People will really say “Imagine if we treated mental health like physical health” and then use BDSM to “cope with their trauma” like that wouldn’t equate to ✨consensually ✨ having someone hit their broken leg with a mallet
Only that people with a broken leg do not have the wish to have someone hit their broken leg, nor have their been studies showing improvement of broken bones through hitting them. There have, however, been studies showing the positive psychological effects of BDSM.
Also, mind you: by far not everyone into BDSM has trauma, let alone sexual trauma. While number of people with some variations of both PTSD and CPTSD is higher among kinksters than the general public, it is far from 100%.
Because in the end, a lot of kinks are just related to amygdala development in the brain. You know, the same part of the brain that makes you disgusted and unreasonably angry about things other people do consensually and in private.
In homo sapiens the amygdala participates in sexual arousal (it does in some other mammels, but in those only in the males - in homo sapiens it is involved in both male and female arousal). But the main function of the amygdala is anything related to self-defense, and danger accessment. What happens in people with kinks is that for some reason there are axioms between the "arousal" neurons in the amygdala, and the "danger" neurons in the amygdala. Like most neurological things this cannot be changed of shifted. But given that from all we can say the effects are positive - as long as everyone keeps the motto of "safe, sane and consensual" in mind - there should not be a reason to do anything about it.
And what happens with your disgust is that the amygdala - due to culture being such a recent thing to happen - also regulates culture dependend moral disgust. So, yeah, as you are angrily typing this, you are literally being unreasonable because of the same brain region that is responsible for people having kinks.
Kinks are autonomically neurological but criticizing it is due to culture? Do you think I typed the word ‘kink’ into google, said “ew”, and then never engaged with it again? Many kink critical individuals have prior experience with kink, and at the very least read about it. And many times their beliefs are in opposition of the (patriarchal!!) culture they’re surrounded in.
Sure there are psychological components to it but it is also largely sociological. Females are socialized to be submissive and to rationalize abuse, and this is rarely subverted (including dommes) in BDSM subcultures. You will find that time and time again the “golden rule” of safe, sane, and consensual is weaponized against anyone who dares to second guess their experiences within the community. It’s a fallback designed to always be indicative of a personal fault and can never be linked back to kink itself. That way if anyone thinks that they’ve been abused through kink, it’s either the fault of the individual dom or the sub themselves for failing to uphold the golden rule.
I was in a past relationship with a man who had a free-use kink. He ended up raping me. It was something that we had touched on lightly but never seriously considered adding to our relationship. It took me a year to even consider it rape because I thought it must have been through some fault of mine, because though we talked about it maybe once, I never explicitly said that I wasn’t interested in it. It was an “oh well, he must have thought it was alright” thought process that is not unique to me. And you could say it’s his fault or my fault as much as you want, but you can never ever blame it on the infrastructure that creates these situations in the first place.
And as per your link, roughly 50% (49.5% to be exact) of the data used is from self reported satisfaction rates, and it cites an additional autobiographical account from one author. Why can they make up a chunk of evidence in a pro kink context but many, many accounts of the contrary are disregarded?
Guess what. Pretty much ALL Psych-Research is self-reported. Because so far we have not yet found any way to read people's mind. So pretty much all psych- and cognition-research is self-reported, because outside of some very few things that we can test, there are not really any tests we can do to measure psychology or cognition. Take that from someone who is right now in the process of trying to design a cognition study that tries to remove as much participant bias as possible.
If you are going beyong that, it is neurology. But neurology research is famously underfunded, due to being fairly expensive (if we are talking fMRI) or near-to-impossible (looking at the actual endo-neurological happenings in the brain), and usually being not capable of changing any of the things it studies. (Neurology has the issue of pretty much all major neurological illnesses like alzheimers and such being often impossible to cure so far. Which also means there are no treatments that make money. And stuff like this - "how does kink actually work" or "how does sexuality generally work" - does not even seek to cure something, it is just stuff researchers want to know. So frankly, it is a miracle that the study finding the entire amygdala relation even exists.
