Alright then, who was it?
"Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me"
Kinky? You're mentally healthier than 'vanilla' bonkers
A new study has discovered that practitioners of "bondage-discipline, dominance-submission, sadism-masochism (BDSM)" tend to be less neurotic, anxious, and paranoid, and more extroverted, conscientious, and open to new experiences than members of the "vanilla" general public. BDSM practitioners "either did not differ from the …
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Sunday 2nd June 2013 18:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This is..
For the last 300 hundred years human sexual urges have been have been attacked and suppressed by religion, governments, do gooders and women's lib. The result has been a need to conform to a norm, the norm issued by all these self interest groups.
What is abnormal to one person is the elixir of a turn on to another.
I say if it floats your boat, get boating.
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Monday 3rd June 2013 05:08 GMT Wzrd1
Re: This is..
"I say if it floats your boat, get boating."
Within constraints. Lest murder and rape become acceptable.
Want to know this dirty old man's observations? The dominants tend from average psyche to potential sociopaths. The latter are of concern, for they respect no boundaries, social or legal.
Fortunately, sociopaths are unusual outside of political leadership. (sorry, couldn't resist a political joke.) And hence, are even more unusual in any "kink" crowd.
I use quotes for a reason. Kink for some is anything that isn't the "missionary position".
In that case, this dirty old man's dirty old lady of 30+ years are downright kinky.
But then, in our youth, we did submit an entire chapter to the Kama Sutra, with thanks. ;)
We're on disability today because of that contribution.
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Monday 3rd June 2013 11:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
RE: The dominants tend from average psyche to potential sociopaths.
Not a very popular viewpoint, but one I agree with. Having moved in a variety of circles in my time, a good percentage of dominant people are just not very nice, and their behaviour towards others (not just their partners and not just in the bedroom) often verges on the abusive.
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Monday 3rd June 2013 14:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This is..
Actually the psychos usually get found out pretty quick.
The BDSM community is fairly tight knit and although not everyone gets along, as with any group, they will usually support each other and word gets around if a guy is wrong in the head.
As any Dom kno, the sub ultimately has all the power as (s)he has to give permission before play commences. If a guy misjudges this he will find himself blackballed by the community PDQ.
(Posted anonymously because... well.. you know)
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Monday 3rd June 2013 20:09 GMT Glenn Charles
Re: This is..
Just don't tend to be an experimentally-minded sailor or mix with them, because you're liable to end up dead. Oddest thing how sailor jokes tend to get taken seriously and how quickly that can lead to trouble. Yes, experience; yes, I know it's still valid--but yes, personally, it's from long ago.
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Tuesday 4th June 2013 11:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This is..
"As any Dom kno, the sub ultimately has all the power as (s)he has to give permission before play commences. If a guy misjudges this he will find himself blackballed by the community PDQ."
Yeah, except if the subs are basically in thrall to an arrogant asshole. Coercion exists in the BDSM community as much as anywhere else.
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Tuesday 4th June 2013 20:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This is..
Quoting the article: "The results mostly suggest favorable psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners compared with the control group; BDSM practitioners were less neurotic, more extroverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, had higher subjective well-being, yet were less agreeable."
This defines the political class quite nicely I should think. Most politicians in the United States are definitely socio-pathic.
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Saturday 1st June 2013 01:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's not the stuff you do
It's the way you deal with it. And that isn't determined by your own (sexual) fantasies and or habbits but simply by the person(age) you really are. I guess this is way too cliched for these kinds of studies, in my opinion because there's little money to be made by stating the obvious, but it's simply the way it is.
Just because a woman is into bondage doesn't automatically make her a sex-crazed femme fatal nor does it mean that the only way you can get along with her is to tie her up.
The only thing to keep in mind is that you also can't rule these things out. Sometimes you /are/ dealing with a (sexual) disoriented person. But its not his or her hobbies which define that.
In my opinion researches like these are no better than the well known "violence on TV is bad because it corrupts children", while totally overlooking the small yet important factor that the real issue is the way those children deal with it. And that's something normally taught by the parents.
As said, IMO this isn't different.
Of course; in the end this whole research is flawed by design. Because let's go over something obvious once again: most people are not very comfortable talking about their sexual desires or fantasies. Doesn't that fact alone indicate that if you start a research into this matter you'll automatically get answers which only reflect a small portion of the people involved?
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Saturday 1st June 2013 16:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: It's not the stuff you do
You said.. most people are not very comfortable talking about their sexual desires or fantasies
Maybe but a local BDSM club (of which we were all unaware till then) rented a room upstairs at our local and didn't seem too bothered about it. Once our giggling was over, neither were we. They left the door open so we could hear the slaps and yelps. They didn't mingle but they certainly didn't shy away. So maybe you're right and maybe you're just projecting your own feelings onto it.
Perhaps you should read the research paper before accusing the researchers of missing the obvious.
Curiously, the aforementioned event organisers specified tea and coffee to be provided[*] - no alcohol.
[*] Inevitable thought follows..."one lump or two?"
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Saturday 1st June 2013 07:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Standard Stats jargon, but do they understand?
