Right, keyword, "endures"; that is, the will to power regardless of whatever obstactles are effectuated during self-imposed action and not rather the will to submission for the sake of submission, or, reinstated, not ascribing higher intrinsic value to the ideal itself, in effect turning it into an end all, as opposed to a means. You're verging on moral nihilism here: submission or obedience to some "higher" or "other" superimposed command, whether it is inherited and accustomed conscience or tradition, a God, a "categorical imperative," an eroticism, a Nothingness.
I understand that N. did not have BDSM in mind, when he wrote the above quote; but it is validly applicable to the sub.; like I said before, BDSM is not always an end in itself, submission for the sake of submission. For some, it acts as an initiation into higher states of awareness. Think of Evola's The Meta-physics of Sex.
BDSM can be a means to knowing thyself.
It's not for everyone, only certain souls can derive higher value from it.
This is pathetic; is there some "psycho-dramatic" past you try to re-live or something. What are your intentions, do get sexually aroused by making this topic?
Well, yeah...kind of difficult not to get aroused with all those lovely pictures of goddesses in the thread.
I've been trying to keep this thread as non-personal as possible, in the attempt to educate my audience about BDSM, in particular, female-domination ( Femdom ).
OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
I think the thread exposés your needs, it is all about your pleasures, and the more it is denied to you, the more pleasure in your desire.
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
I think the thread exposés your needs, it is all about your pleasures, and the more it is denied to you, the more pleasure in your desire.
It's already been made manifest that I'm into BDSM, not really some secret, which has been " exposed " via this thread.
------------------------- Erotic Humiliation
Quote :
Technically speaking, erotic humiliation and erotic degradation are not quite the same thing, though they are often spoken about interchangably or lumped together as “humilation and degradation”.
Humiliation is a mental state, and what humiliates one person may not humiliate another. For example, telling a man he has a small penis may be humiliating, if it injures his dignity or reduces his self respect. It’s not necessarily degrading though. Making him a public cuckold might be degrading because in the eyes of the world and himself it would make him something less than he was.
It’s really like splitting hairs, and the two forms of play tend to be used together by the same people, so for the purpose of this article, I won’t draw a distinction.
WHEN IS HUMILIATION AND DEGRADATION EROTIC?
Erotic humiliation is the consensual use of psychological humiliation in a sexual context. Whereby one person gains arousal or erotic excitement from the powerful emotions of being humiliated and demeaned, or of humiliating another; it is often, but not always, accompanied by sexual stimulation of one or both partners in the activity.
The humiliation need not be sexual in nature; as with many other sexual activities, it is the feelings derived from it that are sought, regardless of the nature of the actual activity. This is usually a feeling of submission for the person being humiliated, and dominance, for the person doing the humiliation.
It can be verbal or physical, or in private or public. Often it can become ritualized, and unlike some sexual variations it can also be easily carried out over a long distance (as online). Humiliation is an example of the power dynamic that exists in a Dominant/submissive or Master/slave relationship. For example, in an activity such as spanking, the sought effect is primarily the humiliation; the activity is just a means to that end.
It can also be a part of Emotional Sadomasochism, which doesn’t always have a Dominant/submissive element. Some sexual humiliation involves physical inflicting pain, but much of it is far more concerned with ridicule, mocking, degradation, and embarrassment.
Humiliation play can be taken to a point where it becomes emotionally or psychologically distressing to one or the other partner, especially if it is public humiliation. Erotic humiliation can become extreme enough to be considered a form of edgeplay.
It’s important to understand that erotic humiliation and degradation is based firmly on consent. If there is no consent then it is abusive. This doesn’t have to be consent given in that exact moment, it could be an agreement between partners of Consensual Non-Consent. But it HAS to be there.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HUMILIATION AND DEGRADATION
Humiliation in general stimulates the same brain regions that are associated with physical pain, the inference being that humans evolved to remember social rewards and punishments as strongly as they recall physical reward or pain in response to their environment. As with any form of pain experimentation in a sexual context, consent and (paradoxically) a high degree of awareness and communication are needed to ensure that the result is desirable, rather than abusive. For example, a submissive may enjoy being insulted in some ways but be genuinely crushed and devastated if humiliated or insulted in other ways.
