BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Sado-Masochism) I think is heavily misunderstood by the majority of people how don’t participate in the practice or have only heard about it on tv. I think when people think of this concept, they have vague images of bound up women, leather clothing, various ropes and chains, and a vanilla 50 shades of grey imagery is often conjured. However, as someone who is an enthusiast of the practice, Many of the themes in BDSM are just mirror reflections of how we implicitly think about sex and gendered relations (hetero or queer gendered relations) made emotionally explicity, physical, and desired rather than implied, silent, and obligated as they are in everyday life. I could go one about this forever, but lets keep it small and start this journey bit by bit.
Domination.
Domination, or the assertion of power from one individual or group onto another individual or group, is a concept that people who are culturally, historically, sociologically, or experientially aware of, but is rarely ever discussed in the positive for a variety of reasons. The most prevelant of those reasons being that domination often has a connotation of violence or harm being done. Whether it is the political domination of a settler colony onto another indigenous group, the financial domination of a corporation over the population it claims to serve, or simply the physical domination of one person over the other, we have a very specific set of images that we conjure in our minds at the mere utterance of the word: malice, violence, largeness, and victory. I think that domination is the underlying force within all of the other pratices prevelant in BDSM, despite being the second concept in the acronym. Much of the history of domination as it relates to sex is a history that stems out of our ideas of a proper, righteous, heterosexual family unit in a plethora of pervasive means, the most pervasive and commonplace being out of the church.
When Domination Becomes “Sexy”
This state of affairs evolves from being the behavior expected from women to the desired, morally correct, and even idyllic situation. it becomes so pervasive that women are eventually trained to desire domination of a man over them. This is often expressed through acts as marrying a man if he has a good job (Financial Dominance), being always available when a man needs sex (Physical and Sexual Dominance), and women feeling an obligation to find arousal in their own subservience (Self inflicted sexual dominance). In the hegemonic sexual-power structure that is heterosexuality, it is expected for women to accept their own subjegation and domination by men and to understand it as love. It implies an inherent violence to sex and relationships that is often ignored in leau of a more flattering version of the same dynamic. It sublimates the gender inequality of it all and makes the replication of said gender inequality and act of love, that in any other context would be considered morally dubious. And if this how it looks in heterosexual spaces, then how does it crop up in queer spaces? This is something I would like to see to in a future update.
Unruly Bodies 
While I have read academic papers about the purpose of BDSM and the role it serves in sexual spaces, I’ve never read about it as means of subversion of the typical white cis straight heterosexual relationship, especially as it relates to domination. I found this interesting!
I think viewing domination as the underlying force of BDSM is a very interesting perspective. I have always believed that BDSM was primarily about the relationship between participants. Although the dominant is an important member of a BDSM-style relationship, is it not true that there is no dominant without a submissive? Having said that, I think this perspective on domination is incredibly valuable to keep in mind when discussing BDSM dynamics, as BDSM is still subject to mainstream society’s influences, and vice versa.
I think you make a lot of interesting points here. I would love to further explore this whole concept, especially through the lens of religion. How does the domineering force of Christianity play into the normalization of domination and submission. The act of pain and penance, both self-inflicted and externally, ties to domination as it’s applied to the idealogy behind sex. This piece sparks so many questions in me and I would love to see more of this work continued! I’ve been wanting to do academic research on the porn industry and how that influences the hegemonic structures we find ourselves in and would love to compare notes.
I do think this is an interesting way to look at it – though I can’t say I agree with quite a bit of it. I think this is a rather reductionist view of both BDSM and social domination. I also think we can look at how BDSM and general dynamics in sex and adjacent activities appear in different spaces – how BDSM looks in the context of a for-pay dominatrix vs in public BDSM spaces vs between heterosexual and queer couples. The gendering and sexing of those spaces each looks very different, including in individual spaces and between unique individuals. I do think exploring the context of why people perceive domination, through the self or through others, as attractive, but think associating it so heavily with women’s social domination by men lacks some of the nuance this conversation deserves.