Ask the Sadist

[Rubystreak]

@freekalette

I guess I’m chiming in here again. I liken “using D/s to help me grow and be a better person” to someone who is afraid of heights going bungie jumping. Sure, I have a chance of coming off worse for the wear, but at least I can stand up (or lie in traction) proudly and say I tried!

Can I ask how this makes you grow into a better person? I’m not understanding it. You cede all power and authority, so you don’t have to make any decisions, are taken care of, and leave all assessment of right and wrong to someone else. I’m not sure how that would cause you to grow as a person if it were a 24/7, lifelong arrangement. If anything, it seems like it would cause you to regress, as the psychic muscles used to work through the decision making, to assert yourself, and to have agency in what happens to you atrophied.

If there’s a way that this promotes growth that you can help me understand, I’d be grateful. It runs counter to what I’ve always thought and believed, that we learn by struggling to reason through situations that are challenging and by arriving at decisions via this process. Being a sub seems to negate that process, by completely taking your own rational judgment out of the equation (in a 24/7 permanent dom/sub relationship). Sure, you will learn things about yourself, and that’s growth, but I don’t see how it helps you be a more functional, responsible adult.

Thanks for any insight.

[A_Priori_Tea]

@The Weird One

I also process pain by flexing my feet and ankles, so if I’m standing and receiving a hard beating, I stomp my feet. This doesn’t make me laugh, but it does my friends, who’ll point and say, “Oo, look, the stompy dance!”

Ooohhh, I love this one! I know a girl who processes in a very similar way, but we have a tendency to go, “Hey, she’s counting! What was that on a one to ten scale, honey? Maybe we should make her do math!” (Did I mention I hang out with assholes?) Of course, invariably, somebody makes a Mr. Ed joke, and it all goes downhill from there…

@Frylock

In your experience (i.e., conversations with other openly kinky people) does sadism necessarily involve power play? I’ve always wondered about that. It seems like the two go together in popular presentations, but it has never seemed to me that they would have to. Someone could like pain (either end of it) without caring about power issues. Yet whenever I read things written by sadists or masochists about what they do, power always seems to come up.

No, they’re not necessarily inter-related - it’s definitely possible to do all one or all the other. It’s certainly easier to roll with the unexpected if you have at least a little of each - easier to enforce dominance if you can use pain, easier to top if you can order someone to hold still - but not necessary, by any realistic definition. I think one of the reasons that you see them intertwined so often in popular presentations is that you’re seeing a caricature, rather than a culture. With pretty much any mainstream media (news, comedy, porn, what-have-you), you’re going to get a picture that’s geared towards what people expect to see - and a lot of what they expect to see is evil, domineering, whip-wielding tops and cowed, submissive, easily intimidated bottoms. So you get that picture that’s about as accurate as the taped-glasses, pocket-protector geek: sure, you can point to a few similarities with real geeks, and even a few examples where the match is good, but it doesn’t by any stretch convey the breadth or depth of geekitude in general.