For our first post, I want to share some thoughts on the
publicity our research has been getting over the past couple of weeks after
being featured in an article in LiveScience. The LiveScience article, “The
New Yoga? Sadomasochism Leads to Altered States, Study Finds” was picked up
by the Huffington Post (“Consensual
Sadomasochism May Actually Lead To Altered States Of Consciousness”), the
Daily Mail (“S&M
is GOOD for you: Researchers say sadomasochism can lead to an 'altered state of
consciousness' similar to meditation”), and a variety of other outlets.
I’ve never had a story “go viral” before, and the experience has been both
exciting and disconcerting. But first a bit of background:
Last month, James Ambler and I presented a pair of
posters at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social
Psychology. James’s poster described an experiment designed to test whether
BDSM activities cause altered states of consciousness in tops and bottoms. My
poster described our research on hook/energy-pulls.
This is pretty edgy stuff for a psychology conference, and
it attracted the interest of a reporter from LiveScience, Stephanie Pappas.
Shortly after the conference, James and I spoke with Stephanie for about 15 minutes about the
research. We threw a lot of information at her during those 15 minutes, and I
thought she did a great job of distilling that information into an article that
got the essence of the studies and findings almost exactly right. But
distilling two complicated lines of research into a 900-word article means that
some of the details were inevitably left out.
Errata
Going through the article with a fine-toothed-comb, here’s
what I found:
1) The acronym “BDSM” includes “dominance and submission” in
addition to “bondage and discipline” and “sadomasochism”.
2) The Stroop test that we used presented participants with
two types of trials: mismatched trials in which a color word appears in a
different color of text (“red” in green text, for example), and matched trials
in which a color word appears in the same color of text (“red” in red text) or
“xxxx” appears in any color of text. Participants are instructed to ignore what
the word says and instead to press a button at the bottom of the screen
corresponding to the color of text (the buttons are labeled “red” “green”
“blue” and “yellow” in black type). The mismatched trials are difficult because
our automatic response is to read the word rather than look at the color of
text. The Stroop score is calculated as the average time it takes to answer the
mismatched trials minus the average time it takes to answer the matched trials,
with higher Stroop scores indicating poorer performance on the task.
3) Although the article describes altered states of
consciousness as the appeal of SM, we believe that these altered states represent
part of the appeal of SM, not all of the appeal.
4) The article refers to the participants’ BDSM activities
as “sexual ‘scenes’”, but the scenes varied in the extent to which they were
sexual.
5) The studies discussed under “Spiritual, not sexual”
examined a ritual often called a hook-pull or an energy-pull. We’ve collected
data at three hook-pulls: The “Dance of Souls” at the 2012 Southwest Leather
Conference in Phoenix, AZ, a hook-pull at the 2013 Leather Levi Weekend in
Northern California, and the “Dance of Souls” at the 2014 Southwest Leather
Conference in Phoenix, AZ. The hook-pull in which we surveyed 22 participants
was the event at the 2013 Leather Levi Weekend. The cortisol results came from
the 2012 Dance of Souls. We also collected saliva samples at the Leather Levi
Weekend and the 2014 Dance of Souls, but we have not yet analyzed the samples
for cortisol levels.
As the story propagated, more errors were introduced. For
example, at some point, the “Stroop” task became the “Strook” task. That was
the point I realized we had totally lost control of the story.
For me, one of the more unnerving things about the past
couple of weeks was the realization that we were no longer in control of the
presentation of our research. Academic publishing is slow (sometimes glacially
slow). It prioritizes precision over speed because journal articles represent a
permanent repository of scientific knowledge. As a result, when I publish an
academic article, I have nearly 100% control over what appears in that article.
Peer-reviewed journal articles also provide a lot more space
to include things that don’t fit in an article in the popular press. For the altered
states research, for example, our journal article will include:
1) The foundation of prior research that our work is based
on (Baumeister’s theory of Masochism as Escape from Self, Csikszentmihalyi’s
concept of flow, Dietrich’s Transient Hypofrontality Hypothesis).
2) Acknowledgements of all the people who made this research
possible. Here’s how this reads in the altered states paper: “This study was
generously supported by a grant from CLAW (http://clawinfo.org/) and CARAS
(https://carasresearch.org/), a donation of space by APEX
(http://arizonapowerexchange.org/), and travel funds from Northern Illinois
University’s Presidential Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.
We thank Archer, Tess, Mick, and South for their help with the logistics of the
study, Leslie Matuszewich for analyzing the saliva samples, and especially our
participants for sharing their time, their scenes, and themselves with us.”
3) A full list of research collaborators.
4) Plus a lot more detail about everything.
Likewise, for the study on the 2012 Dance of Souls, our
journal articles will include the foundation of prior research,
acknowledgements, research collaborators, as well as a special section
describing the history of the Dance of Souls including its roots in the Plains
Native American Sundance and the Hindu Thaipusam festival, the central role of
Fakir Musafar in introducing hook pulls and ball dances to the sadomasochistic
and body modification communities, and the introduction of ball dances and hook
pulls to the Arizona Power Exchange and the Southwest Leather Conference by
Fakir Musafar and Cleo Dubois.
Future articles that describe the Leather Levi Weekend
hook-pull, the 2014 Dance of Souls, etc. will include all these elements as
well.
Do I wish all this stuff could have made it into the
LiveScience article? Absolutely. But the LiveScience article was about 900
words, and there simply isn’t room in a 900-word article to describe everything
that will appear in multiple full-length academic papers.
Lastly, although many of our findings will seem obvious to
those in the BDSM community, they are not necessarily obvious to those outside
the community. For example, in our 2009 paper “Hormonal Changes and Couple Bonding in Consensual Sadomasochistic Activity”, we documented caring behaviors
that occurred between scene partners during and after their scenes. Of course,
the concept of “aftercare” will come as no shock to anyone from the BDSM
community, but it has been an eye-opener for many in the scientific community
who were unaware of the positive relationship context in which BDSM activities
typically occur. We believe that documenting things like aftercare and the
pleasant altered states of consciousness that BDSM activities can produce will
help counteract the negative stereotypes of BDSM that still pervade our
society.
