapy is best, and it has the
advantage of being time limited, and therefore less expensive, it is also true
that the data for its superiority are eroding, and that some clients are not
helped by it at all. So research offers
a murky picture about which kind of therapy might be best, and no research has
been conducted focusing specifically for therapy on kinky and polyamorous
clients. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is beyond the scope of this
blog to advise readers about the best psychotherapy types. This is just as well, most practitioners have
already made that choice, or had training and marketplace determine this for
them. Although we have critical comments
to make about psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral, or sex addiction therapies
here, it violates one of our core values to tell readers which psychotherapy to
choose. One of the reasons is that such
advice violates the principle of being ’client-centered.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Client-centered therapy puts the
welfare of the client first, but by philosophy and legal regulation, all
therapies are supposed to do this, so it is a legitimate question, what
behaviors and techniques differentiate client-centered therapies from
others? After all, all are supposed to
benefit the client. My argument is that
client-centered therapies do not differ from others in their goals, but in
crucial aspects of process. In
client-centered therapy:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is the <b>client</b>, not the therapist who is, moment-to-moment in the therapy,
responsible for the therapeutic goals, and</span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">the therapy relies on the <b>client’s</b> insight, rather than on the
therapist’s direction and advice, for its primary effects.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCbp6OA3sp4NdfSIWGbvI1pxh4Uv2dsRYuTSXf4BvOXbftphY717AiJINOomR-l9Z1wWXjHgOwPS2GiEN9Jj46QHlvDB3i_zYUgXWtnF_otq2t6Yian90urB67CZKe7aN2nOkLGGFPmSQu/s1600/Police+officer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCbp6OA3sp4NdfSIWGbvI1pxh4Uv2dsRYuTSXf4BvOXbftphY717AiJINOomR-l9Z1wWXjHgOwPS2GiEN9Jj46QHlvDB3i_zYUgXWtnF_otq2t6Yian90urB67CZKe7aN2nOkLGGFPmSQu/s400/Police+officer.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Socially necessary but not client-centered!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The therapist is
an agent of the client, rather than other social forces. In reality, no therapist is able to avoid
some social accountability to other agencies when conducting therapy. But accepting any more accountability than
necessary risks making a therapist an agent of social control, rather than an
agent of the patient. Some therapies and
some therapeutic situations force modifications in this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Court-ordered
therapy for matters like intimate partner violence or non-consensual sexual
behaviors are, by definition, unable to be client-centered. These therapies are accountable to external
agencies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Therapies with
minors require the consent of parents, and may be considered accountable to
those paying the fee, rather than to the child.
Most child-practitioners have careful procedures to deal with the
inevitable problems that arise when the best interest of the child and parents
come into conflict.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Couples and
family therapies where the interventions are aimed at the dyad or family
system, and no therapeutic participants’ interests can be ethically
subordinated to those of any other by the therapist. In some polyamory cases, this can become
quite complicated in complex polycules, particularly where some members come in
for therapy and others do not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Client-centered
therapy is an idealized case, in which no other interest interferes with the
client’s welfare. But psychotherapy is a
regulated profession and child abuse and neglect reporting laws, duty-to-warn
laws, institutional context, and insurance coverage can all limit the
therapist’s practices in placing the client first in the therapy exclusive of all other
considerations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, humans
are, by evolutionary design, creatures of internal conflict. While therapists are skilled at not getting
drawn in to these conflicts, it is an idealized fiction to think that there is
always a neutral middle ground when a client wars within about which
conflicting interests will be primary.
Therapists are humans too and a good faith effort at engaged neutrality
does admit to differing interpretations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Despite these considerations,
therapies and therapists do vary in how they place the responsibility for
therapeutic change on the client. Given
the long history of therapeutic mistakes in trying to help people change their
sexual variations, client-centeredness is a strong protection against therapy
inadvertently becoming just one more place where the pervasive social
stigmatization of sex and variation gets done.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoS6qr_YxgCORcPhESOFS_0pibbTLR7-J8MYbydauws4pjXycJGJ_noDqPn0R386hPdFHwy2CxS3oZ21o3HGM7cHk_LmJsyzXqHMgNyvR_JFhkCTT3oOPV_aZKfuK1jotBBxQOeiCPXtiE/s1600/carl+rogers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoS6qr_YxgCORcPhESOFS_0pibbTLR7-J8MYbydauws4pjXycJGJ_noDqPn0R386hPdFHwy2CxS3oZ21o3HGM7cHk_LmJsyzXqHMgNyvR_JFhkCTT3oOPV_aZKfuK1jotBBxQOeiCPXtiE/s400/carl+rogers.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Carl Rogers (1902-1987) American Psychologist and father of client-centered psychotherapy technique</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The original use of the term
‘client-centered therapy’ was devised by Carl Rogers. <st1:city w:st="on">Rogers</st1:city> is a towering figure in the history of
psychotherapy. He pioneered university
student counseling centers. He is
rightly seen as a father of humanistic psychology, the human potential
movement, and self-help psychology.
Forgive for a moment the fact that the term ‘self’, which is in
profligate currency today was not nearly so popular when he did his work, and
its use in this blog has really not been set up and defined. Suffice it to say that in the late 1800’s
when psychology was getting formally organized as an academic discipline, there
was no such term in clinical currency. Sigmund Freud, who regarded our conscious notions
of ourselves as highly suspect manifestations of internal conflicts over
frightening and often immoral unconscious impulses, was at great pains to avoid
using any term in his model of the mind that assigned explanatory power to the
patients’ conscious ideas about themselves or their condition. And one of the great insights to be derived
from the study of modern social psychology is just how systematically distorted
and unreliable our conscious self-representations tend to be.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTZw32AnEs4WZDFON20SwccI0JaWAvCL5vgWYzxWOTFqj5f9ylBYGDb4ovAtpx8Pmhv3ovi22pByXeO6p-K3x0z0jBFFuGnlVHG1_6p8L3vO_IdOb8Yw6VV3dqdpDgCzHaew99ju3KAQTw/s1600/desitorted+self+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTZw32AnEs4WZDFON20SwccI0JaWAvCL5vgWYzxWOTFqj5f9ylBYGDb4ovAtpx8Pmhv3ovi22pByXeO6p-K3x0z0jBFFuGnlVHG1_6p8L3vO_IdOb8Yw6VV3dqdpDgCzHaew99ju3KAQTw/s400/desitorted+self+image.jpg" width="342" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"Mirror mirror on the wall..." Self-image is not always very accurate!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There are countless
examples: anorexics think they are fat;
fat people think they are thinner than they are. We believe we are more
independently-minded than we are when we really act like a herd. We say we will vote one way, then do
something else at the polls, if we even vote at all. We live in an internal <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Lake</st1:placetype></st1:place>
<st1:city w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Woebegone</st1:placename></st1:city></st1:placetype></st1:city>
where the pies are tastier, the kids are all above average, and our own errors
look minor in comparison to the same errors committed by others. We are fearful of and more averse to loss
than we admit to ourselves, often paying excessive costs to avoid having to
accept inevitable losses. Our perception
of risk is extremely distorted, we fear air travel more than extensive
commutes, jihadists more than bathtubs, and think attractive sexual partners
are less likely to carry STIs than less glamorous ones. All of this until we become depressed, at
which point our view of the external world becomes more realistic at the
expense of self-vilification. These
insights and more await the serious student of social psychology, yet we revere
Carl Rogers for his founding work in humanistic psychology -- all built on the foundation of the self.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUKcdm0kSOSUUOyROCqt5M8Pauw3MYR5mD6OE4SiEGhPy1OlzWLECYp25eoABuf6_jdwu_226fiCVV8Vu3IdC0z3uxAEE473qDDUSfPKYmDbcRDXgb3GLomJvJURjS-lNWbRCVdoKcB5An/s1600/Otto+Rank.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUKcdm0kSOSUUOyROCqt5M8Pauw3MYR5mD6OE4SiEGhPy1OlzWLECYp25eoABuf6_jdwu_226fiCVV8Vu3IdC0z3uxAEE473qDDUSfPKYmDbcRDXgb3GLomJvJURjS-lNWbRCVdoKcB5An/s400/Otto+Rank.jpg" width="318" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Otto Rank (1884-1939) A psychoanalyst who worked closely with Freud, but later broke with him over how emotions were handled in Freud's theories. He was an important influence on Carl Rogers.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Rogers studied under Otto Rank,
who for 20 pivotal years between the 1900’s and mid-twenties, served as Sigmund
Freud’s right-hand man and as secretary to the newly founded International
Psychoanalytic Association. In 1924,
Rank wrote “Trauma of Birth” to address two perceived weaknesses in Freud’s
theories. The first, was over-emphasis
on the explanatory power of the Oedipus complex, and the other was the lack of
a here-and-now language for emotions. Rank
thought Freud’s theory was too abstract and not grounded enough in the language
of clients. Rogers<span style="font-size: 10.6667px; line-height: 11.4133px;"> </span>was especially concerned about this latter
weakness in psychoanalysis, and compensated for the highly elaborate theory of
psychoanalysis with being grounded in the present in consultation with his
patients.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Despite all the examples I
provided about the flaws in our self-conceptions, the idea of self was at the
center of Rogers’s theory. After Freud,
he was among the most influential clinicians of the twentieth century, and his
approach was much more grounded in the American cultural experience than
Freud’s. Roger’s felt that whatever
misconceptions clients might have acquired about themselves, the clinician
could gain enough insight to be helpful by staying empathetically grounded in the
session, by being supportive, striving to accurately reflect back the
emotionality of what the patient was saying.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Rogers also came to believe that
unconditional positive regard for the client was an essential part of the
healing experience. While Freud argued
that neutrality was important in therapy, and spoke of positive and negative
transference feelings as grist for the mill of therapeutic work, Rogers
insisted that the counter-transference be kept positive. There has been great intellectual debate
