Sociological Forum, 2018

DOI: 10.1111/socf.12460
© 2018 Eastern Sociological Society

“It’s All About the Journey”: Skepticism and Spirituality in the

BDSM Subculture
Julie Fennell1

Previous research on BDSM (bondage & discipline, dominance & submission, sadism & masochism) subcul-
tures has largely ignored the spiritual aspects of BDSM for participants. Drawing primarily from my years
of experience and participant observation as an insider in the DC/Baltimore BDSM pansexual community
and 70 interviews conducted with self-identified kinksters throughout the Mid-Atlantic United States, as well
as a convenience sample (n >1,100) survey of American and Canadian kinksters, I show that the BDSM
subculture, as a noncriminal deviant subculture, provides a hospitable social environment for cultivating the
“lived religious” (Wilcox 2012) experiences of this mostly agnostic/atheist and Pagan group. Nearly half of
all American and Canadian kinksters who are heavily involved say they sometimes engage in BDSM for spir-
itual fulfillment. Many kinksters demonstrate discomfort with the more mystical aspects of this spirituality,
and often adopt an epistemic stance I call post-rational to reluctantly acknowledge mystical experiences
within a preferred framework of scientific and rational knowledge. Nonetheless, interviewees described spiri-
tually connective, transcendental, and cathartic experiences from their BDSM practices. Further research is
recommended on the spiritual experiences of religious “nones,” the social construction of catharsis, and
potential applicability of a post-rational stance to contexts such as alternative medicine.

KEYWORDS: BDSM; deviance; nonreligious; Pagan; sexuality; spirituality.

INTRODUCTION

Beginning with Durkheim, sociologists have traditionally focused more on the

social experience of religion than personal experiences of faith and belief. To con-
trast these two facets of experience, sociologists usually measure religion by what
someone does publicly in the name of faith, and spirituality by what someone per-
sonally believes. However, whether they practice their spirituality in publicly reli-
gious contexts or not, society and culture still exercise considerable influence over
personal belief (Ammerman 2014).
For younger, well-educated upper-/middle-class white Americans who form
the core of the current research, there are extremely contradictory pushes and pulls
in terms of religion and spirituality. On the one hand, America remains the most
religious and God-believing wealthy nation (Pew Forum on Religion and Public
Life 2015). On the other hand, many upper-/middle-class Americans feel that Amer-
ica is hostile to mysticism and frank spirituality (Fuller 2001). Possibly as a result of
this conflict, young people are abandoning organized religion in droves, and more
of them are abandoning spirituality as well (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life
2010). Popular discourse usually frames “religion” and “science” as antithetical to

1
Department of Sociology Gallaudet University 800 Florida Avenue, HMB 134, Washington, DC
20002; e-mail: Julie.Fennell@Gallaudet.edu.

1
2 Fennell

each other, leaving many people with the sense that they can choose either one or
the other but not both without social and cognitive dissonance.
A growing body of research demonstrates that as the significance of traditional
organized religious participation has declined, a new emphasis on highly individual-
ized spirituality has grown, with a particular emphasis on subjective personal experi-
ence, dubbed “lived religion” by its scholars (for reviews, see Wilcox 2012 and Edgell
2012). Academics have only recently begun exploring how sexuality may be part of
lived religion (e.g., Brown, Munt, and Yip 2017; Harvey 2014), but as a potentially
powerful social and personal experience, there is reason to expect that sexuality may
be a powerful part of some people’s lived religious experiences as well. Given that a
sexual revolution involving vastly increased sexual freedom and exploration hap-
pened at about the same time as modernity’s apparent secularization project, it is
intriguing to explore how these two things may become interconnected. That is, faced
with a decline in traditional institutional religion, a rise in lived religion, and much
more expansive sexual norms, I explore here the possibility that some aspects of sexu-
ality may have been enfolded into lived religious experiences.
In exploring this possibility, I remain aware that even with increased secularism
and much more flexible sexual social mores, mainstream American culture still
heavily stigmatizes some spiritual beliefs and practices, as well as some sexual
behaviors. The concept of “spiritual sexuality” itself seems to be not only foreign to
Americans, but it also carries the double stigma of “deviant spirituality” as well as
“deviant sexuality.” In short, not all spiritual beliefs command equal social respect,
and in particular for this article, both atheism and modern Paganism continue to be
perceived as deviant beliefs (McClure 2017). Scorned by a predominantly Christian
society, I suggest that these deviant spiritual beliefs flourish in specific other kinds
of deviant contexts—as noted by others, in the Burner subculture (Sherry and Kozi-
nets 2007), among the modern primitives (Klesse 1999), in the Tantric subculture
(Urban 2012), and as I will explore here, in the BDSM subculture. The primary
research question this study seeks to answer is, in a larger cultural context of
increased religious skepticism, and where BDSM is primarily understood in terms
of deviant sexuality rather than spirituality, how do members of the BDSM subcul-
ture construct and practice a lived religious experience of “spiritual BDSM”?

BACKGROUND
The BDSM Scene

BDSM encompasses a wide range of “kinky” and “fetish” practices. These prac-
tices include everything from spanking to shibari (a form of Japanese bondage) to
play piercing (temporarily inserting needles or staples into a person) to fire play
(touching fire to a person’s body). The BDSM subculture emphasizes the importance
of consent from all parties in order to differentiate their practices from “abuse” (for
an excellent critique of the complexities of consent, see Bauer 2014). It is important to
emphasize that the sexuality of BDSM is complicated, and many subcultural partici-
pants view BDSM as a whole, or certain experiences of it, as nonsexual (Newmahr
2010). People who practice BDSM in a semiorganized and semipublic way (who often
BDSM Subculture 3

refer to themselves as “kinksters”) constitute the BDSM subculture or “Scene,” and

considerable care is usually taken to try to minimize physical and mental harm from
potentially dangerous activities. The Scene includes social networking and posting
online, public workshops and classes, “munches” and happy hours for informal
socialization and official meetings for formal organizations, and organized parties
that may last hours or days with anywhere from 5 to 2,000 people in attendance.
In America, as in many other developed societies, BDSM is usually largely por-
trayed in popular media and perceived by the general populace to be a set of deviant
sexual practices (Weiss 2005). Writing primarily within and against this frame, soci-
ological research on the BDSM subculture (Kleinplatz and Moser 2006; Newmahr
2011; Weiss 2011) has generally not discussed BDSM in spiritual terms. With the
notable exception of Newmahr (2010), most researchers have taken for granted that
people engage in BDSM primarily or solely for sexual gratification. The question of
whether or not BDSM is “about sex” is much too broad to address in this article.
Suffice it to say that BDSM is generally understood as sexual and something that
“consenting adults” do. Even though “sex” barely features in the stories I will
recount here, I believe that this article speaks to the concept of lived religion in the
broader context of sexuality because that is how society understands BDSM.
Despite the widespread perception of BDSM as being sexual and nonspiritual
in America, many of the activities that Americans label BDSM (and usually stigma-
tize) are practiced in other societies in religious ritual contexts with absolutely no
sense of implied sexuality or stigma of deviance (Zussman and Pierce 1998). A small
body of research has examined these “extreme rituals,” such as the hook rituals of
Mauritius, and found that participants and witnesses in these rituals experienced
major physiological and psychological effects (Konvalinka et al. 2011; Xygalatas
et al. 2013). Although the participants in such rituals almost certainly do not define
their practices in Western terms of BDSM, it seems entirely plausible that the Amer-
ican hook rituals that will be described in this article which occur within the BDSM
subculture may have the same powerful transcendental and spiritual potential as
the piercing rituals done in those societies (Sagarin, Lee, and Klement 2015).
Kinksters themselves have a long history of writing about the importance of
(generally Pagan) spirituality for BDSM (e.g., Harrington 2016; Kaldera 2009). How-
ever, relying on religious texts to understand religious practices is highly problematic
because the two often have little to do with each other and frequently are prescriptive
rather than descriptive. Consequently, I do not analyze any of these texts here;
instead, I have formally and informally interviewed several authors on BDSM spiritu-
ality, and I anonymously incorporate some of their comments in my study. In spite of
the rather prolific writing of BDSM writers themselves, only two published academic
studies have looked at the connection between BDSM and spirituality in depth: Beck-
mann’s (2007) study of British BDSM participants and Zussman and Pierce’s (1998)
study of Northern California BDSM participants. Both studies found that many par-
ticipants describe having “transcendental experiences” through BDSM, leading Beck-
mann (2007:111) to suggest that “Consensual ‘SM’ can satisfy the longing for
religious and spiritual experiences for some practitioners and further provide them
with the possibility of self-actualisation.” However, Beckmann’s research did not dis-
cuss any of the extensive overlaps between Paganism and the BDSM subculture that,
4 Fennell