And please, for love of god, stop sharing this bullshit that kink is all about "submissive women and dominant men". Because in reality there are about as many submissive as dominant woman, and the same goes for men. Yes, there is a tadbit more men participating in the community, but that is largely due to the general (understandable) hesistance of many women (especially cishet women) to openly live their sexuality in even the most vanilla ways. Mostly due to the danger.
But if you actually participate in the community... It is actually one of the savest communities that are out there. Because the community usually actively polices against rapists. There are literal lists of people being handed around within kink community spaces of people who are rapists, even if the victim(s) decided to never go to the police.
Heck, I knew about certain celebrities being creepy assholes and rapists at times more than a decade before it became public knowledge. Because their name was on those lists.
And yes, there are absolutely men who will excuse shitty behavior with kink.
But those men tend to not be part of the community.
Oh, and we know that the entire kink thing is biological, a) because kink has been a thing forever, and has been a thing in a variety of societies, and b) because the entire axiom-conenection that causes it happens in animals, too. Only that in animals it only ever has been observed in males. (Though we so far have not studied it in any apes, I should note. So it might be there in bonobos and chimps as well for both sexes.) And yes, the animal stuff is mostly "ratpack" studies (= neurology studies done on rats, because we cannot afford to do neurology on other species). But as I said, there was at least one study done in human subjects showing the same mechanism.
Also, again, if it was cultural, we would observe the patterns you suppose, but that are not actually there. But we do not observe them. Men and women that actually are kinky are about as likely to be dominant as the other way around. Which you would know, if you really had read any unbiased studies on that. Heck, if you go on porn alone, femdom has a lot more porn to it than female submission. Like four times as much.
Meanwhile the entire "being massive outraged and disgusted by it" thing is very much cultural - because a) it is not there in all cultures in which kink had been practiced, b) even in those where it had been it has been very different from what we see in "feminist" circles today, and c) we actually do know the mechanism in the brain leading to moral outrage, because it is the same activation pattern happening no matter whether you are disgusted by queer people, by Black people, by people practicing a religion you do not agree with, by people eating something you do not agree with or by people doing kink. If I am not mistaken this is the study about it. Literally your brain reaction is pretty much the same for any type of moral condemnation - and it is the same for physical disgust, which is funny, because it tells us as lot about evolution and how fairly recent the development of moral frameworks as a cultural concept is.
And yes, I absolutely knwo that there are men excusing their shitty behavior with kink. But there is a reason those are not connected to the kink community in general - because again, those police against that kinda stuff.
But guess what: Most people who get raped (men and women alike) get raped without kink involved. I got raped by both a random guy from my friendgroup and my very first boyfriend in fairly vanilla ways. But from that I neither took "all vanilla men are rapists", nor "all Japanese men are rapists" (given my first boyfriend was Japanese and absolutely used the fact that I was a bloody weeaboo to groom me). Because, guess what: No matter what group you take, there will be some shitty people there.
Oh, and just to be sure: I was into kink way before I was raped. I was into that stuff before I even knew what sex was. Which is the experience a lot of kinksters have.
Meanwhile nobody I ever did kink stuff with (almost all of them I knew from community events) did anything to me. In fact, I would argue, most of them were a lot more careful about this stuff than I was. Because, yes, I am a bisexual submissive with pretty hardcore kinks - some of which are too hardcore for any male or female dom(me) I have ever kinked with.
And again: You do not need to be into kink. You absolutely do not need to. If you do not have those axiom connections, well, you do not. And nobody is shaming you for not having them. (Or maybe rather: Those people who are shaming you are assholes.) But do not get involved into what other people do in their free time in a private space consensually. Because even if you think it is bad: those axioms do not seem to go away. I would guess that while it probably has some environmental factors it probably is a genetic predisposition to form them or not. In the end kinks are just like sexuality: they cannot be changed or therapied away. And as long as it is a safe kink there is no reason to try that - because as with gay people, trying to therapy it away causes more harm than good.
Meanwhile, though, "moral disgust", just as prejudices can actually be treated as these are an effect of an ineffective shortcut the brain has learned to take. And once the brain learns that it is ineffective it goes away. (In terms of prejudice even surprisingly easily - it is harder with moral disgust though, even though the mechanism and short circuit is the exact same.)
