eyes and shudder a bit or maybe borrow a dollop and see how it tastes on the pepperoni. They are simply classified as weird or, if they are rich enough, eccentric.
Psychologists, psychiatrists, social science theorists, theologians and feminists haven’t lined up to find answers for this chocolate “perversion,” for people carrying handkerchiefs they never use in their coat pockets or for voting Republican. These are simply “trite eccentricities” unworthy of study.
To make the question even more complex, the language of experience is not the same as the language of classification. Race car drivers don’t study physics, although they may pick up a good bit of it in passing. They drive. They experience. They don’t think about the underlying mechanics but about the feel of the car and the track.
People have studied poems since before Aristotle wrote Poetics. Their reactions still come down to “This poem speaks to me.”
However, some enjoy sharpening their Aristotelian knives and having at “the search for why.” If you tend toward this approach, I dedicate this search for causes to you.
Some give a simple answer to “Why?” “It is fun, enjoyable.” “We like to do it.” Unfortunately, this kind of simplicity isn’t looked upon kindly by the members of the Ivory-Tower Brigade, who glory in philosophical head- knocking and counting dancing-angels.
Unfortunately, all too many of these deep thinkers have largely fixated on sadistic monsters and masochistic victims. Like Shakespeare’s Horatio, they have failed to realize that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. Neither loving domination or sensual submission is part of the paradigms they develop. To admit that these exist might knock their carefully constructed houses of cards askew. To make matters worse, the competing theories are all different, and most of them, are mutually exclusive.
I was strongly tempted to exclude much of the psychological theory on the grounds that it is inconsequential to the people most actively involved. Unfortunately, I have been repeatedly and forcefully reminded that anyone attempting to discuss BDSM with a learned audience or with doctors is going get presented with these spurious explanations.
I suppose that it is better you encounter them here, amid interpretation and exegesis, than to have them flung into your face with an implication that they are, somehow, revealed truth. Just take a firm grip on your temper and read on.
Theories of sadism and masochism
In the labeling craze of the 19th century, when scientists still clung to the mystical concept that to label something was to control it, D.R. von Krafft-Ebing came up the terms “sadism” and “masochism” in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. This learned tome was a sort of Sears and Roebuck catalog of perversion, listing just about everything that two or more people could do together to get their individual or collective rocks off. Krafft-Ebing must have had a good laugh on thrill-seekers perusing his volume; he put the boring stuff in English and the good parts in Latin.
As most people in the scene know, the term “sadism” came from the writings of the Marquis Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade and masochism from those of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Both de Sade’s writings (including Philosophy in the Bedroom, Justine, Juliet, Twenty Days at Sodom) and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs are still hot-selling items today. A quick glance at any of de Sade’s work will show you why many dominants are infuriated when they are accused of being sadists. Nonconsensuality was the order of the day for the Marquis.
Krafft-Ebing got it almost right with submission when he defined masochism as:
“A peculiar perversion of the psychical sexual life in which the person affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite
Psychologists, psychiatrists, social science theorists, theologians and feminists haven’t lined up to find answers for this chocolate “perversion,” for people carrying handkerchiefs they never use in their coat pockets or for voting Republican. These are simply “trite eccentricities” unworthy of study.
To make the question even more complex, the language of experience is not the same as the language of classification. Race car drivers don’t study physics, although they may pick up a good bit of it in passing. They drive. They experience. They don’t think about the underlying mechanics but about the feel of the car and the track.
People have studied poems since before Aristotle wrote Poetics. Their reactions still come down to “This poem speaks to me.”
However, some enjoy sharpening their Aristotelian knives and having at “the search for why.” If you tend toward this approach, I dedicate this search for causes to you.
Some give a simple answer to “Why?” “It is fun, enjoyable.” “We like to do it.” Unfortunately, this kind of simplicity isn’t looked upon kindly by the members of the Ivory-Tower Brigade, who glory in philosophical head- knocking and counting dancing-angels.
Unfortunately, all too many of these deep thinkers have largely fixated on sadistic monsters and masochistic victims. Like Shakespeare’s Horatio, they have failed to realize that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. Neither loving domination or sensual submission is part of the paradigms they develop. To admit that these exist might knock their carefully constructed houses of cards askew. To make matters worse, the competing theories are all different, and most of them, are mutually exclusive.
I was strongly tempted to exclude much of the psychological theory on the grounds that it is inconsequential to the people most actively involved. Unfortunately, I have been repeatedly and forcefully reminded that anyone attempting to discuss BDSM with a learned audience or with doctors is going get presented with these spurious explanations.
I suppose that it is better you encounter them here, amid interpretation and exegesis, than to have them flung into your face with an implication that they are, somehow, revealed truth. Just take a firm grip on your temper and read on.
Theories of sadism and masochism
In the labeling craze of the 19th century, when scientists still clung to the mystical concept that to label something was to control it, D.R. von Krafft-Ebing came up the terms “sadism” and “masochism” in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. This learned tome was a sort of Sears and Roebuck catalog of perversion, listing just about everything that two or more people could do together to get their individual or collective rocks off. Krafft-Ebing must have had a good laugh on thrill-seekers perusing his volume; he put the boring stuff in English and the good parts in Latin.
As most people in the scene know, the term “sadism” came from the writings of the Marquis Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade and masochism from those of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Both de Sade’s writings (including Philosophy in the Bedroom, Justine, Juliet, Twenty Days at Sodom) and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs are still hot-selling items today. A quick glance at any of de Sade’s work will show you why many dominants are infuriated when they are accused of being sadists. Nonconsensuality was the order of the day for the Marquis.
Krafft-Ebing got it almost right with submission when he defined masochism as:
“A peculiar perversion of the psychical sexual life in which the person affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite
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