as we will see, form an important aspect of BDSM spirituality within the American
BDSM subculture. Zussman and Pierce’s study is much older, predating the major
changes to the BDSM scene that my respondents assured me were brought by social
networking online (including the very term BDSM). Moreover, it did not really differ-
entiate meaningfully between the gay/lesbian “Leather” subculture and the hetero-
leaning/“pansexual” BDSM subculture (which I refer to as the “mainstream BDSM
scene” because it is not precisely pansexual but rather is primarily composed of
heterosexual men and bi/pansexual women). Their observations and interviews indi-
cated that many BDSM participants sought transcendental experiences through the
altered consciousness of “topspace” and “bottomspace,” but they concluded that
these motivations were primarily found among gay and lesbian “leatherfolk,” and
not really among hetero-leaning participants.
Previous research on American BDSM participants, such as Newmahr’s (2011)
and Sheff and Hammers’s (2011), has sometimes observed that there are many
Pagans within the BDSM subculture; however, this research has almost always trea-
ted the presence of Pagans in the BDSM scene as almost coincidental rather than
stemming from some more socially meaningful overlap between the two subcul-
tures. Zussman and Pierce (1998:35) were the only observers to suggest a deeper
connection, concluding their article with a short paragraph offering the tantalizing
observation that modern Paganism “is beginning to provide a historical and mytho-
logical context and validation for S/M, bondage and fetish play.” The current arti-
cle explores this assertion, looking at the role that Paganism has come to play in the
mainstream BDSM scene (which is, at this point if it was not before, fairly firmly
culturally distinct from gay and lesbian Leather culture) 15-plus years later.

Contemporary Paganism

Meanwhile, research focusing on Paganism (usually called neo-Paganism by

academics, but usually referred to as Paganism or Wicca by practitioners) has often
been more concerned with trying to simply count and identify this ambiguously
defined religious group (Crowley 2014; Jensen and Thompson 2008; Johnston 2013;
Jorgensen and Russell 1999) than it has with mapping its many overlapping subcul-
tures. Of particular interest for the purposes of this study from that previous
research is that there do seem to be statistically valid differences between people
practicing New Age spirituality and people practicing Paganism and Wicca (Jensen
and Thompson 2008), because people practicing New Age spirituality have much
less in common with the BDSM subculture than do Pagans. Although this research
has highlighted how difficult it is to define contemporary Paganism, it is still possi-
ble to discern common beliefs and ritual techniques. When I describe rituals as
“Pagan” or “Pagan-influenced,” I am referring to practices that make use of com-
mon Pagan ritual techniques that include “casting a circle” and “the four elements”
and often use alchemical or other elemental symbols. As these techniques are much
too complicated to summarize here, I refer the reader to Pike (2001).
With such a strong focus on trying to simply understand Paganism in general,
it is unsurprising that little has been written about the social implications of Pagan-
ism’s possibly unique approach to sexuality. As explained by Kraemer (2012),
BDSM Subculture 5

Paganism’s ideological belief that “all acts of love and pleasure” may honor the
Goddess has created a subculture that is extremely accepting (at least superficially)
of virtually all “alternative sexualities,” including BDSM. Neitz (2000) likewise
observed the liberal attitudes toward sexuality that Pagans tend to embrace, and
also pointed out that public Pagan rituals almost never actually include sex, despite
often invoking deliberately sexual symbols and vocabulary. Neitz also pointed out
that despite its ideological support for alternative sexualities, Paganism was actually
quite slow in practice to lose many ritual and ideological trappings of heteronorma-
tivity. As we will see, the tension between that more conservative strand of sexual
practice and a broad dogmatic support for all kinds of sexuality has created a rift in
the Pagan subculture that the BDSM subculture has started to fill.

Enchantment, Ambivalence, and “Post-Rational” Perspectives

An even smaller body of work has discussed Paganism in Weberian terms of

“reenchantment” (Puckett 2009; Ruickbie 2005), suggesting that Pagans have
responded to an increasingly rationalized world by focusing on mystery, magic, and
spirituality. This argument assumes, of course, that Weber’s thesis of rationalization
was correct—a point that I shall remain agnostic about in this study. I am uncon-
cerned here with the degree to which America has been “objectively” (which is
mostly to say, measurably) secularized or rationalized; what is important for my
purposes is that many Americans (particularly white middle- and upper-middle-
class Americans) feel that America has largely rejected mysticism.
Two recent studies have strongly supported the idea that many Americans feel
a cultural rejection of mysticism. Both looked at the reemergence of mysticism
among upper-/middle-class, mostly white Americans outside of Paganism: Bender’s
(2010) study of the “new metaphysicals” looked at people who use Reiki and alter-
native healing and delve into reincarnation, and Besecke (2013) looked at the emer-
gence of more mystical strands of Protestantism and self-help groups. Both studies
were in-depth qualitative studies with extensive interviews, and both found people
struggling to find new ways to incorporate spirituality into their lives. Besecke’s
(2013:25) study looked at the framing of “reflexive spirituality,” which she says sug-
gests that “intellectual rationality can help religion provide meaning to modern peo-
ple.” Both studies reported respondents who felt that the rest of the world derided
their spiritual convictions, but they seemed fairly firm in those convictions
themselves.
However, I think that the ideas of reenchantment and reflexive spirituality hint
at a rejection of scientific rationalism for the former and a total comfort with it for
the latter that my own respondents mostly did not evince. Instead, I believe that
many of my respondents’ perspectives could be better characterized as “post-
rational.” I propose the term post-rational to refer to an epistemic stance that con-
tinues to prioritize scientific and rational knowledge even as it reluctantly acknowl-
edges and attempts to reconcile nonrational knowledge. Post-rational attitudes are
characterized by discomfort with, and skepticism and ambivalence about, magic
and mysticism, while simultaneously accepting the existence of those things. Indeed,
6 Fennell

post-rational attitudes often lead people to eschew the terms magic or mysticism
even though those words might traditionally be applied to what was being
described. Post-rational attitudes tend to assume that scientific ways of knowing are
inherently “better” than religious and spiritual ways of knowing, and may even
attempt to apply scientific(ish) methods to analyze spiritual experiences. I believe
that this concept may be broadly applicable to the study of lived religious experi-
ences, as these tend to occur in contexts with little direct institutional or social sup-
ports, or where other social forces actively discourage spirituality (Wilcox 2012).

