Sex in the Digital Age

Bibliographic Data

ID19905018
AuthorsK Tiidenberg (0000-0002-7895-7617, corresponding author)
EditorsPaul G Nixon, Isabel K Düsterhöft
Year2017
Pages220
Publication date2017-08-16
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueSex in the Digital Age (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4324/9781315446240
OpenAlexW3002416971
Open LibraryOL53980718M
ISBN9781315446240
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited16

Becoming BDSM in an online environmentThis chapter presents the voices of five young BDSM practitioners discussing the development of their identities, and the role of online pornography -and other textsin that process.There exists a lot of research into young people and BDSM online -although little of it is honest about its object of study.There exists a longstanding tradition of research into the relationship between young people, online pornography and violence (see for example Bhuller, Havnes, Leuven, & Mogstad, 2013;Lam & Chan, 2007;Peter & Valkenburg, 2009;Wallmyr & Welin, 2006), but it is notable that most of this research doesn't distinguish between 'violent' sexual materials and consensual BDSM (McKee, 2015).Instead, much of this work deliberately confuses consensual and nonconsensual sex acts, so that the majority of the material being studied under the rubric of 'violence' is in fact consensual kink and BDSM material (see for example, Bridges, Wosnitzer, Scharrer, Sun, & Liberman, 2010).Concerns about whether exposure to 'violent' pornography makes young people sexually aggressive often turn out to be concerns about whether exposure to consensual kink turns people into consensual BDSM practitioners.That is to say -as we explain in this chapter -research into young people, pornography, the Internet and violence often turns out to be -at least implicitly -work on the development of BDSM identities. The Heteronormative Brain That Changes ItselfIn his influential book The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge offers a possible model of how the internet pushes consumers to embrace a BDSM identity: in 2001, shortly after he first went online, [Thomas] got curious about the porn everyone said was taking over the Internet ... galleries of naked girls, of common types of sexual fantasies ...Then one day he came across a site that featured spanking images.To his surprise he got intensely excited ... 'This was the moment', he writes 'that the real addiction set in ... What other kinks was I harbouring?What other secret and rewarding corners lurked in my sexuality that I would now be able to investigate ... Plenty as it turned out ...'. Until he happened upon the spanking pictures, which presumably tapped into some

Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Anthropology · Cultural · Cultural Policy · Erotik · Internet · Neue Medien · Online social networks · Political science · Popular Culture · Public policy · Sex · Sex instruction · Sexualerziehung · Sexualverhalten · Social aspects · Social Science