Marylin Manson, Los Angeles, 1999. (Credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns)

The Marquis de Sade was obsessed with the torture of women. “Sex without pain is like food without taste,” he wrote — and his life was positively a buffet. When he was not writing horny screeds from behind bars in a mental asylum, he was pouring hot wax into the open wounds of beggerwomen, poisoning prostitutes and raping servants. He has since become an icon of alternative sexual practices, revised as a champion of freedom and tolerance in a way his contemporaries would find impossible to imagine.
A bald fact about this most famous of sex pests is that his appetites were, by their very nature, destructive — bad for society and positively pestilential for women. But the lending of his name to that sainted acronym, BDSM, has brought about a rehabilitation which blows the central problem of this muzzled cult wide open: that it’s not at all concerning for men to want to hurt women in the first place, and that instead of addressing these grim tastes, they should indulge them. The moral crisis of sadism is the engine of two parables of celebrity scandal this month, about author Neil Gaiman and the spidery metal rockstar Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner), and their frightening magnetism among vulnerable women. The first emerged in a mega-viral Vulture article with harrowing testimony from one principal accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich. The second came in the form of a three-part Channel 4 documentary, Marilyn Manson: Unmasked, with accounts from fans, bandmates and ex-girlfriends.
If the testimonies prove correct, both Gaiman and Manson saw sexual sadism as a way to challenge boundaries — a positively sophisticated indulgence, and evidence of their cultivation. But as Angela Carter argued in 1978, de Sade himself was no proto-liberator, no feminist libertine. From its roots, BDSM has served the ill intentions of violent men, and it remains predicated on the violation and humiliation of women to this day. Yes, there are exceptions; yes, the “community” is hot on consent. But as Kathleen Stock argued last week, consent is tenuous in a scenario where arousal requires people to suspend disbelief, to pretend someone is in pain or unwilling. The acceptability of BDSM now, couched as it is in flexible doctrines of consent, cows women into compliance for fear of being labelled intolerant — intolerant, that is, for wincing at the tastes of men who only want to fuck women they can frighten or hurt. In this (allegedly), Gaiman and Manson are in esteemed company — remember when Armie Hammer was accused of saying he would “barbeque and eat” a lover’s ribs?
The opening scene of the Manson documentary might begin to explain why sadism holds such sway among certain male celebrities. In Manson’s case, it was part of a pompous artistic endeavour: “Marilyn Manson is about transcending morality and sexuality,” he tells admirers in a backstage clip from early on in his career. Beneath his towering form, two young girls inexpertly kiss, awkwardly writhing for the singer’s delight. Grand statements of creative intent like this always seem irredeemably cynical with hindsight; this clip now reads as a group of perverted prats gassing off in lipstick and leather trousers. But the performativity of Manson’s sadism is important: at one point, his satanic persona is described as having a “WWE feel” — that is, an aesthetic of villainy which belies a careful, risk-assessed choreography. But it was not play-acting: according to one ex-girlfriend and accuser, Manson was able to “hide abuse by doing it during sex”, excusing away violence and coercion as part of exaggerated sexual roleplay. Equally, his cartoonish, evil lunatic persona does the same thing: beneath all this white paint, I am a serious artist. I will hurt you, but it’s all part of the show.
Similarly, Gaiman’s towering popularity in the world of fantasy fiction is contingent on the aesthetics of sadism. His message of sainted victimhood, of the way the young and powerless might prevail over their oppressors (notably explored in his semi-autobiographical novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane) relies on a preponderance of dangerous, monstrous freaks to be vanquished. Coraline, his young-adult hit, is awash with the blacks and reds of BDSM. The villain at its heart, the Other Mother, has hair “as black as coal” and teeth “as sharp as knives”, dark, red fingernails and a “jagged red slash” for a mouth. He could almost be describing Manson. And it’s telling that Gaiman’s alleged private endeavours mirror the strange darkness of his own villain.