The Religious “Nones”

Although Paganism has exerted considerable religious, spiritual, and ideologi-

cal influence on the BDSM subculture, as I will show, the plurality of kinksters have
no religious affiliation. Sociologists of religion have taken to referring to this popu-
lation as the religious “nones,” which is a term that encompasses spiritual people
with no specific religious affiliation as well as agnostics and atheists. Statistically,
the vast majority of the nones are unchurched Christians (Hout and Fischer 2002).
However, survey research shows that some atheists do still occasionally engage in
spiritual activities (Baker and Smith 2009). The qualitative literature on religious
nonbelievers is small (e.g., Baker and Smith 2009; Ecklund and Long 2011;
Sumerau and Cragun 2016) and has primarily focused on community, identity, and
morality. The current research is partly intended as a small contribution to this
growing qualitative literature on religious nonbelievers by examining the spiritual-
ism of (an admittedly very unusual group) of American religious nones.
Previous research suggests that the beliefs of both Pagans (Tejeda 2014) and
religious nonbelievers (Cragun et al. 2012) are stigmatized, often leading to mock-
ery and discrimination of their beliefs and adherents in a variety of contexts.
Indeed, this is not the first study to link their experiences (McClure 2017). I suggest
that the BDSM subculture, as a well-educated noncriminal deviant subculture
focused on individual subjective experience, provides an unusually hospitable social
environment to cultivate the deviant “lived religious” spirituality of these two stig-
matized groups. I suggest that the deviance of these belief systems makes it difficult
to cultivate them in more conforming social contexts and that the deviance of
BDSM makes it difficult for the subculture to cultivate more conforming religious
beliefs.

METHODS

Primary data for this study were collected using extensive participant observa-
tion and in-depth interviews in a wide variety of Pagan and BDSM settings, and
secondary data were collected from an online survey. I have been involved with sev-
eral Wiccan groups since 1999 and involved in the East Coast Pagan subculture
since 2006. I have also been involved in the Washington, DC/Baltimore public
BDSM scene since winter 2010 and conducted formal fieldwork from January to
October 2012. It is important to recognize (although it has largely been ignored by
BDSM Subculture 7

previous scholars) that there is no such thing as a single BDSM scene or subculture.
Instead, there are a thinly connected set of overlapping and related microcultures.
The DC/Baltimore kink scene formed the core of my research focus, and I incorpo-
rated other kink scenes in the Mid-Atlantic primarily for comparison purposes.
Throughout the country, regional scenes vary greatly in their emphasis on sex, non-
monogamy, traditional Dominance/submission dynamics, and spirituality.
To the best of my knowledge, I am the first publicly “out” kinkster to study the
American mainstream BDSM subculture ethnographically. My social position as
an insider provided me with many advantages in terms of access to events, parties,
and interview respondents in a deviant community that is often extremely nervous
about the presence of outsiders and observers. As a community insider, I generally
refused to interview my friends, although I made exceptions for people I considered
key informants. Overall, I sought interviews that would allow me to expand my per-
spectives on the community. Since the conclusion of my official fieldwork, my level
of involvement in both the BDSM scene and the Pagan subculture has remained
very high.
During the period of my formal fieldwork from May through September 2012,
I functionally immersed myself in the BDSM scene. As a central part of my ethno-
graphic work, I attended a variety of multiday hotel and camping events, which
were each attended by hundreds of people, including two secular BDSM events in
hotels, three Pagan-influenced BDSM camping events, two adults-only “sacred sex-
uality” Pagan camping events that were heavily infused with BDSM, and two multi-
day “family-friendly” Pagan camping events that were heavily attended by BDSM
participants (but that did not actually include BDSM). I attended private or public
parties in DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City nearly every weekend
that I was not at an event, attended numerous BDSM happy hours, and was perpet-
ually connected to other scene participants through the primary BDSM social net-
working website FetLife.com. All of the events observed were part of the
“mainstream” or “pansexual” BDSM scene, which means that the participants were
often in or seeking heteroromantic relationships.
In addition to my ethnographic work, I conducted 70 interviews with people
who lived in or were currently attending BDSM events in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic. I
recruited respondents through FetLife (which virtually all publicly involved kink-
sters are members of), friends of friends, and through random meetings at events. I
deliberately sought people with a wide range of exposure to and experience with the
BDSM subculture, including anyone who self-identified as kinky and/or who
attended kink events; my final sample included people who had never been to a
BDSM event up to people who had been involved in the public scene for more than
20 years. I also deliberately sought out respondents who identified as religious or
spiritual, but I did not do so with any sort of quota. Because I recruited some
respondents while I was attending Pagan events, I effectively “oversampled” Pagans
(although I was not seeking to create a representative sample). The shortest inter-
view lasted 20 minutes and the longest three hours, with an average length of just
over an hour. Interview questions covered a wide range of topics and were heavily
adjusted based on respondents’ level of participation in the public BDSM scene.
8 Fennell

All respondents were asked about their current religious identification and if
they saw anything spiritual about their BDSM practices. In addition, I asked all
respondents for whom it was relevant to describe an “awesome scene” they had
done, which I let respondents define for themselves. Most took it to mean a public
sexual or kinky act that they had engaged in, and 12 respondents spontaneously
described scenes that clearly had a spiritually significant component. Twelve other
respondents described scenes with a major spiritual component in response to speci-
fic interviewer probes (usually after saying that BDSM could be very spiritual for
them). Most of the interview data for this article come from those three questions,
meaning that most of the responses here were described by the respondents them-
selves as “spiritual” or in specific reference to the idea of “spirituality.”
As a sociologist, rather than a theologian, I am in no position to determine
what is or is not spiritual (Bender 2010; Ecklund and Long 2011). Throughout this
article, I shall mostly describe what my respondents specifically referred to or
framed as spiritual, and observe how the experiences that some respondents framed
as spiritual were not framed as spiritual by others. One could just as easily reinterro-
gate these frames and ask why experiences that some framed as psychological or
biological, others framed as spiritual. However, as the overarching frames used by
my respondents to construct these experiences was spiritual, that is the frame I use
to guide my analysis.
All primary-level coding was done by myself and a research assistant using
NVivo software. The relevant primary codes for this article come from any men-
tions of spirituality and from descriptions of memorable BDSM and sexual expe-
riences that respondents had had. Primary codes also included respondents’ own
sometimes complex spiritual self-identifications in response to my questions, such
as “deist,” “agnostic, raised Catholic,” or “Wiccan.” Secondary coding simplified
religious self-identifications into the most logical common categories—for exam-
ple, “unaffiliated,” “agnostic,” and “Pagan,” respectively, for the three primary
codes just described. “Unaffiliated” for this study meant that a person did not
specifically identify as agnostic or atheist in the interview, and they also did not
identify with any particular faith. “Buddhist” for this study meant American
Buddhism. “Pagan” included all individuals who self-identified as “Pagan,”
“Neo-Pagan,” or “Wiccan.”
In addition, I fielded an online survey in April 2017 seeking respondents who
“considered [themselves members] of the BDSM subculture.” As this survey merely
provides background statistics for my analysis, I will only briefly outline my meth-
ods here. The survey used an Internet convenience sample with more than 1,100
American and Canadian (primarily American) respondents for the relevant ques-
tions on spirituality. Respondents were primarily recruited through FetLife, but the
link was widely shared, and only 92% of respondents had a FetLife account. As it
is impossible to objectively determine who is in the ill-defined BDSM subculture, it
is impossible to have a representative sample for an undefined population of inter-
est. Women are almost certainly overrepresented in the survey, but numerous
checks were made to ensure that the survey is otherwise as representative as possible
(most notably by age, according to the averages of FetLife users).
BDSM Subculture 9