Humiliation play is also connected to sexual fetishism, in that non-sexual activities may become sexualised by association with arousal, and also may be associated with exhibitionism in the sense of wanting others to witness (or being aroused by others witnessing) one’s sexual degradation.
For some people, activities such as name-calling are a way of achieving ego reduction or getting over sexual inhibitions. For example, between gay people, terms usually associated with homophobia may be used, such as faggot and dyke.
As with all sexual activities, some people have sexual fantasies about humiliation, and others actually undertake it as a lifestyle or in a scene. Sexual fantasies relating to mild humiliation are common. Some humiliation roleplay (pup-play and age play in particular) is combined with loyalty and care-giving to the extent that these fetishes can be seen as exercises in trust rather than primarily a humiliation fetish. The desire to be beneath the other partner during intercourse, the idea of “getting caught” (as in having sex in the garden or woods), and mild rape fantasies (in which the people imagine themselves to be forced in ways they would like, and which are different from any real form of rape) are mild emotional games that emphasise status, vulnerability, and control.
However, for most people such ideas remain fantasies; the people would have strong reservations about the fantasies’ being made public, or engaged in with a partner in real life, however erotic the idea may be. When someone reveals a fetish to a partner, this usually is a result of great trust. However, the desire to be humiliated may be a motivating cause for confession, in that the act of confessing can itself be humiliating.
Many people worry about being ridiculed for their fetishes, and such ridicule from their partners could be psychologically catastrophic. Therefore, many people use online humiliation (in which the humiliator and others are involved via the Internet, using chat, email, websites, etc.) as a compromise between exhibitionism and reality on the one hand, and safety and anonymity on the other.
WHAT CAN BE HUMILIATING OR DEGRADING?
To a large extent, what is humiliating or degrading is quite individual and varies a lot from person to person. Animal play is mentioned several times in this article as degrading, but the guys I know into pup play would totally disagree. The same goes for age play, exhibitionism, crossdressing, servitude and pretty much everything else on the list. One person’s “humiliating” is not necessarily another’s.
Some scenarios may be based on verbal abuse and others on physical aspects. Some possible examples are:
Verbal humiliation and degradation
• Animal play—describing the submissive as a pet, dog, girl, or bitch; making the submissive eat and drink from pet food and water bowls. • Verbal belittlement, with such words as slave, boy, girl, missy, and pet. • Insults and verbal abuse, such as fat, ugly, stupid, and worthless. • Degrading names, such as slut, shit, bitch, and whore. • Racial and ethnic slurs. • Slighting of body parts and behaviors, such as disparaging or cruel references to breasts, facial appearance, genitalia (including size), buttocks, and slighting of such mannerisms as walking, responsiveness, and standard of self-care. • Requirement to ask permission for everyday activities, such as going to the toilet, spending money, and eating. • Forced repetition, such as the submissive’s being obliged to repeat commands that he or she has been given and to confirm them. • Forced flattery, such as agreeing that every decision that the dominant makes is wise, correct, and justifiable, while additionally praising the dominant’s physical and personality traits. • Mockery, derision, and ridicule. • Scolding of the type commonly reserved for children.
