History

In this chapter

1. Two writers and a psychiatrist
2. Leather and the “Old Guard”
3. SSC, then RACK
4. Kinbaku and shibari
5. Getting out of the psychiatric manuals
6. Fifty Shades, and what it is criticised for
7. The internet, munches and communities
8. Timeline
9. Further reading

BDSM has a short history under that name and a long one under others. This chapter follows three threads: the words, the communities, the medical classifications. It also points out the stories that were tidied up after the fact, because there are some, and some of them are still used to decide who is supposedly “in the tradition” and who is not.

Two writers and a psychiatrist

The two best-known words come from proper names. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, the writer known as the Marquis de Sade, lived from 1740 to 1814¹. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch published Venus in Furs in 1870². In 1886, the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing derived “sadism” and “masochism” from their names in Psychopathia Sexualis, a forensic study written for doctors and lawyers²³. The book went through at least twelve German editions before its author’s death in 1902⁴.

This framing opened a century of pathologisation. Tastes became symptoms, filed somewhere between illness and crime. Freud shifted the question without leaving that vocabulary behind. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915) and The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924), he made sadism and masochism components present in everyone, which can become a perversion without being reducible to one⁵. Desire became universal; the suspicion remained.

Leather and the “Old Guard”

In the United States, after 1945, demobilised gay and lesbian service members settled in the big cities. Gay motorcycle clubs appeared in California, such as the Satyrs in Los Angeles in 1954, and the first bars frequented by leathermen opened in New York and Chicago in the 1950s⁶. A culture took shape: dress codes, protocols, knowledge passed down from elder to younger.

This period is often told as the era of the Old Guard: a discreet, highly hierarchical brotherhood modelled on the military, with initiation, discipline and uniform rules, supposedly diluted later by an influx of newcomers. This story is largely a reconstruction. It was mostly written from the late 1980s onwards, and historians and writers from the scene, including the anthropologist Gayle Rubin, have pointed out that strict and relaxed styles coexisted from the start⁶. There were protocols. There was no single tradition of which anyone could hold the authentic version.

Women have their own history too: in the 1980s, lesbian leather and SM groups formed in Los Angeles and New York. During the AIDS epidemic, women from the leather scene cared for sick men from the same community⁶.

SSC, then RACK

In 1983, in New York, David Stein and the group Gay Male S/M Activists (GMSMA) drafted a statement of purpose. The phrase “safe, sane and consensual” appeared in it for the first time⁷. The idea: to distinguish the practices the community stood up for from abuse and exploitation. Stein himself described it as a “rough first approximation”⁷.

The phrase went around the world, and so did its limits. Nothing is ever completely safe; “sane” suggests that other desires would be unsound. In 1999, on a mailing list of the Eulenspiegel Society in New York, Gary Switch proposed an alternative: RACK, Risk-Aware Consensual Kink, which asks for awareness of risk rather than a promise of safety⁸. Other frameworks followed; they are covered in detail in Consent.

Kinbaku and shibari

Kinbaku is often presented as the direct heir of hojōjutsu, the techniques used to restrain prisoners in the Edo period. This lineage is debated. Capture techniques aimed at speed and restraint; they bear little resemblance to today’s kinbaku⁹¹². It is better to speak of influence than of lineage.

The name that keeps coming up is Itō Seiu (1882 to 1961), a painter often called the father of modern kinbaku. Fascinated by the Edo period, kabuki and woodblock prints, he tied up models and photographed them to prepare his paintings; the censors targeted him from 1930 onwards¹⁰. After the war, erotic magazines took over. The most cited, Kitan Club, published in Osaka from 1947 to 1975, devoted articles, drawings and photographs to SM from 1952 onwards, including images of Japanese bondage, and helped popularise the practice in the 1950s¹¹. The word shibari, in the sense of decorative bondage, spread in the West in the 1990s¹².

Getting out of the psychiatric manuals

Depathologisation happened country by country. Denmark removed the diagnosis of sadomasochism in 1995. Sweden dropped these categories in 2009, Norway in 2010, Finland in 2011¹³.

In 2013, the DSM-5, the manual of the American Psychiatric Association, distinguished paraphilia, an atypical sexual interest, from paraphilic disorder, which involves distress or harm to others¹⁴. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11, presented for adoption in 2019 and in force since 1 January 2022, removed fetishism, fetishistic transvestism and sadomasochism. The only disorders left are those involving non-consenting people, including “coercive sexual sadism disorder”, or marked distress¹⁴¹⁵. Criticism has not gone away: Charles Moser considers the new classification an improvement but still logically inconsistent¹⁶.

Fifty Shades, and what it is criticised for

Fifty Shades of Grey began as fan fiction, a story written by a fan and inspired by another work. The novel was self-published in June 2011 as an e-book and in print on demand, bought by Vintage in March 2012, then adapted for the cinema in February 2015¹⁷. In 2018, the publisher announced more than 150 million copies sold for the trilogy¹⁸. A Belgian study on the prevalence of BDSM practices even titled its paper Fifty Shades of Belgian Gray¹⁹.