The relevant survey questions asked respondents to indicate their levels of

involvement in the public BDSM scene, which I recoded as “low” (which function-
ally meant no real involvement at any point), “high” (which included people who
teach, organize, or who said they attended public events often), and “medium”
(which was basically everyone else). The validity of these categories was verified
through repeated tests and did not differ by gender. Respondents were also asked to
check all of the reasons that they “engage in BDSM lifestyle and activities” and
were presented with an extensive list that included “spiritual fulfillment (including
meditation, ordeal, and catharsis),” which is the category reported here. Addition-
ally, respondents were asked about their “religious practices” and their “spiritual
beliefs (what you believe, even if you do not practice)” with multiple options and a
write-in “other” category. The results of the spiritual beliefs question are reported
here. Estimates here for spirituality probably overrepresent spirituality in the scene
overall, as I have compressed all genders together for simplicity, and women were
statistically significantly more spiritual than men (although there is no reason to
believe that this inequality is greater than the gendered spiritual inequality among
men and women outside the Scene). Both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of
this research were approved by the Gallaudet University Institutional Review
Board in 2012 and 2017, respectively, and all respondents and interviewees formally
agreed to participate and have their experiences quoted anonymously.

RESULTS
Overview

One of the common aphorisms in the BDSM subculture is, “It’s all about
the journey.” The saying frames participation in the BDSM scene as a quest for
unnamed—and presumably extremely individual—fulfillment. It is true that many
BDSM participants laugh at this aphorism as “pretentious” and “cheesy,” saying
that they do what they do for pleasure and entertainment, and dismiss the impli-
cit spiritualism in the saying. However, the results from all of my methods
strongly indicate this aphorism does not overstate the importance of spirituality
in the BDSM subculture and that spirituality is a major motivating factor for
why many kinksters participate in BDSM. Although the plurality of kinksters
claim no spiritual affiliations, the subculture heavily promotes “spirituality” as a
reason for engaging in BDSM, and it primarily envisions “spirituality” in Pagan,
and to a lesser degree American Buddhist, terms. As predicted by Zussman and
Pierce (1998), Paganism has come to provide a spiritual foundation for the
BDSM subculture. However, regardless of their spiritual affiliations, the vast
majority of kinksters embrace a scientific/rationalistic frame as the primary one
for understanding their experiences, so incorporating the mysticism of Paganism
often requires some awkward mental gymnastics—what I have termed a post-
rational perspective. I begin my results with an overview of religion in the Scene,
then continue to an analysis focusing on these post-rational experiences, and
finally examine some of the less ambivalent efforts to combine BDSM and
religion.
10 Fennell

Religious Landscape

Table I provides background statistics, giving the spiritual affiliations of all

American and Canadian survey respondents involved in the public BDSM scene.
Although the table separates “Pagan” (which also includes Wiccan, but not Sata-
nist, respondents), “Buddhist/Taoist,” and “Others,” in cultural practice in the
almost entirely white upper-/middle-class world of the BDSM and Pagan subcul-
tures, these three labels are culturally very similar, as most of the “others” identify
as “spiritualist”—a vague label that tends to be Pagan inspired/leaning. Together,
they make up 38% of the sample. The plurality of kinksters identify as none
(“agnostic/atheist/none”), followed by Pagan. The table also shows the percentage
of respondents in each spiritual affiliation who checked spiritual fulfillment as one
of their reasons for engaging in BDSM. Differences between affiliations were highly
statistically significant (p < .0001), with Pagans, Buddhists, and Others much more
likely to say they engaged in BDSM for spiritual reasons than Christians, Jews, and
nones. In my interviews, Christians and Jews usually described a perceived sense of
conflict between their religion and their BDSM that they either had to reconcile or
ignore, while Pagans and Buddhists often perceived their spirituality and BDSM as
complementary.
Confirming my own observations, my survey results found no support for the
assertion of Zussman and Pierce (1998) that bottoms seemed to be more spiritually
motivated than Tops (results not shown). However, in keeping with their observa-
tions and my own, Table II draws from my survey data to show that as participa-
tion in the BDSM scene increases, people are much more likely to say they engage
in BDSM for spiritual reasons (p < .0001). My interviews and observations indicate
that this relationship appears because the BDSM subculture exposes people to the
idea of spiritual BDSM and teaches them how to practice it, and because people
who find spiritual fulfillment from BDSM are very motivated to engage in it more.
The remainder of my results will focus on my interviews and observations.

Polytheists and Atheists Together

At first glance, it seems bizarre that (an ostensibly nonreligious) subculture

could be so disproportionately composed of people who doubt the existence of God
(agnostics and atheists) and people who often believe in many gods (Pagans). How-
ever, my lengthy discussions with people from both groups about spirituality

Table I. Spiritual Beliefs of US and Canadian Survey Respondents with Medium or High Scene
Involvement

Pagan Buddhist/Taoist Christian Jewish None Other

Spiritual Identification 24% 7.5% 16% 4% 42% 6.5%

Spiritual BDSM
Yes 53% 64% 33% 35% 30% 54%
No 47% 36% 67% 65% 70% 46%
BDSM Subculture 11

Table II. Spiritual BDSM for US and Canadian Survey Respondents

Level of Scene Spiritual Spiritual

Involvement BDSM: No BDSM: Yes

Low 79% 21%

Medium 62% 38%
High 53% 47%

strongly suggest that these groups hold many key theological principles in common
—at least in the BDSM subculture. Based on my observations and discussions with
participants, it appears that most people from these groups will evince profound
skepticism at the idea that a religious text might be the literal word of God; they
usually assume that morality and ethics basically stem from a principle of minimal
harm rather than religious dogma; they take for granted that women and men are
fundamentally equal and that there is nothing evil about bodies, sexuality, or physi-
cal pleasure in general; they usually assume that scientific and rational ways of
knowing are superior to other ways of knowing; they tend to be well educated and
like to educate themselves; they tend to evince great skepticism toward traditional
authority sources and traditional social institutions; and they tend to be highly criti-
cal of monotheistic religions and their most intolerant adherents. Most importantly,
they tend to assume that they are their own ultimate moral authorities (as opposed
to a religious leader, holy scripture, or divine entity), and that their own satisfaction
and happiness is a worthwhile life goal. They mostly differ in their belief in the
power of ritual, their belief in magic (although Pagans often define magic in very
personal and individualistic terms), and their belief in a higher power. Pagans
almost never try to convert anyone, and they are extremely unconcerned with
whether nones practice their faith or not. Several respondents described winding
personal spiritual journeys that included both none and Paganism, in both direc-
tions. Subculturally, the main conflicts arise when Pagans take for granted in con-
versation that there is divine influence on their actions and lives, and the nones
simply roll their eyes at the “woo” (explained below).