That wodge of jargon is pretty standard statistics. But it isn't enough to show that the people using those mathematical tests understand what they are doing. And that's a rather too common problem. Pocket calculators have been able to compute the mean and standard deviation of a set of numbers since the 1970s, and "serious computer software" has been doing this complicared stuff on desktops since the 1980s, and it's really easy to do some standard test, and get a good result, without knowing whether that result is even measuring anything useful.
And, on my experience, if any statistician is picked to take part in a survey, they will lie, just for the LOLs.
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Saturday 1st June 2013 07:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Anon - but only out of respect for my partner
Trust and selflessness are the two crucial factors that make a BDSM relationship work. While it's true that these should be a part of any physical relationship, vanilla or otherwise, when you're dealing with restraint and punishment it gets very bad very quickly if either are missing.
Perhaps this is why those who have successful and enjoyable Dom/Sub relationships show these traits - they wouldn't last very long without them!
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Monday 3rd June 2013 12:07 GMT Poor Coco
Re: Anon - but only out of respect for my partner
There’s a third aspect you’ve missed: kinky folk are amazingly good communicators. They are much better, on average, than the average person on the street at expressing their wishes honestly; they are also far more skilled at listening with empathy.
Ahhhh, that “Submit” button has a whole new meaning today :D
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Monday 3rd June 2013 12:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Anon - but only out of respect for my partner
Not exactly a BDSM practitioners ourselves but we both do take part in age-play and I enjoy TV-play with my wife and yes it takes a hell of a lot of trust for you both to commit to something so personal. You can't get into the full experience or fully enjoy it without being able to express yourselves clearly or trust each other explicitly. That leads to the way we bring up our kids, we talk openly ( obviously not about this! ) in our house, we don't have secrets and make sure we all talk to each other about things. When we had to explain the "birds and the bees" to our daughter, it was just a casual and open talk, no silly embarrassment or mumbling about "trains and tunnels", just the facts using the correct terms and due to our solid relationship we stressed that mature relationships are about about trust and caring for the other person.
On the subject, the thing we found so hilarious was when my Missus would come home from work and we'd laugh about all her ( bored? ) female work colleages getting so excited about the 50 Shades rubbish. They kept asking her to give it read but she said she had no interest in it, which they couldn't quite figure out. As we both agreed, if that lot stopped reading about it and actually started doing it they'd realise that it's much more exciting to make your own fun rather than reading someone else's fantasies.
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Saturday 1st June 2013 07:48 GMT Ketlan
WTF?
"Associations were examined using χ2 tests of independence with φ and Cramer's V as effect size measures and eta or Pearson's correlation. Group differences were tested using analysis of covariance, with partial η2 as effect size measure. A priori contrasts were tested using α = 0.01 to correct for multiple testing; for all other tests we used α = 0.05, two tailed."
Okay, I'm still interested but does someone want to explain what all that shit means?
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Saturday 1st June 2013 13:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: WTF?
Stripping it down the the nub:
Compute the statistics on the people - where the "average" is (that is, where is the line where half the people are above the line, and half below), and compute how spread out people are (are they all pretty close to the line, or are they all pretty far away from the line).
Then, compute the differences between the two groups - where is the average for one group vs. the average for the other group, and what is the spread of one group relative to the spread of the other group.
OK, so far pretty simple. But what if one group's average is just a squeak above the other's? If the spreads are small, that may mean something, but if the spreads are large, it may mean nothing. So how do you turn that sort of fuzzy statement into measurable science? You do some math that tells you "what are the odds that that difference is really a difference, and not just noise?" That's what the χ2 (chi-square) tests do: they allow you to mathematically model the odds that the differences are really a difference.
To people who know statistics, they know what those terms all mean, and this is basically the researchers showing how they came to the conclusions they did - describing the way they did the math.
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Saturday 1st June 2013 15:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: WTF?
My supervisor in statistics used to say that many physicists and engineers distrusted statistics because it tended to demonstrate that their experiments were not convincing (or their engineering tolerances were not actually good enough).
I imagine he's dead by now, an Internet search doesn't find him, which is a pity because when the crucial test for the discovery of a new boson last year was announced in terms of its statistical significance, he would surely have cheered.
I didn't entirely believe hi, though, until our company got a new MD, a mechanical engineer, who wanted us to stop using this "statistical process control" because he didn't believe in it.
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Saturday 1st June 2013 19:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: @ribosome @Chris Miller
Well, given that even the first demonstration of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity depended on statistical analysis, Rutherford was wrong.
In fact my supervisor's favourite was the size of Pluto. Following its discovery, each successive measurement was smaller than the last. The explanation was that the original discoverer had estimated the size at the extreme top of the range - it was after all the only planet discovered by an American and it needed to be big to explain the perturbation of the orbit of Venus.
Successive measurements were more accurate but, because they didn't like to challenge the estimate of a Great Astronomer, were still quoted at close to the top of the range, instead of in the middle. Thus the size of Pluto progressively declined until eventually it was downrated altogether from being a planet - a move which a number of American astronomers continue to complain about.
Eddington did the measurement to demonstrate Special Relativity, and another Quaker, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, was in the chair at the IAU when Pluto was downgraded. As one of them myself, and someone who has done a lot of statistics in his time, can I just remark "Yay Quakers"?
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