Practitioners of bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism, or BDSM, have long had the mental and sexual health questioned by wellness experts and society in general, but a new study has found that playing with whips and chains in the bedroom may actually lead to a better psychological wellbeing than taking a more “vanilla” approach to sex. Even though BDSM sexual preferences are listed in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DMS-5) as potentially problematic, the new research, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, has revealed that those who practice sexual activities that revolve around those found fetishes score score better on a variety of personality and psychological measures than “vanilla” people who don’t engage in unusual sex acts.
The DSM-5 – which is the newest edition of the definitive psychiatrist’s manual – lists BDSM as a paraphilia, or unusual sexual fixation. This label has caused controversy amongst psychiatrists and a growing number of members of the public (perhaps thanks to the new prevalence of novels such as Fifty Shades of Grey) who are not quite sure whether such sexual predilections belong in the catalogue of mental disorders. However, it is important to point out that BDSM is only listed as a disorder in the DSM-5 if it causes harm to the practitioner or to others. Even so, some psychiatrists point out that including BDSM and other kinks in the manual is stigmatizing, especially considering the lack of research proving that enjoying sex with a side of pain is linked to psychological problems.
The new study showed that, contrary to the DSM-5 belief, BDSM practitioners may be better off psychologically than the general public. Study researcher Andreas Wismeijer, a psychologist at Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands who conducted the research while at Tilburg University, commented that BDSM practitioners ‘either did not differ from the general population and if they differed, they always differed in the more favourable direction.’ For the study, the researchers put out a request on the forum for people in the BDSM “scene”, as well as seeking out participants who didn’t do BDSM via a women’s magazine website, a personal secret website and a university website.
The participants – which included 902 BDSM practitioners and 434 vanilla (non-BDSM) respondents – were merely told that the surveys were on “human behaviour”. They answered questions on personality, sensitivity to rejection, style of attachment in relationships and wellbeing. On a basic level, the results of the study revealed that BDSM practitioners are no more troubled than the general population. In fact, they were found to be more conscientious, extroverted and open to new experiences and more conscientious than vanilla participants, as well as being less neurotic, which is a personality trait marked by anxiety. Moreover, BDSM aficionados had lower scores in terms of rejection sensitivity, which is a measure of how paranoid you are about others disliking you.
Looking at a breakdown of the BDSM results, 33% of men reported being submissive, 48% dominant and 18% “switch,” or willing to switch between submissive and dominant roles in bed. In the women studied, about 75% of the BDSM respondents were submissive, 8% dominant and 16% switch. The submissives lowest and switches in the middle. Still, submissives never scored lower than vanilla participants on mental health. Wismeijer noted, ‘Within the BDSM community, [submissives] were always perceived as the most vulnerable, but still, there was not one finding in which the submissives scored less favourable than the controls.’ He concluded, ‘We did not have any findings suggesting that people who practice BDSM have a damaged psychological profile or have some sort of psychopathology or personality disorder.’