the BDSM scene
BDSM is an acronym for bondage, discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism. BDSM also involves fetishism. Although they are classified as sexual disorders by medicine, such sexual activities are governed by a set of “safety and argumentation tools” – which include the so-called safe word, respect for the partner’s consent and the SSC concept (safe, safe, and consented) – created and defined by its practitioners in order to legitimize these activities and distance them from the label of perversion and pathologization. The internet has thus become the main space where BDSM practitioners communicate to exchange experiences and politically organize themselves to combat the stigma and prejudice that persecute them, as stated by researcher Bruno DallaCort Zilli in the article “BDSM from A to Z: depathologization through consent in Internet ‘manuals’”, unfolding of his master’s thesis defended at the Institute of Social Medicine (IMS/UERJ) in 2007.
In the survey, carried out over the internet, Zilli makes an ethnographic analysis of the information flow contained in the web, in the channels that allow BDSM practitioners to contact each other, focusing mainly on textual elements that contain information about BDSM, which the author calls “manuals”.
One of the authors of the 20 articles that make up the collection “Prazeres Dissidents” , which will be released by CLAM and Editora Garamond on October 21st in São Paulo and November 10th in Rio de Janeiro, Bruno Zilli explains in this interview the ways in which it is they build subjectivities and collective identities based on BDSM practice, interpreting the discourses that its practitioners use to legitimize it.
How to explain or conceptualize BDSM beyond the acronym used to define it?
The acronym itself already indicates the effort of legitimization that characterizes BDSM, by the followers themselves, in the sense of resignifying the practices. Those who do not practice or know BDSM generally define these activities as sadomasochism, or more commonly, sexual perversions. In my study, I understood them as a set of sexual activities that form a sexual identity. Its adherents identify themselves as BDSM practitioners, and some say “I am a BDSM” .
What is the role and importance of consent in BDSM practice?
Common sense considers BSM to be pathological or criminal. However, there is an effort among its followers to legitimize it, to make the practice “politically correct”, which takes place through “argumentative tools” such as the concept of SSC (which means that the activity is healthy, safe, and consented). None of the BDSM activities should be carried out without all individuals agreeing with what is happening, for those involved there must be consent. Dialogue is very important among its practitioners.
This dialogue takes place in the sense of negotiating…
Yes, it is necessary that each practitioner knows everything that is going to happen so that they can give their approval. People agree on what turns them on and what doesn’t, what they expect from their partner and what they don’t want, what they don’t find pleasurable. In this sense, we can say that BDSM is also an “erotic game”, played to stimulate pleasure, even if sometimes through pain. Not necessarily a physical pain, as the pleasure can occur through “emotional pain”, a simulated humiliation, for example. And it is these elements that give the erotic meaning of these activities: pain and humiliation.
All these “security tools” and the simulation give us an idea that this is a scenic game. But doesn’t this end up mischaracterizing the practice a little, considering that violence, in this case, is the source of the erotic?
In fact, some BDSM practitioners consider there to be an acting element. There are even debates within the BDSM community about what “real BDSM” is, and what the limits of consent or negotiation are. However, there is the stimulus based on pain, and this is real. And this is considered pleasurable. But there is also the idea of care and safety. For example, practitioners claim that you need to know how to tie a person without hampering their blood circulation. Also, for example, they teach that one should avoid hitting the torso region, where the vital organs are. Some practitioners talk about how erotic this negotiation is in itself. The practice is not without an erotic character just because it is being “enacted”.
It can be seen that what is sought with this care is a legitimate sexuality, and that is why all illegitimate elements are purged from the BDSM, like real violence. Violence is the main element of BDSM, but it is also what needs to be “appeased”. In this sense, it is possible to speak of a “domestication” of violence, which is elaborated through the consent to something legitimate and acceptable – precisely because it is consented.
What is the relationship between the effort of the BDSM legitimation arguments and medicine?
Practitioners are developing this entire set of arguments to move BDSM away from crime and pathology. Perversions are defined in the late nineteenth century with these names we know – sadism, masochism, fetishism and homosexuality (which left this list in the 70s thanks to the efforts of the American gay movement) and remained stable as diagnostic categories within the psychiatric classifications. Within medicine, and in psychiatry in particular, they are still considered pathological behavior. But by medical definitions, the masochist can only get pleasure through pain, the sadist can only get pleasure by causing this pain, and the fetishist only gets turned on by certain parts of the body or specific objects, like feet or leather. This exclusivity of only getting pleasure in causing or receiving pain or with certain fetishes is one of the characteristics of the psychiatric diagnosis for these mental disorders. It is understood that these disorders are carried out against people who do not consent to being the target of these desires. But, say BDSM practitioners, it is always consented to what they do, they are never acting against someone else’s will. In this way they disassociate their practices from sexual pathologies, which are not consented to. Furthermore, practitioners recognize that they do not rely exclusively on BDSM for pleasure, unlike the exclusivity that is described as pathological by psychiatric manuals. It is understood that these disorders are carried out against people who do not consent to being the target of these desires.
