Please Scream Quietly

Please Scream Quietly is the collective autobiography of the BDSM subculture. It argues that most people are a little bit kinky, but the BDSM subculture teaches its members to emphasize and cherish their kinky differences. Drawing from interviews, survey data, and years of observations conducted by a self-identified kinkster and professional sociologist, it tells the story of how people live and love in this much misunderstood subculture. The book begins with a discussion of BDSM identities, explaining how kinksters learn to define kink/BDSM, and to construct socially meaningful identities for themselves as kinksters. It next discusses what kinksters get out of doing BDSM, with a particular focus on how they experience BDSM as sexual or not. It then moves from individual experiences to relationships, with a focus on BDSM relationships and consensual non-monogamy/polyamory in the subculture. Then it describes community-level experiences of group norms and rules, analyzing subcultural demographics, as well as behavioral and attitudinal norms in and out of public BDSM dungeons. The book concludes with an analysis of how the subculture constructs positive and negative social status for members, and reflects on how the subculture’s world of BDSM might be different from BDSM outside of it.