Overlapping Subcultures

The BDSM subculture and the Pagan subcultures have become heavily
entwined. One of my respondents, Vera, who was Pagan, described events that com-
bine Pagan spirituality and BDSM as “the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of events—
the two great tastes that taste great together,” implying that there is a natural fit
between them. For decades, it was common for large Pagan gatherings that allowed
children to attend the larger event to also have private consecrated BDSM temples
for adults to engage in sacred kink (away from children). By 2010, almost all of the
“family-friendly” Pagan events that I know of in the Mid-Atlantic had closed those
private adults-only BDSM spaces because of internal fights within the Pagan com-
munity about their appropriateness. However, as BDSM temples and rituals were
pushed out of larger Pagan events, they became increasingly common at main-
stream BDSM events. Entire adults-only events (albeit rather small ones) have even
12 Fennell

emerged that are specifically focused on “sacred sexuality,” and heavily flavored
with BDSM. The kink subculture generally assumes that “BDSM spirituality”
equals “Paganism” (and to a lesser degree, American Buddhism). Indeed, some of
my respondents used the term religion in their interviews in a somewhat pejorative
way to talk about Christianity, and used the term spiritual to refer to Paganism and
American Buddhist–influenced beliefs and practices.
All major kink events host a wide variety of BDSM educational classes, and
many of these events have an entire spirituality track of classes and rituals. The
kink subculture has a kind of top-down structure such that these major days-
long events that occur throughout the year tend to create the core socialization
for the community, and almost everyone who is heavily involved attends some of
them. Common topics for the spirituality classes at these events include the con-
struction of BDSM rituals, sacred body modification (i.e., tattooing, branding, or
piercing for religious or spiritual purposes), sacred sexuality, and Tantra. Nota-
bly absent from these tracks are classes such as “how to be a good Christian
kinkster” or “what does the Torah say about kink?” However, even though
Paganism is often very visible at these large events, it is often invisible at the reg-
ular weekend parties or weekly happy hours that make up the majority of most
people’s lives in the Scene (especially the lives of people who are more casually
involved). Thus, it heavily infuses the social core of the BDSM scene but is much
less present elsewhere.

Mystical Experiences Outside “the Vanilla World”

Like the Pagans documented by Pike (2001) and Ezzy (2014), kinksters often
construct the secluded social worlds of their larger days-long events (whether at
hotels or campgrounds) as being set apart, or sacred in the Durkheimian (2008
[1912]) sense, from their normal lives. People frequently make remarks that describe
kink events and their lives at them in utopian terms, distancing themselves from
“the outside world,” “the real world,” “the vanilla world,” and even sometimes “the
Muggle world” (a reference to the Harry Potter novels). This dichotomy is often
extended to kink parties and social environments in general, which are usually por-
trayed as providing social oases that allow for a kind of radical self-actualization
that is not possible in mainstream culture. Mainstream culture, in turn, is portrayed
as profane in the Durkheimian sense: old fashioned, intolerant, unimaginative, and
dull.
Although we can apply a Durkheimian framework of sacred/profane to this
discourse, the kink subculture overall tends to frame this dichotomy between kink
and “vanilla” social worlds in largely secular terms. Yet many individual kinksters
(especially the Pagans) describe this difference in explicitly spiritual terms, suggest-
ing that the BDSM subculture is literally a sacred space for sacred activities. Ame-
lia, who was unaffiliated and had worked as a professional dominant in San
Francisco years before, articulated this difference, saying that she had known many
professional dominants who “consider[ed] themselves as doing Good Work depend-
ing on one’s faith—Goddess work,” adding, “and I totally saw myself as creating a
BDSM Subculture 13

space wherein a person [the client] could be free to express what they were that the
outside [world] didn’t allow.” As Danielle Lindemann (2011) has previously
described, it is common for professional dominants to construct their jobs in these
sacred therapeutic terms. However, many people carry over this attitude to their
experience of the BDSM subculture as whole, not just the professional workers
within it.
The “outside” or “vanilla” world is not merely portrayed as limiting self-
expression; it is also portrayed as simply less magical and less open to spiritual ful-
fillment. People constantly reiterated in interviews and in conversations that I have
had that mainstream American religions have failed to provide them with spiritual
satisfaction. Indeed, one of the few Christians in my sample, Nathan, said that he
got more spiritual fulfillment from BDSM than from his religion:
For me, BDSM is a lot more spiritual than religion. Religion for me is like, “Oh, that’s cool. I
can believe that.” [. . .] But in the BDSM community you find a lot more spiritual people deal-
ing with things such as energy or auras. Energy play or even things like astrology. And while I
cannot logically fully believe in those things, I have felt the energy and stuff. I have interacted
with people with energy and felt things the other person was like, “It seemed like this.” And I
was like, “Well, that’s strange, because that’s exactly what I got from it.” So I can’t disbelieve
it completely. But there’s no way to explain it, so it seems illogical to me. So part of me believes
it, but the other part of me is like, “But there’s no way it can be true.” So it’s very complicated.

Like Nathan, almost no one used the term mystical experience in their descriptions
of spiritual BDSM. However, descriptions of a feelable (albeit intangible) spiritual
experience—what would traditionally be termed mysticism by theologians—were
constantly raised as being in contradiction to the rational knowledge (or in
Nathan’s case, his own Christian beliefs) they were accustomed to from the rest of
society. As we will see from other respondents, kinksters often expressed doubts
and uncertainties about the things they felt to be true that did not match what they
intellectually “knew” to be true. Kinksters frequently portrayed the BDSM scene as
a mysterious place where “illogical” and mysterious things occurred that were
impossible to explain and impossible to imagine happening in virtually any other
context.

Metaphysical Energy and “the Woo”

As the previous comments of Nathan, a Christian, would suggest, one of the

most conspicuous manifestations of the crossover between the Pagan subculture
and the BDSM subculture is the way that kinksters casually use the term energy.
Outside of metaphysical subcultures, the term energy usually refers to physical
power or exertion. Inside of these subcultures, the term acquires an additional meta-
physical meaning. As also documented by Ezzy (2014) and Bender (2010), it
becomes an extremely vague term, used to describe intangible but perceivable prop-
erties of individuals, relationship dynamics, and environments. Individuals may be
described as having “great” or “terrible” energy, as might rituals, dungeon spaces at
a particular time, or even entire events. For example, people will make comments
such as, “the dungeon had great energy last night!” or that something “felt off
about the energy in there.” Kinksters will also often describe themselves as having
14 Fennell

