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[P.E. Dietz is a forensic psychologist who consistently tries to point out the absurdity of the link between s/m devotees and psychotic criminals.]
According to Dietz, the five main differences between psychotic sadistic serial murderers and SM devotees:
1. Psychotics search for unwilling partners. S/M devotees use a "safeword" that the submissive can say at any time to end the scene, thus the submissive retains real control throughout the encounter.
2. Psychotics force their acts on the victim rather than aiming at pleasing the submissive (as in s/m). The psychotic sadistic acts are quite different from s/m practices, and usually include: forced anal penetration, forced fellatio, or violent vagina-penetration with various foreign objects -rather than the penis.
3. The sadistic offenders' demeanor is diametrically opposed to s/m devotees: usually the psychotic is detached and unemotional throughout the torture, while the s/m dominant appears to achieve a "high" or pleasure equivalent during the scene.
4. Psychotic criminals torture their victims, inflicting serious and permanent injury, trying to arouse terror in their victims. S/M devotees skillfully enhance the sexual arousal of their partner, following the rules and guidelines that were established before the scene, thus creating only the illusion that the submissive is not in control.
5. Psychotics usually have a past history of sexual crimes such as rape or incest. S/M devotees are average people who typically don't have criminal pasts.
Park Elliot Dietz, forensic psychologist (Ph.D)
Paul H. Gebhard, Ph.D., stated that S/M practices were "only prevalent in its organized form in literate societies full of symbolic meanings." This means that far from being a manifestation of a base instinct, sadomasochism required a considerable amount of intelligence and organization.
Paul H. Gebhard, Ph.D., Harvard, second director of the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University
William A. Henkin, PhD.; November 1992 letter to the committee that advocated changes to the entries on sexual sadism and masochism in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
"In conclusion: consensual sadomasochism offers its adherents an opportunity to explore paraphilic urges and fantasies, not in a dangerous or debilitating fashion, but in a safe and supportive manner, where those urges and fantasies can be pleasurably satisfied, and where their values in a person's psychic life can be revealed.”
"Within the past decade prominent clinicians and scholars in the fields of psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, and clinical sexology have proposed that consensual erotic power play is not a psychiatric disorder: that instead, it can simply be a form of sexual pleasure, and that as a path of psychological and spiritual development it can even be the evidence and experience of triumph over childhood adversity.”
"Absent distress, harm, or functional impairment, to define such activity as a mental disorder is to place chains on the human spirit, and to produce a chilling effect on the very processes we as psychotherapists are trained and charged to abet: the healing and liberation of damaged and imprisoned personalities, and their integration in the full creative expression of human beings."
William A. Henkin. Ph.D.
Susan D. Wagenheim, M.D.
As a board-certified psychiatrist and supporter of the National Organization for Wom |
en, I write in support of amending the policy statement on consensual S/M. It is my understanding that S/M practice is a valid expression of adult consensual sexuality. In my private practice, I hear patients tell me frequently that they were "born this way"; ie submissive or dominant in sexual nature. Their experience is that S/M is their sexual ORIENTATION, and they "come out" to themselves much as homosexual and lesbian people do. With that understanding, there is no place in NOW for discrimination against a woman's right to choose; her right to choose how, when and with whom to express her sexual self.
Susan D. Wagenheim, M.D.
Charles Moser, Ph.D., M.D. S/M practitioners have been victimized by society as a whole and by many groups that should know better. There is no credible evidence that S/M practitioners have any more problems or issues than other sexual orientations. There is no data to suggest that S/M leads to violence. All research so far, indicates that S/M practitioners are indistinguishable from individuals with other sexual orientations, except by their sexual behavior.
Charles Moser, Ph.D., M.D.
Dolf Zillmann (1984)
[D. Zillmann along with Park Elliot Dietz are two of the world's leading authorities on the relationship between sex and aggression.]
"As the arousing capacity of novel partners is likely to fade and acute emotional reactions such as fear and guilt are improbable accompaniments of sexual activity, what can be done to combat the drabness of routine sexual engagements that is expected to result from excitatory habituation? Rough housing, pinching, biting and beating emerge as viable answers. In terms of a theory it is the controlled engagement of pain that holds promise of reliably producing excitatory reaction for transfer into sexual behavior and experience…. Pain then always can be counted on to stir up excitement, however, pain must be secondary to sexual excitedness. It must be dominated by sexual stimulation. Only when thus dominated can it be expected to enhance sexual excitedness."
Dolf Zillmann, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
An Inside Look at S&M; Psychology Today
S&M, the ultimate break from thoroughly modern stresses on the self.
"Modern Western culture has placed enormous and unprecedented demands on individual selfhood," psychologist Baumeister observes. "The self is an unending project, throughout life, that constantly needs to be built up and defended. It has to prove capable and autonomous and attractive, along with everything else. As such it is a source of stress, and hence worry and pressure."
And if there's one thing stress research has taught us, it's that any respite from vulnerability is a good thing.
If masochism is about contradicting one's identity, then socioeconomic status reveals masochists for what they are. "Masochists seem to be drawn largely from the privileged classes," Baumeister finds. They are above average in education and income. "Society's real victims do not seek out masochistic sex. Rather it is often the rich, powerful, and successful, the people with the heaviest burdens of selfhood, who need the escape of masochism. Hence, it is an expression of mental balance, not the reverse"
Roy E. Baumeister, Ph.D.
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