Physical humiliation and degradation
• Ejaculating, spitting, and urinating on the submissive’s body, especially the face. • Servitude • Forced sexual degradation, including such acts as erotic massage, cunnilingus, analingus, and fellatio. • Detailed accountability and control (micro-management) as to time spent and activities done, including lists of jobs to do, precise directions as to how the job is to be performed, and exactly how to act and behave. • Real Humiliation is the act of making a person carry out specific tasks which involve other real people who are not aware that there is a task or dominant relation issuing the task in the background. • Specific rituals and affectations to be adopted. This includes displays of subservience, such as lighting cigarettes, walking a pace behind the dominant, speaking only when spoken to, kneeling or prostrating oneself in front of the dominant when expecting orders, eating only after others or on the floor, and low-status place to sleep. • Body worship, including such activities as kissing or licking the dominant’s feet, boots, buttocks, anus, vulva, etc. to express acknowledgment, subservience, shame, and even positive emotions (such as happiness and excitement). • Deprivation of privacy, which may include the submissive’s never being able to leave the room in which the dominant is present without permission. • The dominant watches while the submissive uses the toilet. • The submissive’s being forbidden to leave the house or ‘dungeon’ in general for the duration of slavery or servitude, etc. • Discipline (BDSM), including erotic spanking, slapping, whipping, restraint, and other BDSM activities (such as cock-and-ball torture (CBT)). • Dresscode (BDSM): prescriptions and proscriptions of clothing, even in public. – For women, a common example is being mandated to wear only bikinis or lingerie. – For men, forced feminizing and cross-dressing. • Both sexes may be expected to go completely naked, with decorative objects such as collars, diapers, bands, tiaras, and cuffs as the only exceptions. • Erotic sexual denial, including the use of a chastity device. • Wearing of external signs of “ownership”, such as collars. • Public humiliation, in which the submissive’s friends or family, or strangers, are aware of or even witness the treatment. • Erotic objectification, in which the submissive is used as human furniture, such as a footstool. • Embarrassment. • Forced anal penetration, with dildos, anal plugs, and similar objects. • Cuckolding, a mostly heterosexual fetish in which the dominant woman has sex with a man outside of the relationship while the submissive man may or may not be present. If the man is not present, he might help her choose what clothes to wear when she meets the other man, or they might get together afterward so she can tell him about it, either while having sex or in addition to withholding sex. If the man is present during the cuckolding, he may or may not be allowed to pleasure himself while watching. The cuckolding may or may not be followed by sex between the couple. Another variant of the cuckolding fetish is that a heterosexual couple fantasizes that another man has already impregnated the woman. • The submissive’s having to ask permission to orgasm during sex or masturbation. • The submissive’s being forced to wear a gag or restraints on the body. • Forced masturbation in a humiliating manner.
Hrodeberto
Gender : Posts : 1318 Join date : 2014-07-14 Age : 37 Location : Spaces
Look, why not just imagine the woman of your attraction or infatuation fucking or bonding with some lowly man or someone you disdain and then fixing upon whatever thoughts and emotions accordingly arise? You don't even have to degrade or humiliate yourself, and also don't run the risk of humiliating others.
_________________ Life has a twisted sense of humour, doesn't it. . . .
* * *
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37263 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Yeah...like imagine your loved one fucking a Negro. Masochism...self-humiliation from a distance. Self-torture.
Sacher-Masoche would find a brute to fuck his wife in his presence...a degradation of her, that also punished him. Today, the Jews give us porn to accomplish the same self-punishment.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
I read one time a post from a man who wanted to father mongrel children with his wife, to be impregnated, in Africa and back to America - to tell his family they adopted the mongrel; because it turns him on.
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
Hrodeberto
Gender : Posts : 1318 Join date : 2014-07-14 Age : 37 Location : Spaces
With a strapon in your ass, you might start to feel something, spiritual - who knows.
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37263 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37263 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Lost boy seeking guidance.... No father figure...the absentee, the missing.
Mother takes over as the vehicle through which he strives to fulfill himself, to find meaning, purpose. intercourse with mother is incestuous, so he seeks a replacement, a surrogate, some female that will embody not his real mother but his ideal mother. A mother/lover, a dominatrix, through which he gives birth to his destiny.
The mother/slut duality, a womb that will birth his ideal self.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
is about the Avoidance of proper initiation by the father and the necessary killing of the monster [solving the Sphinx's riddle] as the necessary condition for a non-incestuous marriage.