about whether such positive feelings are curative in and of themselves, or
whether they are even realistically possible at all. One can practice in a
client-centered way without suspending all judgment about the client. But Freud
would have seen this as a dangerous loophole in the therapeutic contract when
the analyst’s feelings were in danger of biasing the clinical conception of the
client.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">An Emerald Tree Boa. Nothing to be afraid of!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The benefits of unconditional
positive regard, rather than excessive identification with or sympathy for the
client, or of too much neutrality, is that it promotes an emotional state with
the fewest possible barriers to empathizing with the client’s experience of
their narrative in treatment. If Rogers
was correct that this is crucial for effective therapeutic interventions, the
therapist’s theoretical sophistication, training, accountability to
professional peers, and such must not serve as barriers to understanding the
client’s emotional world. One does not
need a snake phobia to treat a client with a fear of snakes, but not only must
the therapists not be too afraid of snakes to sit still listening to the
client’s hair-raising tales of snake horror, but so too must not take flight
into the very reasonable scientific insight that non-poisonous snakes are
rarely harmful and that poisonous ones are rarely encountered. Anyone who has treated a phobic client knows
how unhelpful it is to make the cognitive behaviorally accurate observation
that such feared objects are rarely genuinely dangerous, and certainly not
proportionately dangerous to phobic levels of terror. Indeed, such clients have repeatedly been
told that snakes can’t hurt them, and present for treatment with their phobia’s
undiminished despite all the good advice.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQAX6Xmp3KdudNZmNDzyo88Gffnylv4iuPHGk-OlyxA5L45N5ubMQYanUGl31QrWYMAXZhIZAgVSKXFIxcXRuCS6xO4Px0gVkmf1ZyFUWr-pIaXCGzH75ZYqfEnjS3ZhthU2UpUShDgQgP/s1600/Gary+Larson%2527s+Dog%2527s+hear.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQAX6Xmp3KdudNZmNDzyo88Gffnylv4iuPHGk-OlyxA5L45N5ubMQYanUGl31QrWYMAXZhIZAgVSKXFIxcXRuCS6xO4Px0gVkmf1ZyFUWr-pIaXCGzH75ZYqfEnjS3ZhthU2UpUShDgQgP/s640/Gary+Larson%2527s+Dog%2527s+hear.jpg" width="520" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alas, this classic Gary Larson cartoon is not just characteristic of canines. <br />It applies all too well to us.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">These problems of fighting off
the client’s difficult feelings are particularly serious when treating kink
because one of the distinguishing characteristics of kink ethos is to embrace
the very feelings that conventional people fear. Ugliness, aggression, apparent violence,
pain, power imbalance, bondage, slavery, anxiety, gender role blurring and
reversal, sexual objectification, even ‘evil’ are sometimes ‘played’ with in
kink, and they often do not have the same meanings in kink that they have in
the larger society. For example, with a
kinky client might talk about undergoing a sundance ritual in which they are
painfully partially suspended by hooks inserted in their pectorals. Just listening to their description would
require tolerance for fears of such intense feeling. But while you can imagine what intense
feeling you would have in that situation, you might find the feelings your
client has are very different indeed. Even
another person who went through that ritual – even one who is kinky in a
different way, may find they have fundamentally different reasons than those
driving your client! In client-centered
therapy, it will be important for you to identify and empathize with their
meaning over your own. (Indeed, this is one of my reasons for arguing that a
therapist need not be kinky to treat kinky clients. Not only is kink so diverse, a kinky
therapist is not going to be able to enjoy the wide diversity of activities the
way their entire caseload will, but their embrace of any single activity may or
may not be all that similar to the enthusiasm of a client with similar
preferences.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The therapist also needs to be
tolerant of ambivalent feelings, and to be careful to not prematurely take
sides in a client’s conflict about whether they love or hate such intense
experiences. In the past, therapists
have often made the mistake of interpreting the conventional side of such
ambivalence as ‘healthy’ and the kinky side as ‘pathological’. Even where such ambivalence is directly
identified by the client as a key part of the therapeutic contract that is
driving the treatment, it is premature and unwise to arrive at such a judgment
without fully empathizing with the client’s feelings about multiple sides of
the conflict, and allowing the client to arrive at their own conclusions about
how such ambivalence can be tolerated or resolved.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It has been gently argued in this
blog that the unifying dimension of most BDSM activity is power exchange,
although no single dynamic is universal to all participants. The essence of client-centered therapy is,
following the sage advice of Vigorito and Braun-Harvey, protecting the client
from casual exercise of the inherent professional powers of the therapist. The social conventions of therapy rely on the
context of professional services: we seek counsel with an expert in some
technical specialty in which we lack knowledge or detached objectivity. This empowers our doctor, lawyer, or
financial advisor to tell us things we cannot know directly. But flawed individual clients, in conflict
about the meanings and consequences of their own behavior, bring to
psychotherapy a rich history of past experiences and an inner world in which we
therapists lack the special knowledge base that tax lawyers and orthodontists
have. Our special process expertise,
which the vast majority of our clients lack, and our capacity for detachment --
which is conventionally valued, but brings special challenges as well as
observational power and perspective -- may or may not work to advantage in an
intimate therapeutic situation. We can
know about all those risks of self-reflection I have cited from social
psychology, but clients seeking our expertise come in a vulnerable position of
power imbalance. We exaggerate that
vulnerability by assuming conventional assumptions<span class="MsoCommentReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></span> that we are the experts.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKV8JXONNF45QlW3IwPFUKEy3Lt5TGhxUnbO4MPGED37VNshklrp2p9miMsJgIguJqYUE9oxb7ZketpflUtzWkOKJP-M15XjbsQZBPvqFp734zkxC-XfpMb0UiIxj5cJqagu-xLnYRL2Gt/s1600/Indiana+Jones+and+Snakes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKV8JXONNF45QlW3IwPFUKEy3Lt5TGhxUnbO4MPGED37VNshklrp2p9miMsJgIguJqYUE9oxb7ZketpflUtzWkOKJP-M15XjbsQZBPvqFp734zkxC-XfpMb0UiIxj5cJqagu-xLnYRL2Gt/s400/Indiana+Jones+and+Snakes.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Indiana Jones: "Snakes! Why does it always have to be snakes?"<br />Actually, Indy, Cobras are fairly dangerous.<br />From Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As in the previous example of the
ophidiophobe who was not cured by all manner of mundane assurances that snakes
aren’t all that dangerous, somehow, all the ‘good’ rewards cues, norms and
incentives of conventionality have not rendered our client’s kinks irrelevant
and depleted them of meaning or satisfaction.
Many clients present in therapy after having experienced powerful social
sanctions for their kinks. They imagine
that they would be better school board members, aunts, sex partners, or
athletes without these temptations.
Perhaps they have already lost jobs, friends, lovers, or harmonious
relations with their families because of them.
So we risk repeating the same old mistakes conventionality makes if we
cannot understand why those conventions did not work for our clients.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sometimes therapy is just the place
for the power exchange a client may crave, in which they get to be neither tops
nor bottoms, but fully co-equal participants.
For a few, this may be therapeutic in and of itself, but at minimum it
is a novelty that they must explain to themselves, and this may hold out
methods for applying insight that can undergird genuine life changes. All that is impossible if we collude with
society or the client in pretending that we are powerful experts with special
knowledge that the client lacks and they need to submit to our advice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of the discomforts that our
refusal to cloak ourselves in traditional professional power dynamics may hold
for the client is that, frightened, anguished and confused about the conflicts
in their life, our confrontation of the wish for the security of having someone
more ‘qualified’ to do the work for them feels abandoning and scary. After all, if we do not know more than they
do, why are they paying us a large fee?
When they go to the orthopedic surgeon, they do not expect the surgeon
to ask for their uninformed opinion about whether joint replacement is
needed. Actually, better professionals
of all stripes do actively draw the client into contracting for treatment and
take care that treatment decisions are informed and made on a participatory
basis, rather than coming down as professional diktats. In psychotherapy, like BDSM play, consent
based on mutual communication needs to be alive moment-to-moment in the
treatment, and that makes the client more directly responsible for the
treatment than many people are used to experiencing. Seasoned members of BDSM communities and poly
relationships may be very sophisticated about this from the moment they arrive
for treatment. Clients with low social
skills, poor affective control, and who are bringing lots of social isolation
and/or romantic idealization to treatment are likely to be much less
comfortable with the implications of client-centered technique. Client-centered therapists are experienced at
confronting the dynamic in which clients come in, flop down in the consultation
chair and say “fix me!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Likewise, client’s may experience
hopelessness that, after long and painful confrontation from some bind in their
lives that touches on their kink, that they will achieve new insight in therapy
that has eluded them in social discussion and private introspection. Partly, this hopelessness is a reflection of
just how distorted we can all be as mirrors for ourselves, and how difficult it
can be to reexamine our own assumptions with fresh eyes. But it can also be hard for clients who have
experienced social stigma outside the therapy not to anticipate it from within,
and it is not uncommon for Kink Aware Professionals to hear stories of other
therapies that lend credence to such feelings.
But being deeply listened too and reflecting together on how one talks
about one’s inner experience often does lead to new insight, and can lead to
supporting behavioral changes that are based on that new knowledge. In all cases, the feeling of being understood
and accepted that client-centered techniques promote bolsters the likelihood
that such insights will be transformative, not just intellectualizations that
fail to change.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For Rogers. many of the most
deepening and powerful insights were promoted by verbal reflection of the
client by the therapist. He is the
father of applied active listening techniques.
