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Under Anglo-American law, the consent of the masochist furnishes no defense to a charge of assault arising from sadomasochistic sexual practices. Our unwillingness to recognize consent in this context suggests disquiet with the ways in which S/M reflects the operations of law. Although the case law casts the masochist as a victim, other accounts represent masochism as a forceful enactment of submission. Masochism also challenges certain ideals of masculinity central to legal reason. Misgivings about the legitimacy of consent to S/M find a useful analogy in critiques of psychoanalytic treatment that understand consent in that context as irreducibly fraught.

This introductory chapter will provide the context for the collection, introducing the topic(s) of sex, consent, the law and the wider ongoing debates concerning the use of consensual ‘rough’ sex and/or bondage, discipline, sadism and/or masochism as a defence in homicide cases. An overview of the book will also be provided.

Using original transcripts of cases in which ‘sex games’ have ‘gone wrong’, this chapter examines how the practice of bondage and sado-masochism (BDSM) is figured in legal discourses and the implications this understanding of it has for debates about consent and sexual violence. The premise that consent to sexual violence might act as a defence or mitigating factor in cases which go to trial suggests that something understood as BDSM is recognized as a legitimate sexual practice by the courts. Recognizing the legitimacy of marginalized sexual practices can be understood as a progressive way to recognize individuals’ autonomy and freedom, within the contemporary neoliberal framework in which these cases play out. Campaigners against the judgement of the foundational Brown case make this clear (The Spanner Trust, n.d.). Yet, BDSM practice has also been mobilized to justify or diminish the significance of sexualized violence against women (Harman & Garnier, 2019, July 19).

This chapter navigates the line between these two priorities to interrogate the ways in which courts themselves interpret and understand BDSM. Gaining insight into how courts might be said to ‘operationalise’ BDSM, we can gain some insight into the role that consent plays in understanding sexual violence, including the work that consent has to do to turn an act of sexual violence into one of BDSM.

In order to do this work, I have acquired nine transcripts of crown court cases from 2010 to 2020 in which a ‘rough sex’ defence was used. Conducting a discourse analysis of how BDSM is imagined in these cases, in dialogue with previous I have conducted on consent and BDSM communities (Fanghanel, 2019, 2020), this chapter traces how knowledge about BDSM in created, and how this becomes used to affect justice outcomes.

In the last decade, much has been debated about the topic of BDSM in various scientific fields. With the slow and steady blending of BDSM with mainstream culture, which escalated rapidly with the appearance and extreme popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, BDSM has become a current topic of discussion in a broad variety of contexts. Moreover, with the recent change in medical classification of BDSM practices in ICD-11 (World Health Organization, 2018), which strictly clinically separated the sexological diagnosis of nonconsensual sadism from consensual SM practices, BDSM has also become a hot issue in the community of diagnostic experts. This chapter explores three aspects of the evolution of BDSM subculture in the postcommunist Czech Republic in the context of the continuous worldwide development of BDSM subculture – (1) role-play, (2) unification, and (3) commodification in the BDSM subculture – situating them within the broader context of the development of society in the postcommunist environment and the development of the BDSM scene worldwide.

WE START this month with some earnest advice to my contemporaries: once you reach a fairly comfortable middle‐age, you should settle for a form of exercise that brings pleasure and contentment without any pain. Long before there were reports of sudden deaths in midstride—indeed, as soon as the nonsense was imported—I was convinced that jogging is masochism, or worse, for anyone other than clean‐living athletes under the age of twenty‐five.

IF YOU ARE intending to move house and it is over ten years since you last indulged in that particular form of more or less necessary masochism, you haven't any time at all to write—or, indeed, to think—of anything else.

Sexual harassment is a worldwide and prevalent problem that can have severe consequences. The #MeToo movement has highlighted that sexual harassment is not an isolated event and is linked to misogynistic cognitions and other forms of sexual violence. However, there is a lack of research regarding the relationship between sexual harassment and its nomological network, particularly in the general population. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the nomological network of harassment.

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between perception of harassment and rape myths (RMS), with paraphilia (fantasy and behaviour) as mediators. In addition, the prevalence of paraphilia in the general population was explored and gender difference was analysed. Frequencies, Pearson's r correlations, independent sample t-tests and mediation analyses were conducted on a sample of n = 254 participants from the general population.

