Demographic and psychosocial features of participants in bondage
and discipline, "sadomasochism" or dominance and submission (BDSM):
data from a national survey.
Richters J, de Visser RO, Rissel CE, Grulich AE, Smith AM
School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of New South Wales,
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of New South Wales,
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
The abstract is at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18331257
In Australia in 2001-2002, a representative sample of 19,307 respondents aged 16-59 years was interviewed by telephone. The research took into account the biases associated with telephone sampling to derive a representative sample of the whole population.
The paper reports that:
In total, 1.8% of sexually active people (2.2% of men, 1.3% of
women) said they had been involved in BDSM in the previous year.
I suspect that many who practice BDSM (or just read all about it on the net) would have expected the percentage of sexually active people who practice BDSM to be much higher.
Unfortunately the full paper is not available on the Internet (I believe that any research that is publicly funded should be available to the the public, and so the paper should be freely available). This means that I don't know the questions asked, and so my interpretation of these results remain open.
I can think of several reasons why the figures are as low as they are.
Firstly, this is a real scientific representative sample. Most other surveys are less rigorous, and tend to bias towards those active in the area of interest.
Secondly, as the purpose of this analysis was:
"To
examine sexual behavior correlates of involvement in BDSM and test the
hypothesis that BDSM is practiced by people with a history of sexual
coercion, sexual difficulties, and/or psychological problems."
it is clear that the researchers were not wanting to include those who play the occasional slightly kinky game.
If they had asked `In the last year have you ever tied your partner up or been tied up? Have you ever had one person take charge? Have you ever used mild pain such as bitting or spanking?´ then the results would have been very different.
It is common for those who are into BDSM to regard mild play (as listed above) as just vanilla people enjoying a bit of kink, and not "real" BDSM, so for studying BDSM it is appropriate to exclude mild play.
So I'm pretty sure that for this paper, BDSM means the more hard-core practices which usually include pain and punishment, humiliation, and strong dominance and submission. In this is the case, then the paper comes close to what people on BDSM forums would agree is "real" BDSM.
The third reason for the numbers being slightly low is that it does not count those who have practiced hard-core BDSM, but not in the last year.
And finally, without seeing the whole paper, we do not know how they dealt with the possibility of people who had engaged in "real" BDSM in the last year not reporting that they had done so.
But taking all the above into account, and even if the figures are a tad low, the research makes clear that "real" BDSM is very much a minority interest.
For most, BDSM is not a symptom of problems
Finally, the paper does have some good news about BDSM. The paper reports that:
"People
who had engaged in BDSM were ... no more likely to have been coerced
into sexual activity, and were not significantly more likely to be
unhappy or anxious - indeed, men who had engaged in BDSM scored
significantly lower on a scale of psychological distress than other
men. Engagement in BDSM was not significantly related to any sexual
difficulties."
And the conclusion of the paper was:
"Our
findings support the idea that BDSM is simply a sexual interest or
subculture attractive to a minority, and for most participants not a
pathological symptom of past abuse or difficulty with "normal" sex."
Those familiar with BDSM will not be surprised that most who are into it are mentally healthy. It is great that there is now some scientific research proving that this is so.
Discussion and follow-on
You can discuss this research, or introduce any other research on the numbers who practice BDSM and the health of doing so, at the Devotional Sex forum here.
What this research means to men who wish to practice FemDom but have a partner who is not interested, is presented in Chapter 14 here.