What can BDSM teach us?

Learning through BDSM

In his article - BDSM as a Playful Learning Site for Qualitative Complexity - Sacha Kagan shares his research insights about the potential for experimental learning that BDSM settings can provide. While including transdiciplinary research and a review of related literature, Kagan has the courage to write about his own personal experiences in BDSM play. Especially in an academic context, I find this exceptionally courageous!

Without any naivety Kagan's article stresses the positive possibilities of reflected BDSM practices. Playing being one of the most powerful ways of embodied learning, BDSM can literally help a person to become more capable, mature and attentive in a social community. „What we can learn through BDSM (both as a personal learning site and as a social practice) is to play with, and thereby playfully learn to become wiser about, the complex chaos of our lives and of society. Beyond stereotypical role-play, BDSM practice can maintain ambivalences and revels in ambiguities, mediating between several realities with out flattening them.“ (quoting the article)

For me personally the first part of the article made clear, once more, how much we are actually stuck in a sexual stimulation matrix. One quality of BDSM is the creativity of handling the body, opening up the possibilities of touch and stimulation and freeing the whole physical landscape including the genitals of their attributed desires; meaning you don't necessarily have to (only) feel pleasure from kissing, caressing, a blowjob, some sort of penetrative sex or whatever “normal” thing. There is a vast range of sensations possible to feel in the body and, at least in BDSM, nobody to dictate which of these feelings are proper right and which ones are wrong.
I also had to think of some life situations that have become more easy for me since playfully experimenting with power structures; whenever I find myself in a situation of annoying power play, like, let's say some Ordnungsamt-Idiot is unnecessarily mean to me, I would - inside myself - just pretend to be in a BDSM setting as the naughty girl who just didn't do this or that correctly. And right away I would find the situation way more fun and bearable than before when I would just get angry in such situations. For sure this is hardly accurate in more serious situations of unjust power structures in real life. Still, deciding at which point you want to make life a game and when not can be a real super power!

Ballbusting as a challenge to hegemonic masculinity

In the second part of the article we hear about Kagan's personal experiences, which take place in the practice of Ballbusting whereby the testicles are being tortured in many creative ways, ranging from soft to extreme sensations. The balls of a male person are definitely a touchy subject and “especially interesting in the context of patriarchal order and heteronormative male domination […]. Ballbusting offers a very concrete occasion for cisgender men to learn to be more conscious of the patriarchal order in terms of the self-conceptions of masculinity that they usually take for granted. It allows to redefine the “balls,” a site of male “identity” and a so-called source of power, strength, potency, etc., as equally a source of weakness, vulnerability and (to mainstream conceptions supposedly “feminine”) sensibility." (quoting the article)

Lessons learned through BDSM/CBT

Kagan beautifully describes his personal learnings through BDSM/CBT. I will just briefly list some of the experiences that he discusses further in his article.

1. Blurring the lines between fear and lust

2. Realising and abandoning the illusion of control

3. Finding a broader and more colourful range of feelings and sensations

4. Exploration and performing gender

5. Understanding more the inner complexity of the body-mind and psyche

6. Letting go of the fear of social stigma

7. Learning to accept more easily and cope better with unforeseen, insecure or unexpected situations in life

8. Being “less afraid of being afraid"

9. Becoming more attentive of the emotional well being of others in non BDSM contexts

You should really read the whole text to grasp the full picture of the learning potential of BDSM – it's totally worth it! You will find the full article here.