by Mary Aiken
To be diagnosed with a paraphilia disorder, a person must:
• feel personal distress about their interest, not merely distress resulting from society’s disapproval or the disapproval of significant others;
or
• have a sexual desire or behavior that involves another person’s psychological distress, injury, or death, or a desire for sexual behaviors involving unwilling persons or persons unable to give legal consent.
I am often asked why politicians and celebrities give in to this kind of behavior with such apparent frequency. My answer is that public figures with careers that thrive by amplifying their presence online are probably more exposed and noticeable. When you are standing on a stage, a much larger crowd will be seeing your act. I believe their struggles simply mirror the struggles of many others. Technology can make it harder for anyone to control impulses and can facilitate and escalate problematic behavior.
The Normalization of a Fetish
Over the centuries—and probably throughout the history of humankind—there’s been a small but consistent human interest in sadism as it relates to sex. The word sadism, or arousal from inflicting pain on another person, refers to a bisexual French aristocrat, libertine and prolific author, the Marquis de Sade—or Donatien Alphonse François de Sade—who died in 1814 and left behind a slew of erotic literary novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. A proponent of extreme freedom and unrestrained morality, the marquis spent years in prisons and asylums because of his own appetites and behavior, which his works are based on, and in which sexual fantasies involve criminality, blasphemy, and violence. Most of his works were suppressed until the mid-twentieth century, when the Marquis de Sade became a subject of interest to intellectuals, who called him, in turn, a nihilist, a satirist, and a precursor to Freud and existentialism. The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire described de Sade as “the freest spirit that has yet existed.”
Pain is the central interest of sadomasochism, either inflicting it or receiving it. And it appears to have ongoing appeal for a small percentage of the population. Over time, there has been a steady underground interest—but not quite acceptable for dinner-table conversation—in sadomasochistic “play” between consenting adults. In 1953 the pioneering American biologist and sexologist Alfred Kinsey determined that 12 percent of women and 22 percent of men admitted to responding sexually to sadomasochistic narratives; twice as many males and almost equal numbers of women were found to have responded erotically to actual pain (in the form of being bitten). The results led Kinsey to the conclusion that “males may be aroused by both physical and psychologic stimuli, while a larger number of the females, although not all of them, may be aroused only by physical stimuli.” A study done two decades later, in 1974, in the midst of the so-called sexual revolution, found that 5 percent of men and 2 percent of women reported that they obtained sexual gratification from inflicting pain.
An early study of Canadian men in 1976 found that 10 percent had sadomasochistic sexual fantasies during sexual intercourse, and a more recent study of Canadian women in 2008 found that a large percentage—from 31 to 57 percent—were reported to have rape fantasies. These are reported “fantasies,” not reported experiences. For 9 to 17 percent of women, these were a frequent or favorite fantasy experience. Another study found that 33 percent of women and 50 percent of men had sexual fantasies of tying up their partner, although the participants were not asked if they’d ever done this. According to these studies, a fairly significant number of people are aroused by thinking of these scenarios or have participated in them to some degree, either once or repeatedly.
What else does this information tell us? It provides a possible scientific explanation for the wild popularity of the novel Fifty Shades of Grey. Since its release in 2011, and the publication of its many sequels, it has become the bestselling book of all time excluding the Bible, with sales now exceeding 100 million copies worldwide. That is a big number. And a lot of readers.
I guess most people on the planet know by now that the book tells the story of a young entrepreneur, Christian Grey, and a literature student, Anastasia Steele, who become romantically involved, but only on Grey’s terms—which means participating in bondage, dominance, and sadomasochism, which is referred to nowadays as BDSM. The book introduced a couple of serious paraphilias, sexual sadism disorder and sexual masochism disorder, to the general reading public as a fun and fascinating pastime.
Certainly there have been other attempts to mass-market paraphilia—from Madonna’s bestselling coffee-table book, Sex, in 1992 to Belle de Jour, the 1967 Luis Buñuel classic film about a young woman who engages in fetishistic behavior. Catherine Deneuve stars as the newlywed who’s obsessed with her father and fantasizes about whips, crops, domination scenarios, and bondage. Even though she really loves her new husband, a nice doctor, she can’t bring herself to be intimate with him. To seek pleasure and fulfill her fantasies, she begins to spend midweek afternoons as a prostitute while her husband is at work. And who could forget the BDSM scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction—or the line “Bring out The Gimp”?
It’s fascinating to read about rebels and libertines. They deliver vicarious thrills and fulfill our fantasies of living large and wild—and not caring what society thinks. The “forbidden” and even disturbing aspect of Fifty Shades is clearly part of its popularity. Curious to see what this book offered the general public, I launched into my first Fifty Shades novel with some trepidation. In full immersive ethnographic research mode, I set out to read the trilogy in order to critique it, but after sampling thirty or forty pages of the first installment, I stopped hunting for irresponsibly lighthearted treatment of a serious mental disorder and found myself worrying about the psychological disposition of the writer, E.L. James. But then, I always do that.