great energy with a particular partner, using the term in much the same way that
other people might use the term chemistry. All told, 39 of my respondents, including
5 unaffiliateds, 1 agnostic, and 1 atheist, used the term energy with this spiritual
connotation.
Many Pagans in particular talked about the powerful transfer of energy
between people during BDSM as one of its most compelling spiritual properties.
When I asked Melissa, a Pagan, if she saw any overlaps between her BDSM and
Wiccan practices, she said that “it’s mostly about the energy play, I’d have to say. . ..
You really can connect and—your energy meshes so well with theirs that it intensi-
fies the scene so much, or just the sex in general,” concluding that her own ability to
sense energy intensifies her BDSM play, sex, orgasms, and relationships overall. In
short, the spiritual perspective of many Pagans like Melissa was that BDSM and
sexual interactions between people generated a great deal of metaphysical energy,
which then became a sort of fuel to intensify everything from orgasms to
relationships.
While some people (almost always Pagans) in the Scene use the term energy
without hesitation, other people used it with much more hesitation and ambiva-
lence. One of my respondents, who had been raised Southern Baptist, told me, “I
don’t feel like I’m spiritual at all” but came up to me later the next day at an event
we were both attending and said, “Ugh, I hate to say this, but for lack of a better
word, you just have such great energy!” Similarly, Claire said, “I would say I’m
atheist. I believe in energy and—I’m atheist with a few Pagan things thrown in
there.” Claire seemed to feel that believing in energy in some way potentially com-
promised her atheism (and was an inherently “Pagan” thing to believe), but as we
will see, many agnostics found a belief in “energy” as a way to compromise between
believing in metaphysical phenomena without having to believe in God. Even
Pagans like Lucy often expressed some ambivalence about the concept of energy,
saying, “Well, as much as I believe in energy of people, and I also believe in psychic
abilities. . .. I mean, it’s also easy to dismiss that stuff, too, because it’s not tangible.
It’s not something you can put your finger on or explain in concrete terms. It’s more
abstract.”
The ambivalence that many people feel about this rational/magic conflict is
most clearly exhibited by the subculturally popular term woo, which seven of my
respondents used in their interviews. People in the Scene often use the term woo to
refer to the idea of a certain type of magical thinking about and experience of
(Pagan/New Age) divinity, ritual, auras, and divination. The term is occasionally a
noun, as in, “I’ve spent a lot of time studying the woo.” However, it is more often
an adjective such that people, events, or groups can be described as “so woo” if they
are perceived as being particularly focused on these things. While meaning exactly
the same thing that “transrational” does, as reported by Besecke (2013:79)—”the
things that can’t be understood with rational language”—the use is quite different,
as woo is never used either completely pejoratively or completely seriously. Rather,
it contains a kind of gentle self-conscious mockery (and people will often laughingly
describe themselves as woo). It encapsulates all of the ambivalence we have seen in
remarks so far from people who find themselves confronted with what feels like dis-
concerting or uncomfortable spiritual realities that do not match their rational
BDSM Subculture 15

understanding of the world. Amelia, an unaffiliated woman who was quoted earlier
about her experiences as a professional dominant, laughed at herself as she
described how her woo manifested in a powerful rope scene she had done:
[When I’m playing,] there will be some sort of imagery or a vision [. . .] This time, it was like I
was a storm. And then I rope danced, and I started this psychotic, violent little spider dance
that was just like—God, I am so woo. (Man, the San Francisco shit, even if I could call myself
—“I’m a secular humanist”—blah, blah, blah, the woo comes out).

Spiritual Atheists and Agnostics

The self-conscious ambivalence of “secular humanists” like Amelia as they

tried to reconcile themselves to the woo, and Claire’s comment earlier suggesting
that even as an atheist, she could still believe in energy, illustrate the ways that the
BDSM subculture simultaneously challenges atheists and agnostics by surrounding
them with experiences that are deemed spiritual, and yet can console them by pro-
viding them with a secular-ish vocabulary for explaining those experiences. Tony,
who said that he was “unsure” if BDSM had ever been spiritual for him, but who
thought that it had the potential to be, became quite passionate as he explained that
being an atheist and being spiritual were not necessarily at odds:
I don’t think that being an atheist robs you of the potential to have wonderfully transcendent
feeling experiences. And if that’s what people call spirituality, then I totally think you can. I
think it’s neurochemical; I don’t think it’s like magic. But I think the feeling that people tend
to call spiritual is one that you can basically have just as well as an atheist; you just don’t think
of it as having anything to do with the supernatural. You just think like, “Man, our brains can
do some awesome things. This feels great.”

Oliver, who was unaffiliated, provided further insight into the sort of spiritual
experiences that nonreligious people could experience from BDSM. He described a
rope suspension in which he had meditated, focusing on the idea of “being here
now,” saying, “I was rope suspended, like hammock-style from a single steel twine.
And I could feel the vibration in it as I just kind of meditated there—the feel of the
rope, just being here now, that kind of thing.” Like Oliver, seven respondents
(mostly Pagans) mentioned using BDSM for meditation. I have discussed with
many people (and personally experienced) the particular power of overcoming the
intense physical discomfort of many BDSM activities as an opportunity to engage
in meditative types of transcendence.

Connection and Transcendence

Although BDSM meditations are common, as suggested by Melissa’s earlier

comment, one of the most popular conceptualizations of spiritual BDSM is as a
tool for extremely intense interpersonal connection. This conceptualization held
true across religious affiliations, and 14 respondents mentioned intense spiritual
connections with partners through kink. While some people (usually bottoms) told
stories of intense BDSM experiences that were more individual meditative experi-
ences like Oliver’s, other people (more often Tops) described BDSM more in terms
16 Fennell

of an intense shared meditation with another person. When asked if he saw any-
thing spiritual about his BDSM practices, Jackson, an agnostic Top, replied, “I
think since BDSM is a way for me to reach altered states of consciousness to an
extent (and I like to think my play partners also seek it for that way), I think that
there is a spiritual connection.” The meditative and connective experiences that can
result from kink were neatly summarized by Ben, an atheist, who said in reference
to BDSM spirituality, “S&M can open two doors and people can meet. It can be a
conduit for two people to connect in a way that the vanilla world doesn’t have.”
Some respondents explained how these feelings of intense connection came
about in terms of transcendent spirituality. Rather than just being about a moment
of intense connection with a person, or a feeling of presence and connection, these
people described their experiences more in terms of a nirvana-like generalized con-
nection to all living things. In particular, people emphasized the experience of trust
and the experience of giving up control as a vehicle for that sense of connection.
Vicky, a Pagan, explained that the particular dynamics of Dominance and submis-
sion (which focus more on control and less on pain) have echoes in spirituality:
“You’re releasing yourself, in the way that I do it, anyway, to the control of
another, in D/s; and in some ways that’s sort of what you are doing in certain prac-
tices in spirituality.” I have heard people say that submitting to the will of a Domi-
nant is like submitting to the will of god, and as such, it can lead to feelings of
divine interaction.
In relation to this type of transcendence, kinksters often talk about a particular
type of experience called subspace. Subspace can be described as the person who is
giving up control experiencing a sense of floating, or a kind of profound and divine
loss of self (which Newmahr [2011] has pointed out resembles psychological “flow”
states). Mila, who was Jewish, described massaging her Dominant’s feet in these
terms, saying that she “got completely lost in the foot massage and falling into that
subspace and falling into a place where nothing else is going on around me—and I
felt so much better afterwards. It is a spiritual thing. It cleanses your soul to an
extent, if you allow it to.” Ellie, who was unaffiliated, described an even more
intense nirvana-like transcendental experience in which she actually felt like she left
her body from having many needles put in her by her Dom: “It felt like almost, I
don’t want to say, the best I can explain it is when most people think of astral pro-
jection where you’re near your body but not in it, and just like, hear and feel every-
thing so much intensely and just feeling disconnected but connected to everything at
the same time. It’s insane.”
The kink subculture tends to frame this type of transcendence as something
that primarily bottoms and submissives experience. Kinksters frequently discuss
and analyze the experience of subspace but rarely talk about a parallel experience
for Tops and Dominants of “topspace” or “domspace.” Despite this lack of discus-
sion, observation of and discussion with Tops and Dominants reveals that they
often space in a manner very similar to bottoms and submissives (although my
observations and interviews suggest that this experience is much less frequent for
Tops and Dominants). In contrast to Zussman and Pierce (1998), several Tops
whom I interviewed had extremely intense stories of transcendental spiritual experi-
ences from Topping. Notably, none of them used the term domspace or topspace to
BDSM Subculture 17

