While I’m talking about the definition of BDSM (as I just was), allow me to air a pet peeve. Most readers probably know that the acronym stands for Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism. I get the second and third pairing, but that first one always bugs me. Why is bondage explicitly paired with discipline? People tend to hand wave around this issue being saying they’re related activities. For example, Wikipedia says…
they have conceptual similarities, and that is why they appear jointly.
Frankly, that seems like bullshit to me. I think people just like the symmetry of the phrasing and the clever re-use of the letters, and therefore gloss over the fact the first pair makes no sense being tied together (ahem).
Personally, I’d drop discipline entirely. Bondage is such a common and important shared activity then I think it deserves a special place in the acronym, but discipline can slide under the D/s bit as a particular style of that dynamic. That’d keep the same four letters, but make it a lot more logical.
These beautiful bondage images come from Amaury Grisel. You can see more from the same shot in this post.
Oooh, apparently I’m all commenty over here (and I’m doing well, thank you) :).
I happen to have read something recently (of course I can’t remember where and I am too lazy to fact-check) that claimed that the entire acronym USED to be just B&D in the old [guard?] days, and I assume the ‘D’ actually covered all the S/M, so it was less ‘a pairing’ and more ‘this is ALL THE STUFF WE DO’.
Then I guess over time it got longer because people thought it didn’t quite fit the changing world (in an interview with Eric Pride in Psychology Today he claimed the acronym ‘BDSM’ started on usenet in 1991).
Ferns
I’m certainly never going to complain about you being all commenty 🙂
I might be dating myself here (insert your own joke there), but I do remember B&D being used. However, from my (admittedly hazy) recollection it stood for Bondage and Dominance (or Domination). So B&D would be used to talk about restraint, control and psychological play, where S&M was more about pain, power and strong sensations. That would actually have made sense jammed together as a bigger acronym – Bondage, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism – but somehow they sneaked a discipline in there. Of course it might just be there was never clear agreement on the D in B&D, so they threw everything into the final version!
I’ve seen a couple of different dates for the combined expression. The 1991 seems to be the early internet use, but I’ve also seen 1969 listed, which would seem to pre-date Eric Pride.
e.g. http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2011-June/110442.html
Glad your doing well 🙂
-paltego