Sexology

Adults with a history of childhood sexual abuse often experience symptoms derived from lived traumatic experiences, which are analogous to many of the criteria of diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) but also with those of stress disorder post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We will briefly examine these symptoms in the context of a framework trauma, to conclude later whether symptomatic behaviors may be indicative more accurate for a post-traumatic response, especially in terms of behavior reconstitution or re-experience of trauma. Recognition of self-harm behavior or masochistic tendencies in adult survivors of sexual abuse trauma as an attempt to reconstitution of sexual trauma suffered in childhood, rather than as a manifestation characteristic of personality disorders, serves to establish an appropriate diagnosis, mental health professionals can continue to focus on the consequences of trauma unresolved sexual issues rather than personality restructuring. (Standardized intervention model SON, Delcea C., 2019) Thus, seek to We understand clients in a trauma setting can provide a more objective treatment climate and can minimize the stigma that may result potentially from making an inappropriate diagnosis borderline personality disorder (BPD).

This is the entire book.

"Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?" is an attempt to understand why scholars have begun writing at such tremendous length on individual pictures. Before the 20th c., one of the longest texts on a single painting was Vasari's description of Leonardo's "Last Supper." In the last forty years it has become common for historians to write entire books on individual artworks.

Why have we started experiencing images as so complex? Why do they seem to us like puzzles, waiting to be solved? Why doesn't it concern us that previous generations did not think of writing at such length?

This book also has a couple of chapters on what I consider to be psychotic behavior about images: compulsive sighting of supposedly hidden images, and a crazy art historical book about a painting written by Dalí. So I have tagged the book with psychoanalytic terms.

The book itself is still in print and in copyright, but I found a full pdf of this on the internet (for example on scribd), so I decided to post it on here on academia.edu, where at least it can have the correct context and links.

It is sometimes argued that the non-therapeutic, non-consensual alteration of children’s genitals should be discussed in two separate ethical discourses: one for girls (in which such alterations should be termed ‘female genital mutilation’ or FGM), and one for boys (in which such alterations should be termed ‘male circumcision’). In this article, I call into question the moral and empirical basis for such a distinction, and argue that all children—whether female, male, or intersex—should be free from having parts of their genitals removed unless there is a pressing medical indication.

Parafilie wiążą się z podnieceniem seksualnym wywołanym u jednostki w przypadku wystąpienia określonych obiektów lub sytuacji, które nie są przedmiotem normatywnej stymulacji seksualnej.
Ostatnie wydanie klasyfikacji zaburzeń psychicznych (DSM-V) Amerykańskiego Towarzystwa Psychiatrycznego wprowadziło rozróżnienie na parafilie i zaburzenia parafiliczne. Zaburzenie parafiliczne dotyczy parafilii, która powoduje szkody lub ograniczenia dla danej jednostki, lub takiej parafilii, której zaspokojenie naraża na cierpienie pacjenta lub innych osób.
Przedmiotem referatu jest przedstawienie konsekwencji diagnostycznych ostatnich rozwiązań wprowadzonych przez DSM-V, przedstawienie wybranych przypadków diagnostycznych oraz streszczenie dyskusji na temat traktowania parafilii jako zaburzeń psychicznych.

We are still left with the issue of characterising what counts as successful outcome in sex therapy. The aim of this paper is to report the progress of the outcome measurement project initiated by the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists. In this report, I have reviewed the existing literature to answer the following question: “Does there currently exist a validated evaluation tool (or a package of tools) by which the effectiveness and success of sex therapy in dealing with sexual problems can be measured and demonstrated?”. I start with discussing some of the key dilemmas in relation to measuring outcomes in sex therapy and arrive at a conceptual framework to address this. I finish with suggesting a few measurement tools that can be utilised in this regard.

The purpose of this research was to observe cosplayers at a large, comicon convention set in the Midwestern region of the United States.
Qualitative themes from this observational study include: 1) gendered experiences of cosplayers, 2) issues of consent related to photography, space, and physical touching, and harassment, and 3) issues of consent across ages of cosplayers. Implications around management of consent related concerns for adult and child individuals.

