Forget Fifty Shades of Grey. Here’s your real primer on all things kink.
Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
BDSM includes bondage and discipline (B&D), dominance and submission (D&S), and sadism & masochism (S&M). The terms are lumped together that way because BDSM can be a lot of different things to different people with different preferences, BDSM writer and educator Clarisse Thorn, author of The S&M Feminist, tells BuzzFeed Life. Most of the time, a person's interests fall into one or two of those categories, rather than all of them.
Most people think BDSM is always tied to sex, and while it can be for some people, others draw a hard line between the two. "Both are bodily experiences that are very intense and sensual and cause a lot of very strong feelings in people who practice them, but they're not the same thing," says Thorn. The metaphor she uses for it: a massage. Sometimes a massage, however sensual it feels, is just a massage. For others, a rubdown pretty much always leads to sex. It's kind of similar with BDSM; it's a matter of personal and sexual preference.