And this lead to a powerful and ironic social experiment that still
resonates today in the world of ‘artificial intelligence’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Back in 1964, the famous computer
scientist Joseph Wiesenbaum invented a computer program called ELIZA, after
George Bernard Shaw’s flower girl protagonist who language professor Henry
Higgins contrives to pass off as an aristocrat on the basis of reforming her language,
dress and deportment alone. Following
the guidance of Alan Turing’s famous test that an artificial intelligence would
be ‘real’ if it was indistinguishable from human communication, Wiesenbaum
contrived to build a simple program to implement active listening technique by
simple implementation of syntax rules.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjewGTFYhqoocZOLL6sw4unnqvrikWhzsBBtuc_sNUOoEi4249ESNVdCDML_jkN1k8KfgpYhs_g5u7Ol6S9RxJyM6T17s0ojt6s-_qbkR1IFF4-4cfB3AVkL5CehS0_Z7QxUZKizeWOP-KC/s1600/Audrey+Hepburn+as+Eliza+Doolittle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjewGTFYhqoocZOLL6sw4unnqvrikWhzsBBtuc_sNUOoEi4249ESNVdCDML_jkN1k8KfgpYhs_g5u7Ol6S9RxJyM6T17s0ojt6s-_qbkR1IFF4-4cfB3AVkL5CehS0_Z7QxUZKizeWOP-KC/s640/Audrey+Hepburn+as+Eliza+Doolittle.jpg" width="506" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.<br />Getting Audrey Hepburn to pass doesn't seem that challenging, in retrospect!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ELIZA would analyze the typed
sentences of the human participant for key words, and then frame queries that
repeated those key words. Often this
felt like a deepening of the conversation, as ELIZA appeared interested in the
most significant and affect-laden words.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ELIZA: How are you today, Russell?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">client: I feel bad. It has been a hard week!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ELIZA: A hard week?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Client: Yes, I’m very anxious about the upcoming
exam.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ELIZA: Can you say more about the exam?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Client: Yeah, the last one was quite difficult and I
only did OK on it. It is really
important that I do well in this test.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ELIZA: Tell me more about the test?.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The program was not capable of
rendering interpretations, so long conversations could, at times, become
circular. At no point would it break in
and suggest the I might manage my test anxiety with well-tested self-calming
techniques, an intervention that any good cognitive behavioral therapist would
eventually suggest when they felt they had a pretty good handle on why I was
stressed enough about the test to devote this attention to it in session.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The ELIZA program raises
significant questions about how we know we are understood and what empathy
really means, but there is no question that back in the 1960’s when computing
power was very limited and programs needed to be very simple, the observed fact
was that people who played around with ELIZA often marveled at how ‘real’ and
deep their conversations felt. For
comparison purposes, the reader is referred to my previous coverage of bots and
the Ashley Madison site’s exploitation of men looking for affairs with married
women <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2015/08/romantic-idealization-betrayal-and-free.html">Romantic Idealization and Betrayal</a> and <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-epistemology-of-lies.html">The Epistemology of Lies</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The reader may wish to experience
Eliza directly at the following site:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <a href="http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3">http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You will find ELIZA is easy to
trick, and do not expect much if you try to draw her into a conversation about
the Turing Test. Like the hoary old joke
about the dancing bear, the miracle is
not in her fancy footwork, but that she appears to be dancing at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Client-centered therapy and
unconditional positive regard, to be effective, need to be more than automatic
reflexive mirroring. The example that the behaviors of active listening and
unconditional positive regard can be aped by a computer program is another
example in a long string of stories on this blog that behavior has limited
intrinsic meaning and that its context is crucial in the interpretation of a
behavior’s significance. But it is also
true that, for clients who do not understand themselves fully and expect others
to be judging and dismissive, genuine empathy re-contexts how they listen to
themselves, and makes them look at their insights about themselves in new
ways. And in that sense, a therapist can
practice any psychotherapeutic orientation more effectively by advising less,
reflecting more, suspending moral judgment and promoting articulation from the
client about all of the client’s different perspectives on the problems brought
them to treatment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">© Russell J Stambaugh, March 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></div>
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Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-61432804659256378722016-03-14T12:35:00.000-07:002016-03-15T07:22:59.625-07:00The Son of the Bride of Spanner Returns: Part II<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Judge Rules You Have No Right to BDSM”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixmtnpPU-RdUf-XdcHgQVPgk9zGCUc0IZEpYOhSCDPANkbmHl9Sly9bGkF4xc7uBQychgbb9h6ShKeNCwQyd9V8Tmwk2E8KmGe92xgBWiBv38vDvxoGiB0rfL_Xe6CSDJFup0xy2wpGBc3/s1600/Alien.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixmtnpPU-RdUf-XdcHgQVPgk9zGCUc0IZEpYOhSCDPANkbmHl9Sly9bGkF4xc7uBQychgbb9h6ShKeNCwQyd9V8Tmwk2E8KmGe92xgBWiBv38vDvxoGiB0rfL_Xe6CSDJFup0xy2wpGBc3/s400/Alien.jpg" width="341" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Almost Bedtime for Ripley in <i>Alien (1979)</i></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We all know the horror movie trope. We are nearing the end of the final reel, and
the menace has finally been disposed of.
Sigourney Weaver and Jones the cat are about to bed down to nice cozy
cryo-sleep when, ‘She’s baaack!’ The
alien uncoils from hiding and we get to sweat through a final desperate
battle. And on that basis, we are
treated to an unending series of prequels, sequels, and spin-offs intended to
milk our tolerance for excessive self-stimulation until we are as dry as the
husk of the Alien’s midnight snack. Tell
me it isn’t so! Spanner isn’t back?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSdaC4DtNp4EKGr2hJyj2C3Zk0mJkhsu40b6wyRCAnH5QQZCFDgxUorRwpV88SrHIrq3oRQ-duGMozDfIca4yFGL7YGCiM7bgUjjNwktdWkrmdh80iRKS-5YcBk5sgTjFLtvXw9G63NkVa/s1600/Sigourney-Weaver-Alien-5-559248.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSdaC4DtNp4EKGr2hJyj2C3Zk0mJkhsu40b6wyRCAnH5QQZCFDgxUorRwpV88SrHIrq3oRQ-duGMozDfIca4yFGL7YGCiM7bgUjjNwktdWkrmdh80iRKS-5YcBk5sgTjFLtvXw9G63NkVa/s400/Sigourney-Weaver-Alien-5-559248.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Miss me?</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Readers who know their kink history, or have simply have
read the earlier blogpost on Elephant about <a href="http://elephantinthehottub.blogspot.com/2013/05/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html">Operation Spanner</a>, know the importance of the case in the organization of BDSM in Britain and the U S. But they couldn’t have been pleased to see
the Federal Court of the Eastern District of Virginia asserted<b> “There is no basis to conclude that tying up a willing
submissive sex partner and subjecting him or her to whipping, chocking, or
other forms of domination is deeply rooted in the nation’s history and
traditions or implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”</b> The argument that consent is no defense
against assault was precisely at issue in Spanner, and this looks like that
argument all over again. It seems we are
going to have to sit through a bad sequel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">First, let’s briefly review the original horror show, which derived
its title from Scotland Yard’s – the British equivalent of our FBI -- investigation,
‘Operation Spanner’, of an alleged ‘snuff’ film back in 1987. Local police had found a gay kinkster’s
erotica collection which included a videotape of genital torture. Never having seen anything like it before,
they presumed that the scene was coercive and part of torturing someone to
death and a huge and expensive investigation was launched. It culminated in Scotland Yard swooping down
on a local group’s play party and 16 gay men were arrested. When the stunned authorities learned that all
the action was consensual, and the original film was for private use, the
prosecutors were thrown into disarray.
After 21 months of hemming and hawing, the prosecutors declared that the
participants had no right to consent to assault, which was criminal under
British statues as it is in the US. They
went ahead with the prosecution. All 16 either
plead to the charges, or were tried and sentenced to several years in prison while
the case wended its way through the appeals process. This culminated in a special panel appointed
by the House of Lords which serves as the British Supreme Court, which ruled
3-2 that consent was indeed no defense against criminal assault charges. The case was eventually referred to the
European Union’s Court of Human Rights, where member nations unanimously voted
that Britain was not violating human rights principles to criminalize assault
and to disallow consent as a defense.
The net legal result: BDSM that involves significant sensation play
remains illegal in Great Britain to this day.
That is a genuinely horrific outcome to be sure!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjidJuKanuM7xRT-zW0hZ4HLQgQ7n0MoBvfEOhJBUugLfqN2cnoAARAwrUBEswP5d_PKYRTt3ST4MfH74la1Xt_RBjtTpYGsGZX-ZmQu8lgRKRi3grSDmYpokNOzHZLUNlw3M-t4AeEGufc/s1600/VT+massacre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjidJuKanuM7xRT-zW0hZ4HLQgQ7n0MoBvfEOhJBUugLfqN2cnoAARAwrUBEswP5d_PKYRTt3ST4MfH74la1Xt_RBjtTpYGsGZX-ZmQu8lgRKRi3grSDmYpokNOzHZLUNlw3M-t4AeEGufc/s400/VT+massacre.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Virginia Tech shooting tragedy in 2007 led to George Mason University's efforts to improve campus safety.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Our sequel begins with a relationship gone bad between two anonymous
parties, non-student Jane Roe, who entered into the problematical relationship with
plaintiff and George Mason University student John Doe. In 2012, Doe came to the attention of
University when a dorm resident adviser reported him for consensually carving ‘Kill
Them’ into Roe’s knuckles with a pen knife in his dorm room. Referred to the Campus Assistance and Intervention
Team (CAIT) designed to investigate possible threats to campus safety in the wake of
the tragic Virginia Tech shooting, Doe was on George Mason University’s radar as a potential safety threat thereafter.
He accumulated additional interventions for minor offenses that had
nothing to do with his relationship with Roe, before he committed an alleged
safeword violation and Roe decided to terminate the relationship in 2014. At this point, Doe repeatedly and non-consensually
contacted Roe, who eventually complained of his behavior to campus officials
following receipt of a text message threatening to shoot himself if she
declined to respond.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">At this point, George Mason University CAIT officials began
proceedings to remove Doe from the University as a threat. Despite the CAIT eventually deciding that
discipline should not include expulsion, a higher level administrator took over
and ruled against Doe, committing alleged due process violations in the process
of expelling him. Doe sued, complaining
of the due process violations, and argued that his behavior was proper within a
BDSM sub-cultural context. The university
and Doe appealed for opposing summary judgements.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMMLyN2IS7EWozhfNq9khAeJgNL6DcCEOjAwLP7JRsqGxaLkCOvIOXCyIkMQrHfidH6Oubq3oZxM8AyAlWjjtzwWWTbnjg5ZmXukIFpoJSsxYk_YalCagtmLiSgCvSYbD9oP58gDM-YWLr/s1600/160px-Virginia-eastern.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMMLyN2IS7EWozhfNq9khAeJgNL6DcCEOjAwLP7JRsqGxaLkCOvIOXCyIkMQrHfidH6Oubq3oZxM8AyAlWjjtzwWWTbnjg5ZmXukIFpoJSsxYk_YalCagtmLiSgCvSYbD9oP58gDM-YWLr/s1600/160px-Virginia-eastern.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Enter at this point, the villain of this piece, Judge T C
Ellis III of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of
Virginia. Harvard and Oxford University
trained, he was a naval aviator during the Vietnam War era and a Ronald Regan
appointee back in 1987, and is now Senior Judge on the Eastern District
bench. A clear thinker and articulate
writer, he is a strict constructionist, citing jurists like Antony Scalia as
his inspiration in disposing of <i>Doe vs
Rector and Visitors to George Mason University</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEh4IzU3nMwXpdXgMjCavbiiIkrEtT0PuZYc9eLHgtgwahAkKTJqge24VtNuxOrtD_dVGzjWDYfRVfr4-90LK_0q1Nl75eMWYm0xRR9un3GA9Xf3Rj7lq3JXvNDg2zgcmfPKAZmjmjbqlt/s1600/Scalia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEh4IzU3nMwXpdXgMjCavbiiIkrEtT0PuZYc9eLHgtgwahAkKTJqge24VtNuxOrtD_dVGzjWDYfRVfr4-90LK_0q1Nl75eMWYm0xRR9un3GA9Xf3Rj7lq3JXvNDg2zgcmfPKAZmjmjbqlt/s400/Scalia.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States (1936-2016). Appointed by Ronald Regan, he served from 1986-2016. An originalist and textualist conservative, he was an intellectual leader of the court's right wing and a leader to many like Judge Ellis.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The bulk of the Judge Ellis’s ruling focuses on the due
process issues and he cogently finds plenty of fault with the George Mason
University, especially after the case was removed from the hands of the CAIT after
it found too little evidence of safety threat to the community to remove Mr.