An uncomfortable part of the Manson documentary’s “hiding in plain sight” narrative is the naivety of the fans. One interviewee is a woman who, at 14, established a group called the “lunchbox girls”, so called because they mimicked the band’s habit of posing with kids’ lunchboxes. The way she describes her friendship with Manson certainly sounds like grooming — he asked the girls to call him “Daddy”, received underwear pics from a graveyard photoshoot where the teens posed with sex toys and, autographing the girl’s lunchbox, wrote “To Jen, you cum-guzzling gutter slut, love Marilyn”. All of this, as an accuser called Bianca says elsewhere, was exciting rather than skin-crawling for the mere fact that it would have shocked their parents.
That’s how things go when you’re 14; indeed, it seems rebellion drove many of Manson’s young fans to buy into his predatory aesthetics. In one clip from outside a concert, a goth girl, who in another era might have been a blushing teenybopper, shouts “I wanna rape Twiggy!”, referring to another member of the band, Twiggy Ramirez. That she was compelled to say this shows how the language of sexual sadism is connected to rock-and-roll rebellion, and so is ultimately “safe”, part of the performance — an “in-joke”. But by definition, the power dynamics preclude this. If the documentary’s claims are to be believed, and Manson did pluck underaged girls from audiences and rape them on his tour bus, that young fan becomes a symbol of his victims’ vulnerability, and her joke about rape is sickly turned in on itself.
Manson’s own view on the matter is a little more straightforward: in an unearthed interview, he told Rolling Stone: “I’m not into rape whatsoever… I prefer to break a woman down to the point where they have no choice but to submit to me.” In this unbelievable defence, Manson says he cannot be a rapist because he’s not into it — he prefers other methods of leaving women with “no choice”. Little matter that this would seem to be precisely the same thing.
The magnetism of metal or goth scenes for awkward and vulnerable young girls is fascinating in itself and has parallels within BDSM. In each case, women seem drawn to these subcultures for their vague promises of being progressive and alternative, a respite for the marginalised and a way to process darkness. The tour-bus accuser Bianca speaks of a sense of kinship with other teens at Manson’s shows, who were invariably troubled, from “broken homes”. There is a similar black-lipsticked brokenness to Gaiman fans who, just as hypnotised as Manson’s, were taken in by his nerd-centric apparent sexiness, described in the Vulture piece as a “penchant for dressing in black, a shock of unruly black hair, and an erotic power seldom possessed by authors of comic books and fantasy novels”. “Women would turn up to [Gaiman’s] signings dressed in the elaborate Victorian-goth attire of his characters and beg him to sign their breasts,” we are told. One “fell to her knees and wept”. Gaiman’s look — that of the floppy-haired, mild-mannered intellectual — combined with his outspoken feminism was, if the allegations prove true, all part of the act, communicating a certain effete harmlessness.
A world preoccupied with shallowly designating men as “toxic”/”alpha” and “safe”/”sweet” disarms women against the fact that hot nerds are often the worst of the lot, beset as they are by the long shadow of teenaged awkwardness and rejection. Many of those men see themselves as outside of the dynamic of “women and their rapists”; rapists are hypermasculine bullies, but tender loverboys or gangly outcasts would never do that. Manson, conversely, leaps from the pages of a Gaiman novel — a villainous Sadeian caricature. This is not to say that Warner embodies the cruel core of sadism, rather the flatness of its grand claims about breaking taboos and sexual sophistication. If Gaiman’s public face was all children’s charities and comic books, it was equally confected — both men, in light of their respective allegations, were sad, ageing clowns whose costumes furnished shameful appetites. In Manson’s case, there is a profound emptiness, a sense of wretched impotence, to his intent to shock for shock’s sake and in Gaiman’s, to his simpering desire for progressive acclaim.