This article is an attempt to alert sexuality educators and counsellors to the viability of peer association as machinery for propagating sexual ideals and mores. The study reported here examined the influence of peers on the sexuality of adolescents in public universities. The study utilised the ex post facto survey design; a randomised sample of 1,580 adolescent students; and the Tertiary Institution Students’ Sexuality Questionnaire to answer the question: How do peer groups influence the sexuality of adolescent students in public universities in Akwa Ibom State? Analysis of the data collected showed that peers have a persuasive influence on the sexuality of adolescent students in the public universities surveyed. Based on the dynamics of peer influence discussed from the findings, the researchers recommended among other things that peer counselling and peer education on sexuality should be designed and utilised in programmes of sexuality education. This will allow peers to positively influence peers to adopt healthy pro-social sexual mores and ideals and thus forestall sexual maladjustment among adolescents in public universities.

Each volume follows the means by which prohibitions and taboos were produced and circulated. The reader can therefore explore the processes that disciplined the representation of the body and the construction of sexual outcasts. This four-volume set presents a wide range of textual material: criminal reports; scientific and medical publications; newspaper items; sex manuals; guidebooks; speculative accounts, and case histories.

O conceito para Foucault, antes das pretensões de defini-lo abertamente, será bastante mastigado durante sua História da Sexualidade I. Estará disperso por toda obra. Fugindo de tais pretensões, primeiramente, ele busca encontrar essa problemática na experiência europeia nos tempos vitorianos , tanto quanto busca um elemento primordial à discussão, uma: scientia sexualis. A experiência da sexualidade aqui é cristã e europeia.

Gender-focused studies of nineteenth-century French literature and history in the last few decades have often relied on heteronormative and gender normative paradigms. Using Rachilde as an example, I demonstrate how trans studies can offer tools through which to recover the gender-creative past. These tools are meant to work in concert with feminist and queer theories, while centering gender in a broad sense by focusing on challenges to the gender binary, modes of gender expression, attention to the material body, and a felt sense of gender.

Objective A study was carried out to determine the variables presented in given categories of pornographic material. The reason for the analysis was an attempt to determine the most important objects for given types of pornographic materials that can cause sexual arousal. Pornographic materials are defined as pictures or videos produced to induce sexual arousal in recipients, however pornographic material is not a homogeneous group. Viewing pornographic material by adults may not always lead to negative consequences, but there are areas of use of pornographic material that can be considered from a mental health perspective. It is accessing specific pornographic materials related to sexual fantasies, the implementation of which would be difficult or impossible in everyday life. Method 4,500 images classified into one of the nine categories of pornographic material were analyzed. Basic descriptive statistics were calculated and the relationship between variables was examined. Results Sexual activity and nudity were rare in fetish-type materials, except for materials classified as BDSM. The materials were mostly dominated by one type of object (fetish), but there were other objects as well. Conclusions The presented research results lead to the conclusion that it is easy to get access to materials that can be a source of sexual arousal for people with less frequent sexual preferences. In addition, in the case of fetish pornographic material, genitals or sexual activity are rare, suggesting that these fetishes are a sufficient condition for recognizing this type of material as sexually stimulating for people with certain paraphilias.

This link [http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2363_reg.html] leads to my Introduction to the edited collection Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World (Temple UP, 2015). The collection discusses the emergence of modern sexual science in Europe, Asia, Peru and the Middle East. The introduction locates the book in relation to critical debates about sexology and translation. It argues that the research gathered here complicates the idea that modern sexuality is a 'Western' construct that was transmitted around the world.

Sexuality is not the product of fiction, but literary and philosophical works can lay claim to having inspired the terms and concepts in which we think about modern sexuality. This chapter examines how the modern concept of sexuality - and related ideas about identity and the body –  were articulated around 1900. It argues that attention to the literary aspects of sexuality deepens understanding of why, and how, the body and its desires became so influential for defining the modern subject, both individually and in collective terms.

