bdsm history

[dark_tipped_rose]

is there a history of where bdsm originated? does it go back beyond men in leathers & on motorcycles? have there always been kinky people with home-made contraptions?

any ideas?

 

[CutieMouse]

If Wikipedia is to believed, arguments could be made that it dates back the c9.

 

[bridgeburner]

is there a history of where bdsm originated? does it go back beyond men in leathers & on motorcycles? have there always been kinky people with home-made contraptions?

any ideas?

Netzach is an excellent source on this and far more learned on this topic than I am, but I'll give you what I think all cobbled together as it is.

Formal BDSM as we acknowledge it today is the mongrel child of multiple sources, but the leather stuff traces pretty directly back to gay motorcycle culture of the 50's. The showier protocol end seems more rooted in refinements of de Sade and Saccher-Masoch, but despite the fact that they provided a name via von Kraft-Effing (sp?) neither of them likely invented either the practices or the desires --- they're just the first celebs.

There's plenty of perversion in human history revolving around sex -- Elizabeth Bathory, Spanish Inquisition, Witch-finders anyone? --- but little of it could likely be called a "culture" unless you want look at small, closed and secret societies like a Hell-fire club or something.

Power games from the frivolous to the extreme are human nature. Formalized practices are easier to trace, but I'd venture to say that you can't begin to recognize an entity "BDSM" until it had a name and the term sadomasochism wasn't coined until the 19th century. Just because it hadn't been named, however, doesn't mean no one practiced it.

It's sort of like the eternal existence of a triangle --- triangles existed long before humans named them, but you couldn't have a Triangle Club until you invented the word.

 

[Netzach]

There are multiple histories. It depends what vantage point you're interested in. If you consider the fact that there are flagellant women on the temple walls at Pompeii I think we're dealing in something really old. The biggest currents that feed the river as I see it are the gay leather current from the postwar era on, which consists of again *multiple* histories and no single common denominators, and the fetish community mostly consisting of professional women and their partners, and their mostly male clientele. Heterosexual man-on-top flitted around the perimeter of that professional scene, and really didn't have a home until the seventies as a cohesive scene. Well into the 80's contact magazines were really the only meeting up point for most people, clients and pros or simply lifestyle people.