There was once a guy I loved. Well, there were dozens, and somewhere they all still exist (except for a few who have unfortunately perished) but I’m talking about this one guy in specific. We were young, and for a change it was both of us that were young, which is not weird for me now, but it was then. Now that I am older, I realise I am perfectly fine with people my own age, it’s just when I was younger it didn’t feel like my priorities, lifestyle or personality were meshing well with my peers. Now, no problem. I feel like I am finally the age I was meant to be, some people grow into their bodies, I grew into my age. Anyway, this guy, he was a really fun, intelligent, nice guy, and sexually, it was good, but he didn’t want to hurt me too much. He did hurt me, and he liked it even, but it was very tame and it only happened when we were having sex. Like an accoutrement to sex. He hated it when it called that sadism, he preferred the much gentler term, passion.
There was this other guy. I don’t think I loved him, and I am basing this solely on the fact that I do not remember his name (and that may not be a great factor to go by because I have forgotten the names of at least 60% of the people I have been with, fun side story, I have literally forgotten whether I have slept with this one guy, I have known him since I was 2-years old and our families are very close, and I know something happened, but I don’t know what or where or how, and I have now involved all my sisters and my husband in monitoring our interactions whenever we meet to figure out whether we fucked or not, it is not going well, no one can figure it out). Anyway, this other guy, not the schrodinger’s fuck, a different guy, we were together for maybe two months, and he was happy to hurt me, take a belt to me like that’s what they’re really for, but he insisted, that he did it because he liked to participate in my pleasure. The fact that it made him hard and desperate to put it in me when I whimpered, that didn’t mean anything. He wasn’t a sadist, he always insisted, he just liked to follow the path of pleasure.
There are many of these guys (and I use that term now not to denote gender but just to avoid using the word people, which didn’t quite top that sentence off as well). They all have different reasons. There’s the person who wants to hurt you, and admits that it gets them off, but it cannot cross a certain limit. Rough sex is fine, but whipping as sex is not as comfortable. There’s also the person who sets fear-based limits, they often explain it as being fearful of their own sadism and how far they could go (rolling eyes that aren’t even mine rn at the thought of how easily I fall for people like that), so they rein themselves (which is wise, if sometimes, somewhat dishonest, as an approach) in. My husband is a bit like that. At least, he was. When we first met he said to me that he would never punch me, never, because that was a line he had told himself he wouldn’t cross, not because he didn’t desire it, but because he wasn’t sure he thought that was right. This conundrum manifests in many sadists in different ways. There’s the one who cannot hurt you because they love you now. The one who can hurt you but cannot handle marks on your body. The one who needs to go only as far as the realm of pleasure. The one who has very strong opinions about certain acts being inherently violative. The ones who feel ashamed to admit that they relish causing the pain and actually enjoy the activity on face value.
There are a lot of people whom I would say qualify as sadists, who struggle with being that or calling themselves that or engaging in that. I wonder if it’s just because sadism is harder to accept about yourself than masochism.
I think it makes some kind of sense. Masochism is sensation-orientated. At least, physical masochism which is largely what I am talking about here. You feel it being explored in your body so through reflex, feedback and response alone it is very clear to you whether you like it or you don’t. Even if the motivation to like it is emotional, it starts with a physical trigger. Sadism is much less physical. You can vicariously go through the pain of the person you are hurting from a different perspective, but you cannot feel it. The causing of pain, with hands or implements, is a physical act, but the sensation of its impact is much, much more physical, and not able to be felt by the person causing it in any way. It’s like vegetarians when they cook meat for you, and relish watching you eat it even though they cannot taste it or experience it. (Please, tell me I am not the only vegetarian who does that). The experience of sadism is more emotional than the experience of masochism, it’s more cerebral, mental. At least, in the moment. And emotions are harder to figure out than physical responses, for the most part. For me it’s harder to extricate the do I like this from the should I like this in the absence of a physical feedback mechanism (and while I am not a sadist, I feel like that may still apply).
I also feel like I see a lot less discussion about a sadist’s relationship with pain than I do about a masochist’s relationship with it. The discussion is limited to get-you-horny ditties written entirely as a series of conclusions or a rather surface level discussion of the motivations. I’m not sure what to say. Sadists aren’t as evolved as masochists? I’m kidding, mostly, I don’t think it’s that, I think it is harder to explore this space. It’s rife. Most masochists I know, and I know a lot, have a deep relationship with pain that has been through many stages of growth and discovery and they’ll tell me about it, and you can tell by the discussion that thoughtful introspection has gone into the creation of that narrative. A lot of sadists I know, and I also know a lot of those, also have that relationship, but the conversations are harder to have, because often when I ask them questions, I can see that they are structuring their experiences for the first time. Perhaps the lack of exploration is caused by the fact that there is a moral imbalance between sadism and masochism.