Psychologist Catharine Cox Miles (1890-1984) is often remembered as the junior author, with Lewis Terman, of
Sex and Personality. Written with CRPS support, Sex and Personality introduced the ‘masculinity- femininity’ personality measure to psychology in 1936. Miles has been overlooked by some historians and constructed as a silent, indirect feminist by others. Private letters show that Terman and Miles had different assumptions about the need for library research work to precede the empirical work for Sex and Personality.  Miles 1935 chapter on “the Social Psychology of Sex” shows that her theoretical formulation of sex differed from Terman’s in its emphasis on female embodiment, tolerance of sexual variability, respect for the emerging tradition of the sex survey, and its opinions about the determinants of marital happiness, and the variability of intelligence.  Ironically, CRPS monies vired to Terman may have funded Miles’ to develop this early formulation of the psychology of sex.
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Introduction to special issue "Sexology and Its Afterlives," edited by Joan Lubin and Jeanne Vaccaro.
Is sexology over? What does one do with its history, at once a seemingly remote relic and a persistent logic of biopolitics today? “Sexology and Its Afterlives” begins from the premise that the history of sexology lives in the infrastructures of the present. Locating the afterlives of sexology in material and aesthetic form, this introduction to the special issue engages the largely unmarked detritus of a disaggregated sexological project, whose components have found renewed life in the biopolitical apparatus. The contributors to this issue identify not only familiar sites of sexological persistence (the sex-segregated public toilet) but also less immediately obvious ones (the Moynihan report, redlining, the army base) as executing the unfinished business of the sexological project. This breadth of sexological diffusion makes its analysis a necessarily interdisciplinary prospect, and the contributors call on disability studies, trans studies, Black studies, women-of-color feminism, visual culture, and the history of sexuality, generating emergent concepts, including crip-of-color critique (Kim), binary-abolitionist praxis (Stryker), a “trans-mad” aesthetic (Crawford), and a shift toward expressivity as a framework (Musser). Across the issue, newly imagined sites of collective politics come into view as a payoff for working through the stalled-out imaginaries of sexological binarisms.

As recomendações de distanciamento e isolamento social em tempos de pandemia (COVID-19) ocasionaram diversas mudanças urgentes e repentinas no dia a dia da população, inclusive no âmbito sexual. Essas mudanças podem ter uma conotação positiva ou negativa no que se refere aos hábitos de viver, notadamente, em relação as práticas sexuais, e dessa forma, podem afetar a qualidade de vida dos indivíduos. Logo, este estudo teve como objetivo discutir os efeitos da quarentena no comportamento sexual da população. Trata-se de um estudo teórico elaborado a partir de levantamento bibliográfico da literatura científica. Faz-se importante assinalar a existência de um véu moral que obstrui a produção de pesquisas acerca desta temática tão inerente ao ser humano, e tão sensível ao contexto sócio-histórico. Ademais, dada a natureza extremamente estressora da pandemia por COVID-19, e suas consequências como as medidas de contenção, é preocupante o escasso número de estudos que estão relacionados ao comportamento sexual durante a quarentena, tendo em vista que estruturar caminhos possíveis contribuiria para uma maior aderência da população as instruções de segurança. Recomenda-se encontros virtuais, sexting, e chat rooms, assim como a solicitação da higienização de teclados e telas compartilhadas. Ressalta-se que a prática da masturbação não propaga o coronavírus. Por fim, enfatiza-se a necessidade de realização de novas pesquisas sobre o tema para a melhor compreensão do impacto a curto e longo prazo destas mudanças no comportamento sexual decorrente deste período instável.

The use of radical new sexual technologies – digisexualities - are here, and as technologies advance, their adoption will grow. Research has revealed that both lay people, and clinicians, have mixed feelings about digisexualities (Scheutz, 2012). Clinicians need to be prepared for the challenges and benefits in the adoption of such sexual technologies. In order to remain ethical and viable, clinicians need to be prepared to work with clients participating in digisexualities (Hertlein, 2010). However, many practitioners are unfamiliar with such technologies, as well as the social, legal and ethical implications. Guidelines for helping individuals and relational systems make informed choices regarding participation in technology-based activities of any kind, let alone ones of a sexual nature, are few and far between (Hertlein, 2010). Thus, a framework through which to engage in digisexualities is imperative.

