The Psychology of Kink – Part II

To continue with what amounts to Part II of the Psychology of Kink, this article focuses on restraint and pain play.  Be sure and read the Introduction before you read this part if you haven’t already.  This is going to deal with the practical aspects of this subject, and not the larger, more academic discussions regarding theories espoused by the likes of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Deleuze, et. al.

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Easily the two most common forms of kink are being restrained and pain play (sometimes referred to as “impact play”); even the most sexually naive are  generally aware of these.  But while many understand, or can at least visualize themselves being restrained with scarves or belts, and perhaps don’t mind having their asses swatted during an intense sex session, once you get beyond that, you can easily freak someone out.

Tie me up!

Being tied up, or restrained in some way is perhaps the single most often encountered form of kink play. Many “vanilla” practitioners experiment with this, even if they’ve never encountered a BDSM scene.  This might include being tied up with something lying around the house, like a scarf, a belt, or something of similar ilk.  There are even novelty handcuffs for those who want to have something sitting around that just screams “freak!”  Many don’t realize it, but even holding your partner’s hands down while you’re fucking them plays to this fantasy.  So what’s this all about?

For many, the prospect of being tied up, restrained, or bound represents a release of control to another person and allows the restrained person to free themselves of residual guilt they might associate with sexual expression.  Sadly, the way our culture treats sexuality in toto creates a situation where many people feel dirty or guilty about the sexual urges they experience, many of which are extremely raw or primal.  Being restrained and having sex acts perpetrated upon them allows for a release of responsibility such that they can allow themselves to let go and enjoy the physical and emotional experience of the sex without all of the guilt they’d experience if they retained that control.  And, of course, some people just like the primal feeling of being forced to submit (This is not unlike a hint at the rape fantasy – more on that specifically later in this series).

There are some who believe the feeling of being tied up and bound into a ball or small package represents a throwback to the feeling we had as infants in the womb and the safety that represented.  Once you’re in that safe zone, you’re free to enjoy the sex acts you’re engaging in without guilt.  You can see why this might be the case when you consider that one of our most basic physical defense mechanisms when we sense impending harm is to assume a fetal position.  That is, after all, the default “safe” position.

Those two theories tend to be applied mostly to women.  For many men, the prospect of being bound during sex often has more to do with the restraint of power, however.  Many guys are afraid they’d hurt a female or weaker partner and feel compelled to “hold back” during more physical sex play.  Being tied up restrains that physical power and allows them to enjoy the sex without the fear of accidentally harming their partner.  And, again, for some it forces them into a submissive posture to a more dominant partner (typically a female), a prospect which has its own allure.

For still others, the bondage provides leverage against which you can strain in order to release energy.  When you’re bound up, you push or pull against the ropes, thereby allowing your entire body to release pent up energy.  This facilitates a whole body sensual experience.

So, for some it is purely physical, while for others there’s more to it.

Beat me!

What about pain?  For some people, myself included, pain adds to the erotic experience. These people tend to enjoy the pure physicality of sex, and the pain is a means to heighten that.  I’ll admit to being a pain slut.  I like being bitten;  I like being spanked (and I don’t mean love taps); I like being scratched.  I like being hit in a variety of places on my body.  To someone who doesn’t examine that from anything other than an “OMG, s/he’s hitting her” perspective, it is easy to see why it would appear misogynistic or perhaps deviant.  But if you understand the biology behind it, it begins to make a bit more sense.

When someone slaps me on the ass (with a hand, cane, flogger, etc.), releasing adrenaline (see below),  my entire body becomes a totally self-aware sex organ.  I go from just experiencing the sex in my genitals to a full body associative experience.  That heightens the arousal factor, thereby making me even more sensitive to the genital stimulation.  So the whole encounter basically becomes a self-perpetuating arousal experience.

There’s been speculation that the pleasure derived from being spanked, for women at least, is generated because when they were spanked as children, they’d tighten up their butt cheeks in anticipation of the impacts.  This tightening drew up all of the muscles in the pelvic area, including the PC muscles which, among other things, surround the clit and the G-spot.  This may result in an immature version of sexual arousal.  Given the nature of the way we store and recall things from our childhoods, this theory has some plausibility.

