It’s time to share a Great Moment in Science.

One explanation for bdsm desire was supplied by Dr Karl Abraham, one of Freud’s disciples. It’s a snappy little theory, and we’ll get to it in a second. 

These days, if somebody says, “Freud said…” or “According to psychoanalytic theory”, I hear the equivalent of “My astrologer tells me…” I try to be polite and not roll my eyes, and I wait till it’s over before returning the conversation to something sensible.

But Freud was taken terribly seriously for much of the twentieth century, which is probably the most interesting thing about psychoanalysis: it gave us the business model and many of the doctrines for scientology and similar movements/cults.

“By carrying the typed correspondence in her teeth, the masochistic subject achieves complete dental sexual satisfaction.”

Anyway, Abraham’s idea was that what he called “sadomasochism” was caused by teething. You see, babies focus on their mouths during teething, and because eating is both enjoyable and destructive they associate the oral aggression of biting their rusks with sexual pleasure.

Abraham knew that babies take sexual pleasure from eating because Freud had ruled that eighteen-month-old babies locate their sexual feelings in their mouths, and if Freud said it, then it must be true. (This is what being a disciple means.) 

It followed that babies whose teething was unusually difficult or unusually enjoyable become “sadomasochists” in later life.

And that, my kinky brothers and sisters, is where we come from. And people who had braces on their teeth are all into bondage.

Abraham’s sadomasochistic teeth should, by rights, be resting in the lumber room of science along with phrenological heads and homeopathy kits, but as recently as 1992 a pair of psychoanalytic dentists – yes, I know; they were psychoanalytic dentists – claimed to have carried out anatomical analysis of the jaw muscles and teeth that supported Abraham’s sadomasochistic teeth theory. 

Anyway, Karl Abraham’s kinky teeth march on. The show’s never really over. 

Captain Jack Harkness: Who sees a screwdriver and thinks, ooh, this could be a little more … sonic?

The Ninth Doctor: Well, who sees dentists, and thinks, they really need to be  a bit … psychoanalytic?

Johann “It’s a wig” Meibom

Nearly four hundred years ago, a German doctor, Johann Meibom, noticed that some of his patients were reporting something that struck him as odd: they got sexually excited by being whipped across the buttocks and upper thighs.

Whipping happened a lot back then, but very little of it was intended to turn people on. Meibom did some thinking about why people could take sexual pleasure from pain. Eventiually, in  1629, he published a treatise about it: On the Sexual Uses of Whipping (Flagrorum Usu in Re Veneria). 

Meibom’s explanation was that whipping brings blood rushing to the assaulted area, and if the whipping is close to the genitals the increased blood supply will make it easier to achieve arousal.

“Blows on the buttocks and loins (that is, the groin, hips and lower abdomen), the area of the body most involved in producing sexual fluids and carrying them to the genitals,” he wrote, “warm and inflame those parts and contribute strongly to the arousal of sexual desire.”* 

“The irritation of Lechery”, as they used to say, around 1629.

Meibom’s was one of the first attempts to explain the causes of bdsm sexuality and, by suggesting that a sexual response might have a sexual cause, he made a promisingly sensible start.

The question of what causes bdsm desire, where it comes from, is one of the first questions asked by people who discover bdsm desires in themselves or in someone they love. (Yes, it should be a joyous discovery, but it isn’t always that way at first.)

When people raise questions of cause and origin – of aetiology – it’s only partly out of curiosity. They also want to know how the aetiology of bdsm affects the answers to some other questions.

Those questions include whether bdsm is part of the natural range of ways of being human and sexual, or whether it’s a sign that the person drawn to bdsm is pathological or damaged; and whether or not a person can simply decide to have, to to get rid of, bdsm desires.

If they turn to more recent medical or psychiatric theorists for answers, they may find that medicine and psychology have taken some giant backward steps since 1629.

Take Karl Abraham, for example, the twentieth century psychoanalyst who argued that “sadomasochism” was caused by … teeth.

Nah, let’s bring him on tomorrow. 

* I was going to use the contemporary translation by Edmund Curll, because he’s a hero of mine (all underground publishers are), and because he used the phrase, “the irritation of Lechery“, which I love. But for clarity’s sake I’ve provided a modern translation.

I’m going to be writing, off and on, about what we know about why some people like bdsm, and respond sexually to bdsm-like situations, while others don’t.

 I’ve been putting this off for a while because it’s a huge task, and I’m revising the Probation Officer novel into (I hope) publishable form at the same time.

But I promised I’d write something about why corporal punishment of children is a bad idea, and that topic fits into the bigger topic: where does bdsm come from, anyway?  

Since the nineteenth century, most people trying to come up with explanations have come at this issue the wrong way. Bdsm is thought of as pathological, “sick” and evil, and yet there are people who are drawn to it and enjoy it, so psychologists and theorists asked “what is it about those people? What went wrong with them?”  

But bdsm is intensely pleasurable. It seems to work by taking some sexual things that everybody shares (surrender, for example, and the desire to make your partner respond to what you do), and making those things even stronger.

So what mystifies me is: why isn’t everybody into bdsm? 

That oceanic metaphor…

Another way of looking at this is to agree that pretty much everybody actually is into bdsm to some extent, which is why so much love poetry is about conquest and submission, why some lovers scratch and bite each other, and so on. It’s just that some people only explore the shallowest edge of bdsm, getting their feet wet paddling at the shore, while others dive into the ocean and have a whale of a time.

Some of us like bdsm a lot, and some only a little bit. So … why isn’t everybody enthusiastically into bdsm? 

Watch this space.