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Notes -
BDSM relationships are rational and adaptive for (some? many?) modern women
[Epimistic Status: Might just be the girls I date]
Oh boy! Another post on gender and romantic dynamics. Discussions on this topic here tend to go in a few predictable ways, and unfortunately there's a frequent vibe of posters here just not liking women. Leaving aside the whole hypergamy bit, there's frequent sneers about girls being attracted to partners that will mistreat them. This attraction is attributed to two evo psych explanations:
Men with aggressive and dark triad traits are more likely to succeed in gathering resources and accruing power. This makes them valuable mates, but also makes them high risks for physical abuse, infidelity, etc. There's something good correlated with something bad.
Females evolutionarily were frequently coerced by mates. They often didn't get to even choose their mates at all. This goes back all the way to chimps and monkeys. The ones that tolerated the abuse better were more likely to survive and reproduce. One of the pathways to tolerate abuse better is to enjoy it at some level. If you can't really control whether you get hit or not, it's more adaptive to get off on it than have a mental breakdown. The same goes for submissive behavior. Once you're wired deep down to enjoy something, you're going to start seeking it out.
I broadly think these two points are true, and I still like women. I think given submissive and masochistic impulses are wired in, the rational move is satify them while minimizing damage. BDSM relationships (which I'm using here as a catchall for everything from hard power dynamics to good 'ole slapping and choking in bed) are a social technology that fills that role.
Women want things in a partner. They also have different reproductive strategies that don't always neatly coincide. Pretty boys will make pretty daughters. Kind and caring partners are more likely to invest in you and your offspring. Dark triad partners are more likely to be disproportionately successful, but they might hurt you in the process. Straight up abusive partners just need to be survived, and some level of massochism helps.
Some of these reproductive strategies clearly work out a lot better than others. It's much better to end up with a pretty boy than an abusive one, but instincts were evolved when mate choice was much more constrained. Leaving a bad partner is much more of an option now, rendering some of the survival instincts counter produtive. So what's a gal to do with that masochistic drive? Get with a decent partner than have them do BDSM. Much better to be choked by the pretty boy that loves you than the dark triad guy that will actually kill you.
Backdoor on Feminism?
So here's my fringe, underdeveloped thought. Feminism and "womens liberation" broadly decreased the amount women had to submit to their partners. A lot of women liked that change. Some more reactionary ones didn't and explicitly volunteer for more trad lifestyles. I think a lot of women have mixed feelings. They really value the practical gains in freedom in some areas. But in others they didn't really want to stop being submissive. Western blue tribe women are seeped in the idea that feminism is good, and wanting to roll things back is bad. BDSM offers a figleaf for that. It's culture is soaked in the language of consent, so it doesn't contradict feminism. Yep, wearing a collar and being your man's slave is empowering. BDSM offers a framework for picking and choosing what bits of power to keep and return. You can still have your own job, but do everything you husband says at home.
My anecdotes
I had an ex who I was keeping on a leash. She really liked being given orders. One day I asked her to fetch me food a few too many times and she said "I wanted to be your girlfriend, not your servant!" I learned then when girls want to be submissive it's more like they want to be your pet than your maid.
I had two separate exes who ran away from abusive partners and then ended up with me. They were sensible enough to flee at the first sign of trouble. They liked me a fair amount at first, but when I introduced them to BDSM they became enthralled with me. I think early in the relationship were satisfying the Pretty/Caring strategy. Once BDSM hit the mix they felt like they were satisfying Pretty/Caring/Dominant. I think the BDSM community downplays the relationship with domestic violence for PR reasons. There's definitely something there.
If you're a straight man and you're not open to some BDSM elements in your relationship, you're gimping yourself, disappointing your lovers, and quite possible driving them away all together.
My personal anecdata, not nearly enough for a real sample but too many too ignore, is that more women are into BDSM than men are, every time I've gotten kinkier it's the girl driving it, even as what she wants is for me to drive it.
That said, discussing BDSM is difficult because we lack good terminology. You have the intellectualizing kink purists who have an attitude that there are regulations and you can only call it kink if you do xyz, "it's only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling abuse." They're eager to avoid connections with the pagan, chthonic reality of most kinky sex people engage, in favor of a universe dominated by experienced extremists engaging in carefully curated and regulated activities. You have the prudes of both feminist and christian denominations, who perhaps no longer think that anything other than procreative missionary is sinful but asymptotically approach that logic as they go. And you have the broad mass of horny normies who don't really bring ideology into sex, driven by the porn industry that just wants to make money lying to you.
There's layers to what kink can mean, but for the most part I think a missing element people avoid is play. Sexuality is one of the few spaces where we allow true play as adults, creative imagination, pretending to be someone else. That can be formally ("You're the student turning in a late paper and I'm the strict professor") or informally (imagining oneself in the image of the platonic ideal of sexy, inhabiting that archetype in your mind, without saying a word). Per Dan Savage, it's Cops and Robbers with your pants off.
Sex has become the only space of true play and risk in the modern world for many adults.
Well yeah, because it's a power thing.
Could you imagine if men were allowed to think that women liked sex? They'd never be able to extract rent from that resource if that was the case- you'd have a bunch of women trying to have sex with men and men returning the favor, with very few strings attached. Plus, imagine if the woman were able to avoid the risks of pregnancy by taking a pill?
The value of sex would go to basically zero- how's a woman going to secure a man now? They'd have to rely on other stuff, like being a decent human being[1], to ever have a chance at bagging a man where body counts are not just expected, but not having one suggests some defect.
That's why non-missionary sex has to be a sin- so that women have an excuse to never acknowledge it's a thing, and have an excuse to shut other people up who claim that it is, and men aren't allowed to initiate a thing even if somehow they break through that censorship and discover it exists.
But to people who know better than that, it's nothing but virtue Georgism. Yes, BDSM can be an infohazard for imbalanced relationships where the BDSM dynamics are, uh, also happening outside of the bedroom (and not in the good way)- and then the question becomes, as so many questions of this nature do, about forcibly redistributing virtue from those who can handle [the truth] to those who can't, and suppressing [the truth] is part of the way in which that is done.
[1] The feminist and [this type of] Christian here are alike in that they're using their group membership to justify not working against a below-average personality. Being stingy and begrudging are personality flaws, but the [particular versions of these] outlooks are the same in that they define holiness as leaning into those flaws, not away from them.
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Yes, and based on women’s porn preferences, we have solid scientific studies backing up that claim.
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