Doe despite his obnoxious conduct toward Ms. Roe. For example, the Judge saw clearly that penalizing
Doe for complaints of suicidal ideation had no direct benefit to the safety of
the community, instead acting as a deterrent to the reporting and resolution of
real safety threats. But the ruling,
while irrelevant to the standing of BDSM, does give uncomfortable guidance to university
administrators who are charged under Title IX with trying to protect vulnerable
intersectional minorities from non-consensual conduct on campus. Ill prepared to investigate rape and consent
misunderstandings in the freewheeling environment surrounding the academy,
administrators need to have careful procedures for ensuring the rights of the
accused. Judge Ellis’s ruling is likely
to set precedent and greatly inconvenience those efforts despite Doe’s record
of clearly undesirable conduct.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The potential threat to BDSM comes in the opinion’s short
third section, and proposes that a high bar be set to ‘ordered liberties’ that
merit constitutional protection. As
irritating as Judge Ellis’ opinions maybe to those of us who believe private
personal conduct merits constitutional protection, the plaintiff’s claim that
he faced discrimination due to failure to recognize his sub-cultural identity
and values is too weak for the attack on BDSM to gain much legal traction. Doe was hardly acting on a basis of
continuously communicated consent as advocated by the BDSM community. His BDSM conduct might well have been
permitted and not formed the basis of any discrimination had he kept it private,
and he was having difficulty adhering to other George Mason University rules
besides those relating to his relationship problems that provoked institutional
over-reaction. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgNZNZaP_U_eyId3YoygNExsM6ka51iwOnXvIiR9Nx_8HQ0ojfAgpBkWScSFGIa0NhIji5eClSlFfIX5hPQgJtOQiaEzASOQzRO2wFTkVHgkNLmQsvPTr7KMl3YVytqJVmXOCHz6-oXiu1/s1600/Etruscans+BDSM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgNZNZaP_U_eyId3YoygNExsM6ka51iwOnXvIiR9Nx_8HQ0ojfAgpBkWScSFGIa0NhIji5eClSlFfIX5hPQgJtOQiaEzASOQzRO2wFTkVHgkNLmQsvPTr7KMl3YVytqJVmXOCHz6-oXiu1/s400/Etruscans+BDSM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Etruscans at play circa 700BCE. "It was a typical case of blind justice, and the judge wasn't going to look" A. Guthrie</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ellis’ attack on BDSM must needs be circuitous, by
suggesting that BDSM does not deserve the same kinds of protections offered homosexual
conduct in the United States Supreme Court’s landmark <i>Lawrence v Texas</i> (2003) decision.
In this attempt to limit
applicability, Ellis takes a strict constructionist stance following <i>Washington v Glucksberg</i> that in order to
merit protection, an activity needs to be “deeply rooted in the nation’s
history and traditions, and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” I suspect that, for Ellis, homosexuality,
despite a long history would lack standing as a protected class under the
criteria used in <i>Washington v Glucksberg</i>,
but that BDSM definitely does not because of the risks associated with physical
harm from assault. Although BDSM has a
long and varied human history, Ellis is arguing here that it lacks significant
standing in American cultural history for kinksters to be a protected class
with a history of unjustified discrimination that requires judicial
acknowledgement for possible protection or redress. This, it should be noted, is a variant of the
strategy of state legislatures that are trying to re-criminalize sodomy for all
citizens as a method of dodging the argument that they are discriminating
against homosexuals. This is a
ridiculous argument, in that homosexuals do not have access to the narrow
definition of permissible acts available to heterosexuals if oral, anal, and
inanimate means are barred to all. While
I am certain the Judge Ellis would not be citing the Marquis de Sade or Pauline
Réage, cultural history, even of an American institution like the Folsom Street
Fair if he was familiar with them, they are not relevant to the kind of
tradition he is referencing in his opinion here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAnSS2oT39-FTBM2BA7PAQo78JsfgYTa6TkZRqWdSCkWp9beOjDRcVRcuVftzOI-yVymd7Xi7CtDJVVr3ysRdHKWwlotqc_40FjCzhH5sDEoC7VU4Qf819qdMGhniXPkxBMh-T7GXJYNpN/s1600/NCSF+logo.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="124" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAnSS2oT39-FTBM2BA7PAQo78JsfgYTa6TkZRqWdSCkWp9beOjDRcVRcuVftzOI-yVymd7Xi7CtDJVVr3ysRdHKWwlotqc_40FjCzhH5sDEoC7VU4Qf819qdMGhniXPkxBMh-T7GXJYNpN/s320/NCSF+logo.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom NCSF) has issued public
statement that, holding no power to set precedent, this judicial pontification
constitutes dictum; the judicial equivalent of an empty gesture. On BDSM, it is an opinion, not a ruling. George
Mason University might appeal the case, but can only do so on the grounds they
lost, about the due process concerns. Doe
who, won the summary judgment he requested, cannot appeal the part of the case
he disagrees with because he won. So
legal argument about the standing of BDSM is not going anywhere from this legal
dead end. So the monster is disposed of,
right?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From a strictly legal point of view, this is surely right,
but from a social constructionist view, this is not a very reassuring
discourse. This is not a real horror
story like Spanner was, just a flimsy sequel.
Still, it contains harmful messages that deserve some education. For example:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Interested
people might decline to explore their kink desires because the behavior of Doe
in this story suggests that some BDSM practitioners aren’t very safe to play
with.</i> This is true as far as it
goes. It is very important to stay
connected with a community and use your scene relationships to protect against
a rogue practitioner like Mr. Doe.
Conventional people have trouble letting go when relationships end, so
this part of the story is far from unique to kink. But they might have an easier time availing themselves
of conventional resources when relationships go badly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Interested
people might decline to explore their kinky desires because they have no
constitutional protections, and institutional responses to kink might be
discriminatory.</i> Sexual rights aren’t
well protected under the Constitution, but institutional responses are becoming
less discriminatory. You are safer now
than pioneers in the field were 40 years ago.
And how you vote matters a great deal.
The judge in this case is a great admirer of the very conservative Supreme
Court Justice Antonin Scalia who just died, and the Obama administration and Republican
led Senate are fighting over his replacement.
Your vote might influence how this conflict gets resolved. But <i>Lawrence v Texas, </i>as little as strict constructionists may like it, protects against moral judgments like Judge Ellis would like to make. Kinky folk retain all the protections they had prior to this opinion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>It
might be hard to expel troublesome people who do not adhere to a BDSM social organization’s
rules. Look at the difficulties George Mason
University faced. Maybe my local BDSM
group couldn’t get rid of a bad apple very easily</i>. <b>That is basically false.</b> BDSM social organizations are private clubs and have to clear a
much lower bar to expel troublesome members than universities do. It is a
very good idea to for groups to have a code of conduct in place and for new members to learn
those rules and use them for their protection, but violators are easy to expel from private clubs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>BDSM
isn’t very safe and yet neither is it possible to get much protection under the
law if I try things conventional people think are risky</i>. This is also partly true. But your protection in matters sexual is not primarily a matter of law, but comes from communication. Relative to conventional behaviors, you do
need to educate, inform, protect yourself and take primary responsibility for
your kinky decisions. But because of the diversity of interests in kink and the importance of continuous and on-going consent, there is much stronger support for communication in kink than many conventional relationships. Kink is stigmatized,
and the worst part of this court decision is that it isn’t helping to make kink
seem safer or more acceptable, but it doesn't make it more dangerous.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>The
court makes people think they have no right to private sexual conduct that is
outside some narrow set of conventional norms.</i> Right on!
The Constitution does not actually directly protect any sexual behavior,
conventional or not, but public perception does matter. Your best protections are to keep your
private behavior private. Doe did not do
this here. Additional protection can come from acting collectively to show
that conventional thinking about BDSM is incorrect. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>If
I try to get help for my problems, instead of assistance, I might be subject to
discrimination like Doe was.</i> We don’t
know that much about Doe from this very sketchy summary of his case, but it is
impossible to rule out the possibility that prejudice against kink contributed
to this messy story of well-intentioned administrators mistreating a troubled
kinkster. NCSF maintains a list of Kink
Aware Professionals to help you find sophisticated and non-judgmental
professionals if you need help to protect yourself from these kinds of
misunderstandings. Kink Aware Professionals are not readily available in all areas of the country, nor equally represented across all professions, however.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">These observations are my poor substitute for a dramatic
final confrontation with the Spanner menace.