describe their experiences, but they did tell stories with a similar transcendental
quality. For example, Pat, who was a very religious Pagan, described a remarkably
similar experience from cutting and putting needles in someone as a Top as Ellie did
from receiving needles as a bottom:
So I asked another person to watch over us, and I prayed at the beginning of the scene [. . .]
And then I just literally shredded her abdomen. Like, I just cut her and put needles through
her and drew runes on her in blood. [. . .] And there was at the pinnacle of the scene this sort of
giant bright light that emanated from all of the wounds on her stomach, and it kind of went up
through the roof into the atmosphere or whatever and there was this sort of holy moment. We
both sat there and breathed and just kind of bore witness to what was happening. Like, not
only was she putting all of her trust in me to bring her to where she needed to go, but I was
putting all my trust in my spirits.

Even as the person who was physically in control of the scene, Pat emphasized that
ultimately he was basically becoming a tool for divine will, which was how nearly
all of the religious Tops and Dominants who described profound spiritual and tran-
scendental experiences described their roles. They described themselves as channels
for divine powers to control willing mortals.

Catharsis, Ordeal, and Atonement

By far the most common framework for connecting BDSM and spirituality in
the kink subculture is through themes and rituals of catharsis, ordeal, and atone-
ment. While these things may not be inherently “spiritual,” they are almost always
framed that way in the context of the subculture (and while I have encountered
many individuals who questioned the value and legitimacy of “catharsis,” I never
encountered anyone in the community who questioned its spiritual framing). Eigh-
teen respondents told stories of having personal experiences with catharsis, ordeal,
and atonement from BDSM, and several others told stories of witnessing others’
scenes that seemed to have cathartic elements. Although these three themes of
catharsis, ordeal, and atonement are technically distinct, they tend to be incorpo-
rated in very similar ways into BDSM activities. Whereas transcendental experi-
ences typically emphasize more of the Dominant/submission aspects of BDSM
(divine connection through ultimate trust and giving up control), catharsis, ordeal,
and atonement experiences usually emphasize more of the sadism/masochism
aspects of BDSM such that pain and suffering become tools for intense spiritual
experiences. Luke, an agnostic, explained that a sadist had offered to do a “torture
scene” with Luke at a point where Luke’s “world was kind of collapsing” and he
had started becoming “angry all the time.” Finally, after two and a half hours of
being fully suspended or partially suspended in ropes, in addition to being tortured
with choking, electricity, canes, and punching, he explained, “It took away the
anger, which was kind of an unnatural state for me. So this is a therapeutic use of
BDSM, if you will.” Luke’s ordeal in search of a self-transformation was a common
one.
Like Luke, kinksters often undergo a variety of torments to help them deal
with anger, guilt, low self-esteem, and even trauma. For example, it is not uncom-
mon in the Scene for people who have been the victims of real rapes to reenact their
18 Fennell

rapes in a controlled (and sometimes even humorous) way in a BDSM setting for
cathartic purposes. Mark, who was unaffiliated, analyzed the spiritual aspects of
BDSM in general in terms of classical catharsis, saying:
Well, exactly like a Greek tragedy, you’re enacting some fundamental deep desires and behav-
iors. Exactly like the Greek tragedy, you do it in a controlled way, during what is actually
described as a “scene.” So while it is arousing and fun, it is the enactment of a script in some
way, and you leave the scene having been purified [laughing], and set free your desires with a
positive effect on you, I believe.

Mark’s self-conscious laughter at the idea of BDSM as purifying is important

because it shows again the kind of ambivalence that many kinksters feel about
explaining and dealing with the more spiritual aspects of kink. Although themes of
“purification” and “cleansing” were common in my interviews and are certainly
mentioned in the subculture, it is never precisely clear what people need purification
from. The idea of “sin” is not really part of the dogma of Paganism, nor is it an idea
that is really part of the BDSM subculture in general. And yet, people still often
seek spiritual cleansing.
The most profound story I have ever heard of the transformative power of
BDSM came from Connor, who is a well-known long-term BDSM priest. He
described himself as a “24/7 collared slave to the Goddess that I serve”; “god-slaves”
as they are known in the Scene, are uncommon but certainly not unheard of. Connor
explained that everything he did was in service to his Goddess. He recounted a chilling
story of atonement that he had facilitated at a BDSM temple at a non-BDSM event,
which he said had helped him to know that he was on the right spiritual “path”:
I had a guy come through who’d gone to prison for 10 years as a serial rapist. And he’d just
gotten out of prison three months earlier and came to [the event]. And I remember him looking
up at me, because he was down on his knees, and he said, “I have paid my time, but my soul is
still heavy, because I know that I have done wrong.” And I beat him within an inch of his life
and made him, out loud, list the names of every woman he’d ever raped. The next day, he
brought an offering to me and said, “Thank you so much. I don’t know if I’ll ever fully forgive
myself, but at least I can now go out into the world.”

The transformative and cathartic potential of BDSM to help people feel that
they had made atonement was told from the other side by another of my respon-
dents, Lane, a Pagan who said that she had violated people’s consent earlier in her
life. She participated in a hook suspension ritual and said that it “pretty much
ripped a hole in [her] reality.” She recounted an intense ritual experience that
included drumming, being drawn on with ash, having a fire wand placed on her ton-
gue, meditating, and dancing around a ritual fire. She said that once the hooks were
in and her feet left the ground, “It was as if the fire was burning inside of me, and
my skin felt like it was made of steel, and all I could see was just the light and the
heat. And it was as if that was burning away the negative parts of myself—mostly
because I used to be a pretty big asshole.”

BDSM Religion

As the stories of Connor and Lane suggest, many events and people deliber-
ately combine Pagan rituals and BDSM. Thanks in large part to the “modern
BDSM Subculture 19

