Perks, problems, and the people who play: A qualitative exploration of dominant and submissive BDSM roles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many bondage-discipline, domination-submission, sadomasochism (BDSM) practitioners identify as primarily dominant or primarily submissive. In the current study, BDSM practitioners with self-identified preferences for dominance or for submission described the traits that they feel make them well suited for their preferred BDSM role, their perceptions of benefits and challenges of BDSM generally, and the benefits and challenges of their preferred role. Semi-structured interviews were completed with 9 dominants and 12 submissives and explored using thematic analysis. Participants described dominants as empathic and nurturing, desiring and able to take control, and attentive and responsible, while submissives were characterized as willing to give up control and having a desire to please. Interviewees described ways in which their BDSM role fit with their overall personality, as well as incongruities between their role in BDSM play and their day-to-day personas. The general benefits of BDSM mentioned by the participants for both roles were pleasure from pleasuring others, physical pleasure and arousal, fun, variety, and going beyond vanilla, personal growth, improved romantic relationships, community, psychological release, freedom from day-to-day roles, and being yourself. Participants also discussed the dominant-specific benefits of control or power, rewards, and confidence, and the submissive-specific benefit of giving up control. In addition to the shared challenges and risks of stigma, relationship problems, and accepting desires reported, dominant-specific issues of more work and responsibility and possessive submissives, and submissive-specific issues of vulnerability, bad dominants, and following orders and accepting decisions were addressed by participants. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".