“It's All About the Journey”: Skepticism and Spirituality in the BDSM Subculture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research on BDSM (bondage & discipline, dominance & submission, sadism & masochism) subcultures has largely ignored the spiritual aspects of BDSM for participants. Drawing primarily from my years of experience and participant observation as an insider in the DC /Baltimore BDSM pansexual community and 70 interviews conducted with self‐identified kinksters throughout the Mid‐Atlantic United States, as well as a convenience sample (n >1,100) survey of American and Canadian kinksters, I show that the BDSM subculture, as a noncriminal deviant subculture, provides a hospitable social environment for cultivating the “lived religious” (Wilcox ) experiences of this mostly agnostic/atheist and Pagan group. Nearly half of all American and Canadian kinksters who are heavily involved say they sometimes engage in BDSM for spiritual fulfillment. Many kinksters demonstrate discomfort with the more mystical aspects of this spirituality, and often adopt an epistemic stance I call post‐rational to reluctantly acknowledge mystical experiences within a preferred framework of scientific and rational knowledge. Nonetheless, interviewees described spiritually connective, transcendental, and cathartic experiences from their BDSM practices. Further research is recommended on the spiritual experiences of religious “nones,” the social construction of catharsis, and potential applicability of a post‐rational stance to contexts such as alternative medicine.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".