The furries, fetishists, leatherfolk, submissives and dominatrixes of the world have a thing or two to teach everyone else, and not just about sex.
So says a group of experts conducting the first worldwide study into how kink and alternative sexual and erotic play can affect mental health.
Their early findings, shared last week at the American Psychological Association’s (APA) annual convention in Denver, show that nearly half of people who have engaged in consensual kinky behavior report that it has helped them with emotional healing.
‘People in general are looking to overcome sexual shame, kink is a way to reconnect with their bodies,’ said Anna Randall, a sex therapist from Silicon Valley and executive director of The Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance (TASHRA), which is generating the study.
‘There’s a lot for everyone to learn here’ said Julie Lehman, a Bay Area psychotherapist, sex therapist and the study’s principal investigator.
‘I would hope that all adults, whether kinky or not, would start engaging in some of the kink communities’ brilliant ways of doing things.’
Christian conservative group Focus on the Family is slamming the researchers and TASHRA for condoning ‘sexual brokenness’ and training mental health professionals to promote ‘sexual sin’.
The group is also taking aim at the APA for what it calls its ‘collusion with darkness’.
Kink is an umbrella term for sexual activities that are not conventional or ‘vanilla’.
But what’s kinky to some may be standard to others.
‘For lots of people, anything beyond penis-vagina missionary sex is kinky,’ Lehman said.
One category is BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) which often entails switching or intensifying power dynamics between partners.
BDSM can range from being tied up and hoisted into the air via complex contraptions to simply raising one’s arms above their head during sex for a feeling of vulnerability.
Other behaviors include dirty talk, use of sex tools, consensual/ethical non-monogamy, group sex, voyeurism, exhibitionism, erotic hypnosis, erotic breath play, asphyxiation or choking, and other costumed and role-playing activities.
Kink can also involve fetishes for objects ranging from adult diapers to stilettos and for body parts spanning from ears to feet.
The prevalence of kink has been hard to quantify because the sexual minority who admit to it have largely been ignored and marginalized by social scientists.
Clinicians have long viewed forms of consensual kink as pathological, deviant and abusive rather than a chosen preference or lifestyle.
The World Health Organization listed fetishism and sadomasochism as psychiatric diagnoses as recently as 2018.
Many mental health professionals still have little or no sexuality training and continue framing kink as negative, perpetuating stigma and shame among their clients.
What they miss, Lehman told us, is that ‘Everybody’s sexuality is wild and chaotic’.
Sexual desire, experts say, often involves risk-taking and pushing boundaries, exploring the lines between pleasure and pain.
Safe and healthy kink requires a steadfastness around what the kink community calls ‘the four Cs’: communication, consent, caution and care.
That means openly and honestly seeking to know your partner’s fantasies and desires rather than merely touching them the way you like to be touched. It entails setting clear expectations about what is wanted and what is not.
It involves establishing safe words and gestures to stop and opt out when a scene gets too intense.
And it requires knowing the physical, emotional and legal risks of certain behaviors and understanding the lines between consent, abuse and assault.
Autoerotic asphyxia has been estimated to cause 250 to 1,000 deaths per year in the US.
If a partner is too drunk or high to drive, sex therapists say they are too impaired to engage in healthy kink.
And if they are uncomfortable talking about sex and feelings, experts add, kink probably is not for them.
Researchers found the kink community lead in practicing healthy forms of consent, Sophia Selino, a research assistant at Yale University’s psychiatry department told the Daily Mail
Perhaps most importantly, healthy kink requires partners to take time before and after intimacy to touch, soothe, hold each other, check in and debrief emotionally.
‘That’s what people really long for, that sense of fulfilling their desires in a context of safety, caring and connection,’ Randall said.
‘Too often, people don’t know how to create that context, so they stop having sex altogether.’
Although the four Cs started among kinksters, mental health experts say they’re useful to enhance any sexual situation.
‘What lands for me is that people in the kink community are leading the general population in healthy forms of consent,’ said Sophia Selino, a research assistant at Yale University’s psychiatry department.
The Kink and Flourishing Study has Lehman and her team of 16 mental health experts closely surveying 672 people from 40 countries to understand how acting on kinky desires has affected their mental health, personal growth and well-being.
The research is ongoing, but early findings show that 48 percent of respondents report that kink has led to at least some level of emotional healing.
Participants say it’s especially helpful for healing past trauma, particularly involving rape and other types of negative sexual encounters.
Going ‘trauma-near’ – putting oneself in a controlled condition that in some ways approximates a past traumatic event – can allow a person to take control of sexual situations in which they were once powerless, experts say.
Some people experience ‘restructured memories’ that allow them to reframe a limiting and negative narrative with feelings of autonomy and safety – and what was triggering can become pleasurable.
The study showed situations that once set off fight-or-flight responses can help build the trust, intimacy and emotional connection respondents said was missing in their lives.
‘Kink puts me in a raw vulnerable situation where my emotions get expressed, getting them out there and receiving pleasure from it in a way that helps push the hurt away and rewrite some of the hurt,’ one of the study’s participants wrote.
It can also help people who are depressed feel more alive.
‘It makes us juicy. It fires us up,’ Randall said, adding that kink can help anyone repressed or bored sexually ‘explore what’s possible, free and unfettered, in a safe container’.
This practice is not new.
‘Images of [kink] are carved into caves,’ Randall said.
But, by most experts’ accounts, interest has grown exponentially in the past 15 years with the popularity of books and movies on the topic, especially Fifty Shades of Grey, published in 2011.
Although the novel and movie starring Dakota Johnson were panned by critics and clinicians alike, both helped normalize conversations about BDSM desires and dynamics.
A national survey conducted in 2015 found that at least 30 percent of adults in the US engage in erotic spanking, role playing or bondage.
Other research has since shown that somewhere between 20 and 47 percent of adults in Western countries report acting on kinky behavior, and somewhere between 40 and 70 percent say they fantasize about doing so.
‘The likelihood is you are working with kinky people and don’t know it,’ Stephen Ratcliff, a National Coalition for Sexual Freedom board member, told the crowd of a few hundred mental health professionals attending last week’s kink panel.
Although TASHRA and its research group aim to teach those professionals about kink, they stop short of urging them to recommend it to clients – at least for now.
‘It’s not an impossibility in the future, just like it wasn’t that long ago that people wouldn’t have imagined recommending psychedelics [for treatment],’ Lehman said.
Focus on the Family, meanwhile, disputes the findings about kink’s ability to heal trauma.
‘More abuse simply compounds previous abuse,’ Jeff Johnston, a culture and policy analyst for the group wrote in an article about the study.
Lehman responded to Johnston, saying, ‘Those parents in Focus on the Family could probably all use some kink.’
The Christian conservative organization based in Colorado Springs also derides APA for what it describes as ‘perverse’ subgroups such as its Taskforce on BDSM, Task Force on Sexism and Cissexism, and Committee on Consensual Non-Monogamy.
‘The APA debases its profession by highlighting debauched ideology,’ Johnston wrote.
‘Even as we condemn the immorality of the APA as an organization, let us pray that God will have mercy and redeem many of its members from sin.’
APA responded Thursday.
‘The purpose of the APA’s annual convention is to present psychological research in all its diversity,’ spokesperson Kim Mills said.
‘If Focus on the Family wishes to pray for us, we welcome their prayers.’