CITATION: Chodecka, A., Beisert,M., Izdebska, A., Pilarczyk, K., Zielona-Jenek, M. & Begoyan, A. (2016). Ekspresja seksualna dziecka przedszkolnego w opisie jego opiekunów. Oblicza integracji w obszarach teorii i praktyki psychologii klinicznej. II Krajowa Konferencja Psychologii Klinicznej, Poznań 24-26 listopada 2016. - s. 44.

cpad.com.br /editoraCPAD @editora_cpad @EditoraCPAD A Bíblia precisa ser a regra de fé e conduta de todo cristão. É exatamente por isso que é possível encontrar nela orientações sobre os diversos assuntos que emergem durante a vida, e isso não é diferente quando discutimos sobre dinheiro, sexo e poder. Nesta obra, ao tratar da cobiça e do orgulho, o pastor Natalino das Neves demonstra o que os textos bíblicos do Antigo e do Novo Testamento falam sobre esses temas complexos que, ao serem balizados pela Palavra de Deus, perdem o potencial de trazer pro-blemas à vida pessoal e espiritual do cristão.

"Pleasure principal" is one of the most important driving forces of the human psyche. Pleasures in human beings include various satisfactions, such as food intake for the survival, satisfaction of the ego and higher cortical cognitive functions, sexual satisfaction and orgasm, satisfaction of basic physiological needs. Female orgasm, which does not happen in other animal species (other than maybe one or two higher primates), is one of the most intriguing phenomena in female psychology. Female orgasm and female 'peak experiences' are well documented in the ancient historical literature of the Far East and India. In Tantra and also in Taoist philosophy, for centuries, prolonging the sexual pleasure of the women was regarded as an essential approach; old Chinese Taoist prescription for male sexuality was also defending males to prolong intercourse for a couple of hours, while, according to Chinese medicine men, losing semen was a bad habit or losing the yang energy. As described by Masters and Johnson, some women can attain an orgasmic state which may last for 43 seconds, coined as status orgasmus. The highest orgasm number recorded in medical literature is 134 orgasms per hour. ESR is a recently defined novel phenomenon, although it is very ancient. ESR was defined as: "being able to attain long lasting and/or prolonged and/or multiple and/or sustained orgasms and/or status orgasmus that lasted longer and more intense than the classical orgasm patterns defined in the literature". Status orgasmus are the continuous form of blended orgasms and/or clitoral/vaginal orgasms that last for starting from 1 to 15 minutes (or more). During status orgasmus a continuous orgasmic state is experienced and very few women are believed to achieve status orgasmus state, e.g. less than 1% of the whole female population. Nearly 10% to 15% of the women population has the capacity to develop ESR and prolonged orgasms. ESR is also a learned and developed phenomenon. Some non-ESR women can also develop ESR after certain trainings. Tantric and Taoist techniques are one of the training methods. ESR can also be measured by means of a psychometric ESR scale developed by Dr. Ümit Sayin.

The objective of this study was to test the Betty Dodson method of breaking the female orgasm barrier in chronic anorgasmic women. The aim was sexual and existential healing (salutogenesis) through direct confrontation and integration of both the repressed shame, guilt, and other negative feelings associated with body, genitals, and sexuality, and the repressed sexual pleasure and desire. We conducted a retrospective analysis of clinic data from holistic sexological manual therapeutic intervention, an intensive subtype of clinical holistic medicine (CHM). The patients received 3 × × × × 5 h of group therapy, integrating short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (STPP) and complementary medicine (CAM bodywork, manual sexology similar to the "sexological examination"). The therapy used the advanced tools of reparenting, genital acceptance, acceptance through touch, and direct sexual clitoral stimulation. A clitoral vibrator was used. Participants were 500 female patients betwee...

Be it in images of working women who blurred clear-cut gender boundaries merely because they were employed outside the home, of masculine women and feminine men, or of homosexuals, time and again New Objectivity artists commented from a variety of perspectives on sex, sexual difference, and gender ambiguity. Notably, their colleagues elsewhere were typically less interested in such subjects, despite the fact that there too clear-cut gender boundaries were also being eroded by working women, new dress codes, and visible homosexual subcultures. This essay will probe how specific socioeconomic and scientific developments in 1920s Germany uniquely informed New Objectivity, which differed from contemporaneous representational styles elsewhere in part because of its focus on gender effacement and alternative sexualities.

