The major Anglo–Saxon states are indeed rooted in a puritanical past, and recent criminal legislation and renewed efforts at censorship appear designed to keep them there – or, more accurately, to keep their populations in that repressive past. For the foreseeable future, BDSM is set to remain a misunderstood if not reviled orientation, excluded from the privileges enjoyed by those living according to mainstream values and conventions, an outcast in the sexual hierarchy established and actively maintained and policed by heteronormative society and all its structures of power.