Most of the masochists I know were the type of children who put their fingers in the candle flame, the ones who poked safety pins through the top layer of their skin in the back of study hall. They felt the effects of serotonin long before they had the words to describe it. It was only a matter of time and circumstance before they were writhing under the strikes of a paddle. Others discovered much later, usually at the hands of a more experienced lover, that they have an affinity for taking pain. A hand accidentally grazed their neck and, feeling a rush, they pulled the hand back placing the fingers snug to the throat, squeezing, saying please. Or, it could have been a slasher movie that made them wet—meat cleavers and lots of blood causing their heartbeat to rise into their mouth igniting the primal death drive.
Culturally I think that at least those of us into BDSM understand the whats and the whys of masochism, while I simultaneously emphasize/scream that we don’t really need to pathologize our desires. BUT, nonetheless we ponder. Yes, pain can feel good. Our bodies release serotonin, a natural analgesic, which provides a biological explanation for why it feels good. It is an emotional experience. And, it’s sexy.
I recently read Leigh Cowart’s Hurts So Good, The Science & Culture of Pain on Purpose. You guessed it, it’s all about masochism. For them, growing up a ballerina, pain was coupled with reward. You dance hard > your toes become “hamburger meat” inside pointe shoes > you become a better dancer. Suffering for a reward is usually what makes the suffering “worth it,” because it doesn’t make any logical sense at all to suffer in vain. In fact, did you know that giving your pain a purpose actually helps improve pain tolerance? Context matters! It’s true and it’s fascinating. (Read the book!)
My fellow ex-Catholics are probably familiar with the concept of pain with a purpose. It’s known in religious terms as redemptive suffering. As a child I was told that I could offer my headache to God as a gift. I always thought God was kind of dumb if he wanted my pain as a present, but nonetheless I prayed. I now realize that this very popular concept called “offering it up” wasn’t explained to me properly at all — quite comical when I think about my fuck-up parents.
The ultimate suffering for meaning was when Christ died on the cross for *our* sins. If you are suffering, let it not be in vain. In trying to find the exact origin of “offering it up,” I fell into a deep hole of horny blogs talking about suffering. Focus, focus! The Catholic blogosphere is chock full of stories of loved ones dying of cancer or enduring great illnesses and “offering it up,” praying every day for God to transform their suffering into meaning. Not as I was told, that God would accept your suffering as a present and take it away from you, but instead he accepts your suffering as a present but leaves you to martyr yourself for redemption. Talk about bad boundaries!
Suffering like Jesus all comes back to Colossians 1:24 where Paul says, “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” This sexy divergence is all to say that in many cases suffering is spiritual. When pain is given a higher purpose it means something. In the Catholic sense, disgusting and delusional ideas about the meaning of human suffering have a redemptive purpose, a moral masochism.
Focus, focus! I wanted to bring this back around to examining why masochism and being on the receiving end of pain is much more accepted and understood(?) than sadism. I’ve thought about this for a very long time, as a sadist who lives in the world — as I have received weird Twitter replies about how I’m a sicko for enjoying hurting people, as I have read books focused on SM that seem to skip completely over emotional perspectives of sadists, and as those against SM frame masochists as the victims of evil psychopaths. Why does it seem like after all these years being on the sadist end of sadomasochism is still taboo?
Masochism as a concept seems to imply consent. As such, it is almost peripheral to violence. Even if someone is being beaten to a bloody pulp, they are asking for it with a smile on their face. How bad can that be? We can even talk about the healing and transformative aspects of pain on purpose, etc etc. Even if someone doesn’t want to be hurt, they may be able to understand, and can perhaps see this practice as one of empowerment by intellectualizing it. As the book Hurts So Good suggests, masochism is everywhere! Thus, it may be easier for the average person who loves something as mundane as hot sauce to vaguely understand the sexual masochist. Masochists are practicing embodiment. Masochists are ritualizing pain. Masochists are perverting an apparatus of control.
“Masochism takes control of the technologies that produce subjectivity as cultural stereotypes. It develops elaborate strategies for framing the collapse of socially sanctioned identities, and it performs this collapse as a pleasurable abandonment of identity. These strategies aim specifically to pervert the disciplinary technologies our culture uses in its everyday operation. Sadomasochism produces subjectivity through the performance of a sexual technology. It relies upon the pleasurable disappearance – and controlled reappearance – of the subject.”
-John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism
I find that sexual (I must keep saying consensual!) sadism, on the other hand, doesn’t ever get the social privilege of being on the periphery of violence. Consensually inflicting pain onto someone else means you are the violence, buddy! Unlike my painslut pervert friends who had masochistic tendencies from a young age, Sid from Toy Story usually doesn’t grow up to be a hot ethical dom top. Quite unimaginative and unfair, I do protest. Perhaps it’s the early psychoanalytic theories (Freud, which I will admit to only having read second hand) that posit sadism as a masculine drive and masochism as a feminine drive that have fucked us all up. I won’t say that aggression isn’t characteristically masculine, but also it doesn’t have to be. How do we get to a place of understanding (consensual) sexual aggression as neutral and, dare I say good, in the right context.
When I Google sadism, I get a mix of results about murderers and sexual sickos, purely negative vibes. Aggressive behavior, sadistic aggression, inflicting pain for pleasure, The Dark Triad, etc. I learned, just now, the idea of the everyday sadist. Sadists are not just serial killers, they walk among us and they get pleasure from watching others in pain! My innocent girlfriend who laughs for hours at videos of children face-planting, by definition, is an everyday sadist! Psychologically unstable! I’m honestly not sure what I expected given this niche topic of research, but I am still left disappointed.
Maybe I can’t explain with science what happens in my brain when I’m giving someone the pain they have asked for. It would be cool to understand more about why I find such pleasure in making hot babes writhe in pain, why I love sinking my teeth into juicy thighs until they bruise (ok we’re getting horny again!). To physiologically define the joy in the feedback loop of hand, to cane, to ass, to scream, to moan, to ears, to brain, to pussy, and back to hand feels like an impossible feat. I can only share my perspective on how fucking wild it is that people trust me to do things like put a knife to their throat so they can feel turned on by the possibility of death. Me, the death bringer! The smell of fear mixed with desire is intoxicating. In a way I get to play God, not the biblical vengeful version but a new type of deity who feeds off the loving offerings of screams and tears.
Do sadists have a God complex? Is this all about ego? How do I explain to people outside of my insular community that consensual sadism is not an antisocial behavior, in fact it is intersubjective. Bodies in sync feeding into each other’s desires—I know that they know what my face looks like while I’m watching the first drop of blood exit their body, and no one else in the world but us exists. They know that I know that they know that this is an act of love.
the science of giving pain