If you visited the Syracuse University events calendar recently, you may have stumbled across the university’s latest Health and Wellness seminar: Kink 101, a Bondage Domination Sadism Masochism (commonly known as BDSM) seminar aimed at teaching students — and this is a quote from the event description: “a night of safe and consensual learning.”

Columnist Augustus LeRoux recently argued such seminars, as well as the normalization of pornography, are connected to endemic sexual assaults on college campuses, implying that the 19% of students who were sexually assaulted in 2020 are the result of SU’s normalization of BDSM. I believe a few factual clarifications are in order.

LeRoux wrote that “the degree to which students’ day-to-day lives have become hypersexualized has damaging implications.” However, the past decades have shown a steady decline in sexual activity among young people. A 2019 CDC report showed that just 27.4% of American high schoolers were currently sexually active, a significant decrease from 1991’s 37.5%.

Condom and birth control usage is up, and the number of students who have ever had sexual intercourse is down. A 2020 study also found that since 2000, sexual inactivity increased among U.S. adults, especially among men aged 18-34. Wouldn’t a culture of sexual perversion and hypersexuality involve more sex?

He also argued that normalization of BDSM “compounds an already existing mental health crisis supplemented by the widespread consumption of internet pornography.” However, a 2013 study found that practitioners of BDSM were actually found to exhibit a healthier mindset than their vanilla control group. Practitioners of BDSM showed less neuroticism, more extroversion, less rejection sensitivity, more conscientiousness and higher subjective well-being.

And if LeRoux meant to argue that exposure to BDSM is connected to incidence of sexual assault, evidence to support that point is nonexistent. If nothing else, a BDSM practitioner who has been trained in safe and consensual sex — the exact education Kink 101 offered — is better off than a BDSM practitioner who could make mistakes.

And yes, LeRoux cited an article to back his argument that exposure to pornography leads to violence. (Admittedly, this article only studied first age of pornography exposure, not current frequency of use.) But the broader view of science studying pornography and violence is muddy. The National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, for example, has found no evidence in its research to back the assertion that pornography usage causes sexual assault.

If what LeRoux calls “perversion” — the rise in comprehensive sex education, on-demand pornography usage and seminars like Kink 101 — is responsible for normalizing sexual assault, one can expect the past 20 years reveal a skyrocketing rate of sexual violence. But the FBI found that rates of sexual assault are decreasing, both short- and long-term. The FBI estimated that the proportion of survivors who reported to police increased from 29.3% in 2004 to 34.8% in 2013, according to the 2013 report, and up to 40.9% in 2019. In short: sexual assault is down, and reporting is up.

LeRoux’s alarmist article does get one thing correct — he cannot contend that SU will soon be racked by a deluge of sexual violence. His words paint little more than a man appalled that his legal adult peers would shamelessly learn safe and consensual sexual practices. His argument is a series of loosely connected dots, revealing little more than his personal discomfort and unfamiliarity with BDSM. Perhaps he could consider attending the next Kink 101.

This article was written by Erin Sheffield, a senior policy studies and citizenship and civic engagement major, and former political director of College Democrats.

Published on February 28, 2022 at 1:13 am