You get a different kind of pain depending on where you’re hit, too.  Being hit on the ass feels one way, being hit on the inside of the thighs is altogether different.  So is being hit on the cunt, on your boobs, or even your face.  Being hit in the face adds a whole new psychological aspect to the experience.  When someone slaps my face, the sting penetrates my spirit and body much like the spasms of an orgasm do.  And I’m hardly alone.  I had an online friend post the following in a forum I participate in:  “[Alexa] inspired me to try to get [my boyfriend] to smack me across the face while giving him a blow job…. and holy eff was it hot… it was like… the sensations in my face just traveled right down to my cunt and it just got wetter. It’s incredible.”

It is an incredibly intimate expression to allow someone to slap your face; the face is perhaps the most intensely personal area of your body, after all.  Is there some deep-seated psychological reason why being slapped is such a turn-on?  Who knows?  I’m not aware of anything from my history that would suggest such a connection, however.  It just feels fucking awesome.

Regardless, allowing someone to inflict pain on you during sex play in an environment where you’re not being forced to submit shows a willingness to trust a partner, and comes about as a result of you dropping your own defense mechanisms, both physical and psychological.  This allows you to enjoy the sex much more robustly than you might otherwise.

There is some biology here that helps explain the appeal as well, though.  When you experience a sharp pain, your body releases waves of chemicals, endorphins and adrenaline, that cause the body to react to that pain.  Adrenaline, as you probably know, is the “fight or flight” hormone released by the adrenal glands on top of your kidneys.  When you have a sudden burst of this chemical into your system, your body takes on some new physical characteristics:  Your senses become heightened; you become much more situationally aware;  all the hairs on your body stand on end; your nipples may become erect, etc.  The adrenaline also triggers a rapid increase in sugar metabolism in the body to provide energy for that fight or flight.  That energizes you to increase your sexual stamina as well in this case.

Endorphins are nature’s pain killers.  After your body has experienced some trauma (being slapped, in this case), and has had a few seconds to react to it, a wave of chemicals is released that help deaden the pain and boost your sense of power.  Again, this helps you to react to the source of the pain, giving you a sense of great strength (it works in conjunction with the adrenaline to help you ward off an attack or lift things you might not otherwise try to lift, for example).  In many cases, this heightened sense of power transfers to one’s sex drive as well.  Endorphins can be addictive, such as is the case with people who self-harm.

Taken to an extreme, the infliction of pain will put some people into an almost trance-like state (often referred to as sub-space), where the meld of pain and pleasure become intertwined and indistinguishable.  One of the tricks that professional doms will use to “break” a submissive is to begin with light pain and slowly work up to intense pain.  That allows the endorphin load to build, pushing the submissive toward that state.  A knowledgeable dom increases the pain to almost the sub’s threshold, then pulls back, allowing the endorphins to work their magic (sedating the pain), and then increases the pain level some more, pulling back again, and repeating the cycle.  This will allow the body to endure far more abuse than it would normally.  You see this at work in The Training of O series quite vividly.

So given all of that, I think it is fairly easy to see how one might come to enjoy having pain inflicted upon them during sex.  Though very much abbreviated, hopefully, that will allow people to understand the reason some people lay with this, even if outsiders only see it as abusive or misogynistic.

Painful History

If you’re into pain, you are in good company.  The famous Janus and Janus survey (1993)¹ revealed that 16% of males and 12% of females agreed or strongly agreed with the assertion that pain and sex go well together (results similar to Kinsey’s findings in the late 1940s, btw).  And that was in the day when it wasn’t “acceptable” to admit to being turned on by pain.   Back in his day, Freud came to the conclusion that inflicting or receiving pain during intercourse was “the most common and important of all perversions.”  Aspects of pain play were discussed in the Kama Sutra as well, so the association of pain and sexual pleasure has been around for quite some time.

