The Pleasure of the Pain and Why Some People Need S and M - Sadomasochistic Sex - Linking Childhood Memories And Adult Sex

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

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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, sadomasochism 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 structure, with our culture placing more demands on the 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.