Last night, on an Informed Consent forum, someone posted a link to an intriguing Guardian article about forensic psychotherapy. The piece was from 2008. It quickly and inevitably escalated into a flame war.

However, despite the furore of the thread, I think that the article does bring up some important points. We should certainly be concerned that some psychoanalysts – both three years ago, and now – still equate the seriousness of consensual BDSM, fetish and trans issues with rape and paedophilia, just as homosexuality once was.

One therapist quoted in the article speaks of “transvestites and transsexuals, and people who practise bondage and other sexual fetishes”. I respect that he appears not to be saying that these people are doing anything wrong, but that instead the problem is with what these activities may be helping each individual avoid: “They come here because the desired effect of those things, what they were intended to do, has started to break down, usually when they’re in their thirties. The papering over the cracks that those practices fulfilled is no longer working.”

Yet we all have “cracks”*, however kinky or vanilla our desires may be, and isn’t any act of pleasure or distraction just a way of “papering over” them? Nobody is without problems. A kink shouldn’t be seen as any different to any other form of pulse-quickening escapism.

If we like watching a bit of telly or participating in sport, are we told that it’s just a way of avoiding deep, unexamined issues with our parents, or the school bully, or our own sense of gender and status? Much as it’s good to question yourself on every aspect of your life now and then, it shouldn’t be at the expense of every form of fun. Just because a person enjoys consensual kink (or telly, or sport) and doesn’t spend every minute of every day dissecting and condemning it, it doesn’t make them any less sane than anyone else.

*(fnarrr, I know, but I meant the symbolic kind)

Graun article here.

IC thread here.