Marilyn Manson, for his part, is no longer shocking anyway: the provocateurs of the 2020s are more about ribald female sexuality than male violence (allow me to introduce our readers to 21-year-old rapper Ceechnyaa, who has gained international fame for the line “I’m peggin’ that man at the back of the bus”). But the inheritance of those Nineties goth sex freaks is still rich, and the cult of violent satanism still has great purchase among young weirdos.
Only last week, a 19-year-old internet forum nerd called Cameron Finnigan was jailed for encouraging a girl to kill herself on camera as part of a Hitler-worshipping satanic cult linked to the Order of the Nine Angles. That same group had inspired 18-year-old Danyal Hussein to kill sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a London park in 2021. The Order’s tenets, which a brief glance suggests involves Aryans taking over the Milky Way in a galactic empire, are tellingly tailored to sci-fi dorks. Members are encouraged to commit acts of violence and human sacrifice as part of a spiritual endeavour; it is no coincidence that this resonates with Manson’s stated aim to “transcend morality and sexuality”. The O9A, as it’s known, has inspired various metal groups, particularly among provincial Euro-goths, for decades, and satanic aesthetics more generally underpin metal as a genre, if only for its pearl-clutching potential.
So, sadism continues to hold sway — and is as dangerous for women as it ever has been. The home of BDSM is not cellophane-sheeted “playrooms” at ticketed, consent-centric sex parties. The true consequences of sadism play out in quiet corners, abandoned buildings, internet forums, Hinge dates gone wrong. They play out behind closed doors — and women really get hurt.
In a noxiously “sex-positive” culture which increasingly privileges the titillation of men above the safety of women and girls, the only solution is this: we must return to stringency on the simplest demands, and jettison kink/casual-sex apologists. Don’t choke me, don’t hit me, don’t frighten me, don’t use me. Be intolerant, be prickly and uncool, if it keeps you safe. After all, a system in which it is fine to strangle a girl you meet on an app, or (allegedly) make a girl who nannies your young son vomit during fellatio then lick it up, is not one which is remotely feminist, even with that golden ticket, “enthusiastic consent”. Obscuring that fact, and keeping the lines between exploitation and experimentation hazy, is essential for predatory men if they are to continue to intimidate women into silence.
In the arts, the thrilling aesthetics of dark, twisted desire will, and should, always belong — think of the electrifying strangeness of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, or the strangled strains of the Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs. This is no Mary Whitehouse manifesto. But when it comes to the real sex lives of real people, these celebrity stories show us that some men have used the grim utopia of BDSM, and its atmosphere of progressive sophistication, to conduct horrors. So do not be afraid to be disgusted — even if it is at the cost of some weirdo’s grand artistic and sexual mission to, as one of Manson’s school friends glibly puts it, “push boundaries”.
Sex and the power dynamics between men and women are inseparable. Add another layer of power between a famous rockstar / author and it is easy to make the case that these men indeed exploited the women mentioned in the article (and I agree they truly did judging by their statements).
In most if not all cases, there are simply less consequences for men to face than women when engaging in sex (whether vanilla or kinky sex). Where I disagree with Poppy’s take is the “return to stringency of the simplest of demands” and the jettisoning of kink apologists”.
Sex will never be risk-free. Sure, things like BDSM and aggressive-roleplay heightens that risk that women (and sometimes, men) will encounter, but it is that same risk that heightens the excitement and thrill of sex. Having sex with your partner in the confines of your bedroom is safe and comfortable, but a sudden tryst in a risky dark alleyway or an abandoned shed can fuel that thrill. That’s why most fantasies involve deviance and, yes, kink. I have never heard of anyone (yet) saying they fantasize about having sex with their partner of 10 years in the same bed, in the same bedsheets, doing the exact same thing for the exact same 10 minutes.
I think a healthier way to approach sex, kink, and relationships in general is a concession that not everything we will experience in a sexual encounter will be good. It is a spectrum –
On one end there are the “I don’t like this” and “I don’t mind”, on the other end, you have the “it’s okay” and “I like this”.