They are the equivalent of those internet rules about how not to behave
in a horror movie if you want to last to the final reel. But the legacy of Spanner is still with
us. Some of that legacy is bad, like the
media over-reaction to this case, but Spanner’s legacy is more complex.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Not long after the 1997 Human Rights Court decision in Strasbourg
cementing Britain’s ruling that consent was no defense, Scotland Yard recognized
that their relationship with the British kinky gay community was in shambles. They began programs to cooperate with the
community so that the community would not shun them when Scotland Yard had
serious crimes that needed investigation and they needed community help to
protect community people. While BDSM is
still unnecessarily risky in Britain today, the police are much more culturally
competent than 30 years ago.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Another part of Spanner’s legacy is that kinksters, gay and heterosexuals
alike, realized that they needed to get much better organized to protect
against this kind of discrimination. The
Spanner Trust was started, and money goes to kink charities and organizing from
events like Folsom Street Fair, The NELA Flee, and Southwest Leather. You can fight decisions like this by giving
to those organizations and to NCSF! Although leather activism did not begin with NCSF, it formally launched in 1997 as part of the increase in social organization caused in part by Spanner.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsAysBdbj_GVv-8r37XGCu8F9UAW2dCHrLb1HmIdwOjxfUJkORqCsW6giYNwsWiQ0banrNGXkxEjryinWejjz8qjsKm20WqA3LiLF9uYK7MepiooKnT5Tqvr_RJB8GZP4f4Vw3vaJER3LG/s1600/DVforeplay.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsAysBdbj_GVv-8r37XGCu8F9UAW2dCHrLb1HmIdwOjxfUJkORqCsW6giYNwsWiQ0banrNGXkxEjryinWejjz8qjsKm20WqA3LiLF9uYK7MepiooKnT5Tqvr_RJB8GZP4f4Vw3vaJER3LG/s400/DVforeplay.jpg" width="353" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Cute, but it takes serious educational efforts to teach authorities the different signs of kink vs abuse. Unfortunately, there are some relationships that are both kinky and abusive.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Part of the British legal argument against consent was
valid: it is impossible to prosecute
domestic violence cases on either side of the Atlantic if authorities must rely
exclusively on victims’ willingness to prosecute abusers. Victims withdraw consent in large numbers and
cases would collapse if the state did not retain an interest in and the legal
authority to continue prosecutions. Kink
cases are a trivial percentage of police matters relative to domestic violence
calls. Yet BDSM practices and domestic
violence do not present to the authorities in the same way, and, taught to
differentiate consensual BDSM from domestic violence, police can discern the
difference in many instances. Since
1997, NCSF has spent lots of time and energy supporting programs for educating
police on just these points.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Like any proper horror franchise, the struggle isn’t over
when the final credits roll. While we
are not very entertained by this court decision, it is not nearly as scary as
it looks, and there are lots of things you can do to protect yourself and the
BDSM communities, until next time. Until
we have more substantive protections for personal and sexual expression in this
country, there will surely be a next time….<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Select Links:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">NCSF’s press release:
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://ncsfreedom.org/press/blog/item/ncsf-announcement-on-the-george-mason-university-case.html">https://ncsfreedom.org/press/blog/item/ncsf-announcement-on-the-george-mason-university-case.html</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A good legal analysis of the implications: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">http://kinksanity.com/2016/03/12/why-the-george-mason-university-case-ruling-on-bdsm-was-correct/<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Woodhull Foundations Press release: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.woodhullfoundation.org/2016/sex-and-politics/woodhull-speaks-out-on-bdsm-court-decision/">http://www.woodhullfoundation.org/2016/sex-and-politics/woodhull-speaks-out-on-bdsm-court-decision/</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Judge Ellis’ opinion can be found here: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.thefire.org/doe-v-george-mason-university-civ-no-115-cv-00209-e-d-vamostly-feb-25-2016">https://www.thefire.org/doe-v-george-mason-university-civ-no-115-cv-00209-e-d-vamostly-feb-25-2016</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A cute defense of BDSM history from Jill Keenan in Slate,
but not relevant to the use of 'tradition' in the court opinion: <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/03/09/bdsm_isn_t_a_right_due_to_lack_of_history_virginia_court_says.html">Jill Keenan on BDSM history</a><br />
<br />
Richard Cunningham's post on <i>Lawrence v Texas </i>and <i>Doe </i>v <i>George Mason University</i><br />
<a href="https://ncsfreedom.org/press/blog/frontpage.html">NCSF Legal Opinion on Doe v George Mason University</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px; text-align: justify;">© Russell J Stambaugh, January 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span><br />
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Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-65932102794605407062016-01-21T10:33:00.005-08:002016-01-21T19:53:23.351-08:00The Tower of Babel<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu4_oe87k_paiwkfvcrfXnduyqp3N4aH243HBtALzuFPz3FLpCtpGQOfIs8j0LAhEKTqrNPy7kYAIc1-UCFnyVzK4PquD68wlDDlsrnxSVLfLfWqZxHR4avPkcJPWAaEHhnzlMtBnAv6T3/s1600/Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_%2528Vienna%2529_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu4_oe87k_paiwkfvcrfXnduyqp3N4aH243HBtALzuFPz3FLpCtpGQOfIs8j0LAhEKTqrNPy7kYAIc1-UCFnyVzK4PquD68wlDDlsrnxSVLfLfWqZxHR4avPkcJPWAaEHhnzlMtBnAv6T3/s400/Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_%2528Vienna%2529_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Tower of Babel (1564) by Pieter Bruegel the elder, (1525-69)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“And the whole world had one language and of one
speech. And it came to pass as they
journeyed from the east they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they
dwelt there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">They said to one another other, Go to, let us make bricks
and burn them thoroughly. They had brick for stone, and used slime for morter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower,
whose top may reach unto heaven; let us make us a name, lest we be scattered
abroad upon the face of the whole earth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which
the children of men had built.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And the Lord said, “Behold the people is one and they all
have one language; and this they begin to do; now nothing will be restrained
from them, which they have imagined to do. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Go to, let us go down and there confound their language,
that they may not understand one another’s speech.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face
of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Therefore is name the name of it called Babel; because the
Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the
Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Genesis 11:1-9<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is the Biblical creation myth of how all the peoples of
the earth came to speak different languages and cannot understand one another. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From a social constructionist view, this is an essential
story for maintaining the illusion of exceptionalism that allows believers to
know that, despite the fact many people in the world do not speak their
language or share their symbols, believers have special understanding of The
Lord’s lessons and purposes.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But the problem of shared meaning is a great deal broader
and more pervasive than just shared faith.
Cultures and subcultures are established in part to concentrate meanings
and beliefs. They exist in dialectical
relation to one another, and are each in tension with private, idiosyncratic
meanings. Clinicians have one
language. Organized kinksters have
another. Our separate jargons stand in
relation to the larger parent culture that is part of our shared context. Divine intervention is hardly necessary to
cause us difficulties understanding one another.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This essay is going to look at some of those unshared
understandings so that we might better know what the different communities
mean. Sometimes the effects are silly,
like CBT translating as cognitive behavioral therapy in the clinic and cock and
ball torture in the dungeon. The real
opportunities for genuine confusion are minimal given the context. Only the willfully oppositional or the
sarcastic seek to confuse the meanings.
Sometimes its political, like Polynesian activists urging the consensual
non-monogamy community not to infringe on their language by calling polyamory
‘poly.’ The context overlap between Polynesia and polyamory are few and far
between. And sometimes it’s a term like ‘sadism’ which has gone far beyond
specific reference to the practices of the Marquis de Sade, and means a number
of other things across several different contexts.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitHilTjYSyoSBM0aeTSZ_Djb8GQcb7DPSULTu_C9pQWUTgrKtFJLUwwp0CXpGuQqDpvMmIWs7nOuog6AawVPWihlR0RpRNjXsFosFIQffgWxkuvzrDnzrshM8abZ-JBCUV8eq81lo5YVTi/s1600/Pacific_Culture_Areas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitHilTjYSyoSBM0aeTSZ_Djb8GQcb7DPSULTu_C9pQWUTgrKtFJLUwwp0CXpGuQqDpvMmIWs7nOuog6AawVPWihlR0RpRNjXsFosFIQffgWxkuvzrDnzrshM8abZ-JBCUV8eq81lo5YVTi/s400/Pacific_Culture_Areas.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Polynesians settled the eastern areas of the Pacific, mostly in the last 1000 years, through amazing feats of seamanship. Mostly they were not polyamorous!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of the consequences of the close examination and
politicization of these languages is that stigmatized activities or communities
have become very difficult to name satisfactorily, and the low barriers to
participation that the World Wide Web has provided lubricate and publicize
these discussions. Nowhere is that more
evident than in kink, which has undergone a kaleidoscopic array of name
changes. It has been called ‘The Life,
The Scene, The Lifestyle, the Underground, sexual outlaws, S-M, S/M, S&M,
Leather, Leather Sex, Bondage, Bondage and Discipline, Fetish, Sadomasochism,
Love Bondage, and recently, BDSM followed by Kink. Every one of these terms can be challenged on
some basis. Some terms are used by other
subcultures such as prostitution or rock music.
Some are overly specific, or feature only a part of a larger
community. Some are too broad, and leave
boundaries unclear. Some changes have
been advocated to choose less pejorative language, such as the drive to expunge
medical terminology such as ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ from the community’s
identity. Some are efforts to prevent
fragmentation, others are an attempt to exclude. All of this struggle serves as background and
context for individuals who choose to affiliate or not based on how they relate
to and adopt the communities’ language.
The naming “Wheel of Fortune’ has stopped for now at ‘kink’, which is
embraced for its generalism and its connotations in the general culture of
being about minor, relatively non-pejorative difference. It is free of medical baggage. And it avoids privileging traditional kink
activities like sadism, masochism, bondage, leather and fetish over new
activities like steampunk, cosplay, furries, and activities not yet named.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQrer35eX0QaLUYIdQdeCdRvsy1RbYclfp-gleYY9Hnv7pcrs8Fhde4JZnyL14dpVj5nBipDs3RLg6CxLwWKhjajD4bBs7Vyh_5r5OHj71bYTLFbOFApD6XdmekI6kjG9xd2DH6ohhPDiT/s1600/BDSM_logo.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQrer35eX0QaLUYIdQdeCdRvsy1RbYclfp-gleYY9Hnv7pcrs8Fhde4JZnyL14dpVj5nBipDs3RLg6CxLwWKhjajD4bBs7Vyh_5r5OHj71bYTLFbOFApD6XdmekI6kjG9xd2DH6ohhPDiT/s400/BDSM_logo.svg.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The triskelion used as the logo for BDSM,...</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5MxSRSaaltkxuA3rHODZXWT2HNLJExOzDC_UBQVNskBUeqtwWNTQGQWBJh5ty9zlJ6xoHkNzy2LTPYm7TuT4TXeB7D5Ur3RW6GozOIB0f6uzsl61ZRcIKYeDreoOeMp9Cuxi_O-MTyv32/s1600/120px-US-DeptOfTransportation-Seal.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5MxSRSaaltkxuA3rHODZXWT2HNLJExOzDC_UBQVNskBUeqtwWNTQGQWBJh5ty9zlJ6xoHkNzy2LTPYm7TuT4TXeB7D5Ur3RW6GozOIB0f6uzsl61ZRcIKYeDreoOeMp9Cuxi_O-MTyv32/s400/120px-US-DeptOfTransportation-Seal.svg.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The triskelion used as the logo for the US Department of Transportation!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lest the reader conclude that kink community is special in
these naming differences; a theme in this blog is the progression of
understanding about sexual deviations, to paraesthesias, to perversions, to
paraphilias has gone on in the mental health community. These terms all refer to similar things, yet
changes were made to bring them under medical authority, and to attempt to
manage the stigmatizing consequences of diagnosis. Doctors insist that the language is neutral
and scientific, but are nonetheless aware of its iatrogenic consequences, and
they walk a tightrope between privileged understanding, desire to avoid stigma,
and the desire to have their legitimacy accepted by the larger social context
where stigma is prevalent. It turns out
that when the general society is afraid and judgmental about something,
terminology’s meanings drift towards the general consensus. Perversions of reproductive purpose become
moral perversions, and the pejorative properties of the term ‘perversion’ that
led to the adoption of ‘paraphilia’ come to infest the replacement
terminology. In some corners of the
general society, it is not possible to neutralize the language. Stigma fighting through language alone is tricky
business, even when you enjoy medical authority.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Franklin Veaux has created a wonderful glossary of kink and
poly (excuse my use of poly for the more accurate but cumbersome consensual
non-monogamy terminology. In no sense am
I referring to the inhabitants of Polynesia, Melanesia, or Micronesia!). I do not intend to replicate his piece here,
except to mention a few examples that I think busy clinicians mustn’t miss
because many kinky clients are likely to use them.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.xeromag.com/fvbdglossary.html">Franklin Veaux's BDSM Glossary</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">BDSM is sometimes referred to as ‘the scene’, which has the
attractive attribute of being vague and non-specific. Often language is chosen because it
communicates meaning to insiders that are kept opaque to the general
public. Much of this language appears to
be lifted from the language of the stage. ‘Scene’ refers to kink in general,
but ‘scene’ is also roughly synonymous with ‘session’. Kinksters contract to perform scenes, or
‘play’ together. The term ‘play’ means
doing kinky behavior together and is derived from ‘sex play’, even though
players may or may not regard playing as sexual behavior, and may take it very
seriously indeed. Scenes may be planned
in detail, but are generally not scripted in the kind of detail that is
expected in drama or stage plays. They
may or may not involve role play with characters such as Frtiz the Cat,
Pinkachu, or Dracula. In cosplay and
furrie paly, some people deliberately attempt to take the roles of specific
characters, and scripted dialogue sometimes plays a small part in these
scenes. But mostly players play
themselves playing the roles.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPjH5DUUQEYyybgFsFPTK8Ch8fXpFFl7cVmD63ymXqbwOrzYyLHSHUXr2fvHh01VChK-3vG5_ikBpxG5l8PRDm6TPykK8eqrVC43Q_GbSBUPLGH8Bcqy8tSgX67_9QSEzqReJVb0GeOM-r/s1600/furries.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPjH5DUUQEYyybgFsFPTK8Ch8fXpFFl7cVmD63ymXqbwOrzYyLHSHUXr2fvHh01VChK-3vG5_ikBpxG5l8PRDm6TPykK8eqrVC43Q_GbSBUPLGH8Bcqy8tSgX67_9QSEzqReJVb0GeOM-r/s400/furries.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is impossible to download stock photos of cartoon furrie characters because of a serious context problem. Can you spell "Copyright violations!"</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In therapy, the wise clinician asks what the client is
trying to express when certain language is used. What does it reveal, what does it conceal,
and how does this representation stand in relationship to the client’s desires
and self-concept? Sometimes the use of
scene jargon is a test to see how much the clinician knows. Perhaps it is about acceptance, and the
clinician effortlessly understanding the argot is experienced as acceptance, or
even sophistication and actual participation in the underground. Sometimes the jargon is a snow job, an
attempt to veneer over conflicts about which the client is defensive. So clinicians are smart to stay abreast of
the language of sexual minorities they treat.
