One of the hardest things is [that] I have to honestly tell him exactly what I’m thinking whenever he asks. That’s hard sometimes because I’m a very private person. I’ve always been very independent. It has taken me a long time to get used to being under this much control, to having my desires thwarted at times. The biggest sorrows that I’ve experienced as a permanent slave have had to do with the resistance that I’ve experienced and acted out in response to this control. I’ve had particular difficulty with aerobics. I’m a lazy person. I don’t like to exercise, yet my master insists I do that for my health. I get angry and emotional and stomp my feet and throw tantrums.
Resistance is particularly ugly. You treat your master like you would never imagine a slave should treat a master or a human being should treat any other human being! I get angry; I say vicious things. I fight him with all my might. In the end, though, we talk and we talk about why I’m resisting. We talk about the struggles that are involved. In the end I [always] end up submitting to his will.
I get this perverse delight in giving up my power completely and knowing that I am absolutely controlled by someone else. It’s this tingly feeling in my body, this shiver of delight. Another delightful part of [our] lifestyle relationship—the things I’m describing are very individualistic; they probably don’t resemble anyone else’s relationship—is I like being little. I don’t mean infantilism, but I like the aspect of our relationship in which my master is older—he is physically older than me by about 13 years and mentally older than me by about 50 years—[and] more experienced. I see him as a mentor and as almost a father figure. I like being small and childlike in his presence. That’s very pleasant to me.
In this relationship I’ve become a lot more emotionally healthy. My master respects individuality. He’s always respected my personality and not tried to crush it, although he certainly has the power to do so. He’s got a very powerful personality himself. [When my master makes a bad decision], it’s no big deal. I may get angry or upset, but he admits his mistakes. We talk about it, and it’s over in a few hours. [Sometimes] I argue with him vehemently about what I think is the right way to do things. Sometimes he changes his mind; often he doesn’t. He lets me get angry and express my reasons over and over, ad nauseam. But in the end, he decides.
Obedience is a big part of the lifestyle relationship for me. The more obedient I become, the more delightful the experience becomes for me. I think a person who is not in a permanent relationship doesn’t get that same feeling of obedience and joy. They may experience pain [or] humiliation, but it isn’t an ongoing thing that becomes deeper and deeper. My sexual feelings continue to intensify, and my feeling of being owned grows deeper.
I love serving my owner. I love doing things for him. I love having routines and duties that I must perform every day. I love when he dresses me up in this obscene French maid’s uniform he bought for me and I become Fifi, the French maid. My service to him takes on a more formal and ritualized aspect when I’m Fifi. My curtsies are much deeper and more frequent. If I drop something, if I misplace something, if I’m not quick enough, Fifi gets turned over his knee and gets a very painful beating. I love being a French maid! I like to be whipped and beaten in various ways. I really love being caned. We don’t do a lot of bondage. Instead, my master likes me to hold myself in place. I love having to maintain that position no matter how painful the cut of the crop or the bite of the cane. I love oral sex. In S&M it is real different than [in] vanilla. You’re servicing your master. You’re very aware that you’re trying to please him. With my ex-husband, I was aware that I was in control, orchestrating his feelings and his orgasm. With my master it’s the opposite. He’s controlling my head and my mouth and telling me exactly what to do, and I’m trying to serve him in the best way possible.
I distinguish between good embarrassment and bad embarrassment. Bad embarrassment would be where your boss calls you into her office and yells at you in front of other employees and makes you feel like shit. Humiliation and good embarrassment usually involves some kind of exposure, physical or emotional. I like having my bottom exposed and talked about and played with. I like it when my master beats me and I squirm around on the bed and inadvertently expose my vaginal lips and shake and squirm in all kinds of embarrassing ways. Humiliation is a wonderful thing. In S&M you know that the person isn’t doing it to hurt your feelings. A masochist gets sexual excitement from experiencing physical pain, and humiliation is a form of emotional pain. There’s a small element of exhibitionism in humiliation, but true exhibitionists don’t like to be humiliated. They like to show off the parts of their bodies that they’re proud of. In humiliation, you get parts of your body exposed that you like to keep private. It gives me a real thrill to be embarrassed in that way. I blush; I giggle; I turn red. If I had my own free choice, I wouldn’t walk around with the bottoms of my Dr. Demons undone.
[This is the first time] I’m close enough with someone that I can loosen up and relax and be silly. I see the part of his personality that is fun and playful. I’ve become more relaxed and more myself than I have in any other relationship with any other person in my life, including my family [and] an ex-husband who I was with for over a decade. If you’re with the right person, miracles can occur.
SECTION THREE
THE PLEASURES OF DISCOMFORT
Nine
CORPOREAL PUNISHMENTS
May those who know me see the marks of biting
And bruises which betray a happy love!
In love I want to weep or see you weeping;
To agonize or hear your agony.
—PROPERTIUS1
To experience pain as pleasure seems paradoxical. Yet, the playful pinch or slap of a lover in a moment of high passion are varieties of pain, and both are common and widely accepted as aspects of intimate play that increase excitement. Pain is pleasurable when it is perceived as pleasurable. A love bite given in the bedroom may drive one to a peak of passion. A bite of identical force given on the street may drive one to the nearest police station to press charges.
