New Moon: A brief ontology of sadism & masochism

It's Friday. This landscape is seemingly being freed from the latest wave of wildfire smoke from hundreds of miles away — so far the first such event this summer, but based on other recent summers probably not the last. But temperatures might also already be veering toward more tolerable peaks, as the cicadas whine, the corn ripens, and the roadsides are lined with blazing-stars and young goldenrod. Orion has had his heliacal rising, and sunrise is now late enough that on workdays my early-rising household will reactivate our morning light timer. Hello.

Please be forewarned this is going to be more of a "stub" post than it necessarily deserves. As noted for the past few weeks, I am feeling more and more mentally impeded by my current hormone balance — or imbalance, as it were. Certain cognitive tasks remain quite within my bandwidth, but when it comes to writing I have become particularly given to creative, more-fictitious, narrated or poetic pursuits, while remaining competent at basic correspondence and documentation, whereas for long-form critical analysis and argumentation I can think my way through something but it's very hard to articulate myself as thoroughly and logically as I've practiced for so long. I know this ought to resolve at some point, especially because I am too stubborn to give up altogether on essay writing, not even temporarily; I must keep stretching this muscle however I can. However, capacity limits are limits, so I am sometimes just going to have micro-posts for at least as long as I remain in this physical condition, compounded by taking on a second volunteering gig that may eat my Friday afternoons, and then perhaps extending for a while longer, given the givens.

I am still holding off on an official announcement about my strategy for keeping Salt for the Eclipse active during this complex life transition, but informally speaking, what I lean toward is posting somewhat more flexibly and doing even more to focus on paid posts so that those readers who pay are still getting a better chance at reading something than anyone else is. This will probably look like publish dates ranging more frequently between Fridays and Sundays, and increasing the paid post rate from the recent change of four paid posts per season to six (roughly half).

But having offered that warning, let me get to at least a snippet of something decidedly kinky that I've realized I want to clarify for any reflections on kink and ordeal that I may return to in the future.

Motives for pain

In writing about kink as one pillar of this newsletter[1] I know that I have pretty neatly laid out my stance on why kink is a worthy consideration for any ritualist exploring sacred violence protocols or true consensual power structures, and I've followed this with primers on some basic kink activities; where sadomasochistic acts are concerned, I have for instance broken down impact play for newcomers. I have also touched over and over on an explicitly "woo" facet of kink — or, one might argue, an explicitly kinky facet of ritual practice — referred to as ordeal work, which I have not probed very much in a deliberate way but which has a lot in common with the energy I prefer to explore as a bottom and/or submissive, and which as of six months ago I have spontaneously experimented with in a service topping capacity for someone else's ordeal-ish experience.[2] And in all of these settings I've usually discussed sadomasochism, i.e. the giving and receiving of pain, as performing some function around sacred, ecstatic, transcendental suffering.

What I have not really discussed, though, is why anyone could feel a strong personal motivation to pursue such suffering, either as the sufferer or as the inflicter. And this is important to talk about, because even though pain is a powerful skill set for any ritualist to develop — even a staple of some magical traditions — the fact of the matter is that lots of people, maybe even some majority, do not like to feel pain and do not like to watch other people in pain, let alone know that they caused the pain. Of the people who do derive any enjoyment, I'd place a confident monetary bet that only a fraction of those people directly connect that pain with sexual satisfaction or any other erotic qualities. In modern hegemonic culture, we look down on masochists as pathetically weird, and we fear sadists as being somewhere on the same psychological continuum as serial killers. Even if you don't feel that way, it's entirely likely that if you haven't already had a kinky awakening, there are plenty of normal, negative biophysical reactions to pain that would inhibit your likelihood of incorporating that into your own ritual path. In fact, there are even a lot of kinksters who have minimal interest in sadomasochism, since kink is a very large and not at all monolithic umbrella.