Not everything done to you that you did not particularly enjoy was done with malice or ill-intent. In the same way that not everything that you did to your sexual partner that he or she didn’t enjoy was with malice. I concede that women will always be at a disadvantage in these scenarios and the consequences for women will, more often than not, be far greater.
What’s the solution? Either we take Poppy’s position and “return stringency on the simplest of demands” or… we become open to the idea that not all we experience during sex will be good and something we will enjoy. There is a fine line between rape and rough-play that got a little too rough for your liking or verbal-humiliation play that hit a little too close to home (“You like this, don’t you? You dirty, boring, little housewife that can’t even make me a proper sandwich!”).
Sex is messy (sometimes literally) and complicated. But I think they’re part of what makes it fun.
Kathleen Stock was worth an argument but this is not even worth disagreeing with. It is just a feminist rant.You notice how everything is about evil men exploiting ‘women and girls’, without even considering that the women involved are taking decisions and making choices too. Apparently men have a responsibility to save women from their own decisions, even as they respect the power and agency and right to decide of all women?
Just one brief phrase worth remembering. BDSM and other dark things are indeed “a way to process darkness.” For both sexes. Maybe someone who could briefly go beyond her rigid ideology and preconceived notions and look at reality could make something of that.
Are there no female sadists?
Surely people make films about female sadists, such as the documentary film “Fetishes” (1996) by Nick Broomfield which explored Pandora’s Box, a professional BDSM establishment in New York City.
Should men be wary of female sadists? (Is this a trick question….)
“Surely people make films about female sadists”
“Nymphomaniac” by Lars VonTrier comes close.
I thought the main character was masochistic.
Sex and the power dynamics between men and women are inseparable. Add another layer of power between a famous rockstar / author and it is easy to make the case that these men indeed exploited the women mentioned in the article (and I agree they truly did judging by their statements).
In most if not all cases, there are simply less consequences for men to face than women when engaging in sex (whether vanilla or kinky sex). Where I disagree with Poppy’s take is the “return to stringency the simplest of demands” and the jettisoning of kink apologists”.
Sex will never be risk-free. Sure, things like BDSM and aggressive-roleplay heightens that risk that women (and sometimes, men) will encounter, but it is that same risk that heightens the excitement and thrill of sex. Having sex with your partner in the confines of your bedroom is safe and comfortable, but a sudden tryst in a risky dark alleyway or an abandoned shed can fuel that thrill. That’s why most fantasies involve deviance and, yes, kink. I have never heard of anyone (yet) saying they fantasize about having sex with their partner of 10 years in the same bed, in the same bedsheets, doing the exact same thing for the exact same 10 minutes.
I think a healthier way to approach sex, kink, and relationships in general is a concession that not everything we will experience in a sexual encounter will be good. It is a spectrum –
On one end there are the “I don’t like this” and “I don’t mind”, on the other end, you have the “it’s okay” and “I like this”.
Not everything done to you that you did not particularly enjoy was done with malice or ill-intent. In the same way that not everything that you did to your sexual partner that he or she didn’t enjoy was with malice. I concede that women will always be at a disadvantage in these scenarios and the consequences for women will, more often than not, be far greater.
What’s the solution? Either we take Poppy’s position and “return to stringency the simplest of demands” or… we become open to the idea that not all we experience during sex will be good and something we will enjoy. There is a fine line between rape and rough-play that got a little too rough for your liking or verbal-humiliation play that hit a little too close to home (“You like this, don,t you? You dirty, boring, little housewife that can’t even make me a proper sandwich!”).
Sex is messy (sometimes literally) and complicated. But I think they’re part of what makes it fun.
Though I believe de Beauvoir was a fan. And presumably Angela Carter argued this precisely because some people thought he was a feminist libertine.
First, you can’t base an argument on extremes.
