Disclaimer: Boy howdy this post is chock-full of my own opinions based on my own experiences.
My masochist days are behind me, I think. I’m starting to get a better fix on my relationship with pain. Like most of my other kinks and fetishes, I’m into it in ways that I feel aren’t entirely in line with what people widely expect.
At the risk of painting too broad a brush, I can break pain into two categories:
- Punishing pain, where the goal is inflict pain on the sub either because they’re a masochist, or the Dom is a sadist.
- Coercive pain, where the goal is to extract some sort of desired behavior from the sub.
Now of course there’s overlaps and outliers to this. About once a year or so I get it into my head that I need a good beating. In general though I definitely fall into the latter category. Whenever it comes up in the past, I’ve described enjoying pain when it’s a threat; e.g. “do what I want or this will get worse”.
I think this is most apparent when it comes to spankings. Gosh darn do I love getting my ass beaten for the first ~10 minutes or so. After that the pain to pleasure ratio diminishes and I go soft. Now granted, that’s not to say I don’t still enjoy that scene, but I’m curious what happens if the Dom keeps it at like a 5 or a 6, instead of working up to a 10. I really want to explore that headspace a little more, instead of being overwhelmed by the pain. Maybe I just need to speak up more before the scene. Maybe this is me doing that.
Another area where I’m taking this to heart is shock collars. As above, I do enjoy a little zap here and there, but I’ve never explored shock collars as a tool of control (their actual intended use). No one’s ever put one on me and threatened to zap me if I don’t suck them off, for example. Instead they just zap me and laugh at my misfortune when I yelp. I’ve already implemented a policy of “no arbitrary shocks” if I’m the one holding the remote in the future.
There’s also an engagement aspect to these scenes as well. Any good Dom can flog a sub until they’re a broken, sobbing mess. You just detach yourself from the scene and wait until they’re done. It feels impersonal to a certain degree, whereas hurting them until they worship your boots the way you want is much more active. Then the sub is more actively engaged in the scene, rather than just being a canvas for the Dom.
This also stems from another problem(?) I have: I really don’t like being a brat and earning punishments (certain naysayers will disagree with this statement). So it feels silly to, despite being on my best(okayest) behavior, get spanked until my ass is red. Maintenance punishments bridge the gap here, especially if they lean into the this could be worse for you aspect.
Anywho, that's where I am. This isn't all to say I'm a pwecious widdle bean that no one should hurt. Rather, I want to be hurt in meaningful ways. I have a much better idea of the kind of scenes I want now, and I'm going to try and do a better job about speaking up about this in the future. Just gotta distill this down to an elevator pitch.