Therefore, I want to assert a few things about what I perceive words like sadism and masochism to actually mean, because I don't want to advocate for the development of ritual sadomasochistic abilities with some implicit notion that to enjoy receiving pain you must find an erotic thrill in it and to enjoy inflicting it you must harbor some frightening lack of empathy for fellow living things. I also would like to dispel the inverse notion that masochism or sadism have to involve sensory enjoyment of any kind.

It's my view — shared among some other kinksters I know — that even within the larger umbrella of kink, masochism and sadism form their own umbrellas.

A masochist could be any of the following personalities:

• Someone who experiences some or all types of pain in a genuinely pleasurable way, sexual or otherwise
• Someone who experiences pain in a genuinely unpleasant way, but who enjoys the challenge of surviving it or experiences arousal secondhand from the pain
• Someone who experiences pain in a genuinely unpleasant way and who does not even harbor personal goals for what their body is capable of taking, but who enjoys surrendering power to somebody else who's entrusted with the option to inflict pain for their own amusement

Mirroring this, a sadist could be any of the following personalities:

• Someone who empathically resonates from the energy of another's pain as a genuinely pleasurable experience, sexual or otherwise
• Someone who empathically resonates from the energy of another's pain as a genuinely unpleasant experience, but who may still enjoy helping the other through the challenge of surviving it, or following up the pain with sexual release
• Someone who empathically resonates from the energy of another's pain as a genuinely unpleasant experience and who does not even care if the other achieves personal growth from the pain, but who enjoys holding power over somebody else and having the option to inflict pain for their own amusement

None of these subtypes are necessarily healthy or unhealthy; it may be easy to recognize how the third option in each case could lead to very exploitative dynamics if consent protocols are not thoroughly factored in, but you can also throw together a pain-as-pleasure masochist with a pain-as-pleasure sadist and still experience consent issues due to either party getting carried away. One of the most central characteristics of healthy sadomasochistic kink is rather that all parties involved should engage in enough self-examination to understand why they are using pain in the first place, so that negotiations around pain will happen along the most helpful lines of inquiry.

In my own case, for example, I am mostly the second type of masochist, in the sense that pain very much hurts for me but I still have my own motives for seeking it out, suffering for my own reasons instead of for somebody else's. And I have bottomed for an array of different sadist types, but my impression is that the main person who tops me — my owner — is somewhere between the first and second type. And in my own capacity as a sadist, I am almost exclusively the first type, which can be a source of wariness because of what risks crop up there, but luckily at least I only seem to have my sadism activated by people[3] who are directly offering me their suffering or are already suffering on purpose for public entertainment, such as actors or professional wrestlers. (I do also have to find someone sexually attractive, otherwise the pain <—> eroticism circuit can't really complete itself.)

By contrast, I really do not relate very much to the third types of masochist or sadist at all, and I would not play well with someone in either category. However, I think that any type can be well-suited for developing a ritual kink practice; the third type is just inherently built upon a relationship between sadomasochism and power exchange, which needs to be understood as its separate parts as well as the larger sum thereof. This brings me to my next point.

Uncoupling sadism & masochism from power exchange, or not

As I know I've outlined before and as many a "kink 101" instructor will be quick to point out, the letters in BDSM do not go together at all times. D/s (domination/submission) is separable from s/m (sadomasochism). Someone can be the dominant partner in a dynamic but still masochistically bottom for pain; the submissive would just hurt them according to live instructions or protocols. And of course, ideally anybody who is masochistically bottoming should have some amount of input on what it is that they're bottoming for — if nothing else, on what they refuse to bottom for — but the dialogue that ensues is very different depending on which partner holds the negotiated power in the situation.

