Ask An Ancilla: Am I Good Enough As A Masochist?

I had a few questions related to the same subject so I am clubbing them into one theme and addressing different parts of it.

Question: I am a submissive/masochist and even though I like pain, I feel very reactive in the moment and want it to stop, but then later I like it, each time I have to do it again, I feel more fear and I am worried I will not be able to do it past a point. I worry if I don’t take more pain I am being a disappointment to my partners (and one person, as a result, stated they have developed something of a phobia for planning impact scenes and a habit of cancelling/flaking last minute). Even when I really enjoy a scene, I am disappointed by the lack of marks and bruises and it makes me view the whole experience differently after I notice that my skin is unmarked. I used to be able to take a huge amount of pain but of late I cannot match that and/or take as much, I miss it, how can I do that again?

Answer:

First of all, thank you for being so honest and vulnerable with me. Many times people don’t ask such questions because it seems like they will make you *look bad* and we all feel so much pressure to toe a line of perfection, publicly. (*Did you know publicly is the most commonly misspelt word in English? Probably*.)Now, about the pain. Let’s just acknowledge the performance pressure associated with masochism.

Let’s, for a second, stop saying the *right* things and admit that even when most “seasoned” masochists, after years of doing it, stand in front of a person wielding a whip, they wonder —

*Can I do this? Can I really take this?*

It’s the most natural thing in the world for that to occur to a person. Masochism has a distinct feature as a sexual preference, one that may be contained in other expressions of sexuality in different forms as well, it is pleasure via a route of endurance and some form of accomplishment. It’s like the pleasure of finishing a really difficult hike, you will probably feel great during a phase of it, but you may be nervous about being able to finish when you are preparing for it, you may realise this particular hike is too intense for someone with your experience or it could be too easy as well, and there may be a section of it that feels like you just cannot take another step, at some point you will experience your body trying to aid your endurance (by supplying hormones and neurotransmitters) and that may induce euphoria or panic, and when you get to the top of the mountain you may forget the bad parts because the view is so good or you may be completely spent and need some rest. The pleasure of such a path is convoluted, it’s not quite like the pleasure of eating a delicious meal or using a sex toy to get to orgasm. There is really only one answer: Choose the correct hike *for you*.

While our body is capable of enduring great amounts of pain, most people’s bodies do not instinctively view pain as a desirable state. My sexuality, for instance, may desire the pain, but it may be unable to override my body’s reflexive response to pain, the idea of pain or the imminent threat of it. It will most likely catch up, but there will be an intervening period of nervousness or fear. So what? If you feel panic or fear at the prospect of impact play, you don’t (necessarily) need to worry about what that says about your masochism, because in all likelihood it is not a comment on that, it’s just a natural somatic feature. It always helps me to articulate my fears to the person who is going to hurt me but also to myself, and most importantly, as an ongoing practise. As a masochist, it is still okay to approach pain from a place of (responsive) fear, but it is important to investigate the nature of your fear. If your fear is coming from the human place of self-preservation, that would most likely not be related to your masochism and will pass quickly, but if it is coming from an emotional or circumstantial place (ie: you feel unsafe, you don’t actually want to do this but feel like you must, it’s your coping mechanism to suppress issues by engaging sexually), it would help to look into your fears and communicate with them. If your fear is strong enough that you are repeatedly scheduling and cancelling scenes, trying to get out of them or making excuses, I would strongly urge you to consider why and what about confronting the possibility that you may not want this at all is so difficult?

Perhaps, you have an aversive relationship with fear itself, and the incidental levels of fear that almost always accompany any masochistic pursuit have triggered your complicated relationship with fear and associated itself with pain? Or maybe, your self-worth/self-assessment and your identification as a masochist are related to one another, and feeling like you may lose one is making you panic about who you would be without it? It may also be a fear of performance. While I am somewhat uncomfortable with overly performative masochism, there is definitely performance to the expression of masochism, which part of the performance are you worried about not being able to fulfil? Often, it is about the *magnitude* of pain, and it may be time to question whether defining your enjoyment of pain as a matter of sensation over magnitude may be a good change for you. I would also recommend hanging out with your partner(s) without expectations of play and seeing what happens. You could communicate with them in advance about your fear, the tendency to cancel and/or the performance aspect and lay down some guidelines for no-pressure short bursts of play to feel yourself out.

As for marks and bruises, I am sure it has been said enough that people’s bodies mark differently so let us focus on different parts of this discussion. I think sometimes it boils down to intensity and for me, I experienced a lot of growth from making my peace with enjoying various aspects of play at varying levels of intensity. A lot of times, especially with people whose schedules don’t allow for frequent play or whose partners don’t live nearby, there is a pressure to play to the extreme every single time. It doesn’t feel like successful play until you have reached a limit, cried or experienced an extreme. This method of play may work for some people, especially those who do not feel good or bad about their performance, but for others, it may feel like you have to bring an optimal performance every single time and that undermines your ability to actually enjoy yourself. I recommend that you engage in different ways and play at different levels of intensity, and focus instead on your pleasure in the situation as opposed to how your body will look after the fact. You never enjoy your bruises as much as when you weren’t playing for them. If you cannot help but place yourself in a situation where you are playing for the marks, try to see what happens when you abstain from play itself, what do you miss? The pain or the bruises? What does that tell you?

It’s important to make your peace with however your body marks because there is a good chance of a person making themselves unsafe to be able to attain an aspirational state of pain. Some people may not demonstrate outward signs of trauma immediately (because their haemoglobin, liver function, skin type, an autoimmune condition, etc) and some people experience more superficially bruising and others experience deeper bruising, it’s important to know exactly how your body responds and respect that. It’s normal to want to look black and blue but if masochism loses its allure because you *cannot* there are other things here for you to consider. It’s the same with the change in the “amount of pain you can take”.

The change in the amount of pain you are able to take is a natural part of your body’s growth and it comes and goes in phases. There are some phases in which I cannot withstand a pinch. There was a particular scene in which a single needle piercing my skin causing me to tap put completely, there were others when a hundred needles felt like nothing. Give your body the space to do different things on different days and try to avoid approaching it from a panicked state. I have also noticed the tendency to idolise and aspire to *how you used to be* as a masochist in the early days.

In the early days, sometimes in times of frenzy, a lot of pain tolerance can be adrenaline-aided and over time as the incidence of impact play in your life becomes normalised the adrenaline-response may decline causing you to be able to withstand less pain. However it is not important how many strokes of a cane you can take, but how much pain you *experience*, of the pain is satisfying the same need, it’s totally fine for it to be lesser in magnitude. If it’s not fine because it hampers your image of yourself in some way or because you have a view of yourself as a “heavy player” that is being impacted, that is not about masochism, but identity and emotion and you can look into approaching your relationship with pain and what is hindering it. Your body also just changes with time, with declining or increasing hormones, with disease, with preferences, with experience, and that means you will experience pain differently over phases. It happens to everyone. Overall, I would say define your relationship with pain based on how it *feels* and not how it *looks* and try to approach a change in your masochism without panic. Nothing makes pain harder to withstand than pressuring yourself to withstand it to prove something. You have nothing to prove. Your masochism is not being graded so assess it based on your pleasure, and retain the right to change what you want based on what works and what doesn’t.

I hope this helps!