To a person for whom the very idea of being struck with a whip can be perceived only as pain, it is difficult to understand that for some it may well be as erotic as the most gentle and intimate caress. Perception is everything, and perception varies from individual to individual.
This chapter profiles several individuals who speak to the subject of pain as pleasure.
• Cléo Dubois is a professional bondage specialist and professional sadist, as well as a lecturer and advocate of sexual choice. Her private pursuits include avant-garde theater, swimming, bicycling, and gardening. She is married.
• Jean L. is 49 years old, divorced, and works with children. She is the editor of the Society of Janus (San Francisco) newsletter Growing Pains. Her interests include education, reading, shortwave radio, and computers.
• Cassandra is 36 years old and an engineer. She lives with -j- in San Francisco.
• -j- is a graphics engineer. He is Cassandra’s life-partner. They both submit to a male dominant, to whom they refer as “my liege.”
PAINFUL BEGINNINGS
I eroticize pain. Receiving pain sexually stimulates me to the point of orgasm. I can also orgasm from giving pain. I’ve eroticized it to that extent.
—JEAN L.
That acute sensations may enhance erotic pleasure has always been known: Varieties of painful stimulation are recorded as means of enhancing sensations and lovemaking in sexual manuals such as The Kama Sutra (circa 450 B.C.) and other works. According to Magnus Hirschfeld, the Talmud “says that flagellation on the back may lead to a discharge of semen.”2 Erotic pain was considered a specific to combat the wilting effects of age and impotence in cultures as diverse as Imperial Rome and Restoration-era England. It is difficult to assess the sexual mores of another age, especially when that age left little documentation of the practices of the bedroom. Yet the notion that pain and pleasure are intermingled in the act of sex is one that wo
uld probably have elicited little controversy among the ancients.
The love of pain was termed algolagnia (literally, “pain craving”) by Schrenk-Notzing in 1892. It was about this period that pain was apparently segregated from “normal” sexuality. Until erotic pain came under the scrutiny and disapproval of late-19th Century sexologists, it seems to have been accepted as an unusual vice that might, at most, excite gossip or speculation. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the psychological literature on the enjoyment of pain is the absolute inability of psychologists to reach a consensus on etiology. No single theory on the etiology of sadomasochism proposed between 1886 and 1992 stands up to basic scientific scrutiny.3
The bias against painful pursuits has not markedly changed since the 19th Century, although today’s more enlightened helping professionals seldom attempt to cure or to correct a patient’s desire for pain. The exceptions are extreme cases of masochism which result in life-threatening emergencies. This small minority of masochists however seems rarely to pursue consensual D&S.
The eros of pain has a long history of representation in Western literature. Krafft-Ebing identified the enjoyment of pain with the name of novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Masoch’s most notorious novel was Venus in Furs, wherein the whip-wielding Wanda treats her submissive lover, Severin, to sharp depredations which cause him unalloyed delight. Krafft-Ebing chose the Marquis de Sade—whose imagination, as is often the case, was far more active than his sex life—as an exemplar of pain giving. In Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing forever linked the enjoyment of inflicting pain with de Sade. (Contrary to popular belief, the term sadism had been in use for decades before Krafft-Ebing employed it, primarily in French literary criticism.)
These gentlemen are hardly unique in having inscribed a penchant for erotic pain upon the literary record. For centuries the tradition of courtly love glorified the concomitant pain and pleasure experienced by the man who rapturously suffers for the sake of a cruel, unattainable woman. While such sentiments were considered to be chaste, the metaphors and images were explicitly sadomasochistic. By the end of the 19th Century, poets Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, Charles Algernon Swinburne, and Paul Verlaine had scandalized and titillated readers with their evocative descriptions of sadomasochistic sexuality.
DO ALL D&SERS ENJOY PAIN?
D&Sers who are solely interested in the psychological stimulation of D&S or in fetish activities are often just as baffled or put off by physical discomfort as are most mainstream individuals. Nonetheless, D&Sers generally agree that putatively uncomfortable or painful activities, such as bondage, spanking, whipping, or other intense stimulation, are often a part of their sexual relationships.
Spanking is not a separate thing amongst people who do S&M: It’s just one of the ways that you can inflict pain. I like being bound in comfortable positions. I like being whipped; I like being caned; I like pain.
—CASSANDRA
Few, if any, D&Sers do all the things covered in the following four chapters. People who enjoy rigorous physical discipline may not necessarily enjoy bondage. Many “love bondage” enthusiasts object to pain of any kind. Not only does the desirable level of stimulation vary from person to person, but the kind and the location of stimulation desired varies broadly as well. Those who enjoy a stringent spanking may be loath to experience pain to anything but the buttocks, and those who enjoy stimulation in far more sensitive areas may seek only light, teasing, tingling sensations.
WHAT KIND OF PERSON LIKES TO GIVE OR TO RECEIVE PAIN?
