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אה! ושכחתי שלמרות שהמחקר האקדמי שעוסק בבדס"מ עדיין בשלב מוקדם יחסית (השלב שבו המחקר עסוק בגילוי הכנראה מפתיע ובכלל לא מסתדר עם מה שרואים כאן בכלוב, שבדס"מים ככלל הם בני-אדם די נורמטיביים בסה"כ ומאוזנים נפשית בצורה מפתיעה ), כבר היה מישהו שעסק בהתניות (:

אצל Larva ו-Rantala במאמרם Evolutionary Psychological Approach Toward BDSM Interest and Behavior יש חלק שעוסק בSexual Conditioning:

In sexual classical conditioning, one learns to associate a nonsexual stimulus with sexual pleasure. A range of atypi-cal sexual behaviors and interests can come about in this way, and likewise, some forms of BDSM may overlap with sexually conditioned kinks or fetishes (Breslow etal., 1985). Empirical observations of sexual conditioning and imprinting have, for well-understood ethical reasons, been primarily conducted in animal studies. Popular examples of sexual conditioning studies have been conducted with rats; for example, researchers observed that if a young and sexually inexperienced male rat was given the opportunity to mate with females that smell like almond or lemon, an olfactory nonsexual stimulus, these males preferred to mate with females with these scents also later in life (Kippin etal., 1998). Analogously, male rats that did not undergo this conditioning preferred to copulate with females that were unscented. In a similar study, simply smelling the sexually conditioned scent was observed to raise sex hormone lev-els (Graham & Desjardins, 1980). Conditioned males even exhibited less sexual interest in unscented females, more frequently attempting to copulate with scented females even when they were not in estrus (Kippin & Pfaus, 2001). Similar findings have been observed in studies conducted with our fellow members of the primate order, including one in which young male marmosets, sexually conditioned with lemon-scented female marmosets, experienced erections from the mere smell of lemon one week following the conditioning (Snowdon etal., 2011). Sexual conditioning has also been demonstrated in rat experiments where nonsexual stimuli did not require intercourse to produce a “kink” for those stimuli, but in which synthetic clitoral stimulation and even oxytocin injections achieved the same result (Pfaus etal., 2012).Sexual conditioning can also occur with environmental and somatosensory cues; for example, this was observed in a study in which male rats being placed into a chamber where they previously copulated elicited an erection, whereas being placed in another chamber did not (Sachs & Garinello, 1978). Arousal in response to certain clothing, used in conjunction with early sexual experiences, can also be sexually condi-tioned. This was well-demonstrated in another experiment conducted with rats in which researchers (Pfaus etal., 2013) divided sexually naïve male rats into two groups; males in one group wore a jacket during their first copulatory experi-ence with a receptive female, and males in the other group had their first copulatory experience with a receptive female without wearing a jacket. When the jacket-trained males were given the opportunity to mate with females without their jackets, they had three times as many issues with ejaculation and took eight times as long to reach intromission as when mating while wearing jackets. Stated otherwise, the male rats developed something of a fetish for jackets.

To better understand how sexual conditioning can occur in our own species, we can also consider a handful of human studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s (for examples, see Kimura etal., 1990; Marquis, 1970; Quinn etal., 1970; Rach-man, 1966; Rachman & Hodgson, 1968). In one of such stud-ies by Rachman and Hodgson, five male participants were conditioned by being shown nude photographs of women wearing knee-length boots. The researchers tested whether this conditioned stimulus (the boots) would not only elicit arousal but also become generalized to women’s shoes in general. Following the conditioning, three out of the five were indeed aroused by the sight of varying pairs of women’s shoes. While most of these studies lacked in robust sampling and meeting adequate experimental conditions, they offer a demonstration of how sexual kinks in humans could develop via conditioning. While unspecific to kink or BDSM, other methodologically-sound human sexual conditioning studies have also been conducted in the more recent decades and provide compelling evidence of, but also complications asso-ciated with, human sexual conditioning (see Hoffman, 2017).Unconventional sexual preferences in humans can appear as early as adolescence (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Therefore, it is possible for sexual conditioning to take place as early as childhood and youth, not enforced by intercourse but resulting from a nonsexual cue or stimulus paired with rewarding sexual pleasure (i.e., the individual learns to associate the conditioned stimulus with pleasurable sensations, resulting from some form of genital stimulation or masturbation). Sexual conditioning certainly cannot explain every BDSM-related preference, and one caveat to this sug-gested mechanism is that sexual conditioning should imply a sensitive period of development, which to our best knowledge has not been documented in humans. Still, sexual condition-ing is one potential mechanism by which individuals may develop an interest in BDSM. This could apply to various aspects of BDSM preferences and practices if there is—most likely repeated—exposure to the BDSM-element paired with a reward. An example of this was given by one BDSM prac-titioner, who in early pubescence would view websites that sold chastity cages while masturbating. In adulthood, almost 20years later, chastity cages continued to act as a model for their sexual encounters and BDSM practice (Walker & Kuperberg, 2022).

הטקסט לא עבר כ"כ טוב את הcopy&paste, אז כנראה עדיף לקרוא את המאמר או את החלק הרלוונטי בקישור הבא:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380729435_An_Evolutionary_Psychological_Approach_Toward_BDSM_Interest_and_Behavior