Analyses revealed that half of the sample have engaged in at least one paraphilia behaviour. Furthermore, correlations between a more lenient perception of harassment, RM acceptance and paraphilia were found, as well as significant gender differences. Finally, mediation models revealed a strong relationship between RM acceptance and a more lenient perception of harassment, with paraphilia mediating this relationship.

This study has several implications, highlighting the role of misogynistic cognitions in predicting a lenient perception of sexual harassment, and thus, proposing a key focus for prevention and intervention models.

This research is mostly conducted on male samples in these areas; thus, this study aimed to collect data from a diverse sample that may provide a better overview of sexual harassment and its nomological network.

As emerging adults on college campuses, undergraduates are at a key stage of developing their identities and deciding the role that intimacy and sexuality will play in relationships for the rest of their lives. Experimentation through casual sex, which modern researchers have dubbed the hookup culture, plays a part in this development. While hooking up has been linked with sexual gratification and value clarification, there are negative aspects of the culture as well, including a lack of communication leading to regret, shame, and sexual assault. This chapter proposes looking to the bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism (BDSM) community as experts in the field of sexual communication and consent, and utilizing skills developed by this community to fill in the gaps where hookup culture has failed emerging adults. Through the use of a novel intervention called the Hookup Card, emerging adults could be empowered to increase their communication skills and see more positive outcomes as they navigate their sexual and identity development.

Since Barker, Gupta, and Iantaffi (2007), in both mainstream cultural products and academic literature dealing with BDSM, there has been an increase in emanations of the “healing narrative,” which suggests that BDSM practices offer therapeutic potential. However, no significant attempt has been made to explore in greater detail the problematic relationship between this healing narrative and the history of pathologization of sadomasochistic desires and practices. Barker et al. (2007) rightly point out that in suggesting BDSM has healing potential, one runs the risk of implying that individuals who practice BDSM are in need of healing to begin with. This could be damaging to the image of BDSM, which after centuries of pathologization finally appears to be moving into a realm of acceptability. However, the experiences of BDSM practitioners who describe their practices as healing should not be discounted and could actually help to cultivate a more positive reputation, which makes the issue a political one. In this chapter, through an exploration of the concept of “healing” in cultural objects such as the film Secretary (2002, directed by Steven Shainberg) and the Showtime cable television series Billions (2016–present), this issue will be investigated further, leading to a way out of the apparent double bind. The aim is to come to an understanding of the therapeutic potential of BDSM, which would not only reframe the discourse of pathologization surrounding BDSM but also further the political goal of creating space for BDSM practitioners to explore their desires without having to experience stigmatization.

Three well‐known London department stores — Whiteleys, Swan & Edgar, Bournes — have all closed down in the last few months. Does this indicate the beginning of the collapse of the department store as such or is it simply the result of special circumstances, occurring more or less concurrently? Location is clearly a factor that needs to be taken into account. Whiteleys has struggled on valiantly in the past few years in an environment that has become increasingly indifferent to it. Even white elephants can briefly survive, but not when the circus leaves town. When department stores were in their triumphant heyday, they offered opulence, glamour and excitement. Gordon Selfridge persuaded Bleriot to lend the store his biplane soon after that intrepid aviator had flown across the Channel in 1909; and in the 30s several department stores flashed the latest news in moving lights across their fascias as Hitler moved implacably across Europe and the British concentrated on whether or not they would win the ashes. Has the department store's traditional glamour become irretrievably lost beneath grey layers of dowdiness? And what of the competition? With everybody diversifying into non‐food, what after all is the essential difference between a Tesco or an Asda superstore and a traditional department store? Except perhaps that the Tesco or the Asda may be much more fun to shop in? Perhaps the answer lies in how the department store intelligently uses its space; the shops‐within‐shops solution, for example. But while Debenhams continues to perform well with this as an essential strand of its operational policy, some commentators say that this was one of the reasons for the collapse of Bournes. Is specialisation the answer? The John Lewis Partnership has built up a unique and enviable reputation for fabrics — surely this specialisation must be a major factor in the group's profitability. Neither can the department store be seen in isolation from the community; the Law Lords' astonishing failure to realise that no public transport system in the civilised world can run without a subsidy means that London's public transport fares have now reached the kind of lunatic level that prohibits people from moving out of their suburban retreats without a special kind of masochism. Does this mean that suburban department stores will now blossom again around deserts of dead down‐towns? These are some of the questions that Sue Sharpies looks into in this special RDM feature.