Empirical Research
Beyond psychoanalysis, the study of practicing sadomasochists changed societal perceptions of sadomasochism in the late 20th century. In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), the sexologist Alfred Kinsey reported the sadomasochistic tendencies of men and women in the U.S. Moreover, in 1972, Robert Litman was the first sexual behavior researcher to describe the extant sadomasochistic subculture of the U.S. In 1977, using questionnaires to obtain the elementary data, the German psychiatrist Andreas Spengler conducted the first, large-scale empirical study of sadomasochism. The results reported in Sadomasochisten und ihre Subkulturen (Sadomaschists and their Subcultures, 1979) contradicted most of the earlier work about sadomasochism, especially that of the psychoanalysts, from which Spengler concluded that the previous research was “heavily burdened with prejudice and ignorance”. When the statistician and medical researcher Norman Breslow expanded upon Spengler’s work, he discovered the existence of only five previous, empirical studies of sadomasochism in the scientific literature, which included Spengler’s study. Furthermore, Breslow was the first researcher to show that normal women (who are not prostitutes) were a great proportion of the sadomasochistic sexual subculture of a society. None of the extant studies presented causal links between sadomasochistic tendencies and violence, violent crime, or sociopathic behavior that were presumed since the time of Krafft-Ebing, in the 19th century. The acceptance of sadomasochism without cultural norms, can further psychopathic or fake psychopathic crime of a type which fails to be prosecuted or charged.
The understanding that many more people practice sadomasochism than was previously believed, and the existence of sadomasochistic sexual subcultures, prompted the investigations of non-medical researchers. The American sexologist and anthropologist Paul Gebhard described the cultural contexts of sadism and masochism. The German Thomas Wetzstein conducted a large-scale sociologic study of the local sadomasochistic subculture that confirmed and expanded upon the results of the Spengler study, Sadomasochisten und ihre Subkulturen (1979). The investigations revealed that sadomasochistic women practice the sexually dominant sadistic role and the sexually submissive masochist role in equal measures. Yet sadomasochistic women may also be in fact the few committed moralists and monogamists committed to chastity. Much modern sexual research of sadomasochism describes the psychologic characteristics and dynamics of the tendencies rather than seeking to establish their psychic origins.
Read more about this topic: Sadism And Masochism As Medical Terms
Famous quotes containing the words empirical and/or research:
“To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.”
—Bas Van Fraassen (b. 1941)
“Men talk, but rarely about anything personal. Recent research on friendship ... has shown that male relationships are based on shared activities: men tend to do things together rather than simply be together.... Female friendships, particularly close friendships, are usually based on self-disclosure, or on talking about intimate aspects of their lives.”
—Bettina Arndt (20th century)