Cuffs at Iowa State: The Campus BDSM Club That Made National News

Cuffs was a student group at Iowa State University that twice became a national story. It was formed in 2000 to talk about bondage, discipline, domination, and sadomasochism. Campus BDSM education clubs were scarce then, and still are. The members were university students: adults discussing adult sexuality on campus, not minors.

In the early 2000s the headlines were about money and about how the club met. In 2003 the president, Harlan (Duane) Long, asked student government for $94 to print fliers. The sum was small. The argument was not. Plenty of students said student funds should not support a group they called deviant. The request passed, 21 to 9. It became a short case in what happens to campus association, and to student fees, when the club’s subject is SM rather than chess or hiking.

On November 10 of the same year, Cuffs was in the news again. The university said the group had allegedly committed assault during a BDSM-related demonstration at a meeting. Cuffs appealed to the Iowa Board of Regents. The board refused to hear the case, and the appeal failed. The sanction changed how the group could meet: no demonstrations of any kind at future meetings. Education was talk only. Technique was not to be shown. That is the old problem for a campus kink group. People want to teach rope, impact, or negotiation, and the administration wants no live demo and no panic.

Cuffs faded after that. By September 2020 it was no longer an active student organization at Iowa State. Set beside it, Conversio Virium is the oldest student-run university BDSM education group in the United States, and there are wider lists of campuses that have had BDSM clubs. The old Cuffs website still exists in archives, if you want the campus-fetish paper trail.