Games in which power is exchanged, granted and, most importantly, controlled, can teach players how power works and what it means to defy it. As experienced players often report, S/M games are as much about trusting your partner(s) to take or relinquish power as they are about shiny boots and luscious whips.

It's for this reason that theories of consent are at the very core of S/M thought. Playing safely with power requires a sophisticated understanding of what it means to say yes and no in an informed manner. Dozens of S/M manuals, classes and rituals are devoted to consent. And just how do we know when we've obtained it? How can somebody in restraints, ass caned to a bloody pulp, indicate the difference between a happy scream and an I'm-ready-to-stop scream?

It's from S/M theory that we've developed the concept of "safe words:" established phrases that signal the end of a scene (many people use the easy-to-remember "yellow" to request a slow down, and "red" for stop). More importantly, S/M theory has inaugurated a whole new way of engaging in sexual communication. In the S/M community, communication is at the root of all sexual satisfaction -- you can't get consent to shock someone's cock with an electric wand without a fairly detailed discussion beforehand about how you plan to do it.

Many players today consider their sexual adventures to be in the anti-authoritarian tradition of S/M theory. Artesia, an S/M player in the San Francisco area, believes that S/M is becoming more mainstream as 1960s hedonists settle down. She sees gentrified S/M in the context of "the greying of the baby boomers, who have always embraced their sexuality and are educated enough to advocate their explorations."

Like hippies who grew up to found "socially responsible" corporations, many S/M players have moved from life on the fringe to having their own social institutions -- albeit ones founded on fairly radical post-'60s principles. One of the nation's oldest S/M organizations, The Society of Janus (SOJ), was founded in 1971, around the time the counterculture was beginning to feed into what today's pundits would call sexual politics. Devoted to "education and support," SOJ operates somewhat like the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the '70s. One attends SOJ meetings to share experiences in a relaxed environment, and, as the membership brochure states, to learn more about "sexuality based upon a safe, consensual, non-exploitative transfer of power between partners." This language is deeply influenced by 1970s feminist ideals of safety and nonexploitation in personal relationships.

During the Reagan Era, S/M became a new form of safe sex -- especially in the queer community. Hunter, from Mr. S, speculates that many gay men came to appreciate S/M after AIDS put limits on queer sexual experimentation. "Because of AIDS, many people were trying to find alternatives that would intensify sexuality and that would allow them to play in a way that wasn't dangerous. I think that opened things up. They thought, Hey, I'll just tie him up.' Rather than stop having sex, they tried something else."

Nineties S/M, with its highly fetishized latex outerwear and safe sex-positivity, was clearly a reaction against the AIDS-wracked, anti-sex '80s, when bathhouses were shut down and police raided sex clubs. As Cleis Press owner Felice Newman puts it, "The sex wars are over, and we won." The kinky and pro-sex communities were no longer threatened by anti-sexperts like Andrea Dworkin. A movement to re-open the bath houses took San Francisco by storm, and unsafe sex clubs became a controversial new subculture. Even people who didn't consider themselves S/M-ers began reading Anne Rice's erotica about anal torture, caning and bondage.

As a result, what constitutes contemporary S/M is a weird combination of bourgeois ideals -- safety, education, taste -- and what could be called the original ideals of S/M -- radical transgression, a hedonistic anti-work ethic, absolute sexual freedom and a strong distaste for political authority. One finds seemingly incompatible belief systems mingling to create Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt's kinky bible, "The Ethical Slut," and organizations such as Quality S/M (QSM), an elegant and efficiently run mail-order erotica bookstore and S/M education facility where one is invited to purchase "classy" fetish stories about topics such as coporophilia and enslaving oneself.

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