Wanting to hurt yourself, is not exactly immoral, wanting yourself to be in pain in the pursuit of sexual pleasure is more loaded but it’s more likely to seem self-destructive or loathing than immoral or wrong. Wanting to cause someone else pain, is wrong. It’s just what we are taught. Throughout life. Don’t hit people. Don’t beat people. Don’t be cruel to people. I can see how the desire to do those things can be hard to navigate, maybe even harder than it is to navigate the acceptance of masochism. The thing is, also, and I want to say this as carefully as possible, the phase that comes before the articulation of your sexual leanings, the one where you kinda know what you want but you are not sure what to call it, the one where you don’t know yet that there may be a community out there somewhere creating content on how to be a more ethical freak, that phase looks very different for masochists and sadists. For me, that phase led to causing myself harm and putting myself in danger, and while that is not wise, it is more honourable that potentially having put someone else in danger.
I could get harmed as a result of my actions, but they could hurt me as result of mine. One is more morally and socially acceptable than the other. Victims are more socially-acceptable than predators, at least in the discourse we pretend to believe in (because in reality we also treat victims like shit). I don’t mean, at all, that all sadists started out as predators, but there were some who made mistakes that from the other side of it, as the person who received those mistakes on my body, I can frame them very easily as violations. I mostly judge this based on intention and response, if it is clear you didn’t mean to and you take responsibility immediately to manage the situation, I have a more favourable view but that’s not what I am talking about. There are also those sadists whose realisations that they were sadists came from witnessing problematic social situations and wishing they were the abusers/doers in those scenarios. They knew they wouldn’t, and didn’t (except the ones who did, and they are, to me, not exactly sadists, as much as they are predators, consent doesn’t have to be struggled with morally, it just is what it is and the lack of it is what it is as well, no matter how much sadism you may have been struggling with), but the moral ambiguity was built into the nascent sexual realisation of many sadists. It’s easier on your view of yourself to picture yourself as the recipient of abuse, than the perpetrator (again, which is not to say all sadists want to be abusers or are, it’s just to say our early sexual realisations come from our environment and not all environments have the sterility of the politically correct internet).
Cruelty is also just a sick feeling. I don’t know how people are able to not only manage it well enough to be able to feel it, channel it safely and actually relish it. Being cruel, even in the smallest of ways, hurting someone by accident and giggling or saying something hurtful to someone, is something I cannot bear. I have a physical response to it, it makes me feel sick to experience that impulse and emotion. Every instance of cruelty, every thought of it I have experienced in my life, has felt like a physical illness in my body. It may not be inherently cruel to hurt someone who wants to be hurt, but I am hard-pressed to find people who are able to make that distinction right off the bat. Most sadists I know, have struggled with the aftermath at some point. With seeing the impact of what they have done on someone’s body in very measurable ways. Some of aftercare could even be motivated by that, to manage the pain you have caused, by assisting in healing and helping through it. It’s a vital management process to deal with the emotional realities of our fetishes. A good system, I would say.
But that’s also really it.
There is less of a system in place for the management and comprehension of sadism. Few people talk about it with searing vulnerability and reality and part of that, I understand, is that the nuance here may not be hard for the person in question to understand, but it may be hard to express without sounding like a terrible person (and don’t get me wrong, some people are actually just consent violators and predators, and they try to bury that under the guise of being sadists but I am neither talking about them nor inviting them to my validation as a rallying point). I am talking about people who have, usually as teenagers, had urges and experiences that are problematic (because of the context or their own moral experience with them), and hard to talk about because they allude to having hurt someone (not abused someone, hurt someone) or having enjoyed someone’s misery/suffering without understanding why and those experiences — told wrong, understood wrong, handled wrong — when left to percolate within the echo-chamber of just your own self. Mismanaged desires are more dangerous than untested ones.
Some of us discovered our masochism with really problematic fantasies too, mine always had to do with being raped and abused, and it’s harder, infinitely harder, to understand the person who had the same fantasy but from the perspective of the abuser. Some of them to come to accept, if not brandish their sadism as a badge of honour, but that’s dangerous in its own way, when they haven’t considered the endless possibility of their own desires. My point is that I would like to understand sadism better and I’d like that to happen because sadists are doing the work to understand and explain themselves better. (Like if you want to, don’t come at me growling with your axes and god-complexes).
…….
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