[lbo-talk] Re: Sex and Stuff

[queer dewd formerly known as ( )]

At 07:47 AM 1/12/2007, Brian Charles Dauth wrote:

>>Anyway, do you think childhood trauma is the source of the desire
>to experience erotic humiliation?
>
>For most of the kinksters I know it is.


I get the sense people who object to BDSM have a big problem with that. So 
what if people do? If you're using that framework to understand it, then I 
assume there's some Freudian theory behind it. If so, then we are all 
working out childhood trauma of some sort since, for Freudians, it's a 
continuum and an inevitable aspect of human life.

If you take the Fruedian feminists seriously --e.g. Nancy Chodorow -- it 
wouldn't be terribly odd to say that masculinity and femininity in the US 
are the result of trauma induced by what are considered 'normal' 
childrearing practices.

There are folks in the BDSM community, one famous person in San Fran IIRC, 
who are part of it because they were in lots of pain from childhood 
illnesses and hospitalization.

But this seems odd to me, to be worried that a subset of people in BDSM are 
survivors of abuse. I'm sure a similarly high proportion of women who 
become radical feminists are survivors of domestic violence and rape. No 
one's worrying about that. And yet, arguably, radical feminists have had a 
much larger impact on US society than BDSM has had. E.g., MacKinnon's 
framework dominates the law as it pertains to harassment, etc. and, as 
Halley argues, this influence isn't benign and may, in fact, harm queers 
and -- shock! -- horrible hetwhitedudes.

People like to point at the abuse issue re: sex work as well, to discredit 
the industry and the claims of the women who do sex work by claiming they 
can't possibly know their own desires because of this childhood trauma. How 
insulting. There are people on this list who've admitted to various 
childhood traumas. Do we discredit their occupations and hobbies and 
sexuality as a consequence?



queer dewd
http://blog.pulpculture.org

[1] IIRC, the research on the matter of childhood sexual abuse and rape as 
related to sex work is too ambiguous. That is, it often focuses on street 
prostitutes who are more vulnerable and more willing to take the $10 for 
the interview because they need the money. As a consequence, the research 
samples are very skewed and far more heavily populated with women who come 
from impoverished backgrounds and/or who are women of color and/or women 
who are genuinely mentally disabled. As a consequence, the decision to do 
sex work may be a secondary issue, where the childhood trauma helped bring 
them to the margins of social life (lack of h.s. degree, lack of familiar 
support network, etc.) and *then* they began sex work. This is usually a 
backstory very different from the way women in the high end of the industry 
entered it.