Awareness
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ORIGINAL: ChatteParfaitt
This topic was prompted by a few threads going around, the "Is BDSM a Choice?" thread and the "Your Perspective" thread.
Do people who are involved in BDSM, most especially the sadism and masochism aspects, have more emotional and mental "issues" than the general population?
Is a proclivity towards sadism or masochism a result of past (childhood) trauma? In many cases, probably. However I think it's more complex than that. I can think of other reasons.
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Is subbing to someone always damaging to the ego on some level? Implicitly, no. However the form it takes can be. Degradation, humiliation, objectification and nullification of identity all strike me as unhealthy practices which can have a profoundly damaging effect upon the submissive's psyche.
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Is sadism *always* the result of hating your "victim" on some level, while masking it as "love?" No, I think sadism is a product of the dopamine addict who's misunderstood the need for time-out and consequently is driven to increasingly extreme behaviour. It appears to have much in common with porn addiction.
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If a sub lives for humiliation, degradation, objectification, and debasement, is this *always* the result of poor self esteem? A damaged psyche, yes. Characterising it simply as poor self-esteem narrows the range of possible causes. I wouldn't like to be that specific.
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My opinions on these questions can be summed up fairly easily. First, everyone has issues, since no one gets to have a perfect childhood or lead a perfect life. We all have our baggage. Our baggage is a product of our experiences and the way we've interpreted those experiences. Our subsequent behaviour can be vastly different depending upon our internal representation of past events. Dealing with baggage often requires a reinterpretation of those events and a reframing of our understanding of ourselves. If baggage drives you to kink, you'd be naive to think of kink as therapy for it.
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I don't think people who practice BDSM necessarily have more baggage than the general population. I think they do, because the community is largely self-selecting. Consequently, it'll draw in people with issues because there are advantageous reasons for issue-ridden people to practice BDSM.
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I think this all depends on how you deal with those issues. If you hide behind your issues and never really explore why you are the way you are, than you are going to be a BDSM practitioner who is perhaps dangerous to yourself and others. If you see it as your life's work to resolve your issues (as I do) I think it can enhance your life and aid some of that resolution. The problem is that fundamentally, the BDSM community has a greater level of dysfunction than vanilla folk. The principle of social proof virtually guarantees that norms will keep spiralling downwards. Witness the behaviour on CollarMe wherein the more extreme fucked up sadists consider themselves at the top of the hierarchy and you get idiot subs fainting every time one of these fuckwits posts some bloodletting porn. Issues on both sides, methinks.
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I do think that those who like extreme sadomasochist play, such as breaking bones, or extreme degradation play, like eating scat (sorry) have some stuff they need to deal with. That these acts are consensual does not make them "sane" to me. But that is my opinion. See this is the problem. If you postulate a community founded upon nothing more than moral relativism and disdain for the norm, you effectively create a framework wherein nobody's entitled to criticise broken bones, gutting your sub like a fish or murder. Anyone who tries to do so will usually come up with some absurd justification which allows them to set a line but fundamentally if your sadist is entitled to cut your skin, he's entitled to cut your femoral artery as well, provided you consent.
Some people try and claim BDSM stops at what is considered legal, but that's a coward's philosophical cop-out. What this does is substitute the social and legal mores of your society instead of bothering to set some standards of your own. It's monumentally dishonest.
Personally, I think most people are (A) Too stupid and (B) too afraid that setting a standard may someday infringe upon their kink. And so you have a community which has essentially no philosophical rationale that allows anyone to set a line but then dares to say that one exists nonetheless.
Personally, I believe a line has to be set. The principle of consent is not enough. Indeed, in conventional society, it's not about consent, it's about informed consent which is done when you're in your right mind.
I'm firmly convinced many practitioners fall into the latter category. And most people are dopamine addicts too addicted to their kink to allow themselves to conceive of anything which may limit their ability to practice it. Consequently you have a bunch of irresponsible children who have all the reason in the world to close their eyes to anything which might make them uncomfortable and suggest they actually have a responsibility to consider the full impact of what they're doing.
Basically, it's like this. If you're dominant and you NEED your kink, then you're a slave to it. Effectively a slave to your own dopamine. You're directly responding to a craving. And the idea that someone wields a whip or a knife with a craving behind their actions is something I find disturbing. It means they're nowhere near as in-control as they'd like everyone to believe.
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RE: Is the proclivity for BDSM a result of past trauma? - 
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