The History of BDSM

No, it can’t, and it’s not supposed to.

When conservative culture turns its attention to BDSM as a practice and as a culture, the most common view is the neo-Puritanism position that kink is a perversion, the product of an overly permissive, decadent, pornified culture. The shock provides titillation.

However, sometimes the response is different, and the conservatives see BDSM as an application of their ideals. Take, for example, Kelly Brogan and Chantel Quick’s essay “Can BDSM heal the world?” (undated).

According to her website bio, Brogan is a certified psychiatrist, or rather was, as “Dr. Brogan chose not to renew her board certification which expired on 12/31/19”. She is certified in “Integrative Holistic Medicine, ABIHM (The specialty recognition identified herein has been received from a private organization not affiliated with or recognized by the Florida Board of Medicine).”

She is also a major figure in the COVID-denial movement and an anti-vaxxer.

Brogan’s essay opens up with a fairly typical description of bottoming in a bondage session, followed by touting it as the solution to marital problems. However, my whiskers twitched when I got to:

…I believe that we now have the opportunity to mature the insidious backdrops of warfare consciousness and the idea of every man and woman for themselves into the consciousness of complementarity and mutual service.

This is known as complementarianism, a theological view that the two (and only two) sexes are fundamentally different yet complementary. It’s a “separate but equal” idea of gender relations, that in practice tries to cover up a lot of gender inequality.

Brogan and Quick go from garbled Freudian psychology to conspiracy theory.

According to many, feminism was a Rockefeller-funded, socially engineered movement that offered women the poison apple of egalitarian opportunity, and in exchange, they were removed from their homes and role of primary caretaker of their children and added to the taxpayer population.

BDSM becomes the solution to what Brogan and Quick see as the problem of distorted gender roles; complementarianism in action. Their description starts off okay, talking about consent and safety:

BDSM organizes partners into defined roles, connects them through consensual agreements, and creates the conditions for ecstatic union to be channeled through the reclamation of safe power.

But then you notice things like the assumption that the sub must be female and the dom must be male. Though they reference a book written by a dominatrix, Kasia Urbaniak, and talk about using dom and sub roles to ask for money from an uncle, the essay soon returns to the essay of essential female submissiveness.

Why submit?
Because that’s actually what we want as women. We don’t want to be the best man in the room. We want to be well-handled by capable hands so we can finally exhale. Recently presenting at a Weston A. Price conference, I responded to a question about gender dynamics, in part, with the statement, “most women I know long to be well-handled by a powerful man,” and a sensual sigh swept across the 2,000 person room.

This ties into ideas of “surrender” and “a stable, strong, courageous, and intentional man stabilizing a woman’s nervous system”. They even argue that women will unconsciously create their own conditions of confinement, which Brogan ties to her own career struggles for being called one of the “Disinformation Dozen” for her anti-vaccination work.

When talking about the benefits of BDSM, the gender essentialism comes through again.

BDSM offers a framework to resolve the all-too-common pathology of cowering, insecure men and hen-pecking controlling women; when we get into Dom/Sub dynamics, a safety and coherence returns to the field that creates the conditions for true connection.

The essay concludes with a strange contortion of presenting a traditionalist view of heterosexual relationships as being a clever rebellion against the system.

The system would love to remain in charge of determining who’s been a bad girl, who hasn’t, and who gets what punishment, but wouldn’t it be better to empower your man to do that for you? 😉

You’d never know from this essay that BDSM includes switches, or LGBTQ people, or people who don’t engage in dom-sub at all. Brogan and Quick are drawing on the transgressive cachet of BDSM to sell gender essentialism with the promise of better sex and other life benefits that BDSM can’t necessarily deliver. Kink is not the solution to the made-up problem of “cowering, insecure men and hen-pecking controlling women”. Note also that the essay draws on a dominatrix’s book, and Brogan epitomizes the kind of well-educated, professional woman who makes a career out of selling anti-feminism, alongside general crack-pottery.

In my opinion, people should keep their fantasies and their politics separate. The “tradwife” ideal works better as a femsub/maledom fantasy/roleplay scenario than as an actual plan for life. Likewise, if you are a man who wants to pay some guy $10,000 for a weekend-long re-enactment of the first act of Full Metal Jacket, go right ahead; just don’t think it will fix whatever is eating at you.