Today you can watch Samantha on Sex and the City in virtually the same poses. To reconcile the icons with the actual practice, I spent several weeks recently talking to SM practitioners around the U. One man said he had lost a job when his boss found directions to a bondage workshop in his office. Others said they would be embarrassed if their families learned of their proclivities.
We live in a culture in which sadomasochism is everywhere—from Versace billboards to at least a dozen college campuses where SM support groups have been established—but somehow it remains unseen and unspoken, just beyond the edge of respectability. Barratt and other therapists say that couples often hope that role playing or nipple clamps or quick-release bondage will rev up their sex lives.
What sadomasochism does is take these elements of eroticism further toward their extreme. Others become more deeply involved in the SM scene; they use SM props or fantasies every time they have sex. DS relationships are often as emotional as they are carnal. Submissives relish transferring authority over aspects of their lives to others; the submissive might allow the dominant not only to tie her up but even to tell her when she must go to sleep.
A common misperception is that most DS relationships involve dominant women—dominatrices, in the parlance—ordering around submissive men. As a result, some feminists have come to see BDSM lifestyles as not only transgressive but progressive.
And, indeed, among the many prostitutes who offer BDSM services, more are dominant than submissive, says Dr. Paul Federoff, a University of Ottawa psychiatrist who has studied sadomasochists. Married in July, they live in Clayton, N. If Surri fails to accomplish something Doc asks—say, cleaning out the car or working in the garden—he might spank her or stand her in the corner as though she were a wayward child.
