Lily Fine, a professional dominatrix who teaches S & M
workshops across North America, explains: "I may hurt you, but I will not
harm you: I will not hit you too hard, take you further than you want to
go or give you an infection."
Despite the research indicating that S & M does no real harm
and is not associated with pathology, Freud's successors in
psychoanalysis continue to use mental illness overtones when discussing S
& M. Sheldon Bach, Ph.D., clinical professor of psychology at New
York University and supervising analyst at the New York Freudian Society,
maintains that people are addicted to S & M. They feel compelled to
be "anally abused or crawl on their knees and lick a boot or a penis or
who knows what else. The problem," he continues, "is that they can't
love. They are searching for love, and S & M is the only way they can
try to find it because they are locked into sadomasochistic interactions
they had with a parent."
Linking Childhood Memories And Adult Sex
"I can explore aspects of myself that I don't get a chance to
explore otherwise. So even though I'm playing a role, I feel more
connected with myself."
--Leanne Custer, M.S.W., AIDS counselor
Meredith Reynolds, Ph.D., the Sexuality Research Fellow of the
Social Science Research Council, confirms that childhood experiences may
shape a person's sexual outlook.
"Sexuality doesn't just arise at puberty" she says. "Like other
pans of someone's personality, sexuality develops at birth and takes a
developmental course through a person's life span."
In her work on sexual exploration among children, Reynolds has
shown that while childhood experiences can indeed influence adult
sexuality, the effects usually "wash out" as a person gains more sexual
experience. But they can linger in some people, causing a connection
between childhood memories and adult sexual play. In that case, Reynolds
says, "the childhood experiences have affected something in the
personality, and that in turn affects adult experiences."
Reynolds' theory helps us develop a greater understanding of the
desire to be a whip-bearing mistress or a bootlicking slave. For example,
if a child has been taught to feel shame about her body and desires, she
may learn to disconnect herself from them. Even as she gets older and
gains more experience with sex, her personality may retain some part of
that need for separation. S & M play may act as a bridge: Lying naked
on a bed bound to the bedposts with leather restraints, she is forced to
be completely sexual. The restraint, the futility of struggle, the pain,
the master's words telling her she is such a lovely slave--these cues
enable her body to fully connect with her sexual self in a way that has
been difficult during traditional sex.
Marina is a prime example. She knew from the time she was 6 years
old that she was expected to succeed in school and sports. She learned to
focus on achievement as a way to dismiss emotions and desires. "I learned
very young that desires are dangerous," she says. She heard that message
in the behavior of her parents: a depressive mother who let her emotions
overtake her, and an obsessively health-conscious father who compulsively
controlled his diet. When Marina began to have sexual desires, her
instinct, cultivated by her upbringing, was to consider them too
frightening, too dangerous. "So I became anorexic," she says. "And when
you're anorexic, you don't feel desire; all you feel in your body is
panic."
Marina didn't feel the desire for S & M until she was an adult
and had outgrown her eating disorder. "One night I asked my partner to
put his hands around my neck and choke me. I was so surprised when those
words came out of my mouth," she says. If she gave her partner total
control over her body, she felt, she could allow herself to feel like a
completely sexual being, with none of the hesitation and disconnection
she sometimes felt during sex. "He wasn't into it, but now I'm with
someone who is," Marina says. "S & M makes our vanilla sex better,
too, because we trust each other more sexually, and we can communicate
what we want."
Escaping the Modern Western Ego
"Like alcohol abuse binge eating and meditation, sado masochism is
a way people can forget themselves."
--Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., professor of psychology, Case Western
Reserve University
It is human nature to try to maximize esteem and control: Those are
two general principles governing the study of the self. Masochism runs
contrary to both, and was therefore an intriguing psychological puzzle
for Baumeister, whose career has focused on the study of self and
identity.
Through an analysis of S & M-related letters to the sex
magazine Variations, Baumeister came to believe that "masochism is a set
of techniques for helping people temporarily lose their normal identity."
He reasoned that the modern Western ego is an incredibly elaborate
structure, with our culture placing more demands on the individual self
than any other culture in history. Such high demands increase the stress
associated with living up to expectations and existing as the person you
want to be. "That stress makes forgetting who you are an appealing
escape," Baumeister says. That is the essence of "escape" theory, one of
the main reasons people turn to S&M.
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