Most people who try to read de Sade will simply find themselves unable to do so. First the acts described are horrific beyond what anyone would anticipate, and second (apart from some amusing bits about important people of the day indulging in bizarre sex acts) he’s a repetitive bore.
None of what he describes has anything to do with suburbanites indulging in a bit of BDSM to spice up their love lives.
Second, BDSM can only be described as sadism directed against women if you ignore situations where the roles are reversed. Clearly power is involved, but powerlessness seems to be just as attractive to adherents, male and female, as does power.
Yes, Sowerby missed an opportunity to connect with more readers here by treating what is typical as a universal. The so-called exceptions to the usual sex of the participants are common enough to break down sex-based assumptions—or should be. What of the dominatrix? What of submissive or mentally controlled non-hetero men? Perhaps the now daily articles on this subject matter will clear up some of this, at least BTL.
Why can’t we just say that sadistic feeling and behaviour is bad in general, though all too human, for any person, perpetrator or victim? I understand and accept your distinction between dress-up role play and deep-dive capture. But we’re not talking about ‘weekend dabblers’ in most of these instances. And the shaming campaigns against people like Gaiman and Manson are non-binding (cheeky pun not intended, but kept), at least so far. Manson paid a fine and at least one settlement and Gaiman will probably lose his reputation but not all of his audience, nor willing/semi-willing targets. Maybe he’ll go to the next level and attract an apologist cult over time, like de Sade has, including among some academics.
My point is that she is concluding something general about BDSM (most participants in which will be “weekend dabblers” as you describe them) from extreme examples like de Sade. The writings of de Sade describe things that are horrific, not distasteful. I mean really horrific! Think beyond anything in the concentration camps.
I know. I read extended excerpts of his work in Forbidden Knowledge by Roger Shattuck, a book I recommend to those feeling brave and mentally stable. He makes a sustained and learned version of the case I’m picking at in response to these BDSM articles.
Some kinds of knowing and experience are dangerous to the mind and spirit in a way that is likely to affect the actions of SOME that are exposed to it. (Just about anything will ‘trigger’ somebody, but there are matters of likelihood and degree with that too). Sometimes it’s better to opt out, and to eschew the idiotic nerve of people like the intellectuals who actually celebrate de Sade as a liberationist hero, when he was a legit sicko and real-life sexual criminal.
I understand your point on both comment boards too. There are matters of degree, and I don’t suggest a continuous through line from dress-up fun to an ever-more-real torture dungeon, or something like that. I just think that a little chaste self-distancing is warranted for most of us. There’s plenty to fancy short of pain and humiliation, and pleasure isn’t the highest human good, especially in amoral isolation.
I really don’t think warnings or disapproval amount to a meaningful infringement on someone’s right to ‘spice it up’ behind closed doors or even on full internet display. Those in the know, whether in control of the forces they’re flirting with or not, can dismiss or laugh at squeamish alarmists like me, perhaps with good reason.
It is unfortunate that both articles, especially Sowerby’s, reveal some anti-male bias in making their claims. I don’t think that invalidates all the points made, but it does weaken both arguments. Perhaps we can reach a point where a quality that is/seems more common among one group—like dangerous naïveté among young women—is not taken to be representative, much less bone-deep essential, for the whole group. I’m a stubbornly hopeful person, but I’m not holding my breath.
It’s what happens with poorly aimed scatter-gun blasts at vaguely defined targets.
Clearly there is a vast & chasmic difference between nameless, faceless acts of deliberately cruel perversion inflicted upon the innocent and unwary….and sexual game-playing within the context of a loving relationship. What a husband and wife enthusiastically choose to do within the private confines of their marital bed is entirely up to them. And if it involves a toy chest full of who-knows-what and ’50 Shades of Grey’ /Babygirl play-acting, that’s their business, not ours.
I suspect Sowerby would probably agree.