The dominatrix, the cold Sphinx is not necessarily motherly but what attempts to stop the incest with the mother.
The Sphinx is the monster, the hybrid mother/whore which resides in the mind of the youth. He must deny the mother element to consummate the union...he must accentuate the Sphinx monstrosity.
The father no longer stand in the way between him and his eros with mother/whore. He can actually help by providing an example of someone who did, indeed, consummate the erotic act. He wants to learn form father, to accomplish the deed. He wants to imitate him; follow the steps precisely to lie beside the mother/whore monstrosity.
The father is no longer an antagonist, to be killed and replaced, but what is spent, drained, and irreverent, if not for the example he provides The father has been overcome. He will only help in seducing the mother/whore monster, to help the boy lie next to it and complete the union.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
The Sphinx is an obstacle in his path to become the Father he wants to be.
He must break the hold of the Sphincter's grip on him, he must solve the Sphinx's riddle or remain riddled forever. It appears as a monster of contradictions to him, because he has avoided initiation and assumed improper superiority - he becomes the contradiction that is the wrath of Apollo to anyone who assumes non-disciplined rational superiority.
The Monster in his path is not his solution, but his salvation upon slaying it - the contradiction he is. But he cant slay it unless he's properly initiated.
I think I covered that. The father is no longer in the picture...he has been overcome. His only utility is as a mentor, an example to imitate so as to bed the mother/whore monster....an idealization of the real mother who has failed him, and he wants to replace, noetically, with a hybrid of females he has come across.
So, it's the Mother's body, her physicality, and the Whore's mind, interchanging...as monsters often morph. The Sphinx's ambiguity, its paradox.
The father is already dead. He has become a brother, a teacher, to be replaced.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Last edited by Satyr on Fri Jul 03, 2015 8:16 pm; edited 1 time in total
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37263 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
The father is an obstacle in himself, as the father genes, participate in him. He does not literally kill the father, he symbolically overcomes him, and makes him irrelevant. He can now take the father's place next to the mother/whore ideal, without feeling ashamed.
The Sphinx's riddle is the problem, the paradox, of consummating the act without admitting, or knowing, what is going on.
The Dominatrix is trusted to not cross the line, because the mother would never hurt her son. He recognizes his mother in the monster, but only unconsciously, so as to enjoy the whore aspect of the duality. The father is only an example to be emulated, only as much as it takes for the boy to finish the act.
The pretense of masochism is safe, because it is a boy's game. The mother will never hurt her boy. The boy will surrender to the game, the illusion, avoiding the shame of submitting to a weaker creature. He would never submit to a male equivalent.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Last edited by Satyr on Fri Jul 03, 2015 8:15 pm; edited 1 time in total
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? OPHELIA: No, my lord. HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap? OPHELIA: Ay, my lord. HAMLET: Do you think I meant country matters? OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord. HAMLET: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs. OPHELIA: What is, my lord? HAMLET: Nothing.
Nietzsche wrote:
I know no case where the tragic joke that constitutes the essence of love is expressed so strictly, translated with equal terror into a formula, as in Done José’s last cry, which concludes the work:
Yes, I have killed her, I – my adored Carmen!”
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
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 reads 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 James, 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, told 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.
James, a father and manager, has a Type A personality--in-control, hard-working, intelligent, 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 be free," he says.
As James' experience illustrates, sadomasochism involves a highly unbalanced power relationship established through role-playing, bondage, and/or the infliction of pain. 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 a leather corset, people screaming in pain 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 potential psychological value. S & M, they are beginning to understand, offers a release of sexual and emotional energy that some 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."
S & M: No Longer A Pathology
"If children at [an] early age witness sexual intercourse between adults... they inevitably regard the sexual act as a sort of ill-treatment or act of subjugation: they view it, that is, in a sadistic sense."
--Sigmund Freud, 1905
Freud was one of the first to discuss S & M on a psychological level. During the 20 years he explored the topic, his theories crossed each other to create a maze of contradictions. But he maintained one constant: S & M was pathological.