Another ten pages and I had to give up. It’s hard enough to study reports of actual clinical psychopaths or the criminally insane. Reading fictional accounts of torture and brutality was, for me, even more disturbing. But my greatest concern is the underlying message: This behavior might be fun, or even romantic.
Twenty or thirty years ago, a person with a fetish or guilty pleasure of his or her own had to dig around in the public library for a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s writings, go to an art-house cinema to see Belle de Jour, or go to a theater that featured pornographic films. Those in dire need of this material could turn to commercially available pornography. How difficult was it to find? An analysis of the covers of heterosexual porn magazines in the 1980s showed that more than 17 percent depicted bondage and domination imagery. In other words, even in porn magazines, there was limited access to this type of enticing material. The potential for escalating and reinforcing the behavior was somewhat limited. Now technology has changed that.
Is it a coincidence that in the years following the publication of the Fifty Shades trilogy, Internet searches for BDSM porn worldwide have risen by 67 percent and searches for terms like “sex slave” and “master” have increased nearly 79 percent and 72 percent, respectively? Membership in FetLife, a Vancouver-based pansexual social-networking site that serves the BDSM lifestyle, has more than tripled; there are more than 3.5 million members of the FetLife community, and they’ve shared more than 19 million photos and 172,000 videos, participated in 4.7 million discussions, and created 1.7 million blog posts.
FetLife describes itself as “similar to Facebook and MySpace but run by kinksters like you and me. We think it’s more fun that way. Don’t you?”
There are risks in practicing sadism for sexual pleasure—and obviously part of the excitement is the risk itself. But the main thrill comes from inflicting pain, apparently using an array of implements: paddles, wooden spoons, electric cattle prods, skewers, and knives, along with the traditional whips. According to an article by William Saletan in the online magazine Slate, even women who have appeared in BDSM pornography have reported being injured in the production of the scene
s—receiving electrical burns, injuries requiring surgery, and permanent scars from beatings.
Saletan goes on to say, “While these injuries were accidental, the BDSM subculture doesn’t regard intentional harm as wrong. According to the ‘Statement on Consent’ developed by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, injury is wrong only if it ‘was not anticipated and consented to.’ ”
To me, this seems an unusual notion of freedom: the right to be hurt.
Finding Cohorts Online
Sadomasochistic relationships run the range from mild to severe, depending on the power/control needs and expression of passivity/vulnerability. There is comorbidity between sadism and psychopathy, which means that these two traits are often found together. But let’s remember there are also a significant number of studies in the past thirty years showing that individuals who practice sadomasochism demonstrate evidence of good psychological and social function, as measured by higher educational level, income, and occupational status compared with the general population. In one of these studies, U.S. sociologist Dr. Thomas S. Weinberg concluded that “sociological and social psychological studies see SM practitioners as emotionally and psychologically well balanced, generally comfortable with their sexual orientation, and socially well adjusted.”
While an interest in BDSM doesn’t necessarily point to larger problems, given the explosion of BDSM lifestyle material online in the past ten years, and the normalizing of the behavior generally, I have to wonder about the overall impact this has on vulnerable people—those with mental health conditions and disorders. There have been troubling stories and tragedies along these lines, related to how quickly partners for BDSM scenarios can now be found. Masochists sometimes say that it’s hard to find a “good sadist”—or one who understands their preferences. The Internet comes in handy in terms of BDSM matchmaking, just a few keyboard clicks away.
Prior to the invention of the Internet, finding a willing partner or a group to participate in a BDSM scenario wasn’t so easy. I have been working on a theoretical construct I call online syndication, which is really about the mathematics of behavior in an age of technology. It works like this: If I’m a sex offender in a small town in North Dakota and you are a sex offender in a small town in rural Georgia, what are the chances of us meeting each other in the real world?
This used to be capped or bound by the laws of probability and domain. In other words, it was restricted by chance and proximity. Two sex offenders who lived so far away from each other had very little if any chance of ever meeting. Now that has changed—not just for sex offenders, but for girls with eating disorders, cybercriminals, and people with fetishes. All of these groups can easily syndicate to socialize, normalize, and facilitate their particular interests. I hope I’m wrong, but I believe this cyber effect could result in a surge in deviant, criminal, and abnormal behavior in the general population.
You can join communities like FetLife, a dating site like Alt.com, or domsubfriends, a BDSM education and support group. There is also Tabulifestyle (also known as TLS), a matchmaking service for people with taboo tastes. Describing itself as “a service that caters to sexually adventurous couples and singles,” TLS claims to offer “a secure and discreet community for ‘REAL’ members who are sexually open-minded. Tabulifestyle’s comprehensive set of profile features, unlimited picture galleries, robust search functionality, members and swinger clubs calendar, advanced blocking and filtering tools provides a FUN safe and secure environment.”
How FUN? How safe?
