Defenders of extreme sexual behaviour are blinding themselves to the dark side of S&M, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
The Independent
by Eilis O’Hanlon
As the country still struggles to make sense of the murder of Elaine O’Hara by a man she met through an adult website, Ryan Tubridy’s radio show called on Emily Power Smith, “Ireland’s first clinical sexologist”, to enlighten 2fm listeners about BDSM, a range of sexual practices involving bondage, domination, sadism and masochism.
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She immediately reassured him that there’s nothing sinister about consenting adults including BDSM as part of a healthy sex life. Between 10 and 14pc of people are said to have done so in some form.
The devil lies in those three words. “In some form.” There’s a huge difference between a bit of spanking and light bondage, and the more extreme practices which Smith defended last week on the grounds that “the people who are giving the pain will be trained and they will be very boundaried (sic) and very caring”.
“Trained by…?” wondered Ryan unsurely, trailing off.
“Trained by other professionals,” his guest replied, in what may well be the most ridiculous use of the word “professional” ever. “Maybe a dominatrix.” Oh well, that’s all right then.
It got worse. “For blood-letting and knife play,” Smith continued, “the people who do that ethically are very highly trained.”
At this stage, Ryan should have been trying to pin down this bizarre notion of “training”, but such is our collective fear of appearing judgemental when it comes to sex that it never even seemed to occur to him to suggest that blood- letting might not be a valid lifestyle choice, or that those who fool themselves into thinking it’s just harmless, kinky fun should cop on.
When did it become so hard to say that you really shouldn’t cut women?
It’s difficult to even define what consent means in this context, when the relinquishing of power to another is already so advanced that the boundaries start to break down. Emily Power Smith effectively said as much in a video on the Irish Times website, in which she spoke of the point of so-called “knife play” being not such to damage the other person but “may be more about just pushing them to the limits on a psychological level”.
If your alarm bells aren’t going off as you read that, then perhaps you need new alarm bells. Pushing someone to their psychological limits is already damaging them.
Abusive relationships, as Smith herself says in the same video, often “begin with the psychological torment and wearing down of a person, so by the time it gets physically violent that person doesn’t have as much judgement as somebody else, or as they might have had before they entered the relationship. It can be difficult for them to gauge if they’re being abused.”
Exactly. And isn’t that where the more extreme forms of BDSM lead? …