The conceptualization of excessive sexual behavior has been intensely debated over the years, and the concept of hypersexuality is still controversial. After long debates, the indexation in ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision, World Health Organization, 2018) of excessive and problematic sexual behavior as a compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD) is welcome. There are still debates about the category of the disorder. In ICD-11, CSBD is classified as an impulse control disorder, but this classification is controversial, as there is evidence that CSBD has many addictive features (Kraus et al., 2016). Although the diagnosis of hypersexual disorder, proposed by Kafka,
was not included in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, American Psychiatric Association, 2013), this diagnosis was supported by both clinical contexts as well
as by some research that indicates that excessive sexual behavior can have serious consequences in an individual’s life (Kafka, 2010; Kaplan & Krueger, 2010, Reid et al., 2012). Understanding, defining and correctly diagnosing this disorder are important prerequisites for proper treatment, and allow also warning of certain risk factors for the development of this disorder.

This book examines how sexological ideas about desire and the body made their way from German science into British literary culture at the turn of the last century. It shows that fiction not only influenced the vocabulary of European sexology, but that it allowed lay women and men to shape modern ideas about sex, gender and the body.

Main authors discussed include Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand, Edith Ellis, and Radclyffe Hall.

Fetishism, as a technical descriptor of atypical sexual behavior, was noted in the writings of the wellknown nineteenth century French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911) (Binet, 1887) as well as prominent European sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) (Krafft-Ebing, 1886), Havelock Ellis (1859–
1939) (Ellis, 1906), and Magnus Hirschfeld (1868– 1935) (Hirschfeld, 1956). In their seminal writings, all of the afore mentioned sexologists used the terms “fetish” and “fetishism” to specifically describe an intense eroticization of either non-living objects and/or specific body parts that were symbolically associated with
a person. Fetishes could be non clinical manifestations of a normal spectrum of eroticization or clinical disorders causing significant interpersonal difficulties. Ellis (1906) observed that body secretions or body products could also become fetishistic expressions of “erotic symbolism”. Freud (1928) considered
both body parts (e.g., the foot) or objects associated with the body (e.g., shoes) as fetish objects. For the purposes of this review, a “broader” historically based core definition for Fetishism will include intense and recurrent sexual arousal to: non-living objects, an exclusive focus on body parts or body products.

Therapy can be confusing: two people converse in a private room, one in distress, the other described as a helpful expert. At least one of the two is likely to express thoughts and feelings usually kept secret. In other circumstances, the exchange of such intimacies may herald a more physical relationship. For therapists, however, the professional relationship explicitly precludes such contact. The BACP Ethical Framework for Good Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy,1 for example, requires that practitioners must not abuse their client’s trust in order to gain sexual, emotional, financial, or any other kind of personal advantage. Sexual relations with clients are prohibited, along with sexualised behaviour.

While psychotherapists and counsellors generally acknowledge that sexual attraction is a common and often ordinary human response to another, they also recognise that acting on such feelings in therapy will quickly become problematic. The early psychoanalytic community had to confront and respond to such instances as Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein.2 Rosie Alexander’s3 description of the times she sat on her therapist’s knee and felt his erection, elicits a mixture of emotions in the reader, not least shock, and the narrative is saturated with a sense of betrayal.

There have been several types of research investigating boundary breaches and sexual boundary violations.4 In spite of these, however, there is little certainty about how common sexual boundary violations are, as the sources of information about them (confession, client reporting, complaints to organisations, and knowledge of colleagues’ conduct) are all vulnerable to error. Further studies have attempted to identify characteristics of transgressing therapists and the factors that contribute to such events (see Moggi et al5 for an example), and to understand the effects on clients who have experienced therapist-client sex.6 If sexual feelings are ubiquitous and sexual attraction a real possibility in the context of the therapy relationship, how are these managed in therapy? Complaints about sexual boundary violations form a small proportion of complaints about therapists and health professionals.4, 7, 8 Is it the prospect of opprobrium from colleagues or the threat of sanctions from regulatory agencies that contains the relationship within professional boundaries? Do reported violations represent only a small proportion of actual sexual boundary violations? .......

Pornography and the science of sex sexology are redefining sexuality in the West today, but is the model of sexuality promoted by these two industries selling sex short? In this, the first book to fully investigate the connections between the industries of pornography and sexology, they are found to promote a very similar type of sexual ideal. Sex therapists now recommend hard-core pornography to patients and porn stars have become sex-advice experts offering bestselling self-help books. With reports of the increasing pornification of popular culture and an epidemic of Female Sexual Dysfunction, it is more important than ever to understand the influence of pornography and sexology on our sexual lives. Through a feminist critique of current trends in pornography, in sexological research, and in sex self-help books, it is shown that the type of sex being promoted by these industries closely resembles the model of sex found in systems of prostitution. This is a model in which women are bought and sold and yet it is being held up as an ideal for couples to mimic in their everyday heterosexual relationships. Ultimately, this is an unethical model of sexuality that sells sex short.

