Greater involvement in the public BDSM subculture and participation in feminine Dominance/masculine submission are both strongly associated with less preference for and experience of sexual BDSM.

<aside> 😈 Greater involvement in the BDSM subculture increases participants’ likelihood of viewing their sexuality in terms of BDSM but decreases their likelihood of viewing BDSM in sexual terms.

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BDSM practitioners who meet new BDSM partners in BDSM subcultural contexts, even ones where sex is allowed, are much less likely to have sex with their partners than practitioners who met anywhere else.

<aside> 😈 I argue that research should focus more on the social factors that influence participants’ experience and interpretation of BDSM, particularly on the influence of the BDSM subculture, and that theorists should think more broadly about the social determinants of 'sex” and “sexual experience.'

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(From the abstract)

Despite being almost universally perceived as sexual by outsiders,

<aside> 😈 the relationship between BDSM and sex is extremely subjective and socially determined for those who practice it the most publicly.

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My results strongly supported all of my hypotheses and highlight the importance of social context and classic symbolic interactionist theories of cultural meaning-making for looking at the relationship between sex and BDSM: numerous social and personal factors mediate this relationship, but by far the most important of them is involvement in the scene. (P. 798)