Psychology behind BDSM: Why Do People Enjoy This Kink?

So you wanna find out the psychology behind BDSM, huh?

Before we go into a lot of details, BDSM has always had this “dark, psycho” aura around it. For over a century, people who engaged in bondage, beatings, and humiliation for sexual pleasure were considered mentally ill. It’s considered to be some sort of deviant activity that only messed up people do. But that’s a whole load of bullshit. BDSM is practiced by all kinds of people from all walks of life. In the 1980s, the American Psychiatric Association removed S & M as a mental disorder in its manual. This decision—like the decision to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973— was a big step towards societal acceptance of people whose sexual desires aren’t vanilla or traditional. BDSM is essentially just kinky play and there’s nothing wrong with that! Even the science of the mind and human behavior has finally agreed to that.

However, if you’re still a non-believer, here are some fascinating facts and the psychology behind BDSM. Why do people enjoy this kink?

How many people are in this kink?

First, let’s talk about statistics. Have you ever wondered just about how many people are into this kink? Researchers have put the number as somewhere between 2 percent and 62 percent. That’s right. That’s how wide the margin is. It’s because when you’re asking people about their sex habits, the wording of the question makes a difference.

On the low end, researchers have asked a large sample of Australians if they had “been involved in BDSM in the past 12 months”. 1.3 percent of women and 2.2 percent of men said yes. On the high end, the question was more about their “sexual fantasies”. 64.6 percent of women and 53.3 percent of men reported fantasies about getting sexually dominated—and 46.7 percent of women and 59.6 percent of men reported fantasies about sexually dominating someone.

Even with the difference in wording, we can still say that a substantial minority of women and men do fantasize about or engage in BDSM in one form or the other.

Is something wrong with people who are into BDSM?

For Freud, it’s a resounding yes. Anyone even dreaming of BDSM is sick in the head and needs immediate treatment.

But recent research tells a different story.

Research suggests that compared to the average sample, BDSM practitioners had lower levels of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychological sadism, psychological masochism, borderline pathology, and paranoia. On their major personality traits, BDSM practitioners exhibited higher levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and subjective well-being. Practitioners also showed lower levels of neuroticism and rejection sensitivity.

Of course, BDSM practitioners still possessed certain negative traits like they have lower levels of agreeableness compared to non-practitioners. They also showed equal levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and higher levels of dissociation and narcissism.

But in general? BDSM practitioners could be considered psychologically healthier. Interesting, huh?

So what can be the psychology behind BDSM?

The Psychology behind Pain

Common sense tells us that people seek pleasure and avoid pain. In fact, that’s our “survival instinct” speaking to us. If something is causing us pain, we immediately seek ways to stop it from persisting. But that’s not always the case. Activities such as marathons, tattoos, piercings and BDSM stray from this “survival instinct” psychology.

Science can explain this, however. You see, there is a link between pleasure and pain and it is deeply-rooted in our biology. To start with, all kinds of pain triggers the central nervous system to release endorphins. Endorphins are proteins which act to block pain and work like opiates (e.g morphine) meaning, they do not only stop pain, they generate and proliferate feelings of euphoria.

Endorphins

Runners could attest to this relationship. When we get tired like how tired we are from intense activities like running, the body releases lactic acid. Lactic acid is a by-product of the breakdown of glucose when oxygen is in short supply. This acid irritates pain receptors in the muscles. The muscles will then send their predicament to the brain through electrical messages sent via the spinal cord. The signal would be interpreted as a “burning sensation” in the legs and would case the runner to slow down or stop. That is until the nervous system’s control center, the hippocampus, kicks in. This portion of the brain responds to pain signals by ordering the production of the body’s own narcotics, endorphins.

Endorphins then bind themselves to opioid receptors in the brain. This prevents the further release of chemicals involved in the transmission of pain signals. This is how it blocks the pain. But then as what we’ve said, endorphins go further than that. After stopping the pain signals, they then stimulate the same areas of the brains activated by passionate love affairs and music. It’s a post-pain rush similar to the high of morphine or heroin.

But not all pain causes this “high”, others are just plain agonizing.

So there are “enjoyable” kinds of pain. But we do have to acknowledge that there are certain kinds of pain that are just…painful. One theory to explain it is ‘benign masochism’. It refers to seeking out pain while knowing that it won’t cause serious damage. It’s something animals aren’t capable of doing.

To give you an example, let’s talk about chili. Its active ingredient is capsaicin. Now, capsaicin is harmless, right? It just hurts because it happens to bind with TRPV1. TPRV1 is part of a family of temperature-sensitive receptors in our tongues. They alert the body to potentially damaging heat or cold. When you activate TRPV1, it sends the brain the same signals as if the tongue was actually on fire.

As such, as kids, we hated chili. But through repeated exposure, we learn to dissociate the fruit with real physical danger. Yet chili addicts’ tongues are just as sensitive to capsaicin as everyone else’s.

Pain is a uniquely human indulgence

Scientists have tried, and failed, to inculcate a preference for chili in rats. Animals have been trained to self-harm, but only by ‘positive reinforcement’. They have been taught to associate pain with a reward but in general, when an animal experiences something painful, it avoids it.

Pain is a uniquely human indulgence. You can say that this may be the psychology behind BDSM.

This phenomenon could be explained by the theory of benign masochism. This is why we seek out and enjoy intrinsically unpleasant experiences such as crazy roller coasters or tear-jerking movies. If animals did the same, it would be scared and never go again.

Benign masochism in BDSM

Benign masochism is something that those who engage in BDSM won’t find surprising. There is a difference between good pain and bad pain. This is what doms make sure to take note of. Good pain is something enjoyable, the thing that is addicting about BDSM for subs. But then there is bad pain and it indicates that there is something not right and must be taken care of immediately. For example, when the shoulder starts pulling during bondage, that’s potentially unsafe so doms release it.

What effect does BDSM have on the people who do it?

So in the BDSM scene, the one who is bound, receives stimulation, gives up full body control and follows orders is called a sub. The one who is providing stimulation, gives order and has full authority over the sub is called a dom. To find out the psychology and test out the effect of BDSM on practitioners, a study has measured a range of physiological and psychological variables in subs and doms before and after their scenes.

In the study, both subs and doms reported increases in relationship closeness and decreases in psychological stress from before to after their scenes, but subs also showed increases in physiological stress as measured by the hormone cortisol. There was a disconnect between psychological and physiological stress and it indicates that subs may have entered an altered state of consciousness.

To test this theory, the study ran an experiment wherein they randomly assigned switches to be the dom or the sub in a scene. Switches are BDSM practitioners who sometimes take on the dom role and sometimes take on the sub role. The results revealed that both subs and doms entered altered states of consciousness. But they entered different altered states.

Subs entered an altered state associated with reductions in pain, feelings of floating, feelings of peacefulness, feelings of living in the here and now and time distortions. Doms, in contrast, entered the altered state which is associated with focused attention, a loss of self-consciousness and optimal performance of a task. These altered states of consciousness could be a primary motivation why people are engaged and continuously engaging in BDSM.

Conclusion

Contrary to mass perception that BDSM practitioners are a bunch of messed up people, studies have shown that BDSM practitioners are not. In fact, they tend to be psychologically healthier and less neurotic than those with a tamer sex life. The psychology behind pain and the experiments conducted with BDSM practitioners can show the reasons why people love and benefit from this kink.