Customer Reviews

Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures

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This is an excellent and successful book. The Editors are very knowledgeable about Sadomasochism and have each written about S/M elsewhere. Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures, is an ambitious undertaking in that it addresses a wide range of issues that confront those who practice S&M as part of their overall sexuality, or as a lifestyle. Of special interest to me was the chapter that explores Sadomasochism utilizing a comprehensive battery of psychometric tests. The result is that four myths that were or are widely believed regarding S/M are systematically devastated, utilizing empirically sound research methodology. This book has an international flavor touching on the subject as it manifests in nations outside of the North American continent. Also discussed are clinical, legal and human rights issues facing S/M participants in the United States and Europe. I found the chapter on Spanking, which is really about techniques for neutralizing stigma, to be somewhat condescending. Otherwise this book is affirming of S/M without taking an advocacy position. This book positively contributes to a view of Sadomasochism that moves away from pathology, toward a proactive and responsive view of sexuality that lies beyond the conventional wisdom of what is normal. I recommend it to all who are interested in the subject, including practitioners, physicians and sex therapists.

This is an important first book in out new understanding of sexuality. While not a book about SM per se, it is a compendium of papers on who does BDSM, the environment that SM has to live with and what people can learn sexually from those who are more sexually adventurous than most people.

See a full review in my column, Getting Started at [...]

Rick Umbaugh
qui bene amat bene castigat

The best book of real studies into BDSM. I used it as a source for a paper in my Queer Studies and Queer Theory classes in college. The professors were impressed and one asked to borrow it for a bit. I do have some complaints with some of the studies themselves, however. For example, the researchers use categories such as "hypermasculinity," but never actually describe what their definition of it was or why they put some things in that category but not others (when it wasn't obvious). And they explored humiliation in men and women, but didn't describe which end of humiliation the individuals preferred. This would have been very interesting from a patriarchal point of view. However, but I REALLY liked one of the chapters at the end that discussed abuse and the lack of training among psychologists to detect abuse withing the BDSM community. People either think it's all abuse or they don't know enough so they stay away from the issue.

An excellent overview of a difficult subject. Discusses, among other things, past etiologies and problems of classification of S & M in current psychiatric terms. An argument is proferred to remove such behaviours from the paraphilias.
Some legal issues are debated ie the Spanner Case in the UK and the use of the defense of 'She asked for it' in the USA, in forensic and legal terms.
Excellent references and websites are given.
Any Medical, Psychiatric, Psychological, Sexological or Legal professionals will find this most volume useful, and it could be of interest to lay readers.