History of BDSM — from ancient practice to modern community

The practices that fall under the modern BDSM umbrella are not a recent invention. Evidence of human interest in power exchange, bondage, and erotic pain appears across cultures and throughout recorded history. What is relatively new is the framework — the community, the vocabulary, the ethical principles, and the organised culture through which contemporary BDSM is practised and understood.

Ancient and pre-modern evidence

Archaeological and textual evidence of BDSM-adjacent practices dates back thousands of years. Ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian art includes imagery suggesting erotic flagellation. The Kama Sutra, composed in India between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE, includes detailed discussion of consensual striking and scratching in sexual contexts. Ancient Roman texts reference erotic power dynamics explicitly, and Greek art depicts scenes involving restraint.

Medieval European literature and religious flagellant movements — though not primarily sexual in intent — created cultural frameworks around pain, penance, and the body that intersected with erotic life in documented ways. The association of erotic sensation with power and discipline appears to be a consistent human phenomenon across otherwise very different societies.

The 18th and 19th centuries

The Marquis de Sade, writing in France in the late 18th century, produced the literary work that eventually lent "sadism" its name — though his actual writings were far more concerned with power, transgression, and philosophy than with the consensual kink practices the term now describes. The term "masochism" came from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian writer whose 1870 novel Venus in Furs depicted erotic submission in terms that would be recognisable to contemporary practitioners.

Victorian England produced a thriving underground culture of flagellation — documented extensively in clandestine publications and the records of specialists who provided such services commercially. The gap between public morality and private practice in this period was enormous, and BDSM interests survived primarily through this underground economy and literature.

The 20th century — pathologisation and community

Early 20th century sexology — Richard von Krafft-Ebing being the most influential figure — classified sadomasochism as a psychiatric disorder, framing it through the lens of pathology that dominated early psychological thinking about non-normative sexuality. This clinical framing persisted in various forms for most of the century, influencing how society understood and policed kink.

Simultaneously, actual communities were forming. Post-World War II America saw the emergence of leather culture — initially centred in gay male communities in cities like San Francisco and New York, organised around bars, clubs, and motorcycle groups. The Stonewall era and the broader gay liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s accelerated community organising, and leather and BDSM communities developed alongside rather than separately from the wider LGBT rights movement.

The Old Guard — the term used for the protocols and traditions that governed early leather community — established structures of mentorship, earned rank, and community ethics that influenced BDSM culture broadly. Some of these traditions persist in contemporary practice; others have been debated, revised, or set aside as the community evolved.

The late 20th century — mainstream visibility and community expansion

The founding of organisations like the National Leather Association in the 1980s, alongside community publications and the emergence of organised education and advocacy around BDSM, marked a shift toward a more visible and structured community. The concept of SSC — Safe, Sane, Consensual — emerged from gay leather communities in the early 1980s as an ethical framework distinguishing consensual BDSM from abuse, and spread throughout the broader community.

The 1990s brought the internet, which transformed BDSM community-building profoundly. Mailing lists, forums, and eventually dedicated websites allowed practitioners who had previously been isolated — particularly those outside major urban centres — to connect, share information, find community, and organise local events. The munch (a casual social gathering for kink-interested people, typically in a vanilla public setting) became a widespread community institution during this period.

The removal of sadomasochism from the DSM as a disorder — a process that culminated with DSM-5 in 2013 distinguishing between paraphilias (unusual interests, not inherently disordered) and paraphilic disorders (interests causing distress or harm) — marked a formal shift in clinical understanding, reflecting what community advocates and researchers had been arguing for decades.

Contemporary BDSM

Today's BDSM community is diverse in every direction — gender, sexuality, background, and practice. The ethics of consent are central to community identity and explicitly taught in workshops, discussions, and community materials. Consent frameworks, negotiation practices, and the language of limits and aftercare are shared vocabulary across a community that understands itself as practising something genuinely distinct from abuse or coercion.