We're kinky, not crazy (an article by Jillian Keenan)

We’re Kinky, Not Crazy

Including “paraphilic disorders” in the DSM V is redundant, unscientific, and stigmatizing.

By Jillian Keenan

The American Psychiatric Association has decided that people with kinky sexual interests (which—let’s just get this out of the way—includes me) don’t necessarily have mental disorders. That seems like good news, right? If we look up sexual masochism, fetishism, transvestism, or sadism in the forthcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, they won’t be there! In their place, we’ll find a new list of “paraphilic disorders”: sexual masochism disorder, fetishistic disorder, transvestic disorder, and so on. The difference? To be diagnosed with one of these noncriminal sexual disorders, the person must “feel personal distress about their interest.”

Simply put, the DSM V will say that happy kinksters don’t have a mental disorder. But unhappy kinksters do.

Some sexual minorities have applauded this diagnostic compromise as a step forward. It isn’t. This is just the same routine that the psychiatric community dragged homosexuality through decades ago, and adult, consensual (in other words, noncriminal) expressions of atypical sexuality should be removed from the DSM entirely for many of the same reasons that homosexuality was.

....read more at the original article