Why Care About The Sad Decline of BDSM

BDSM was opened to far more people and pulled toward superficiality by the internet. Those two outcomes were linked, and the mechanism that produced them is still running.

A reader told me recently that the whips and chains get in the way. She knew perfectly well that the practice is not all whips and chains, and she said so in the same sentence, but that is still what arrives first in the mind. Leather. Latex. Everything strangely sexualised.

She is right. The aesthetic does arrive first and it arrives loudly.

What is worth examining is how that happened, because it was not always the case.

What the Difficulty Used to Do

Before the internet, reaching this world was genuinely hard. Finding anyone practising required persistence, discretion, and usually a personal introduction. There were no listings. There was no search. You found your way in through someone who already knew, and that person had a reason to be careful about who they brought.

That difficulty acted as a filter, and the filter was not selecting for virtue. It was selecting for seriousness, because nothing in the process rewarded casual curiosity. Anyone who made it through had already demonstrated patience, discretion, and a willingness to proceed slowly with incomplete information. Those happen to be the same qualities that building a dynamic requires.

So what got built tended to be substantial. Not because the people were better, but because the ones who arrived had already passed a test that had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with temperament.

I am not romanticising this. The difficulty also excluded people who should have been included, kept the practice small, and left individuals isolated with something they had no language for. There was real cost. But the filter did what filters do, and when it was removed nothing replaced it.

What the Medium Selects For

The internet opened the door to far more people, and that is not straightforwardly a bad thing. A great many found language for something they had carried privately for years with no name for it. Access broadened. Isolation reduced.

But every medium selects, and what this one selects for is not depth.

• Spectacle photographs well.

• Sex photographs well.

• Violence photographs well.

• Implements photograph extremely well, which is why they became the visual shorthand for the entire subject.

But two years of reflection, correction, and slow accumulated honesty do not photograph at all. There is no image of a debrief. There is no thumbnail for the moment a woman tells the truth about something she would rather have concealed, and he listens and the frame holds, and both of them learn that it can.

So the visible portion of the culture is not a representative sample of the practice. It is a sample of whatever survives the selection pressure of the medium. And because most people encounter the subject only through that visible portion, the sample became the definition.

Access broadened and the surface became the definition in the same movement. Those were not two events. They were one.

The Distortion Was Already There

It would be convenient to blame the internet entirely, but that is not accurate, and a reader pointed this out to me before I had properly thought it through.

Her first exposure to the subject was pre internet, through Story of O. Lots of sex and violence, as she put it. The graphic content did not begin with online pornography. It was sitting in the source material all along.

She is right, and it sharpens the argument rather than undermining it. The literary canon of this subject is almost entirely erotica, written to arouse, and erotica optimises for precisely the same things pornography optimises for. Intensity. Transgression. Immediacy. Nothing in the genre rewards the depiction of structure, because structure is not arousing to read about.

So the internet did not introduce the distortion. It scaled a distortion that had been sitting in the foundational texts for half a century, and it removed the filter that had previously stood between those texts and the practice. Reading the fiction used to be the beginning of a long process. Now it can be the whole of someone's education.

What the Community Can and Cannot Do

I was asked whether real world groups could provide a counter experience, and my first instinct was to say the format limits them to safety and technique. That is wrong, and it underestimates what actually happens inside them.

The better organised communities do transmit depth. They have mentorship, and the mentorship is not confined to how to use an implement without causing injury. There is a hierarchy within the hierarchy, and the people at the top of it are usually there because they have held something serious across years rather than because they are impressive at a party. Those people take others on. They correct them. They say plainly when someone is building on a foundation that will not hold. That is transmission of structure, not just technique, and it happens quietly and continuously in places most people never see.

Meeting in a room also removes a great deal of what survives easily on a screen. Anyone can maintain an identity in text that collapses within ten minutes of conversation.

So the counter experience is real, and it is more substantial than the visible portion of the culture would suggest.

What the community cannot do is speak.

The subject remains taboo, and that taboo operates on the people best placed to correct the record. A man who has held a serious dynamic for fifteen years is not in a position to say so publicly. His employer does not know. His children do not know. The cost of being identified is real and it falls entirely on him, and no amount of conviction makes it rational to accept.

The shape of that taboo is worth looking at directly, because it is not what anyone would predict:

• Kink is not taboo.

• Erotica is not taboo.

• A novel “The Story of O”, about a woman being systematically degraded sold in the millions and is discussed in respectable newspapers.

• Pornography is ambient.

• Restraint and impact appear in advertising, in music videos, in prime time drama, and nobody writes to complain.

The aesthetic has been fully absorbed and is now unremarkable.

Yet incredibly what remains unsayable is the wholesome part.

That two people might use this structure to build a relationship of unusual honesty, unusual depth, and unusual durability. That the point is not the evening but the decade. That this might be one of the better available methods for producing the thing almost everyone says they want.

So the superficial version passes without comment and the serious version cannot be spoken. The imagery is acceptable precisely because it is understood to be theatre. The moment it is presented as a genuine method for living, it becomes something a person cannot admit to.

That is the irony, and it is not a small one. The culture has made peace with the spectacle and remains unable to hear the substance. And it means the only people free to speak are those with nothing to lose by speaking, which is a selection process with no relationship whatsoever to who has something worth saying.

The result is that the culture cannot reclaim its own subject. Not because the argument is weak. Because making it in public costs more than most people can pay.

Where That Leaves Things

The image problem is not going to be solved by better images. There is no photograph of what this actually is, and any attempt to make one would produce something as misleading as what already exists.

It gets transmitted the way it always was. One person at a time, in private, over a long period, usually in writing, and via a mentor. That is slow, it does not scale, and it will never compete for attention with what is already circulating.

But it is the only method that has ever worked, and the reason is not mysterious. What is being transmitted is not an aesthetic. It is a structure, and structures have to be explained before they can be recognised.

The leather is incidental. It always was.