You don’t have to look far for sad and disturbing examples of people whose paraphilia escalated and amplified after they found cohorts on a social-networking site. In 2012, a child-care worker in Ireland, Elaine O’Hara, disappeared, and the media began to closely follow the case. Several unusual things were found at the single thirty-six-year-old woman’s apartment, including a latex bodysuit and images of two hunting knives. O’Hara, who suffered from suicidal thoughts and depression, had a history of cutting herself. Her father’s partner, a psychologist, had assessed Elaine’s emotional age as equivalent to a fifteen-year-old’s. Elaine had told her father that she had met someone who enjoyed tying her up and that she had asked him to kill her.
A year later, in 2013, her remains were found in the underbrush in the Dublin Mountains by a dog walker. Not far away, submerged in the muddy bottom of a reservoir, her mobile phone was found—along with a rusted chain, a bondage mask with zips over the holes for the eyes and mouth, a length of rope, knives, and other BDSM paraphernalia. Retrieval of her text history revealed O’Hara had a relationship with a man who declared himself a sadist.
In exchanges, he and O’Hara expressed an interest in stabbing and being stabbed for sexual gratification. One message to her read: “My urge to rape, stab or kill is huge. You have to help me control or satisfy it.”
Graham Dwyer, a forty-two-year-old Dublin architect and father of three, was arrested and charged with O’Hara’s murder. In 2015 he was found unanimously guilty by a jury and jailed for life.
So how did the murderer and his victim find each other? O’Hara left behind a notebook containing the name of a lifestyle community she was involved in: FetLife. Dwyer was reported to have used FetLife, Alt.com, and other BDSM websites to indulge his fantasies. Over the course of the couple’s online/offline relationship, thousands of profoundly disturbing text messages passed between them, which were reportedly backed up on her laptop. In the master-slave language they used with each other, O’Hara revealed the mental distress she suffered throughout their BDSM affair.
He was disinhibited enough to indicate his profession in his online alias, “Architect77.” Their text messages show escalation, from discussion of BDSM to talk of murder. O’Hara had other partners she had met online, and their perceived anonymity was shattered when they were summoned to give evidence in the trial. But mostly the story of Dwyer and O’Hara is about online syndication—outliers clicking to connect. A master was looking for a slave. A slave for a master. A woman with a history of cutting herself met a man who had a fetish for stabbing.
O’Hara was a fan of TV crime dramas, like CSI, and ironically she had warned Dwyer of the dangers of being caught for murder through DNA and cellphone logs. “Technology is a killer now Sir,” she texted him, more than a year before she was killed.
Cyber-Socialization
As bio-psychologist Bruce King has written, when it comes to sexuality, what’s “normal” depends on where you are. In cyberspace, we know that people may do and say things that they wouldn’t do in the real world, due to the effects of anonymity and online disinhibition. This environment plays a significant role in socialization as well. All geographical barriers are removed when we connect with others online. And with limited social cues, as I’ve discussed, in cyberspace we make friends and meet new people without the help of our real-world instincts.
This has both positive and negative results. The magnificent upside of the barrier-free connection is that we can make friends with people we’d otherwise never know—gain insights into other lives and situations. This is socially broadening and educational, and also generates empathy and understanding. For individuals who are socially isolated—due to distance or personality issues—there’s now a place to reach out and find meaningful relationships. For young people anywhere who might feel lonely and curious about their sexuality, the Internet offers a way to explore. Adolescence is an age when experimentation occurs anyway, so some would argue that curiosity and experimentation online could be better and safer than in the real world. (I’ll be discussing this in greater detail in chapters about teens online, and again in cyber-relationships.)
The downside: We can blindly fall into dubious friendships and social connections. Online syndication isn’t just about finding other people who share your interests. It can ignite a process of norming and socialization that, I believe, when it comes to deviant or criminal behavior, presents an enormous threat to society if not recog
nized or mitigated.
The Oxford Dictionary of Psychology defines socialization as “the process, beginning in infancy, where one acquires the attitudes, values, beliefs, habits, behavior patterns, and accumulated knowledge of one’s society…and modification of one’s behavior to conform with the demands of the society or group to which one belongs.”
Here’s how it works: A group or community assimilates new members by familiarizing and educating them in its ways. Online, familiarization can be formal or informal. Norms and rules can be communicated explicitly or implicitly. Successful socialization is marked by acceptance. In social psychology we call this “norming.” If you have been involved in a group of any kind, you probably noticed that as members start to bond, a group identity forms. This is part of the norming stage of group development, which is a natural part of socialization.
What changes online?
Cyber-socialization happens much more quickly because we are hyper-connected. Online communities and networks are built on the foundation of individuals, or actors, as we call them in cyberpsychology, online contacts who are friends, close friends, collaborators, or colleagues and connected by ties—that is, relationships or special interests. Gardeners find each other on gardening forums. Cooks find each other on food sites. Their “tie” is their special interest in gardening or food. But that tie can become very specific almost immediately—and you find yourself in a community that’s interested in cooking with parsnips or the spice fenugreek. The more specific the tie, the stronger the bond. In terms of atypical sexual preference online, the fetish is the tie.