In recent years, society has moved towards greater acceptance of different sexualities and lifestyles, but how much progress has truly been made on this front? A study published in Current Psychology suggests that the general population still stigmatizes people who engage in BDSM practices.
BDSM, or bondage/discipline dominance/submission sadism/masochism, has moved into mainstream consciousness in recent years, in part due to references in popular culture, such as the prolific novel, Fifty Shades of Grey.
While pop culture representations of BDSM could serve to normalize these sexual behaviors and lead to a more open dialogue about sex, they can also spread misconceptions about the nature of BDSM, potentially leading to further stigma. This study seeks to understand how the stigma towards the BDSM community compares to the stigma toward the LGBTQ community.
For their study, Ashley A. Hansen-Brown and Sabrina E. Jefferson utilized a sample of 257 participants recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Exclusion criteria included identifying as a BDSM practitioner or identifying as gay or lesbian. “We excluded both BDSM practitioners and gay/lesbian participants from our sample because both were comparison groups in the study,” the researchers explained.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of three target conditions: BDSM practitioners, gay/lesbian people, or people in romantic relationships. Participants answered demographic questions, a question about how they are being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and completed measures on stigmatization towards the target group.
Results showed that BDSM practitioners faced higher levels of stigma than lesbian or gay people. This level of stigma was not significantly affected by the participants age, gender, or level of COVID-19 stress. Stigma toward people who are lesbian or gay was lower than stigma toward BDSM practitioners, but higher than stigma shown toward the control group of people in romantic relationships.
This is consistent with previous research that showed a strong stigma toward people who partake in BDSM and suggests that significantly less progress has been made in regard to pathologizing BDSM than pathologizing homosexuality.
“Perhaps the most critical future research direction is to examine how to reduce this stigma. Stigmatization correlates with negative health outcomes; thus, it is plausible that BDSM practitioners are at risk for this in a similar way as the gay/lesbian population,” the researchers said.
“Our findings that BDSM practitioners are still stigmatized in 2020 raise the question of how best to combat the stigma toward BDSM practitioners. We believe this is a worthwhile pursuit both for the general population broadly speaking, as reducing stigma overall would certainly be desirable, and also for healthcare and mental health professionals specifically, as stigma in these arenas is perhaps most likely to negatively affect BDSM community members.”
This study took important steps into better understanding how sexuality is stigmatized in today’s society. Despite this, it has some limitations to note. Firstly, recruiting a sample through Mechanical Turk can limit generalizability because people who use the platform tend to be younger and more educated than the general population of America.
Additionally, excluding people who partake in BDSM or are homosexual means that the study did not account for gay or lesbian individual’s perceptions of BDSM practitioners, or vice versa. “This limits our findings in the sense that our sample consists of only heterosexual, non-BDSM-identified people,” Hansen-Brown and Jefferson wrote. “Although that definition does indeed apply to the majority of the general population, it is still worth considering as a limitation to the current research as our sample does not represent the full general population.”
The study, “Perceptions of and stigma toward BDSM practitioners“, was published April 26, 2022.