This is a reprint of an arti­cle that appeared in

Psy­chol­ogy Today, September/October 1999 by Mar­i­anne Apostolides

The Plea­sure of the Pain: Why some peo­ple need S&M

Image by Derek Bowden

Bind my ankles with your white cot­ton rope so I can­not walk. Bind my wrists so I can­not push you away. Place me on the bed and wrap your rope tighter around my skin so it grips my flesh. Now I know that strug­gle is use­less, that I must lie here and sub­mit to your mouth and tongue and teeth, your hands and words and whims. I exist only as your object. Exposed.

Of every 10 peo­ple who read these words, one or more has exper­i­mented with sado­masochism (S&M), which is most pop­u­lar among edu­cated, middle-and-upper-middle-class men and women, accord­ing to psy­chol­o­gists and ethno­g­ra­phers who have stud­ied the phe­nom­e­non. Charles Moser, Ph.D., M.D., of the insti­tute for Advanced Study of Human Sex­u­al­ity in San Fran­cisco, has researched S&M to learn the moti­va­tion behind it–to under­stand why in the world peo­ple would ask to be bound, whipped and flogged. The rea­sons are as sur­pris­ing as they are varied.

For Mark, the desire became appar­ent when he was a child play­ing war games-he always hoped to be cap­tured. “I was fright­ened that I was sick,” he says. But now, he adds, as a well-seasoned player on the scene, “I thank the leather gods I found this community.”

At first the scene found him. When he was at a party in col­lege a pro­fes­sor chose him. She brought him home and tied him up, telling him how bad he was for hav­ing these desires, even as she ful­filled them. For the first time he felt what he had only imag­ined, what he had read about in every S&M book he could find.

Mark, a father and man­ager, has a Type A personality–in-control, hard-working, intel­li­gent, and demand­ing. His inten­sity is evi­dent on his face, in his pos­ture, in his voice. But when he plays, his eyes drift and a peace­ful energy flows through him as though he had injected heroin. With each addi­tion of pain or restraint, he stiff­ens slightly, then falls into a deeper calm, a deeper peace, wait­ing to obey his mis­tress. “Some peo­ple have to be tied up to befree,” he says.

As Mark’s expe­ri­ence illus­trates, sado­masochism involves a uniquely skewed power rela­tion­ship estab­lished through role-playing, bondage, and/or the inflic­tion of pain. In the sub-category known as Dom­i­na­tion and Sub­mis­sion, or D&S, the essen­tial com­po­nent is not the pain or bondage itself, but rather the knowl­edge that one per­son has com­plete con­trol over the other, decid­ing what that per­son will hear, do, taste, touch, smell and feel. We hear about men pre­tend­ing to be lit­tle girls, women being bound in leather straps, peo­ple scream­ing in pain and ecstasy with each strike of a flog­ger or drip of hot wax. We hear about it because it is hap­pen­ing in bed­rooms and dun­geons across the country.

For over a cen­tury, peo­ple who engaged in bondage, beat­ings and humil­i­a­tion for sex­ual plea­sure were con­sid­ered men­tally ill. But in the 1980s, the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Asso­ci­a­tion removed S&M as a cat­e­gory in its Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual of Men­tal Dis­or­ders. This decision–like the deci­sion to remove homo­sex­u­al­ity as a cat­e­gory in 1973–was a big step toward the soci­etal accep­tance of peo­ple whose sex­ual desires aren’t tra­di­tional, or vanilla, as it’s called in S&M circles.

What’s new is that such desires are increas­ingly being con­sid­ered nor­mal, even healthy, as experts begin to rec­og­nize their psy­cho­log­i­cal value. S&M, they are begin­ning to under­stand, offers a release of sex­ual and emo­tional energy that peo­ple can­not get from tra­di­tional sex.

“The sat­is­fac­tion gained from S&M is some­thing far more than sex,” explains Roy Baumeis­ter, Ph.D., a social psy­chol­o­gist at Case West­ern Reserve Uni­ver­sity “It can be a total emo­tional release.” Although peo­ple report that they have better-than-usual sex imme­di­ately after a scene, the goal of S & M itself is not inter­course: “A good scene doesn’t end in orgasm, it ends in catharsis.”

Escap­ing the Mod­ern West­ern Ego

“Sado­masochism is a way peo­ple can for­get them­selves.” Roy Baumeis­ter, Ph.D., Pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy, Case West­ern Reserve University.

“Noth­ing mat­ters except you, me and the sound of my voice,” Lily Fine, a pro­fes­sional dom­i­na­trix, tells the tied-up and exposed busi­ness­man who begged to be spanked before break­fast. She says it slowly, mak­ing her slave wait for every sound, forc­ing him to focus only on her, to float in antic­i­pa­tion of the sen­sa­tions she will cre­ate inside him. Anx­i­eties about mort­gages and taxes, stresses about busi­ness part­ners and job dead­lines are van­quished each time the flog­ger hits the flesh. The busi­ness­man is reduced to a phys­i­cal crea­ture exist­ing only in the here and now, feel­ing the pain and plea­sure. “I’m inter­ested in manip­u­lat­ing what’s in the mind,” Lily says. “The brain is the great­est eroge­nous zone.”

In another S&M ‘scene,’ Lily tells a woman to take off her clothes, then dresses her only with a blind­fold. She com­mands the woman not to move. Lily then takes a tis­sue and begins mov­ing it over the woman’s body in dif­fer­ent pat­terns and at vary­ing speeds and angles. Some­times she lets the edge of the tis­sue just barely brush the woman’s stom­ach and breasts; some­times she bunches the tis­sue and cre­ates swirls on her back and all the way down. “The woman was quiv­er­ing. She didn’t know what I was doing to her, but she was lik­ing it,” Lily remem­bers with a smile.

Escape the­ory is fur­ther sup­ported by an idea called “frame analy­sis,” devel­oped by the late Irv­ing Goff­man, Ph.D. Accord­ing to Goff­man, despite its pop­u­lar con­cep­tion as darkly wild and orgias­tic, S&M play has com­plex rules, rit­u­als, roles and dynam­ics that cre­ate a “frame” around the expe­ri­ence. “Frames are like fantasies–they sus­pend real­ity. They cre­ate expec­ta­tions, norms and val­ues that set this sit­u­a­tion apart from other parts of life,” con­firms Thomas Wein­berg, Ph.D., a soci­ol­o­gist at Buf­falo State Col­lege in New York and the edi­tor of S&M: Stud­ies in Dom­i­nance & Sub­mis­sion (Prometheus Books, 1995). Once inside the frame, peo­ple are free to act and feel in ways they couldn’t at other times.

S&M: Part of the Sex­ual Continuum

S&M has inspired the cre­ation of many psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ries in addi­tion to the ones dis­cussed here. Do we need so many? Per­haps not accord­ing to Stephanie Saun­ders Ph.D., asso­ciate direc­tor of the Kin­sey Insti­tute for Research in Sex, Gen­der and Repro­duc­tion at Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity, “a lot of behav­iors that are scru­ti­nized because they are seen to be mar­ginal are really a part of the con­tin­uum of sex­u­al­ity and sex­ual behav­ior.” After all, the ingre­di­ents in good S&M play-communication, respect and trust-are the same ingre­di­ents in good tra­di­tional sex. The out­come is the same, too-a feel­ing of con­nec­tion to the body and the self.