Sexual Sunday School

For those of you who are into leather, latex, and roleplaying, I’ve got very bad news. You’re real sicko’s, at least according to psychiatry. Psychiatry has always suffered from bearing the bad news from the charter culture. But here they’ve completely lost contact with the charter culture of today, and are bringing us the bad news from the 1950s.

To be clear, the essence of roleplaying is exchange of power and the pleasures associated with complete control, or complete submission, in a given setting (the bedroom) for a fixed period of time (Saturday afternoon). It is not about “pain,” humiliation,” etc. And leather, latex, and fur fetishes, which are extremely widespread, are an accelerator of sexual desire, not a replacement for it.

Yet psychiatry has a different take on this story, and it’s a take that goes back to Freud’s psychoanalysis, which hated and feared anything not associated with the missionary position. This was Freud’s Vienna: doing it outside of marriage was OK. Doing it with other guys was not. Homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatry in the mid-1970s, as a result of post-Stonewall political pressure. All the other tabus stayed in.

So, on the subject of the sexual “paraphilias,” the sexual bad stuff, DSM-3 in 1980 scorched “bizarre imagery necessary for sexual excitement.” Ditto “simulated bondage,” especially if it is not “reciprocated by the partner.” Hello! All these activities are carried out by mutual consent; if not, they’re crimes.

DSM-3 certainly didn’t like fetishism. An example? “Masturbation into a shoe.” This was the disease-designers’ concept of fetishism. The entire fashion industry, even in 1980, was into fetishism; even then in the club scene leather and latex were totally hip. Hey, man, this is fetishism. Yet DSM-3 considered it a consequence of . . . wait for it . . . childhood sexual abuse, and believed fetishism to be associated with the vile acts of some childhood caretaker.

In the same section were sex with animals (zoophilia – a crime), sex with prepubertal children (pedophilia – a crime), and transvestism, men dressing as women. That women might wish to appear masculine, which applies to some sections of the lesbian community, never even occurred to the Sunday School graduates who wrote the Manual in those days.

The sex section in DSM-3 finished off with strictures against “humiliation” (getting off on your “own suffering”) and on sexual sadism, what the Nazi concentration camp guards did. No concept at all here of voluntary exchange of power and how this might fall on the normal spectrum of what lots of people like to do.

Fast forward to DSM-5 in 2013, which, if anything, is more biased towards the missionary position. Sexual masochism means “excitement from being humiliated.” But you’d be in “full remission” if you didn’t do it for five years! Yaay! Yet another victory for Topeka and White Plains!

“Sexual sadism”: Very bad. The assumption is that it would be with a “nonconsenting person.” This leaves the whole roleplaying community high and dry. What we do in the privacy of our living rooms on Saturday night is on par with pedophilia? Really?

And fetishism! DSM-5 has now incriminated vibrators! I’m not making this up (p. 700).

DSM-5 reserves especial spleen for cross-dressing (transvestic disorder). It’s especially bad “if sexually aroused by thoughts of images of self as female.” (702) This is what transgendered is all about! As in “Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered Community.” This is very big on university campuses right now. We have special washrooms for the transgendered but a psychiatric manual that reads as though it was written in the 1950s. Get with the program, dudes!