That context frames how clients express themselves.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sometimes our own language is a thicket, and we do not have
to travel far afield to the titillating world of sexual minorities to confront
a semiotic Gordian knot that requires untangling. Take the terms ‘sadism’, ‘masochism’, and
‘sadomasochism’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sadism had no standing in mental health until the work of
Krafft-Ebing. Then it was used to
characterize sexual desire to harm or humiliate sexual objects. With Freud’s popularization of the
unconscious, however, the desire need not be known by the client, and its
expression became generalized. With sex
in its proper Freudian role as an underlying human motivation, aggression did
not need to be consciously expressed to be sadistic. Furthermore, underlying sadistic motives
could be aggressive towards others: as in traditional sadism, or internalized
towards the client; as in masochism, and it became proper to speak of
sadomasochism. With the id a dark bundle
of socially inappropriate impulses, just about anything could be down there,
and aggression towards others that appeared sadistic on the surface might
express unconscious sadistic or masochistic impulses. So the original idea of sadomasochism, that
sadism and masochism always occurred together somehow, was not remotely based
upon the kind of observations of sexual sadism and masochism carefully recorded
in Krafft-Ebing’s case histories. In
Freud’s view, we are all unconscious switches, alternately wielding and
submitting to the lash as the occasion and internal drive states warrant. None of this bore the slightest relationship
to fluidity of BDSM expression which was then so underground and uncommon as to
be largely unknown to the early 20th century psychiatric profession. Only the most dedicated and open-minded
sexologists, or the kinkiest ones, got access to the underground of their times.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Everything said above about ‘sadism’ applies with equal
force to ‘masochism’. When Freud wrote
later in his career about three kinds of masochism; primary, moral, and
feminine, he thought of all of them as sexual despite the fact that it was
entirely uncommon for any of the three to be observed in direct sexual
expression. For psychology, masochism
generally meant aggression expressed towards the ‘self’, another awkward term
that is used very differently in mundane conversation than in psychology. Indeed, in psychoanalysis, the term ‘self’
had no standing whatever as Freud went to considerable lengths to avoid the
term.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkYHdl0_DQpH4UOKe-frZwIzltneylEgKTzBwq_6eDCoS3toSmu_hWqrJ399b_1xKJnrTC5GWjlc4PqSxqT10bfLTFtnihysMHbGmW3pQJ67upMO5UfwNHh1Qeh1T5UAxS0Sbav5XcJkpP/s1600/Keith+Ledger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkYHdl0_DQpH4UOKe-frZwIzltneylEgKTzBwq_6eDCoS3toSmu_hWqrJ399b_1xKJnrTC5GWjlc4PqSxqT10bfLTFtnihysMHbGmW3pQJ67upMO5UfwNHh1Qeh1T5UAxS0Sbav5XcJkpP/s400/Keith+Ledger.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Heath Ledger's breakthrough performance as The Joker. Although commonly thought of as 'sadistic', The Joker was never depicted as sexually aroused by his psychoticly evil, mean and destructive behaviors. Such motives were way too hot for DC Comics all the way back to Batman's origin in the 30's before the notorious comics code. <br />It scarcely mattered. This pic was from a Business Insider post about how common 'sadism' is in the workplace! PSA: If your boss is the Joker, change your job and your medication immediately!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In kink, ‘sadism’ refers to the preference for inflicting
pain on a consenting subject.
‘Masochist’ refers to the preference for receiving pain. In both cases, the pain in question is likely
to be highly scripted: only certain
pains, inflicted under a limited set of conditions. Nothing stoops a sadist from being
submissive, or a masochist from being dominant, or from being a true algolagniac,
who is turned on by giving or receiving pain.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Algolagniacs sound like switches; persons who are dominant
in some conditions, but submissive in others.
But here any inference about underlying desire gets confounded by role
fulfillment. The ‘Tower of Babel’
problem not only applies to the definitions of words, but to the definitions of
roles. In mundane life, it may be
properly said that most of us are ‘switches, in that we are dominant in some
roles and contexts, and submissives in others.
We rarely see this need to conform in sexualized terms, and this does
not really correspond to switching in a kink community. In kink, there are people who are devoted to
specific power roles, and there are a tremendous number of Veaux’s terms that
refer to the various permutations of top, Dom, and Domme, switch, or sub,
submissive or bottom. I’ll spare you an
exhaustive review, but provide several caveats:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">• People
take roles out of availability and ability, not just out of passionate desire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">• People
are usually eager to play whatever role they are in well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">• They are
not always articulate about how and why they take the roles they do.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">• People
use different criteria to tell when they are satisfied or not in their roles.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So if a person says they are a top, bottom, or switch, they
may experience this is a context-dependent behavior or an essential expression
of personal authenticity. The best
evidence of the nascent research on BDSM as identity or orientation suggests
these power terms are the best approximation in kink of the identifications
that are more extensively studied in queer theory. So the power exchange terminology is the
first place to look in treatment for signs of kink identity.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the kink subcultures, Dom and Domme generally connote
someone who is committed to the role, either socially, or in a primary
relationship. Top usually connotes a
less committed or temporary assumption of the dominant role. Likewise, for submissive and bottom. Subs tend to be identified as submissive in a
wide variety of their interactions, and bottoming is something that one might
do only with certain partners or for a specific event. Fluidity varies: some people express a lot of
it, others very little.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7-Fv3vckIKdLrC6fBBVs2hmL_PtiA1x5v7g33Xm5O_v0vqdkwpiaMYIohCB5tczUtjCL1JBO2fysphwf4_QEbHNlIpQQEkvlIw_l6KZQFI5HLDOKVYlnCF52GQwWVqg9R0OxFsgZRyrcj/s1600/Dom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7-Fv3vckIKdLrC6fBBVs2hmL_PtiA1x5v7g33Xm5O_v0vqdkwpiaMYIohCB5tczUtjCL1JBO2fysphwf4_QEbHNlIpQQEkvlIw_l6KZQFI5HLDOKVYlnCF52GQwWVqg9R0OxFsgZRyrcj/s400/Dom.jpg" width="261" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dominant in real life? Most likely a model! <br />It is a chancy business predicting people's real life behaviors from their preferred kinky roles or identifications.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Some may debate this, but my limited observations of a few
BDSM social organizations suggests that white and male privileges are modestly
attenuated, but still present, and that Dominants are privileged over switches
over bottoms. This is reflected in the
2014 Consent Violations Survey. Males
and tops were least likely to report violations, switches were in the middle,
and bottoms, females, and the gender fluid were most likely to report
violations. This is true despite a vast
body of anecdotal evidence that in aggregate, people’s kinky roles correlate
poorly with their Real Life roles. I’m
frankly more convinced by stories of top corporate execs who chose to bottom in
BDSM than meek shop girls who magically transform to imposing Goddesses of the
Night. Perhaps role choice and
flexibility, even in BDSM, reflects Real Life privilege behind the masks,
costumes and rituals of dark theater. But it is true that the community rules
for safety and anonymity make it harder to bring mundane signals of dominance
and privilege into the special space of the dungeon.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Although clinicians like to be sensitive, and clients do not
feel accepted when they have to explain the basic assumptions of BDSM to
clinicians who haven’t taken the time and trouble to acquire the kind of basic
information conveyed by this blog about The Scene, close listening is not
likely to resolve all questions when the language overlaps but has specific
meanings in kinky, mundane, and clinical contexts. Hopefully, this post gives clinicians encouragement
to learn kink subculture, but also to be unclear and to ask empathetic
questions of their clients. When you are
puzzled and curious, it is often better to ask the clients about their feelings
than to try to have the answer for them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
</div>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px; text-align: justify;">© Russell J Stambaugh, January 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span>Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1427404636563815125.post-50995400174169066892016-01-15T09:08:00.001-08:002016-01-18T04:26:03.877-08:00Richard Frieherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKzG1PKgL1pnK3dAkSZyGho30j5xG2d0y5ZYRlLm9jaKoZLZb42b_s4ly9rzDA_n0xxi1ltxcMHFqHczFQ_dmjs22iCSEsF7ghXpvdcOLF4KvFZOL2FeYLQfIn5CYBzY4SVzRSKGf0Ps3Z/s1600/Krafft-Ebing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKzG1PKgL1pnK3dAkSZyGho30j5xG2d0y5ZYRlLm9jaKoZLZb42b_s4ly9rzDA_n0xxi1ltxcMHFqHczFQ_dmjs22iCSEsF7ghXpvdcOLF4KvFZOL2FeYLQfIn5CYBzY4SVzRSKGf0Ps3Z/s640/Krafft-Ebing.jpg" width="419" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Richard von Krafft-Ebing</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Richard von Krafft-Ebbing is the
father of modern Western sexology. While
the application of social science methods to human sexuality preceded him, and
many of his terms and concepts were borrowed from others, he very deliberately
reframed sexual deviance from a primarily religious, moral, and legal problem
into a medical one. He did this
precisely in the period of the Second Industrial Revolution when the social,
biological and medical sciences began to benefit from the innovations which the
hard sciences had stared to use during the Enlightenment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc94k8W9ubfs-IXrvKhj4Cn0cIonI7AMfZoAk0kZFp4rCyr5Fs_wH2tQZzcGe2iilVX_glKFhvl41FSdzptYgCyuNz9EPkfP99sdpBV7vu2_YrxT4Nxhf7PldIXWU0Ht0vSDZNmfYi2E7F/s1600/Syphilis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc94k8W9ubfs-IXrvKhj4Cn0cIonI7AMfZoAk0kZFp4rCyr5Fs_wH2tQZzcGe2iilVX_glKFhvl41FSdzptYgCyuNz9EPkfP99sdpBV7vu2_YrxT4Nxhf7PldIXWU0Ht0vSDZNmfYi2E7F/s400/Syphilis.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Treponema pallidum. Not a genetic weakness or product of too much masturbation, but a bacterium!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Educated at the University of Heidelberg
and at work in the Catholic operated asylums in the Palatinate, von
Krafft-Ebing was appalled at the quality of care provided in these
facilities. Starting in the 18<sup>th</sup>
century, the entrepreneurial spirit had caught up with alienists, the precursor
profession to modern psychiatry. Like
surgeons of the time, alienists were not high status professionals analogous to
modern physicians. But rationalism had
made jailing the mentally ill untenable, and privately operated insane asylums
had become a booming and shady business.
