Huffington Post
by M. Gregg Bloche
So slip into those tight leather jeans. That dog collar would look fetching. Add a piercing in a place your mother wouldn’t imagine. Or take your lover to a trendy erotic play-space and make lots of fast friends.
Your therapist says it’s OK. In fact, she or he might be there. (I know a few therapists who partake.)
The American Psychiatric Association has gotten kinky. Well, not quite — its annual meetings each May are pretty buttoned-up affairs. But its newest catalog of mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (known as the DSM V) does some unzipping. You can now do whatever, with whomever (consent required, please), on your own or in groups, and be in the pink of mental health — so long as you don’t suffer “clinically significant distress or impairment.”
Credit cultural change, kinky lobbyists (the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom pressed the APA to stop diagnosing edgy pleasures), or — who knows. But the committees of psychiatrists who rethink disease categories when the APA revises its diagnostic manual dropped “fetishes” sans “distress or impairment” from their list of disorders.
If your style of kinky fun is fetish-free (the APA defines “fetishism” as sexual use of “inanimate objects”), the new erotic liberation still has you covered. The DSM used to treat all “paraphilias” (APA-speak for “atypical” sexual practices) as sicknesses; not any more, so long as the fun is distress-free.
So what Christian and Anastasia do in Fifty Shades of Grey is (mostly) healthy, as of the DSM V’s May 2013 release date. So are sex parties of the sort enjoyed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn — the next president of France, until his alleged doings with a hotel housekeeper undid him.
Psychiatry’s new sexual willingness came along just in time to save the field from embarrassment. If millions of Americans are getting kinky (or want to), diagnosing kink as disease would expand the ranks of the mentally ill implausibly. …