The phenomenon made the subject something people could talk about. It also planted a false image. An analysis of the first novel finds psychologically abusive behaviour in almost every interaction: monitoring, intimidation, isolation, alcohol used to weaken consent²⁰. Practitioners criticise it for confusing BDSM with abuse, for presenting Christian Grey’s tastes as a pathology to be cured, and for showing incorrect, even dangerous, techniques¹⁷. In a focus group study, 35 young women who had just seen the film judged the relationship unhealthy, while finding some aspects of it romantic²¹. What research says about this myth is summarised in What the research says.

The internet, munches and communities

The internet changed access. In the 1990s, Usenet newsgroups such as alt.sex.bondage and local mailing lists served as meeting points. That is where the first “burger munches” came from: meals in a public place, with no play and no special dress. Boston held them as early as 1993; the word munch stuck²². In France, the group PariS-M dates its first munch to December 2006, which it presents as the first in the country, and became a registered association on 10 December 2008²³.

Today there are munches in French-speaking Switzerland, in Lausanne, Fribourg or Biel/Bienne, as well as in France, Belgium and Quebec; a selection is kept up to date in Resources. It is often the best way in: a coffee, people talking normally, no obligation.

Timeline

Further reading

• Consent: SSC, RACK, PRICK and the 4Cs, with what each one corrects.
• What the research says: what studies say about practitioners’ well-being, and the myths they disprove.
• Rope: before trying shibari, the nerve risks and the warning signs.
• Glossary: the scene’s vocabulary, defined plainly.

Sources

1. Larousse, n.d. Donatien Alphonse François, comte de Sade, dit le marquis de Sade. Encyclopédie Larousse. link ↑

2. Rabant, C., n.d. Sacher-Masoch Leopold von (1836-1895). Encyclopædia Universalis. link ↑↑

3. Le Quotidien du Médecin, 2014. Naissance de Krafft-Ebing. Le Quotidien du Médecin. link ↑

4. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026. Psychopathia Sexualis. Wikimedia. link ↑

5. Fernandez, M., n.d. Sadisme-masochisme. Dictionnaire de la philosophie, Encyclopédie Larousse. link ↑

6. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026. Leather subculture, sections on the origins and on the Old Guard myth. Wikimedia. link ↑↑↑

7. Stein, D., 2013. Consent Alone Is Not Enough. Woodhull Freedom Foundation. link ↑↑

8. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026. Risk-aware consensual kink, which draws on Switch, G., 2001, Origin of RACK: RACK vs. SSC, Prometheus no. 37, The Eulenspiegel Society. link ↑

9. Sehayek, M., 2017. Kinbaku, Japanese rope bondage. Vice. link ↑

10. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026. Seiu Ito. Wikimedia. link ↑

11. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026. Kitan Club. Wikimedia. link ↑

12. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026. Japanese bondage. Wikimedia. link ↑↑

13. ReviseF65, 2011. Finland joins Nordic sexual reform. ReviseF65. link ↑

14. Krueger, R. B., Reed, G. M., First, M. B., Marais, A., Kismodi, E. and Briken, P., 2017. Proposals for Paraphilic Disorders in the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Eleventh Revision (ICD-11). Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46(5), 1529-1545. link ↑↑

15. World Health Organization, 2018. WHO releases new International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). WHO. link ↑

16. Moser, C., 2018. Paraphilias and the ICD-11: Progress but Still Logically Inconsistent. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 47(4), 825-826. link ↑

17. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026. Fifty Shades of Grey, sections on publication and reception. Wikimedia. link ↑↑

18. Penguin Random House, 2018. Fifty Shades Freed Film Adaptation Opens Worldwide. Penguin Random House. link ↑

19. Holvoet, L., Huys, W., Coppens, V., Seeuws, J., Goethals, K. and Morrens, M., 2017. Fifty Shades of Belgian Gray: The Prevalence of BDSM-Related Fantasies and Activities in the General Population. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 14(9), 1152-1159. link ↑

20. Bonomi, A. E., Altenburger, L. E. and Walton, N. L., 2013. "Double crap!" abuse and harmed identity in Fifty Shades of Grey. Journal of Women’s Health, 22(9), 733-744. link ↑

21. Bonomi, A. E., Nichols, E. M., Carotta, C. L., Kiuchi, Y. and Perry, S., 2016. Young Women’s Perceptions of the Relationship in Fifty Shades of Grey. Journal of Women’s Health, 25(2), 139-148. link ↑

22. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026. Munch (BDSM), which cites the “Boston Burgermunch” message posted on alt.sex.bondage on 4 September 1993. Wikimedia. link ↑

23. PariS-M, accessed 2026. Page d’accueil, historique de l’association. PariS-M. link ↑