People become masochistic, Freud said, as a way of regulating their desire to sexually dominate others. The desire to submit, on the other hand, he said, arises from guilt feelings over the desire to dominate. He also argued that the desire for S & M can arise on its own when a man wants to assume the passive female role, with bondage and beating signifying being "castrated or copulated with, or giving birth."
The view that S & M is pathological has been dismissed by the psychological community. Sexual sadism is a real problem, but it is a different phenomenon from S & M. Luc Granger, Ph.D., head of the department of psychology at the University of Montreal, created an intensive treatment program for sexual aggressors in La Macaza Prison in Quebec; he has also conducted research on the S & M community. "They are very separate populations," he says. While S & M is the regulated exchange of power among consensual participants, sexual sadism is the derivation of pleasure from either inflicting pain or completely controlling an unwilling person.
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.
"Nothing matters except you, me and the sound of my voice," Lily Fine 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 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.
Laura Antoniou, a writer whose work on S & M has been published by Masquerade Books in New York City, puts it another way: "When I was a child, I had nothing but S & M fantasies. I punished Barbie for being dirty. I did Bondage Barbie, dominance with GI Joe. S & M is simply what turns me on."
Whip Smart: Beyond the Boundaries of Safe Play
While S & M can be a psychologically healthy activity--its motto is "safe, sane and consensual"--sometimes things do get out of hand:
Abuse
It is rare, but some "Tops" get too involved in power and forget to monitor their treatment of the "Bottom." "I call them 'Natural Born Tops,'" says dominatrix Lily Fine, "and I don't have time for them." Also, some bottoms want to be beaten because they have low self-esteem and think they deserve it. They are forlorn, absent and unresponsive during and after a scene, in this case, S & M ceases to be play and becomes pathological.
Boundaries
A small percentage of people inappropriately bring S & M power play into other facets of their life. "Most people in S & M circles are dominant or submissive in very specific situations, while in their everyday life they can play a whole range of roles," says psychology Professor Luc Granger. But, he continues, if the only way a person can relate to someone else is through a kind of sadomasochistic game, then there is probably a deeper psychological problem.
The Use of S & M as Therapy
People often confuse the fact that they feel good after S & M with the idea that S & M is therapy, says psychology Professor Roy Baumeister. "But to prove that something is therapeutic, you have to prove that it has lasting beneficial effects on mental health...and it's hard to prove even that therapy is therapeutic." In mental health terms, S & M doesn't make you better and it doesn't make you worse.
Excerpts from an S & M Glossary
Sadomasoonism (S & M): An activity involving the temporary creation of highly unbalanced power dynamics between two or more people for erotic or semi-erotic purposes.
Bondage and Discipline (B & D): A subset of S & M not involving physical pain.
Top: The dominant person in a scene; synonyms: dominant, dom, master/mistress.
Bottom: The submissive person in a scene; synonyms: submissive, sub, slave.
Switch: A person who enjoys being a Top in some scenes and a Bottom in others.
Sadist: A person who derives sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on others.
Masochist: A person who derives sexual pleasure from being abused by others. Sadist and masochist are sometimes used playfully in the S & M community, but are generally avoided because of psychiatric denotation.
Scene: An episode of S & M activity; the S & M community.
Negotiating a Scene: The process of loosely outlining what the players want to experience before they begin a scene.
Play: Participation in a scene.
Toy: Any implement used to enhance S & M play.
Safe Word: A prearranged word or phrase that may be used to end or renegotiate a scene. This is a clear signal meaning "Stop, this is too much for me."
Dungeon: A place designated for S & M play.
Dominatrix (pl. Dominatrices): A female Top, usually a professional.
Lifestyle Dominant/Submissive: A person involved in a relationship in which S & M is a defining dynamic.
Fetish: An object that is granted special powers, one of which is the ability to sexually gratify. It is often wrongly confused with S & M.
Vanilla Sex: Conventional heterosexual sex.