The problem with the essay is the confusion of these two conditions / contexts with the ill-defined & unsubstantiated assertion that our ” noxiously “sex-positive” culture .. increasingly privileges the titillation of men above the safety of women and girls.”
Before we even start on this debate, perhaps we need a bit more honesty (and information) on female sexual tastes. Too many people seem to operate on the assumption that men are pervy, women are vanilla, when men are vanilla, women are bored might be closer to the truth.
It’s clear from the massive worldwide sales of FiftyShades that there is a lot more going on in women’s heads than is often assumed. Could it be that what they want from men is a chance to indulge those fantasies without guilt or embarassment?
Nature appears to have given us pleasure, a good feeling, as an incentive to reproduce. Pain is the opposite of pleasure, so those who follow the Marquis seem to be going in the wrong direction. Pleasure encourages pursuit, so we embrace it: pain encourages repulsion and we are disposed to avoid it. Mutual pleasure thus seems more desirable than the infliction of pain on another. To reverse these ideas is destructive, not positive. As for ‘pushing boundaries’, that may work, positively, in art, when perceptions are enhanced, but otherwise it is an adolescent preoccupation with testing, which leads nowhere without the possibility of finding a positive result. Manson and Gaiman would seem to be following this latter pathway.
Not sure if you realise just how odd this form of reasoning is. You start from assumptions (not facts) and then deduce contra factuals. Quite clearly human beings (and quite a lot of them) do get off on mixing pleasure and pain, or at least fantasising about it. So clearly you are starting from the wrong assumptions.
Marilyn Manson is only popular with the ladies because he is a Rock star(or was). Beyond fame and money, he has no obvious redeeming features. He isn’t good looking, he hasn’t got hot body, we can hope that he has a great personality although he isn’t particularly famed for having one. I imagine someone like him was bullied a great deal in childhood, possibly by girls, and I see his stage persona as an embodiment of that bitterness. How many of these women were with him because he is a Rock star, how many would’ve been attracted to him if he wasn’t?
and Neil Gaiman was the closest that his genre had to a rock star. (yes, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore … but they didn’t really behave that way). Unfortunately this turned out to be true in more ways than we were thinking.
A thousand Amens. And, of course, many men won’t get it.
But what is it exactly that many men won’t get? I’d really like to know.
That monstrous people are capable of doing monstrous things to the innocent and unwary? Certainly we all know that.
That sex, as a full-contact sport, occasionally — in the fog of passion — produces outcomes for either participant that are painful, or uncomfortable, or discomfiting, or unwanted…and that most of those are entirely unintentional?
That high-risk, intimately-vulnerable engagement with strangers is not an especially wise choice?
What don’t we get?
What is disgusting is disgusting.
What is cruel & predatory is cruel & predatory.
Pain is pain; humiliation, humiliation; violation, violation.
It doesn’t matter if the prime mover is male or female, famous or obscure, performative or private….these horrendous, unspeakable acts in which real people are deliberately hurt, made to vomit, bleed, or even worse are wrong, evil, and utterly unacceptable (or should be unacceptable) to any good, moral / civilized human being.
But of course they’re not.
Or perhaps it’s simply that there are not as many good people as we think there are…or perhaps the separation between right & wrong is more obscure than we think it is?
When we debate these philosophies within the purposely constructed ‘weirdness’ which is the world built by people like Manson & Gaiman, et al… the distinctions become even more difficult to grasp…and lines blur (as Robin Thicke might put it).
Ms.Sowerby speaks of the the ‘naivety of the fans’. But were they? Truly?
It’s hard to think of a 14 year old Goth as being an unwordly innocent when she forwards graveyard shots of herself with sex toys and shouts, “I wanna rape Twiggy!” at concerts she has no business attending (with tickets purchased with her mother’s money). Are we surprised…was she…to receive in response ‘tender love notes’ from Marilyn which whispered his own ‘sweet nothings’: To Jen, you cum-guzzling gutter s**t, love Marilyn”?
