Well Adjusted Kinksters?

Here at the UCTMW World HQ, Mistress and slave enjoyed a low key Sunday, catching up on some work, and spending a lot of time in bed. Mistress even let me take another photo of her in her new V-Day panties to share in response to widespread reader demand (Well at least one of you asked for more!)

Meanwhile, in the mainstream media, where sharing shots of your wife’s firm and hot ass are not quite as prevalent, the world is still focused on the premier of “50 Shades”, with coverage from all sorts of angles. One I noticed was an article posted on Psychology Today titled The Surprising Psychology of BDSM. It concluded that only about 2% of us engage in bondage or physical discipline in real life, but that more than a majority of us dabble in domination or submission in our fantasy lives:

1. How many people are into S&M?

According to researchers, the number likely falls somewhere between 2 percent and 62 percent. That’s right: Somewhere between 2 percent and 62 percent. A pollster who published numbers like that would be looking for a new job. But when you’re asking people about their sex habits, the wording of the question makes all the difference.

On the low end, Juliet Richters and colleagues (2008) asked a large sample of Australians whether they had “been involved in B&D or S&M” in the past 12 months. Only 1.3 percent of women and 2.2 percent of men said yes.

On the high end, Christian Joyal and colleagues (2015) asked over 1,500 women and men about their sexual fantasies. 64.6 percent of women and 53.3 percent of men reported fantasies about being dominated sexually—and 46.7 percent of women and 59.6 percent of men reported fantasies about dominating someone sexually.

So while most of you out there reserve domination and submission to hot masturbatory otherwise  undisclosed fantasies, it’s not something particularly unusual.  And while the M/f style of submission may be slightly more prevalent, the research shows that more than 40% of women harbor a secret longing for some hapless male to grovel at their feet or be chained to their bed to serve their carnal needs.

Does this mean that more of us are fucked up than we’d like to admit. Not at all, dear readers.  The research also shows that habitual BDSM’ers are better adjusted psychologically than your average vanilla guy or lady:

Pamela Connolly (2006) compared BDSM practitioners to published norms on 10 psychological disorders. Compared to the normative samples, BDSM practitioners had lower levels of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychological sadism, psychological masochism, borderline pathology, and paranoia. (They showed equal levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and higher levels of dissociation and narcissism.)

Similarly, Andreas Wismeijer and Marcel van Assen (2013) compared BDSM practitioners to non-BDSM-practitioners on major personality traits. Their results showed that in comparison to non-practitioners, BDSM practitioners exhibited higher levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and subjective well-being. Practitioners also showed lower levels of neuroticism and rejection sensitivity. The one negative trait that emerged? BDSM practitioners showed lower levels of agreeableness than non-practitioners.

So maybe we’re not all that “agreeable”…. Less likely to just go along with the flow? But isn’t that better than being depressed, paranoid or anxious?

There are trade-offs, even for those of us who’d rather lick our devoted wives’ feet than go to a baseball game with the guys.