Vancouver Sadomasochist Denied Chauffeurs Job

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - A Canadian man who claims he was discriminated against as a pagan who practices a form of sadomasochism will get to take his complaint to a human rights tribunal.

Hayes complained to British Columbia's Human Rights Tribunal that he was discriminated against because he is a pagan who practices a "BDSM lifestyle" and deserves protection under the human rights code, based on sexual orientation.

BDSM refers to bondage, discipline and submission and sadism and masochism, according to the court documents.

Purple Room, originally uploaded by ksergeyev.

The development of the term sadomasochism is complex. Originally "Sadism" and "Masochism" were purely technical terms for psychological features, which were classified as psychological illness. The terms are derived from the authors Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

In 1843 the Hungarian physician Heinrich Kaan published Psychopathia sexualis ("Psychopathy of Sex"), a writing in which he converts the sin conceptions of Christianity into medical diagnoses. With his work the originally theological terms "perversion", "aberration" and "deviation" became part of the scientific terminology for the first time.

The German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced the terms "Sadism" and "Masochism" into the medical terminology in his work Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia sexualis ("New research in the area of Psychopathy of Sex") in 1890.

In 1905, Sigmund Freud described "Sadism" and "Masochism" in his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie ("Three papers on Sexual Theory") as diseases developing from an incorrect development of the child psyche and laid the groundwork for the scientific perspective on the subject in the following decades. This led to the first time use of the compound term Sado-Masochism (German "Sado-Masochismus")) by the Viennese Psychoanalyst Isidor Isaak Sadger in his work Über den sado-masochistischen Komplex ("Regarding the sadomasochistic complex") in 1913.

In the past BDSM activists turned repeatedly against these conceptual models, originally deriving from singular historical figures and implying a clear pathological connotation. They argued that there is no common sense in attributing a phenomenon as complex as BDSM to two individual humans, as well one might speak of "Leonardism" instead of Homosexuality. The BDSM scene tried to distinguish themselves with the expression "B&D" for Bondage and Discipline from that pejorative connotated term "S&M".

The abbreviation BDSM was probably coined in the early 1990s in the subculture around the Newsgroup news:alt.sex.bondage. This new term is first recorded as appearing in July 1991.

Later the dimension Dominance and Submission was integrated into the connotation of BDSM, creating the multilevel acronym common today.