Marianne Apostolides is author of Inner Hunger: A Young Women's Struggle through Anorexia and Bulimia (W.W. Norton, 1996).
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
In Greece, before the crisis, banks used to offer good deals on loans...vacation loans they called them. All Greeks had a right to a good lifestyle, a nice vacation. Now imagine living a few kilometers from a beach, other travel hours to enjoy, and still wanting to take a loan to go to an island, or someplace else to enjoy the beach..or to go to some European destination to pretend you are a sophisticated, modern European. To pretend you are more than what you really are.
In my poor, goat-man mind, if I do not have the money, I do not buy, I do not go on vacation.
Circe - The First Dominatrix in Western Literature
Circe, the enchantress from The Odyssey, appears to be the first dominatrix ( representation ) in Western literature. She symbolizes the potential power that women have over men, a motif noticed through out the story of The Odyssey .
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As his journey progresses, Odysseus gradually loses all his ships and companions, all of his spoils of war, until he becomes solitary at the very end of the epic. Right after the disaster with contrary winds, he loses eleven out of his twelve ships in the encounter with Laestrygonians, man-eating giants. Broken and in mourning, while the moon is still in her dark period, he arrives at Aiaia, Circe’s island. The Sun has now entered Leo and the Midsummer is approaching. Odysseus is about to meet the solar goddess queen Circe, daughter of the sun god Helios. But before that he decides to feed his crew by killing a giant stag and carrying it back to the ship:
“In describing the killing of the stag Homer establishes important times not only in the day but also in the solar year and the 19-year cycle. The stag’s death-blow comes from a bronze-tipped spear, a metaphor for the sun and one that is repeated at the climax of the Odyssey. The spear strikes halfway down the line of the beast’s spine, which metaphorically places the sun on the ecliptic below the ‘back’ of Leo. It is now just halfway through the solar year. It is also the mid-point of the 19-year cycle and there are a further nine and a half years to go before Odysseus will be reunited with Penelope. Odysseus carries a giant stag back to his ship at the halfway point of the 19-year cycle with the sun in the stars of Leo. The stag’s golden horns represent the rays of the sun.”
Florence and Kenneth Wood, “Homer’s Secret Odyssey”
The name Circe means “circling hawk” or “Encircler” and her island lies in the centre of the starry seas of the universe. The encircling horizon of the island is the Sun’s ecliptic. Odysseus notices the smoke from Circe’s chimney, which is the focal point of the island around which heavens seem to rotate. The constellation of Leo represents Circe’s enchanted palace. While the Moon is still dark, Odysseus sends a scouting mission to the palace, himself prudently staying behind:
What ensues is probably the most famous episode of the Odyssey: Circe turns Odysseus’ companions into pigs while their minds remain human. When Odysseus finds out what has happened, he sets about rescuing his companions, encountering Hermes on the way, who instructs him how to resist the spell of the goddess by means of the moly flower and a sword. A very deep symbolic message is encoded in that part of the Odyssey. Roger Sworder, in his book Science and Religion in Ancient Greece, restores Circe’s true power lost throughout the ages of patriarchal discourse. Before I summarize his musings, I would like to stop for a moment and ponder on the above passage from the Odyssey. She appears as a powerful Lady of the Beasts in it, a tamer of wild animals (wild instincts), a bringer of order to the universe. She is portrayed as the ultimate goddess from whose body the universe was formed, yet she is also the chaos that universe will eventually return to. She acts as a powerful and crucial initiator for Odysseus. In The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara G. Walker writes that the word “kirkos” (falcon) comes from the same root as the Latin circus, which was originally an enclosure for funerary games. The falcon is a fitting totem for her because in symbolism it is both a solar bird and a death-bird. Walker also calls Circe a fate-spinner, “weaver of the destinies of men,” who manipulates forces of creation and destruction. What is more, Pliny wrote that Circe “commanded all the lights of heaven.”