Just based on my personal experiences with both sexes, though, I’d suspect unencumbered statistics would show a good 50% of people feel that way these days. I believe this is due to the increase in pain play in even “vanilla” porn; it’s becoming more acceptable to admit to wanting to be hurt when you’re fucking.  I’ve had clients ask me to bite them – even bite them on their cocks.  And I’ve had women tell me to bite their nipples, bite their inner thighs, slap their clits, etc.  I sometimes get tickled when I ask someone to bite my nipples and they have a go at it, only for me to tell them to “Do it harder.  Do it like you mean it!”

Interestingly, a recent study showed a dramatic increase in testosterone levels in females who’re flogged/spanked during this kind of play, but this was not the case in men.  An infusion of testosterone will result in increased libido in both genders, generally speaking, but women are much more sensitive to its effects.  So there appears to be some science that suggests that women might be more susceptible to heightened sexual arousal through being subjected to pain as a part of sex play.

Amalgamation

As it turns out, the enjoyment of pain is predicated more on a biological source, whereas the arousal from being bound has more of a psychological nuance to it.  In both instances, however, tension builds up in the body, and the orgasm that is achieved at the end of the session (if one occurs) will often be orders of magnitude stronger than a “normally” obtained orgasm.

The pain inflicted over the course of a sex session, with its attendant buildup of adrenaline, causes the body to build up that energy, and like any good dose of pent up energy, it wants to go somewhere.  That outlet occurs through orgasmic release whereby the orgasm itself is magnified, dispensing the pent up energy.

There are competing theories about why some people seek pain as a part of sex play.  Some psychoanalysts insist it derives from being beaten as a child and its association with the pleasure of sex is the individual’s way of redirecting a negative memory into something positive.   Similarly, others (Freud, for example) believe it has a direct relationship to feelings of guilt – a need for punishment if you will.  While both, or either, may be plausible, the overwhelming majority of people who enjoy pain as a part of their sex play are in it for the immediate gratification they receive through an increase in the intensity of the sex session, pure and simple.

It’s also important to understand that voluntarily submitting to these kinds of abuses does not make one a true submissive.  True (psychological) submissives are made.  More on this in a future article as well.

Psychopathology

For some, the submission to a beating of any kind reflects on poor self esteem – they believe they deserve to be punished just as they were when they were bad as a child.  This kind of behavior gets into some other issues that are beyond the scope of this article, however, especially if it is paraphilic in that the person requires the beating to become sexually aroused or to get off.

There are also a few psychoanalysts who believe there are some associations between needing pain for sexual gratification and being punished for being sexual in childhood, perhaps as a result of being caught masturbating, for example.  A number of additional theories abound as well, none of which has been demonstrated to have any legitimacy.  Like many other aspects of our sexuality, there just isn’t any great, in-depth understanding of why some things are the way they are.

It is perhaps interesting to note, by the way, that masochism is the only fetish that is experienced more by women than by men.  For all other fetishes, the overwhelming majority of those afflicted by them are male (on the scale of 95-99%), including sadism.  And while it is considered a fetish, psychoanalysts generally agree that there’s nothing wrong with it nor does anything “need to be done” about it so long as it is consensual and not causing the person any significant distress in his/her life.  It is a very common variant of normative sex play.

All of the authors mentioned at the outset of this article had theories about the origins of sadism and masochism.  Most of them were quite sexist in nature.  In fact, even today the preponderance of articulated theory suggests that women are more often masochistic because of the male dominant role present in our society – women are brought up to be submissive, as it goes.  The central problem with such theories is that people mistake submission and masochism.  While a person generally has to be submissive in order to enjoy pain, being submissive does not equate to deriving sexual pleasure from the infliction of pain. So while they may be linked through some artifice, they are two different animals.  Many theorists today believe it has far more to do with brain and body chemistry than any societally-induced construct.

So what about writing bad checks, you ask?  The subject of humiliation and degradation play is coming up shortly. 

1. All the references for this series will be provided at the end of the series [↩]

1. The Psychology of Kink – Introduction There have been a number of rad fem attacks on...

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