primitives” movement (Klesse 1999), which slowly made its way into the BDSM
subculture and was adapted and labeled as “primal” there, many BDSM rituals are
structured around hook suspensions and hook pulls like those described by Lane.
BDSM rituals are often extremely syncretic: at one large BDSM event, I attended
an outdoor Pagan ritual where there was a large central fire. Around that fire, the
hundred or more participants could choose between a variety of ordeals: walking
over hot coals, being branded, being suspended by ropes, being suspended by
hooks, being fucked with ice dildos, being waterboarded, or being wrapped in paper
bandages which they were to burst free from like a cocoon. Only two of those activi-
ties (being suspended by ropes and being fucked with ice dildos) really fit into a
standard notion of what BDSM is. Regardless of the activity they chose, partici-
pants were instructed to accept the elemental challenge (fire, air, water, or earth)
posed by the ordeal and honor its spirits accordingly. Jackson, the self-conscious
and very skeptical agnostic mentioned earlier, who had attended a similar ritual run
by the same group the previous year, explained the significance of the permanent
fire branding he had received there: “I felt like I needed to prove to myself that I
could go through some things, as somebody who has an aversion to pain that you
can’t even imagine.” He added that the event overall had been such a positive expe-
rience for him that he wanted a permanent reminder for himself of “something that
felt good” and “something so out of the norm” for him.
Some groups have formed that do more than host occasional rituals at BDSM
events; some religious Pagan groups have formed that are specifically focused on
using BDSM for spiritual purposes. Many of the people who work in these contexts
(such as Connor and Pat, both quoted earlier) frame their roles in these groups in
terms of callings to do spiritual BDSM. One of the women I interviewed, Sofia, had
run a BDSM-focused coven (a very focused group of Wiccan or Pagan practition-
ers) for several years, and was exceptionally articulate in explaining the spiritual
possibilities of BDSM. She now regularly teaches a “cathartic flogging ritual” that
incorporates a kind of “guided meditation” instructing the flogging receiver to
imagine a connection to the earth as the person flogging directs the energies swirling
around the receiver with her flogger to become a “a sort of cosmic egg beater” and
help open up the receiver’s chakras and “clean up their aura.”

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This article has exposed some of the challenges of “lived religious” experience
—namely, without institutional supports and mainstream cultural acceptance,
many people may experience a great deal of cognitive dissonance when faced with
experiences they think feel spiritual. Although sociologists of religion have debated
at great length whether modern societies (including America) are actually becoming
more secular or are merely perceived as such by academics, my mostly white, mid-
dle-class, generally well-educated respondents felt that “vanilla” society afforded
them few conventional religious opportunities for mystical or transcendental experi-
ences. Whether Pagan or none, the intense experiences many people had with
BDSM through connection, transcendence, and catharsis clearly created powerful
20 Fennell

opportunities to engage in mystical experiences in a society they perceived as being

strongly oriented to the mundane. Yet they tended to be ambivalent about describ-
ing themselves and their experiences in blatantly magical terms, and most of them
were often self-conscious about describing their experiences in unambiguously reli-
gious or mystical language. An ideology of science—believing in what can be seen,
touched, and replicated—tended to underlay their descriptions much more than an
ideology of faith—believing in what cannot be seen. I believe that these attitudes
reflected a strong socialization to the ideology of rationalism and science, even as
the respondents reluctantly tried to synthesize that rationalistic worldview with spir-
itual and mystical experiences which seemed to defy it.
The majority of people I spoke with (including the Pagans) seemed unable to
completely escape the rationally oriented worldview I have described as post-
rational. Although many people witnessed and experienced BDSM as deeply spiri-
tual and sometimes magical, many of them were also obviously uncomfortable
describing what they saw and experienced in the vocabulary of mysticism. Again
and again, I saw Pagans and nones separately and together trying to reconcile what
they themselves characterized in mystical and transcendental terms with a world-
view that left little room for those things. Both Bender (2010) and Besecke (2013)
reported that their respondents were self-conscious in describing their own mystical
experience, as if they were afraid of being judged by their interviewer/society. And
while this may have been true for my respondents as well (although many people
who knew of me already knew me as very spiritual), my respondents did not sound
as if they were trying to defend their experiences to me and the wider world so much
as they were trying to defend them to themselves. While even very faithful people
may have some doubts about their experiences or beliefs, there is still a palpable dif-
ference between people who are defending their beliefs to “the rational skeptics out
there” and people who have internalized the vocabulary and worldview of rational-
ism so much that they are clearly constantly defending their experiences and beliefs
to themselves.
The BDSM subculture thrives on the ideology of embodied spirituality that
Paganism preaches. Regardless of their religion, my respondents overwhelmingly
perceived Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as religions that treat the body and car-
nal desires as evil, undesirable, or at best, a neutral thing to try to escape. In con-
trast, Paganism was widely perceived to practice what it preaches: that the body is
sacred, sex is sacred, and that “all acts of love and pleasure” honor the Goddess
(Kraemer 2012). Although I have had conversations with people who claimed that
mainstream Abrahamic religions encompass BDSM as well, I have argued that cul-
turally, the social stigma of BDSM makes it much more compatible with a socially
stigmatized religion (Paganism) than more mainstream faiths. As a philosophy of
lived religious experience, the highly personal and socially deviant “journeys” of the
BDSM subculture are much more compatible with a contemporary deviant reli-
gious philosophy emphasizing individualism and lived religion. At the same time,
deliberately linking BDSM to “ancient” shamanic ordeal practices (which many
people in the Scene explicitly do) provides a kind of social and spiritual legitimacy
for contemporary socially deviant practices. Furthermore, I believe that the
BDSM Subculture 21

subculture’s encouragement for participants to emphasize spirituality in BDSM is

driven in part by a desire for (at least a sense of) increased social legitimacy.
Although interviewees only occasionally talked about spiritual BDSM in bla-
tantly sexual terms, I think that the larger social context of the BDSM subculture
has created a social context for a lived religious experience that is at least related
to sexuality. It has done so in a way that makes it easy for Pagans and nonbe-
lievers alike to partake of this personalized spiritual experience by usually avoid-
ing mention of divinity and magic, and by using terms such as energy,
connection, and woo. Overall, the BDSM subculture has thus become a vehicle
for both intensely spiritual people of non-Abrahamic religions and for religious
skeptics to have profound spiritual experiences while rarely invoking the vocabu-
lary or institutions of “religion.” As such, it has become yet another piece of an
emerging complex social pattern of lived religion, where personal spiritual jour-
neys are valued above traditional religious structures. But lacking conventional
religious structure, and primed with skepticism, both the subculture as a whole
and the individuals within it demonstrated deep ambivalence about blatant spiri-
tuality and mysticism.

Directions for Further Research

The conflicting attitudes I have termed post-rational evinced by my respon-

dents are probably not unique to people in the BDSM subculture. Previous research
indicates that the types of Americans who participate in a wide range of institutions
from “alternative medicine” to yoga may be similar to the types of people who par-
ticipate in the BDSM subculture (especially in the label as “creative unconvention-
als”) (Coulter and Willis 2004; Sivn and Mishtal 2012). People may very well adopt
a similar post-rational attitude when engaging in these other activities as well. The
sense of antimysticism my respondents described as permeating the larger culture
was described by respondents in Bender (2010) and Besecke (2013), suggesting that
it is not unique to kinksters and Pagans. Nor do I think the nervous, self-depreca-
tory yearning for mystical experience in spite of a belief in science is unique to them.
More research should be done on how people reconcile experiences and beliefs that
they themselves describe as contradictory.
Further sociological research should also explore the social construction of
catharsis. Presumably, catharsis is not a basic instinctive human emotion like happi-
ness, sadness, or anger but is instead a culturally constructed complex emotional
experience. It is complicated in many Western cultures because it is associated with
divine transformation and spiritual power. Despite these cultural associations, most
sects of modern Christianity have no rituals for achieving or seeking catharsis.
More sociological research needs to be done on the sociological spirituality of emo-
tions in general—that is, feelings that are assumed to have divine power or associa-
tion—and catharsis in particular. The accounts of my respondents generally took
for granted that catharsis was a desirable, powerful, and even possibly necessary
emotional experience, but there is almost no sociological research about the social
construction of this emotion.
22 Fennell

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