ABSTRACT
The public knowledge of the extent of sadomasochism (S&M) behaviour shared a temporal connection with the concurrent wave of the various liberation movements of the 1960s. Many of the S&M enactments that took place with such abandon in the 1970s drastically declined with the advent of AIDS in the gay population. Browning tells of a CBS reporter who learned from the owner of an S&M shop about gay sadomasochism that 90% of his clients were heterosexual. some sadistic men, there is a slippery slope between acting out S&M sexual fantasies with call-girls and forcing sadistic sex on non-consenting partners, up to and including sex murders. Sadomasochism may be embedded in the separate, but sometimes overlapping, spheres of the sexual and the relational. In the sexual sphere, aggression in the form of controlled sadism or submission in the form of subliminal masochism can be experienced as pleasurable. While Mr. Franklin never loved her, the affair triggered a change in his fantasies and in his sexual behaviour.
