“Often, we tend to fantasize and seek experiences in sex that we don’t have in reality”
Dominants and Submissives:
- People in powerful positions, leading a life with lots of important decisions and responsibilities might have the urge to let go of all the stress and give absolute control to someone else. It can feel insanely liberating to get rid of the weight of the world for a few hours.
- On the other hand, people who have no opportunity to make decisions professionally or even privately might be excited to take the dominant role in their sex lives.
In recent years in the field of psychology and in psychiatry, BDSM is not considered a pathology unless of course if it is causing harm to others or to self and if it is keeping one from living normally. It is just a sexual preference in general cases.
The BDSM practitioners tend do hide their tendencies from the public eye and it is very difficult to make an empirical studies on them yet. Although few studies have claimed that bdsm practitioners have better mental health but you need to take these results with caution since we do not know if it represents the general public since they are only volunteers.
It has been generally thought that the practice of BDSM is in some form associated with psychopathology. However, several more recent studies suggest a relative good psychological health of BDSM practitioners.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1743609515304471
The results mostly suggest favorable psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners compared with the control group; BDSM practitioners were less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, had higher subjective well-being, yet were less agreeable. Comparing the four groups, if differences were observed, BDSM scores were generally more favorably for those with a dominant than a submissive role, with least favorable scores for controls.
BDSM may be thought of as a recreational leisure, rather than the expression of psychopathological processes.
![[Untitled 1163.png|https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201307/bdsm-personality-and-mental-health]]
https://www.jsm.jsexmed.org/article/S1743-6095(19)30002-5/fulltext
Regarding roles played in the BDSM scene, men declared as prevalently dominant, whereas women were prevalently submissive, in line with leading gender roles. Moreover, men preferred fetish activities, whereas women were more in an ownership/belonging relationship.
In line with previous studies, men were more likely to take the dominant role, and women the submissive, as shown in the diagram below.
This might refers to an arrangement in which the dominance/submissive relationship is more or less a full-time practice rather than restricted to specific “games”? I don’t know.
This is consistent with an exaltation of stereotypical gender roles in BDSM erotic games, such as male domination of women, with men focused on sexual activity, in contrast to women’s attention to relational bonding and care.
Regarding sexual satisfaction, dominants were more satisfied than both the control group and the submissives. Dominants also reported fewer sexual problems and less overall sexual distress than the control group or submissives. These findings are generally in line with previous findings that dominants reported better mental health in several respects than either submissives or a control group drawn from a community sample
Psychological Characteristics of BDSM Practitioners:
https://sci-hub.st/10.1111/jsm.12192
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Dominants were lower in neuroticism
- a trait associated with a host of emotional problems)
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Dominants suffer lower rejection sensitivity.
- Rejection sensitivity is characterized by the overestimation of the possibility to be rejected by others and of the emotional impact that will occur following rejection.
- Feldman and Downey found that rejection sensitivity is the expression of both the avoidant and anxious patterns of insecure attachment behavior
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Dominants Had higher subjective well-being than those in the submissive and control groups.
- It is generally thought by the lay public that BDSM practitioners may be psychologically damaged and even dangerous
- Studies examining the psychosocial functioning of BDSM practitioners found that BDSM participants exhibited higher, rather than lower, levels of subjective well-being compared with non-BDSM practitioners
- Male BDSM practitioners (but not female) were significantly less likely to report psychological distress.