Paths of Pain and Pleasure

Greetings all,

(NB: I shall continue the punishment piece later on this week).

One of the questions I am most often asked by people who have no experience in the world of BDSM is about pain and pleasure. How can it feel good to be spanked or whipped? Why would anyone want to be bound in such difficult and challenging positions? Why would anyone crave having hot wax poured on their body, pins pierce their flesh, or have electric shocks on sensitive portions of the anatomy?

Objectively, I suppose I can understand these questions. After all, for the vast majority of people such things would be unpleasant, uncomfortable, and probably hurtful. But not for everyone. For those individuals that the BDSM community labels as "vanilla" or "mundane" (being anyone who is not in the community) it must seem twisted indeed that someone might actually want, perhaps even crave, such sensations. No wonder people in the community are therefore so often labelled as "perverts" and "deviants."

Yet, what is pain, and what is pleasure? I would suggest that they are the exact same thing, only experienced somewhat differently.

In general, I consider anything pleasurable when taken too far, becomes painful. So too, anything painful when properly moderated, becomes pleasurable. It is all about sensation, and how it is processed.

Let me take pleasure first. It is common for lovers to perhaps bite each other's ear lobes or nipples. When we are with a new partner, we may try some of the techniques that worked effectively with another. And so we bite our lover's breast, and she might jerk back and say "Ow, don't bite so hard!" Or perhaps our previous lover wanted to be handled gently, like a dove. And so we take this experience to our next lover, who finds the technique boring, un-thrilling, and who demands "Fuck me hard, fuck me real hard!"

IOW - different people process sensations differently. Some are stimulated with very gentle sensations, but other want more vigorous techniques.

Yet, if these things go on for too long, even they can become painful. For example, many men, once they discover the woman's clit will spend great amounts of time rubbing it, and rubbing it, and rubbing it. At the beginning that is okay, but after some amount of time (it varies with each woman) the flesh starts become raw and sensitive. After that, even the gentlest of touches become hurtful.

IOW - too much pleasure becomes pain.

Let us consider the converse. As a sadist, I have certainly spanked more than one female. What I have discovered is that some women can take a great deal more of it than others. Now, if I went full out with every woman, using the exact same technique, it is likely that not very many of them would ever come back for another session. So, what I must do is discover the limits of my partner, and moderate what I am doing, so that rather than become a distraction, it acts as an accelerant to put them in the right frame of mind for what I plan to do next.

IOW - if one moderates pain it becomes a pleasure.

The boundary condition varies with each person. Some can handle more, others less. Some women, who are deeply masochistic, seek out the most extreme sensations. They want these levels for the intense mental/emotional/physical state that such pain takes them. For them, it is a transendental experience. It allows them to slip free of the "real world" and enter a special realm of peace, balance, and liberation. For most women, such sensations would just have them screaming in agony. They would not be able to process the experience. They are simply not wired for it.

IOW - there is no difference between pain and pleasure in terms of the physicality of it. Rather, the true difference is in how we process it. For people in the community, there is a desire for more extreme sensation to satisfy their desires. For people in the vanilla community, it appears the interest is in more moderated techniques.

And, as a sidebar, none of this has anything to do with domination and submission. Never confuse S&M with D/s. While there is often a relationship, they are very different things.

Be seeing you.