Substance.com
by Rachel Kramer Bussel
When women in pop culture stray from the prescribed “good girl” into the most extreme bad girl—the sex addict—their interest in BDSM is typically equated with their addiction. By contrast, men are usually portrayed as hopelessly addicted to XXX images, preferring porn to people. Are male sex addicts fundamentally different from female ones, shackled to the Internet while women are shackled by handcuffs? If not, why does popular culture portray them in these two different ways? And what does this say about how women’s sex, desire and pleasure are not only portrayed but policed in our culture?
In films, male sex addicts focus on pornography, such as Adam Sandler’s role in the just-released film Men, Women and Children in which he and his son, played by Travis Trope, share this addiction. (Other recent movies in which guys OD on porn include Shame, Thanks for Sharing and Don Jon.) This development coincides with the ease of access to Internet porn, allowing anyone with a smartphone or laptop to have it.
These onscreen portrayals, along with similarly alarming nonfiction articles, offer up modern porn as a dangerous siren luring unsuspecting horny men into the abyss, never to connect with a real-live human woman again. Witness a 2011 New York magazine article about male porn use in which a 41-year-old man named Perry said, “I used to race home to have sex with my wife….Now I leave work a half-hour early so I can get home before she does and masturbate to porn.” The idea of watching porn by yourself for pleasure—and even masturbating!—gets diverted into making porn into a vice men should avoid if they want to have a healthy relationship.
Whereas men’s onscreen libidos get subsumed to porn, women sex addicts in such film classics as Nymphomaniac and The Piano Teacher go down a kinky path of no return. For these heroines, their pathology is part and parcel of their interest in masochism (though in The Piano Teacher, Erika does have a penchant for porn). The repeated linking of women’s interest in BDSM—bondage/discipline, domination/submission, sadism/masochism and other kinky play—with being unable to control that interest adds up to the idea that women just can’t get enough of whips and chains. Just as men’s brains apparently shut off when faced with naked bodies, women can’t think rationally in the face of a sexy Master, which simply isn’t true in the real world.
“There is no evidence that kinky women are more likely to be sexually compulsive. Just because someone has more sex than another person doesn’t mean they’re addicted, either,” says Susan Wright, spokesperson for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. “It’s derogatory to say someone is more likely to be out of control about their sexuality because of the frequency of their desire or because they like to do BDSM. In fact, most people who are nonmonogamous or kinky have learned how to communicate better with their partners to be sure everything is going OK. That’s the opposite of the self-harm model of sex addiction.”
Basically, “safe, sane and consensual” (a mantra for many in the BDSM world) doesn’t compute in the vanilla mindset of the world at large. Therefore, the idea of willingly wanting to give up some aspect of control of your life, whether it’s what you wear, when you orgasm or what kind of paddle is used on you, is deemed “abnormal.”
The recent popularity among women of the BDSM romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, which has sold over 100 million copies worldwide, led to media interest in the topic, much of which expressed a lingering suspicion of kinky sex as dangerous—but in all the wrong ways.
In fact, it’s hero Christian Grey, who tells heroine Anastasia Steele that he’s never had vanilla (nonkinky) sex before, who can fairly be said to be the BDSM “addict.” Yet he at least has a serious, long-term interest in these sexual activities. Anastasia is doing it primarily because she loves him and wants to please him. Does this make her a love addict by default? It’s unclear, but the idea that a woman would consent to an act like spanking or bondage is seen as suspect. One Forbes commentator wrote, “Do middle-aged women, the main audience for this book, really view the threat of violence as an aphrodisiac?”
Well, no, because BDSM takes place within the framework of consent and violence doesn’t. But you wouldn’t know that from much of the Fifty Shades handwringing, which will surely reach a fever pitch when the movie version (starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota Jackson) hits the big screen February 15.
The very nature of certain BDSM activities—especially some of its psychological aspects—are red flags for an addiction model that doesn’t have, pardon the pun, room for shades of gray. Women’s interest in BDSM per se is often taken as a sign of sex addiction, whether or not the activity is causing a problem in their lives, says Margaret Corvid, a writer, activist and professional dominatrix. “If a woman reports a sex addiction, her interest in a particular kind of sex is often tagged as the problem: She is likely to be advised by a healthcare provider to drop the kink, rather than to manage it so it doesn’t negatively impact her life.” …