Sadly, tragically, I don’t think anyone is surprised…not anymore.
So if God is dead…no heaven, no hell, and everything permissible… if the only thing which separates ‘good’ (whatever that means) from ‘bad’ (whatever that means) is consent. Do you consent? Do you agree? Do you want it and do you want it badly enough? And if the answer inevitably, increasingly is YES, and Hell Yes….well then…what remains?
‘If that’s all there is to the…circus…then let’s keep dancing…let’s break out the booze and have a ball.’
Ms. Sowerby’s focus here seems to be how much this kind of perversion hurts women…and quite clearly it does. But it also hurts men. Most importantly it hurts God as it corrupts and destroys what is most transcendent in Man, reducing Love and its sexual expression to grotesque, pain-filled perversion.
Yes I submit. To my appetites…to yours…to theirs…to whatever Influencer I follow…to more upvotes and attaboys on an infinity of utterly meaningless media…to my bottomless compulsion to do whatever it takes to sit at the cool kids table (be that in Manson’s bus or Gaiman’s garden or Epstein’s island or Diddy’s parties, et al.)
And Gaiman knows this; Manson knows it… every RockStar, every Celebrity, every Politician, PDiddy, Jeffrey Epstein, the Guy who ran the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ franchise…every Major & Minor League WannaBe… they all know: if you wanna sit at the Cool Kids Table… you’ll need to debase yourself to another’s whims. And they also know…. as in every pyramid scheme there ever was, you yourself will then be submitted to by endless Others.
You just have to leverage the deal and avoid unwanted, tell-all, investigatory exposure.
I know that there has been a push to decategorize certain sexual proclivities as mental disorders in order to destigmatize them (the word heteronormative often comes up in these discussions). And yet, beyond the obvious criminal acts committed which can and should be prosecuted, I still detect some form of mental illness in these narcissistic fetishes that even jail time can’t cure. Sexual activity, like all biological activities, should be sustainable and enriching. What they get from physical degradation and spiritual (or, if you will, psychological) impoverishment is beyond me.
Agreed. But mental illness? I dunno.
To classify an adult’s behavioral preference as an illness would tend to imply that it is somehow beyond the control of the individual…even that it was inflicted upon the individual against his or her will It is to suggest that they are ‘victims’ of a sickness and can, conceivably, be cured of this sickness, in the same way we are all periodically victims of cold viruses & suffer from the resulting upper-respiratory illness until it, too, is vanquished.
I’m not at all sure that’s true.
Rather I think these corruptions are — for the most part — deliberate choices made by adults who recognize completely that what they are doing, what they enjoy (for whatever reason), is indeed ‘beyond the pale’….abnormal (given an extraordinarily broad spectrum of normal)…and cruelly perverse.
To take an extreme case, I would suggest that Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz was not suffering from any kind of mental illness…that he was not a hapless ‘victim’ of a psychological disorder that drove him to commit acts of unspeakable evil…rather that he himself consciously and deliberately made evil & horribly perverse choices (choices that clearly he must have enjoyed).
As Auden put it, “Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.” To your point, we — thank God — don’t grasp or understand what pleasure they receive from the physical, emotional, and spiritual degradation they inflict.
Is the idea here that if someone gets pleasure from hurting another person, it’s not evil if they happen to get turned on sexually by it as well?
No doubt we’ll be told that it was an islamic variant of BDSM in Rotherham and Rochdale etc.
Sowerby does not seem to acknowledge the existence of genuinely masochistic individuals either male or female. These people exist as any serious study of paraphilias will show. Are these people supposed to put up with “vanilla” sexual practices which might not be at all satisfying? Do they not have a right to seek out a complementary partner to explore the sexuality they have either been born with or acquired in early childhood due perhaps to experiences they have no memory of? There are probably thousands of people who are now able to enjoy sexual fulfillment in the context of loving relationship since BDSM has come out of the closet. There is exploitation in non BDSM sex as well.