What Is the Difference Between Rough Sex and BDSM?

As an expert witness testifying in civil and criminal cases related to BDSM, I am regularly called upon to opine about consent in murky sexual situations. One of my past cases involved a heterosexual couple who had recently connected using a dating app. When they chatted online before meeting in person, they explored the idea of rough sex. He asked her if she liked rough sex, and she responded enthusiastically that yes, she did in fact enjoy rough sex. The problem was that they meant wildly different things by rough sex. Neither of them had interacted with organized BDSM communities in any meaningful way, and most of their knowledge about kinky sex came from watching pornography and experimenting with lovers.

Image: a row of three jail cells with bars

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Thinking that they were on the same page about what kind of sex they anticipated, they met up and got busy. What each thought would be a night of fun, sexy exploration turned out to be a horrific misunderstanding that ended in an emergency room visit and lots of therapy for her and jail time for him.

This kind of high-stakes miscalculation is, unfortunately, becoming more common in the United States, in part because online dating means that virtual strangers are hooking up frequently, and in part because there is a glaring lack of sex education that is inadequately filled by pornography.

BDSM

BDSM has been around for centuries and has become progressively more codified as people increasingly talk, write, and research about it. An acronym that stands for all sorts of kinky fun, BDSM is best understood as three distinct but often overlapping categories:

• Bondage and Discipline (B&D) where people restrain each other with things like ropes, handcuffs, or a scarf and then do mock punishment like spanking, slapping, or other forms of physical impacts or interactions.
• Dominance and submission (D&S) where people roleplay power exchange, with one person taking on the role of the dominant or top who gets to tell the other person what to do, and the other person taking on the role of the submissive or bottom who has allowed the top to do specific things within a negotiated time frame and clear boundaries around what is OK and what is not allowed.
• Sadism and Masochism (S&M) involve pain and other intense sensations, with sadists enjoying the act of inflicting physical and/or psychological pain on a willing partner and masochists reveling in the glee of receiving that negotiated painful interaction.

Kinky sex often involves some combination of BDSM and costuming, using specialized implements that kinksters call toys and a range of erotic interactions that fall outside of conventional “vanilla” sex. BDSM doesn’t always involve sexuality and can be a form of spiritual practice, emotional healing, and/or expanded interactions that have nothing to do with genitalia or orgasm. Communities built around BDSM tend to have a lot of guidelines that structure negotiations, affirm the importance of consent, and help practitioners learn how to play safely.

Rough Sex

In contrast, rough sex is the Wild West of sexual interaction. Hair-pulling, slapping, choking, and holding people down are common actions in rough sex. It may be a spiritual practice or provide emotional healing for some, but usually, rough sex is explicitly sexual.

Without the history and clearly defined roles, what people mean by or expect from rough sex is a lot murkier than BDSM. While both BDSM and rough sex may involve similar actions and have comparable impacts on the people involved, people generally hold differing attitudes towards them. Rough sex is usually an action or behavior in which people engage, while BDSM can become a lifestyle or identity. A private interaction between sex partners, rough sex doesn’t usually have the same kind of clearly established roles and protocols that are often associated with people involved in BDSM communities.

Perhaps most importantly, the kind of education in negotiation and skill sharing that is common in BDSM communities is absent from rough sex because there is no community of people who identify with that as a meaningful source of connection. This has significant implications for the practice of establishing consent, because BDSM communities have talked about the importance of consent and evolved several different mechanisms to ensure that their interactions are “safe, sane, and consensual” and happen only among players who are “risk-aware kinksters” that have established “explicit and prior permission” before they begin their BDSM play. Lacking such a clear structure, rough sex leaves much to the communication skills of individuals who must negotiate their interactions independently. In a society that likes to have sex but does not like to talk about it, this creates the potential for significant miscommunication and devastating outcomes.

Best Practices for Rough Sex

Rough sex can be so much fun for so many people that it makes it worth learning to do it right for sexually adventurous folks. It is certainly not for everyone, and those who do not enjoy rough sex should absolutely not be subjected to it. But those who like it can follow the examples set by the BDSM community and learn about communication and safety techniques. Some of the most important elements that should be a part of every rough sex encounter are:

• Negotiate exactly what will and will not happen before getting started. This means talking about it quite explicitly, not relying on vague terms or body language to see how the partner is feeling. Using negotiation as a form of foreplay is a fantastic skill for rough sex enthusiasts to develop.
• Agree on a way to stop things if someone is not having a good time. Kinksters use safewords that are generally something other than “no,” “stop,” or “don’t” because those words can be fun to play with during kinky interactions. A designated word or signal (such as dropping a small item previously held in a hand) that can stop the action helps to provide a buffer for people who are no longer enjoying the rough sexual interaction.
• Start slow and small, especially with new partners. If people are enjoying it, then they can use mutual feedback to gradually work up to more intense interactions over time.
• Be very careful having rough sex with partners you don’t know very well yet. Known partners can be more trustworthy and have a greater ability to communicate with each other, and folks who have just met each other generally don’t yet have the kind of history that allows them to trust each other or communicate seamlessly about where to go for dinner, much less boundaries around rough sex.
• Play sober, so that you can respond rapidly to your partner’s responses. Inebriation can slow reaction times, cloud judgment, and loosen inhibitions that might otherwise keep people from doing things that they regret later.
• Learn techniques to produce intense sensations without truly injuring someone, like pulling hair gently in big handfuls from close to the scalp and gradually pulling harder if the person enjoys it. People should never, ever choke each other using hands or ligatures around their partner’s neck—not even by pressing on the arteries on the sides of the neck. Because the blood vessels do not necessarily open again immediately when pressure is released, the internal structures of the neck are quite delicate and easy to injure, and oxygen deprivation can cause significant cognitive damage or death far more rapidly than many people expect.