With very poor methods and theories for treating bizarre behavior,
patients were warehoused indefinitely by providers who profited from long
stays. Much theory still rested on the foundations of
Aristotle and Galen with emphasis on maintaining a balance between bodily
fluids or ‘humors.’ In sexuality, Simon
Andre Tissot’s <i>Treatise on the Diseases
Produced by Onanaism</i> (1832) advanced the idea that excessive masturbation
was a sign and cause of degeneracy and many sex related diseases. Modern syphilis was then called ‘general
paresis,’ and was a principal cause of madness.
So there was lots of overlap between sexual deviance and insanity in the
Victorian era popular imagination and asylum populations. And Krafft-Ebing advanced the goal of
professionalizing psychiatry by sorting out the treatment of sexual deviance
from the general asylum population. He
was one of the first practitioners to suggest that general paresis and syphilis
were actually the same disease, a hypothesis eventually confirmed following
Louis Pasteur’s (1860-4) demonstration of the germ theory of disease and later
work in 1905 that identified <i>Treponema
pallidum</i> as its bacterial agent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0SMPNVWnonitpATBU9E_lmwWzNX_LnFqLVyhmz8EdJHVqaEC36EHXdEuD9jYzszTD-E7lzcCD8WDTMjqu1HQ_6I0Lgk4OPYnRzJANZXZdZZT8nUSQWAf2XdLJ3aS3HUsepLv5ZrtqDchU/s1600/psychopathia-sexualisbook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0SMPNVWnonitpATBU9E_lmwWzNX_LnFqLVyhmz8EdJHVqaEC36EHXdEuD9jYzszTD-E7lzcCD8WDTMjqu1HQ_6I0Lgk4OPYnRzJANZXZdZZT8nUSQWAf2XdLJ3aS3HUsepLv5ZrtqDchU/s400/psychopathia-sexualisbook.jpg" width="269" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of the many modern editions of <i>Psychopathia Sexualis</i>. You may bet Krafft-Ebing would not have approved a cover featuring bondage illustrator John Willie's Sweet Gwendoline after having translated the salacious parts into Latin!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In 1886, Krafft-Ebing published
the first edition of his seminal work, <i>Psychopathia
Sexualis,</i> a compendium of case histories of sexual problems and
deviations. Although his primary
hypotheses of their origin was biological, Krafft-Ebing was still sufficiently
concerned about the spread of morally degenerate ideas to write the more
salacious parts of his volume in Latin.
In addition to protecting the public from dangerous ideas, his tactic
had the consequence of professionalizing the conversation. In the mid to late 19<sup>th</sup> century,
the intellectual training for Roman Catholic clergy, medicine and law all
requiring the study of Latin. The medicalization
of this sexual content was therefore advanced by the medium. Serious scientific language played down the
potentially provocative content by emphasizing its academic context! It is just as well, almost as soon as <i>Psychopathia Sexualis</i> was published,
helpful scholars translated the Latin for curious and salacious lay people!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW34RrCxl9_HIcZWO0xrhBHVnUsdEoncb8NQG3vbTt8JZ-FCJM7h9z60OWFWG_AMYBUqc8vzg7zV45aFcNH-9UlQBinvTElWqxCQmVVUBRcV-wnjoQJbdOiRZwCNlPFS-YFstdqwfIqjE4/s1600/Darwin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW34RrCxl9_HIcZWO0xrhBHVnUsdEoncb8NQG3vbTt8JZ-FCJM7h9z60OWFWG_AMYBUqc8vzg7zV45aFcNH-9UlQBinvTElWqxCQmVVUBRcV-wnjoQJbdOiRZwCNlPFS-YFstdqwfIqjE4/s320/Darwin.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Charles Darwin (1809-82) Darwin's inferences from the careful observations of finches revolutionized the narratives underlying 19th century biology. He inspired Krafft-Ebing, Freud, phrenology, and eventually Nazism.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Psychopathia Sexualis</i> also promoted medicalization of sexual
deviance by tying the various sexual practices it described into the emerging
biological narrative sweeping medicine at the time following Charles Darwin’s
publishing of <i>On the Origin of Species</i>
in 1859. While it would take well into
the twentieth century for evolution based upon natural selection to become the
unifying narrative of biological science, <i>Origin</i>
provoked much scientific discussion from the outset of its publication. Krafft-Ebbing used the relationship between
different sexual behaviors and evolution by relating them to procreative
function as the guiding principle for categorizing sexual problems he had
encountered in the case histories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Krafft-Ebing divided sexual
problems into 4 categories with respect to procreativity:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Paradoxia referred to sex drive
at times and places that would not be predicted by sexual functions, such as in
the young, or in post-menopausal women.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Anaesthesia referred to problems
of low or absent sex drive or desire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Hyperaesthesia referred to
problems of too much sex drive, such as nymphomania or satyriasis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Paraesthesia referred to sex drive
in the perversions or fetishes where the sexual impulse was not focused on its
evolutionarily expected functions.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzRa7YdHSo8lVYBJONW3kXkMERyFmf3H6QKPFBs9MqFF9ANxEhmz9L6sytoOSCxhMLWAHcs0VfNNMJd07MTk74DuKTaQMc5X3UQsZnAnT8u02pxmpgaGkPVsXe41drS_H9dgG7WkC-VzCU/s1600/Kinky+Boots.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzRa7YdHSo8lVYBJONW3kXkMERyFmf3H6QKPFBs9MqFF9ANxEhmz9L6sytoOSCxhMLWAHcs0VfNNMJd07MTk74DuKTaQMc5X3UQsZnAnT8u02pxmpgaGkPVsXe41drS_H9dgG7WkC-VzCU/s400/Kinky+Boots.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A gratuitous picture of boot fetishism, because this is, after all, a blog about kink! Or perhaps a sign of genetic degeneration!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Krafft-Ebing regarded perversions
and anesthesia as proof of genetic weakness because of the obvious problems
they might cause with effective reproduction and evolutionary fitness. This was congruent with the pre-existing
medical theories left over from the ancients that health and disease were
determined by the balance of bodily fluids and humors. The concepts of compromised reproductive
fitness and physical degeneracy, and moral degeneracy dovetailed seamlessly. The vast majority of Krafft-Ebing’s case
histories were men, and many took the form of bemoaning the poor wretch’s
dissipation and poor fitness for procreative success. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In his first edition of <i>Psychopathia Sexualis</i>, Krafft-Ebing
assembled 238 case histories of sexual problems. His main thesis is that most should be
treated medically, not handled as criminal matters. He would go on to become a powerful opponent
of phrenology, a pseudo-scientific theory during the late 19<sup>th</sup>
century that personality, and especially criminality could be accurately
assessed by careful measurement of individuals’ heads. By the time he died in 1902, <i>Psychopathia Sexualis</i> had made 12 editions,
over 400 case histories, and had been translated out of German and Latin into
30 languages.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzCZigOum9vbgkIUUWF_CpEj4A7HjIOrDNl0kKNx1TrobNDyO1lQdvWqJci7ziIjWB4lHOf6L1shY3FcVBgfEm9fibgEFfb23HxR-mJbhiad27cqlJH2lktGZ6fYFYClsLdwyd5Mq_Eg7D/s1600/de+Sade.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzCZigOum9vbgkIUUWF_CpEj4A7HjIOrDNl0kKNx1TrobNDyO1lQdvWqJci7ziIjWB4lHOf6L1shY3FcVBgfEm9fibgEFfb23HxR-mJbhiad27cqlJH2lktGZ6fYFYClsLdwyd5Mq_Eg7D/s400/de+Sade.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Marquis de Sade, an 18th century author and libertine Krafft-Ebing selected for 'sadism'</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEideoSOSNjl9SKlWsDr6R4tzOdZKns2h2EW8LT1P5MVI6CAe37zAY0_WlslSHn413t14wFbwvjU7063dkBbRCHT4ptBRN6l2um0S8hs56cDpETakTjMss9niDSKS0edat4KX0i22iXXAq9Y/s1600/Leopold_von_Sacher-Masoch%252C_portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEideoSOSNjl9SKlWsDr6R4tzOdZKns2h2EW8LT1P5MVI6CAe37zAY0_WlslSHn413t14wFbwvjU7063dkBbRCHT4ptBRN6l2um0S8hs56cDpETakTjMss9niDSKS0edat4KX0i22iXXAq9Y/s640/Leopold_von_Sacher-Masoch%252C_portrait.jpg" width="417" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a 19th century novelist whose name Krafft-Ebing selected for 'masochism'.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Although he was in no case the
first person to use these terms, he is responsible for the use of Donatien
Alphonse Francoise, the Marquis de Sade’s name for sadism, and Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch’s name for masochism in the Western imagination. This is primarily because of the primacy and
success of his work and the fact that it led a wave of psychological and
medical interest. It didn’t hurt that he
was a professor at the University of Vienna contemporaneously with the more
famous Sigmund Freud, although Krafft-Ebing was not enamored of his former
pupil’s later theories.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZcC0Pchr0Yk8aW_oS4PZzoMuvIQEKDvUodVpm-R9RdLtpjDNmDTNhBpjFCVVcSWioDbBQrX0xZDOyE0PNcI8AZqwDYXMrxxP1gtmRUXoQSsSPRX5Zm8IWiULJw9ZXSulahgLPH6WVrLSV/s1600/IMG_20151212_142759.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZcC0Pchr0Yk8aW_oS4PZzoMuvIQEKDvUodVpm-R9RdLtpjDNmDTNhBpjFCVVcSWioDbBQrX0xZDOyE0PNcI8AZqwDYXMrxxP1gtmRUXoQSsSPRX5Zm8IWiULJw9ZXSulahgLPH6WVrLSV/s400/IMG_20151212_142759.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Krafft-Ebing's bust at University of Vienna, The dates are his tenure there. Photo by the author.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There is a famous story
circulating in Vienna as recently as last month that a steel magnate brought
his teenage son to a sanitarium in Vienna for consultation because of the son’s
ill-socialized aggressiveness. After the
son assaulted the first doctor who tried to interview him, the father called
for the famous Dr. Krafft-Ebing.