Not only is the percentage of the population who is aroused by intense stimulus high, but the actual numbers vary according to what one classifies as an erotic response to pain, and even what constitutes pain.
There is great diversity on the estimates of the number of S/M practitioners in the general population. At least part of this variance is due to the different ways S/M or similar concepts are presented or defined in these general studies of the sexual behavior. The estimates range from about 50 percent, those who report at least some erotic response to being bitten (Kinsey et al., 1953), to approximately 5 percent of those who report obtaining sexual pleasure from inflicting or receiving pain. It is the present author’s best guess that approximately 10 percent of the adult population are S/M practitioners.
—CHARLES MOSER4
The people we interviewed often made critical distinctions between dominant and sadist, and submissive and masochist. Most D&Sers feel compelled to arrive at personal definitions. The clinical labels rarely fit, perhaps because psychological communities lump together people of significantly different tastes, desires, and degrees of interest.
I’m a sadist. I like to claim that. I do not ever advertise as a dominant. I advertise as a sadist. Sadism is physical. I look at dominance much more as a mental control.
—CLÉO DUBOIS
Spanking, for example, has been little studied as a distinct phenomenon. Instead, it has been assumed to be a behavior within the boundaries of clinically defined sadomasochism, an assumption which makes spanking “purists” bristle. Likewise, there is little general differentiation of bondage or of whipping in clinical classifications, yet these behaviors have a core of practitioners who are interested in little else. Classifications are more a matter of convenience for the researcher than a reflection of what people desire or practice. The distinctions made by the people themselves are crucial to an understanding of their sexual personae. Making the willing infliction or reception of pain in any sexual context a common denominator is guaranteed to result in a huge grouping of peoples whose interests are widely divergent.
WHERE DOES THE INTEREST BEGIN?
The Grimm fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” is about a delicate young girl who is disturbed by the slightest sensation. Perhaps the story of deep masochiste could be titled “The Princess and the Nettles,” since anything less chafing might be undetectable, even boring. A sexual masochist not only requires a profound arousal of the senses but actually loves extreme sensation in much the same way that others delight in a soft caress.
People talk about wanting a light, feathery touch. I don’t feel it. I can lie there with my eyes closed, and someone’s stroking me gently and doing what some people would think was wonderful, feathery, nice stuff, and it feels like nothing to me.
—CASSANDRA
A sexual sadist, conversely, derives pleasure from inflicting intense stimulation. But D&Sers who follow the “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” credo wish to give or feel a pain that is inherently pleasurable to both partners.
[People who are] not involved in S&M don’t seem to understand that although you are delivering pain, it is pain-pleasure: Nobody really wants to feel actual pain.
—JEAN L.
Clearly, people vary dramatically in their thresholds for intense stimulation. The question of why this is so is difficult to answer.
I think the desire for more stimulation is a function of wiring, a primarily physical thing. I like a lot of stimulation … if it’s built up to, it doesn’t hurt. It feels good.
—CASSANDRA
In recent years some strides have been made in developing plausible physiological—if not psychological—explanations for the thrill of pain. This is partly a result of sports medicine’s research on the effects of endorphins. Athletes frequently note the rush of endorphins (from endogenous morphine: “the morphine within”)5 that can accompany pain and fatigue. Endorphins are natural opiates that are secreted by the pituitary gland in response to pain. They bind to opiate receptors in the brain, bringing not only a cessation of pain but a sense of well-being or even euphoria. Pain can literally bring pleasure.
Anybody who is into aerobics and step classes, like I am, will know what that endorphin rush is like! I can have a greater intensity of pain and experience it as pleasure. That’s why my body can probably endure more pain than yours: I’m brought up slowly; and the endorphins take care of it. I go into full-fledged endorphin rushes.
—J
EAN L.
A masochist’s interest in pain may be partly attributable to the craving for an endorphin-induced natural high. Most of our interviewees recall that they first learned that the same sensations that others perceived as purely painful—i.e., an anguish to be avoided at all costs—were for them erotic and exciting when they were still children. For them, pain and pleasure created a powerful erotic admixture.
As far as the psychological aspects of D&S, I didn’t clue into them as early as I clued into the ability to eroticize pain. In childhood I discovered that things that ought to hurt didn’t strike me as painful.
—MR. HAPPY
Dozens of references in classical literature verify that the early erotic linkage of pain and pleasure is an age-old phenomenon. In his 18th Century Confessions, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau goes on at length about his early experience of being whipped and punished and his subsequent cravings for reenactments. These experiences marked him permanently.
I had found in the pain, even in the disgrace, a mixture of sensuality which had left me less afraid than desirous of experiencing it again from the same hand.… Who would believe that this childish punishment inflicted upon me when only eight years old by a young woman of 30, disposes of my tastes, my desires, my passions?6
Although many of our interviewees said that they recall making a connection between pain and pleasure at an early age, most did not recall any specific event (such as a trauma) that revealed this aspect of their sexuality to them. A majority, instead, recall experimenting with painful stimulus in the regular course of exploring their bodies—and discovering that they were aroused by the pain.
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