J.W. Waterhouse, “Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus”
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Roger Sworder gives an amazing analysis of the role of Circe in the Odyssey. She is the only one who calls Odysseus a “hero” in the whole epic and he is the only one who was able to resist her attempts to bewitch him. She was able to recognize his exceptionality instantly. Also Plato was of the opinion that Odysseus was very wise. Sworder summarizes Plato’s “Myth of Er,” (a legend which concludes his Republic), which contains references to the Circe episode. He remarks:
“Towards the end of the myth, the souls who are about to be born again choose the next lives which they will lead, and there is a general metamorphosis as the souls who were once people become other animals and those who were animals become people. This passage is certainly comparable to Homer’s account of Circe….”
Sworder calls the transformation into pigs “a descent into a lower form of life” and “an incarnation in a lower body.” He adds that “in Circe’s sties we are given an uncanny sense of the interchangeability of human and animal bodies….” Like Plato’s goddess Necessity, Circe seems to know Odysseus’ destiny and she helps him do what the gods and the task of soul making require him to do. She gives him detailed instructions how to get to the Underworld, where he needs to consult the blind soothsayer Teiresias. Sworder says she wields three crucial powers: “the power of metamorphosis over other beings; access to the realm of the dead; knowledge of the passage over the heavenly circuits represented by the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis and Thrinacie.” He adds that “Circe’s palace is our whole world of physical nature. She is not primarily the goddess of metamorphosis; she precipitates people into their earthly embodiment.” Before Odysseus leaves her island, she gives him detailed instructions about the journey ahead of him. He is under the aegis of Circe from now on; also he is one of the precious few humans who have mated with goddesses. Circe gives Odysseus a son, Telegonus, who in the distant future back on Ithaca will accidentally kill his father, not having recognized who he really is.
But how was Odysseus able to resist Circe’s spell? He used two props to achieve that end: the moly flower given to him by Hermes and a sword. Sworder writes of the moly herb:
“…the plant comes with its root. It has been plucked from the ground entire, not picked, and its flower is the very opposite color from its root, milk-white against black.
…
And just as the eastern lotus represents the evolved soul which has reached bliss from its root in the world of illusion, so the Moly may symbolize the double nature of the human being whose base black root yields the lovely flower of compassion.
…
This is the symbol of the human being who is liberated or enlightened while still living. The entire physical organism remains but it is no longer attached to the realm in which it developed and from which it grew.
…
She cannot debase him because he is uprooted and detached.”
Odysseus had already been uprooted and detached in the Cyclop episode, where he called himself No one. While his companions still wallowed in the mud, Circe bathed Odysseus in a hall of glowing gold, silver and bronze. But as the lotus flower grows over and beyond the mud of the world, so do Odysseus’ companions get turned back again into human form. It turns out the experience has transformed them: they look younger, taller and more radiant.
As the Sun leaves Leo and enters Virgo, Odysseus and the rest of his crew set off towards Hades. Visiting Hades is a pivotal point in the Odyssey and Odysseus’ most important adventure. Circe tells him that lifeless shadows of the dead crave blood because they desire embodiment. Odysseus needs to pour blood of a sacrificial black ram in order to give the shades their voice and be able to speak to them. Like many mythological figures before him, Odysseus descends to the underworld to bring up his soul. Talking to the blind Teiresias is part of his mission which does not seem to be the most crucial one. The real crux of the matter is giving a say and listening to countless voices of all the famous dead men and women, the superheroes, superheroins and myth makers that lived before him. He speaks, among others, to: Ajax, Agamemnon, Minos, Orion, Tartarus, Sisyphus, Heracles, and twenty-nine famous mythical women such as Phaedra, Ariadne and Leda. It is a poignant episode, especially when he meets his mother who had died before his return, out of grief for not seeing him. She cannot clasp him while he tries to embrace her corporeal nothing in vain.