Krafft-Ebing went into the room and emerged almost immediately with a
hematoma above his left eye. The magnate
then insisted that he then see the junior Dr. Freud. The staff were taking bets on how long
Sigmund would last in the consulting room.
In he went, and came out after 50 minutes as planned and proceeded to
provide a diagnosis and treatment plan to the attending physician. This doctor expressed some amazement, given
that the great authority on criminality had immediately been socked in the
eye. “What could we expect of a middle
aged <i>goy</i> to understand about
alienation in youth?” quipped Freud. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While Freud may have easily
dismissed Krafft-Ebing in this anecdote, Krafft-Ebing produced an enduring
nosology of sexual deviations that has only been modestly dismantled in the
ensuing 130 years. He identified sadism, masochism, voyeurism, exhibitionism
and homosexuality as ‘perversions’ of sexual desire. This was a stroke of marketing genius. Although Krafft-Ebing meant that the sexual
drive had been perverted from its evolutionary purpose to behaviors that were
evolutionarily degenerate, the similarity between his language of biology and
that of moral authorities was sufficiently similar that it would be easy for
moralists to understand. He termed homosexuality an ‘inversion’ but nonetheless
thought it degenerative in the evolutionary sense. All of these variations would remain standard
definitions, with some modification, until after the mid-twentieth century when
disunity about other diagnoses led to the creation of the ICD system and the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of the Mental Disorders after World War II.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Paradoxia failed to stand the
test of time and suffered from the false narrative that sexual expression was
not widespread in children. While it is
easy for us to dismiss paradoxia as product of Krafft-Ebing’s Victorian times, all of his work was
conducted then, framed by Victorian social assumptions. Other contributors like Albert Moll and
Sigmund Freud would challenge the idea that childhood was free of sexual desire
or behavior, and it was eventually acknowledged by science, if not in the
popular imagination even today. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the modern nosology, Anesthesia
has been replaced by various sex dysfunctions, and hyperaesthesia has failed to
achieve inclusion due to disagreement about how much sex is ‘too much’ across
widely varying social contexts. It has
found expression in some systems as nymphomania and satyriasis as in DSM -III,
and in the persistent concept of sex addiction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy1WfHjmHDR-4r7Hnlg3iKRUwlb2cdywyAp70Sst_JnDl0TK-stoxjaGwLVAojGEznq7tAwUFRyBISuH_wMAok3_Jx-LJbEDRp-VgAKvpj9LNDyMAQar9ZHRo7_l6JLusG2K7O2rlydtO2/s1600/WK+Kellogg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy1WfHjmHDR-4r7Hnlg3iKRUwlb2cdywyAp70Sst_JnDl0TK-stoxjaGwLVAojGEznq7tAwUFRyBISuH_wMAok3_Jx-LJbEDRp-VgAKvpj9LNDyMAQar9ZHRo7_l6JLusG2K7O2rlydtO2/s640/WK+Kellogg.jpg" width="440" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">W. K. Kellogg, cereal magnate and philanthropist, typified Victorian ideals about health, fitness, and repressed sexuality. </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Krafft-Ebing continued a long
tradition of failing to recognize the sexual agency of women. Between Victorian era prejudices and the
misconception that women were primarily the passive recipients of male sexual
attention, women did not manifest paraesthesias but often did show excessive
sexual reluctance and occasional paradoxia when they were lusty after
menopause. Prostitution, while often
criminalized, was evolutionarily unobjectionable, and was later blamed on male
enthusiasms well into the late twentieth century. The romantic idealization of female purity and
innocence has led to the idea, still persistent, that women are only lured into
prostitution by male desire and most are coerced slaves of sex traffickers.
Likewise, Krafft-Ebing viewed rape as criminal behavior, but sexually, it was
unobjectionable from an evolutionary point of view, thus not pathological.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A close reader will note that
despite the robust durability of Krafft-Ebing’s nosology, there are rather
severe weaknesses in his degenerative argument.
Oral and anal sex are surely as devastating to reproductive success if
indulged in to the exclusion of coitus.
Don’t these variant activities deserve as prominent a place in the
paraesthesia nosology as sadism or boot fetishism? In fact, those behaviors were criminalized
and regarded as perversions in many places during the Victorian era through the
modern one, but have not been pathologized in the modern ICD and DSM
systems. Birth control in any form was
stigmatized during this period, and became a <i>cause celebre </i>of the nascent women’s movements in the West. Their opponents characterized sexual
expression freed of the risk of reproduction as the gateway to license and
perversion. And this was done in the
face of medical recognition that death in childbirth was the leading cause of
death to women of reproductive age.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWjuBp086FUeIUYZPuoO7bHavLSXUv3s2jM-ZS2xOQrT602p6FxSW-_O9dOa4lgQeh0thP3-MposIKRs8xwETeRFyilx6MIrUOGxOvane1cAetO04uZWmVyMs3ArSJg-Y1TyFv0tX5W9rg/s1600/Alfred_Binet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWjuBp086FUeIUYZPuoO7bHavLSXUv3s2jM-ZS2xOQrT602p6FxSW-_O9dOa4lgQeh0thP3-MposIKRs8xwETeRFyilx6MIrUOGxOvane1cAetO04uZWmVyMs3ArSJg-Y1TyFv0tX5W9rg/s400/Alfred_Binet.jpg" width="311" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alfred Binet (1857-1911) Founding father of associationism and inventor of the first practical intelligence test.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The biggest challenge to
Krafft-Ebing’s views on sexual variation came from the associationists. This branch of nascent experimental psychology
argued that sexual expression was learned behavior. Rather than expressing constitutional factors,
different sexual behaviors were mostly learned.
The leading proponent of associationism was the French psychologist was
Alfred Binet, who argued that fetishism was simply learned by early association
between pleasure and some article not essential to procreation. Binet’s primary research interest was in
assessing intelligence, and he is responsible for devising the original version
of the famous Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A break in this nature/nurture
logjam was to come in 1905 when Sigmund Freud published his <i>Three Contributions to a Theory of Sexuality</i>. Freud recognized that variant sexual
expression was widespread, but many of Freud’s cases showed variations that
were eventually subordinated to ‘genital’, and thus procreative sexual
expression. Thus, Krafft-Ebing’s paraesthesias,
now termed, sexual perversions, did not often substitute completely for
procreative sex. Freud would make a name
for himself by explaining that they arose from pre-genital sexual instincts
arising from psychological development in childhood. Perhaps these variations, if they were so
common, should be diagnosed only when they entirely substituted for procreative
sexual expression? This idea looks
modern indeed when compared with the recent paraphilia revisions in DSM – 5. But Freud’s broadest interpretation of
perversions and sexual dysfunctions was that they resulted from individuals’
internalization of societal repression.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By 1905, Krafft-Ebbing had died,
and we do not know how he would have replied to Dr. Freud’s claims. Krafft-Ebing was no lover Freud’s work, and
he would not have counted himself a psychoanalyst despite that the two great
thinkers addressed many of the same issues.
But the verdict of the popular imagination rendered at the time had
largely held for 100 years. Even in the
face of Kinsey’s work in the mid-century, sexual variation which was primarily
moralized before Krafft-Ebing was still moralized after him, after Freud’s
liberalizing observations, after Kinsey’s survey research and has moderated
only somewhat following the so-called sexual revolution, rise of feminism, and
the partial success of gay rights advocacy and the removal of homosexuality as
a diagnosis within the DSMs. Krafft-Ebing
succeeded in medicalizing sexuality, but he did little to destigmatize it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But Freud’s 1905 work was a huge
advance to the psychology of sexuality.
It provided a middle ground in the stiffening debate between
evolutionists like Krafft-Ebing who thought sexual expression entirely in terms
of essentialist drive expression, and the associationists who argued that
sexual expression was learned. Despite
his defense of the idea of degeneracy, Krafft-Ebing decision to publish his
opus partially in Latin to prevent the vulnerable from being damaged by
disturbing ideas shows some fear that sexual deviance could be learned.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjceFyMog7kxywrqxvy6C8rWo20DJ6yF8ClGJ5OQuhW6r2EE1TyXFWEVEZmr53sDwrHtjcmjiR4U85ycuK9Msl0jGPbNbhekuySdvJg3DGAOrrNjbbCqG1EmllrQ8DGTk5dvkI366Rtw4sK/s1600/Narrator+in+Rocky+Horror.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjceFyMog7kxywrqxvy6C8rWo20DJ6yF8ClGJ5OQuhW6r2EE1TyXFWEVEZmr53sDwrHtjcmjiR4U85ycuK9Msl0jGPbNbhekuySdvJg3DGAOrrNjbbCqG1EmllrQ8DGTk5dvkI366Rtw4sK/s400/Narrator+in+Rocky+Horror.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Charles Gray, as 'The Criminologist, sending up 1920's pups in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)<br />Still doesn't have a neck!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Neither was his concern entirely misplaced. In the 1920’s, a new form of pornographic
literature would arise in which real and pornographic medical case studies were
compiled precisely for sale to persons of esoteric tastes. They took a medical tone, but were not
written in proper medical jargon, designed to evade the censor’s knife. Their production and sale would play a
pivotal, bur circuitous role in the creation of modern kink organizations. But that is another story altogether, well
told in Rob Bienvenue’s dissertation, a subject for another post! Krafft-Ebing had started the classification
for modern paraphilias, but <i>Psychopathia
Sexualis,</i> despite his best efforts, gave rise to the titillating<i> faux</i> case study.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">© Russell J Stambaugh, January 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, DST, CSSPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15920016759140581456noreply@blogger.com0