After visiting a BDSM dungeon while preparing for his role as Christian Grey in the 50 Shades of Grey film, actor Jamie Dornan told Elle UK, “Then going back to my wife and newborn baby afterwards… I had a long shower before touching either of them.”
It’s this kind of shame, fear and judgment that has kept the BDSM community out of the limelight in the past decades, with the exceptions of a few progressive books and films. Until now, when the explosive popularity of E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey trilogy has resulted in more than 100 million copies sold worldwide and a film trailer that has been viewed more than 54 million times.
The impact 50 Shades of Grey has had on popular culture can’t be overstated. In episode 427 of the Savage Lovecast, sex advice columnist Dan Savage noted that Dornan’s kink-phobic statement reflects the same “you don’t have to be one to play one” mentality that has historically distanced mainstream actors from the underground sexual communities they represent.
In this case, it deeply reinforces the sex-negative taboos surrounding BDSM.
Today, we don’t know of any openly kinky actors, and cannot rely on 50 Shades of Grey — as astronomically popular and conversation-starting as it may be — to proliferate healthy or entirely accurate representations of kink. And that’s a big problem.
Whether you hungrily devoured the book or feel it romanticizes abusive relationships, we could all be more informed about the BDSM community — its myths, its best practices and its real-world participants. This is a lifestyle, not a trend, and it’s nothing that requires a shower.
Myth: BDSM always includes pain because kinky people like to suffer.
Fact: BDSM is not one sexual act, but rather an umbrella term for a number of safe, risk-aware practices. BDSM stands for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism, and as a 2008 study published in the Journal of Homosexuality concluded, “Clearly, sadomasochism cannot be thought of as a unitary phenomenon: People who identify themselves as sadomasochists mean different things by these identifications.”
Stella Dance, who runs a regular play party, knows that BDSM practices come in all stripes, and that pain is only part of the equation for some. “Are you kidding? BDSM/kink is an ‘all types for all types’ umbrella term for anyone who does any number of rule 36s,” Dance told Mic.
“While pain does come into play for many people, even that has a huge range, from gentle hair-pulling and running your nails across someone’s back to flogging and caning,” Shanna Germain, author of As Kinky as You Want to Be, explained to Mic.
Pain is subjective, fetish sex expert and therapist Galen Fous reminds us. “Don’t think of it as pain, think of it as sensation,” he said in an interview Mic. “One person might be freaking out and screaming, while another person might be thinking, ‘Woo, that feels nice.'”
Myth: People who engage in BDSM must have experienced childhood trauma.
Fact: An enjoyment of BDSM practices is not a symptom of abuse — the drive originates from elsewhere. Ever since the American Psychiatric Association changed the categorization of BDSM in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2010, the scientific community has rightfully noted that kink is an erotic behavior, not a pathological one.
But that doesn’t stymie the stereotype that BDSMers suffered from early abuse and kink is their way of coping, as with Christian Grey. Fous described it as “an innate, genetically-derived practice.” Gloria Brame, a sex therapist specializing in BDSM/fetish and author of Sex for Grown-Ups, explained to Mic that the predilection for kink “originates in our biology. For whatever reason, it just turns them on. Fetishists don’t choose to be fetishists. It’s too pervasive for anyone to believe that BDSM has to do with trauma.”
