Rihanna:
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But chains and whips excite me
This is currently a big hit. I just heard it on the radio.
S&M makes sense to me in a world denuded of love. I was thinking about it today, that when you are in love, you are in this sort of trance state, where the world is altered somehow in strange but desirable ways. It is still a type of madness.
S&M aims to stimulate a qualitative risk of altered states, but one without the risk of actual emotional vulnerability. These people will go to all sorts of lengths both to approach one another, and to avoid genuine emotional intimacy.
Never having done it, this is my speculation. It does not interest me in the slightest. I will take my emotional wounds all day every day. They may hurt, but they tell me I am still alive.
S&M is a type of death, as the imagery associated with it plainly shows.
For those unfamiliar with my method, I am not calling it right or wrong: I am calling it an incompetent means of pursuing the emotional satisfaction we all want. Sex, likewise, is an incompetent means, and the connection of sex with willful and voluntary cruelty and masochism is obvious: is not emotionally detached sex already a sin against fulfillment, in many cases, particularly over the long term?
What we WANT is to hold hands and walk down country roads. By the age of 13 or so, though, nowadays, most kids have abandoned that fantasy for “maturity”, which seems to normally start with oral sex, and advance to hormonal driven coitus, all without the CAPACITY for lasting committment by the boy–and probably any more by the girl, although they are wired differently.
If you risk nothing, you get nothing. If you cannot trust, you will always be alone. If you cannot get hurt and go again, then life looks like a really scary ride. You get off by closing yourself emotionally, and having done that, not uncommonly by leaving altogether. In my view the only reason suicide rates are not skyrocketing is effective drugs that act on a physical level.
My two cents.