What he returns to the surface with is immaterial but incredibly substantial: it is the stuff that dreams are made of, namely all the myths of Greece. In Homeric Moments, Eva Brann calls Hades “the safe-depository of tales, the treasure house of myth.” The ghosts are like “gibbering phantasms” but the story teller such as Homer or Odysseus infuses them with life and blood through his gift of poetry. Odysseus drinks from the source of Mnemosyne: the collective Greek memory. He is the last mythical hero, for after him begins a historical era, as Roberto Calasso wrote in his Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:
“Partly because he is so near the boundary, so near the point where the circle closes, Odysseus is the hero who most often tells stories. …last among the heroes to return from Troy, Odysseus is also the one who right up to the end maintains his contact – and what an intimate contact it was – with the primordial powers who appeared in the first phases of the cycle. His wanderings were partly a compendium, a roll call, of all those beings and places that were already growing confused in many a memory, already being removed to the realm of the fabulous. … After his return to Ithaca, man’s approach to primordial beings and places could only take place through literature.”
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? OPHELIA: No, my lord. HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap? OPHELIA: Ay, my lord. HAMLET: Do you think I meant country matters? OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord. HAMLET: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs. OPHELIA: What is, my lord? HAMLET: Nothing.
Yes... but also in the way I think, what is Terror, in this case, as also in the case of Romeo and Juliet, is some nothing that can expunge the Vital hatred of two dynasties, two "self-valuings", two histories...
Nietzsche wrote:
I know no case where the tragic joke that constitutes the essence of love is expressed so strictly, translated with equal terror into a formula, as in Done José’s last cry, which concludes the work:
Yes, I have killed her, I – my adored Carmen!”
Emotional contagion...
Quote :
"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them." [Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game]
imposing her female urgency and her "Demetrian" fever for procreation
Nietzsche wrote:
Female voices are already raised, which, by Saint Aristophanes! make one afraid:--with medical explicitness it is stated in a threatening manner what woman first and last REQUIRES from man. Is it not in the very worst taste that woman thus sets herself up to be scientific
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
Synapses are momentarily opened, vulnerable, penetrable, and primed for incorporation… And if "we" do not literally commit suicide when reading Nietzsche's corpus, then the "suicide" will have to take more metaphoric, nuanced, intricate, and subterranean forms - esoterrorist forms more socially productive for "those in the know". Violence lies at the root of Nietzsche's process of weeding out
lol...
Nietzsche wrote:
Even the first criticism of the first part of Zarathustra that I have received (written by a Christian and anti-Semite to boot, and strangely enough produced in a prison) gives me courage, seeing that in it the popular attitude, which is the only one in me that can be grasped to wit, my attitude towards Christianity—was immediately, distinctly and well understood. "Aut Christ us aut Zarathustra![84] Or, to put it plainly, the old long-promised Anti-Christ has come to the fore—that is what my readers feel. And so all the defenders "of our creed and of the Saviour of Mankind" are solemnly mustered ("gird up your loins with the sword of the Holy Ghost"!!) against Zarathustra, and then it goes on: "If he conquers you, he will be yours and he will be true, for in him is there nothing false; if he conquers you, you will have forfeited your faith; that is the penance you will have to pay the Victor!"
Ludicrous as it may perhaps sound to you, dear friend, at this point I heard for the first time from outside that which I have heard from within and have known for ever so long, namely, that I am the most terrible opponent of Christianity, and have discovered a mode of attack of which even Voltaire had not an inkling.[85] But what does all this "thank God!" matter to you?
What I envy in Epicurus are the disciples in his garden, aye, in such circumstances one could certainly forget noble Greece and more certainly still ignoble Germany! And hence my rage since I have grasped in the broadest possible sense what wretched means (the depreciation of my good name, my character and my aims) suffice to take from me the trust of, and therewith the possibility of obtaining, pupils. You will believe me when I say that I have not written a single line "for the sake of fame"; but I fancied that my writings might prove a good bait. For, after all, the impulse to teach is strong in me. And to this extent I require fame, so that I may get disciples—particularly in view of the fact that, to judge from recent experiences, a University post is impossible.
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