Because of this modularity to BDSM, it's important to acknowledge just how many people may enjoy D/s first and foremost but not necessarily enjoy any s/m at all. Many people do enjoy s/m but it's dependent on a D/s situation, which is essentially the third type of sadism or masochism I outlined above. And conversely, I have also run into my fair share of people who get nothing out of D/s whatsoever but who are wildly sadomasochistic; their games of pain are not only negotiated from a position of equality (also all negotiations should be) but also tend to play out as a kind of delightedly perverse but democratic experimentation, and if the atmosphere is more torturous or overwhelming then the way that participants speak to each other is still likely to sound distinct from when somebody has temporarily given up control over the situation.

But even saying this, I would like to float the possibility that just as all forms of D/s involve some degree of CNC (consensual nonconsent) even for people who say they don't like CNC — a topic I definitely will not go into today — it is also misleading and maybe even a bit dishonest to assert that an s/m scene can ever be fully devoid of D/s qualities. I may not have a formal, long term power exchange dynamic with every person who consensually beats me up, but the very fact that I'm willing to put my body on the line with them means that I'm granting them at least a tiny fragment of power over my body for as long as the scene lasts. The more that they hurt me, the harder it will become for me to resist them if I ever want to, either because the pain is so all-consuming or because I might actually get injured. I need some kind of safeword system with them as much as with a D/s partner, since they still have to know when the sound of my suffering is the right kind of suffering and not something that should lead them to stop. I am their consensual victim, but a victim nevertheless.

Ritual applications

The ritual applications of sadism and masochism, whether or not they are joined by power exchange, are numerous enough that I am mostly going to pause the topic here for now. If nothing else, I have already written about some of those applications from certain angles already. I am sure to write more at some point.

To wrap things up for the underlying objective of this particular post, though, I hope that this sifting through terminology and psychology has been somewhat helpful if you have at all felt like an outsider to ritual kink even as some kind of ritualist yourself, and especially if a key distancing factor for you has been the matter of pain. I am not here to evangelize sadomasochistic rites and say that your practice is incomplete without them; no ritual work is suitable for every person, just as I will probably never practice kitchen witchcraft with the regularity or expertise that my owner does. But for a little bit I've wanted to make certain that no reader feels as if they're not enough of a "real" masochist or sadist to engage in ordeal work, when they're basing that assessment off of a popular misconception about what sadomasochistic tendencies are supposed to involve.

In essence: you do not have to enjoy receiving or giving pain in order to derive some ritual benefit from working with it. Since the very nature of pain for most living things is that it's not enjoyable, for many of us the best way to build a relationship with pain is to accept that it is, in fact, painful.

[1] Admittedly still less frequently addressed than other topics. This continues to be a matter of audience reach more than anything else. When I started writing here, I thought that my kinky readership was going to outnumber witchy readership, and while there is plenty of overlap, the opposite ratio constantly prevails. I have long since given up intentionally doing anything to change this. I would care more if I ever meant to build a "following" from within the kink scene; but while the scene is my social home and primary support network, I have matured enough in my kink over the last four years that I do not have nearly as many kink-related thoughts to process compared to the rest of my ritual work. So kink comes up here when it comes up, but if nobody is clamoring outright for me to write something about a given aspect of kink, I'm going to stay in the current pattern of only directly examining kink when some reflection suddenly comes to me.

[2] Service topping, i.e. topping someone less for mutual thrills than for satisfying the bottom's particular goals, is normally of deep disinterest to me, as is a lot of "service-oriented" kink in general — although I will save my thoughts on what that phrase even means or why I dislike it, apart from a hint elsewhere in this post. Nonetheless, I've discovered in ritual kink specifically I can envision putting someone else through pain or bondage even in contexts that won't scratch my own sadistic itch, perhaps for reasons that likewise will be suggested elsewhere.

[3] More specifically men and people whose genders are comfortably man-adjacent, because their consensual vulnerability is uniquely attractive to me even though I'm pansexually queer on the whole.

Thank you for reading. Next week, I will have a hedgecrafty post about the Old English poem known as the Nine Herbs Charm; following that, this year's holiday post for Calan Awst (Lughnasadh) will be a reflection on fertility given my new experiences of what that means.