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The term «heterosexuality» was coined in the 1890s sexualpathological discourse to
differentiate a «homosexual» from a «normal» sex drive. According to the psychiatrist
Albert Moll hetero- and homosexuality were interconnected, but homosexuality was a
mere inversion of a normal sex drive: homosexual men love men just because they are
themselves in a certain way female, and homosexual women love women just because
they are in a certain way male. Moll did not refer to a hierarchical relation between
heterosexuality and homosexuality but defined them both as a normal or inverted desire
of men and women. He thereby constituted a system of continuity between hetero- and
homosexuality: more or less male or female men and women desired more or less male
or female men and women. The sex drive was independent from procreation, but dependent
from a concept of binary sexes, which was preserved and expressed in Magnus
Hirschfeld’s theory of «sexual intermediate stages». This concept of heterosexuality
proofed itself highly influential in the early 20th century, but it also was in competition
with evolutionary concepts, the psychoanalytical theory of mature heterogenital sexuality
and ideal sexual constitution types. Both gender roles and sex categories thereby
were always contested, problematic and in crisis. In this regard the sexological concept
of heterosexuality was in close relation with the problematization of sex, gender and
sexuality in the first third of the 20th century. In this context marriage was no longer
seen as a hierarchical community for procreation, but as a comradeship of sexual desire
and romantic love. The concept of heterosexuality played a major role in establishing a
consumerist sexual economy. The cultural mobilization of an ideal of marriage, notably
in the post war years, coexisted with the sexual training of partner relationship. Since
the 1950s a heterosexualized popular culture approved and strengthened a new sexual
morality emancipated from the dogma of reproduction. Feminist critique of the last third
of the 20th century in coining new concepts like «heterosexism», «heteronormativity»
or «compulsory heterosexuality» referred to both: to this cultural heterosexualization
and to the «coital imperative». A concept which initially enabled a reform of gender and
sexual relations finally gained the status of a negative category of power relations.

Opisano szczegółowo kilka rodzajów parafilii, które są znane opinii publicznej. Zainteresowanie badaniem seksualności człowieka skutkuje odkrywaniem nowych rodzajów parafilii. Wiele nowoopisanych rodzajów parafilii nie posiada znacznego podłoża empirycznego. Celem referatu jest przedstawienie kilku nowoopisanych parafilii patologicznych oraz analizę ich podłoża empirycznego.

BDSM – Practices of Paradoxes

BDSM, i.e. Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission and Sadism and Masochism is an acronym used to describe a variety of (sexual) behaviours including an implicit or explicit erotic power exchange. The aim of the thesis is to understand BDSM as a dynamic, complex and collective phenomenon. It focuses on how practitioners, through their stories, give meaning to their experiences. A theoretical framework that includes both poststructuralism and symbolic interactionism is used.

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in 2012 and 2013 within different BDSM communities in Sweden. The fieldwork included interviews, observations and participation in meetings, workshops, pub evenings and club ventures. In total, 29 persons, defining themselves as practitioners of BDSM, were interviewed.

The thesis shows how different interpretations and political-ideological perspectives have shaped the social reality, which constitutes BDSM today. This process has taken place in different discursive arenas; from medicine and research to political activism, literature, film and media. Existing discourses, where power and violence are central, are challenged by counter discourses, where resistance against heteronormative norms and sexuality are significant. BDSM is seen as ways to achieve feelings of security and belonging. The practice enable strong emotions, bodily sensations, altered states of consciousness and spiritual experiences. Acts, which could be seen as incorrect and immoral, are made morally defensible within the BDSM context. The discourses both enable and limit the practitioners, and the thesis highlights both ambivalences and paradoxes in the practices.

We thank C. S. I. Jenkins and Neil Levy for their thoughtful comments on our article about love and addiction (Earp, Wudarczyk, Foddy, & Savulescu, in press). While we do not have room for a comprehensive reply, we would like to touch on a few main issues.