On being a sadist

Thank you for sticking around this month as it took me longer that usual to gather my sexy thoughts (covid among the reasons)<3 Today's essay is on one of my favourite things – being sadistic. I tried to reflect what it's like beyond the guilt-inducing preconceptions. I also wrote about art, empathy, needles, my shadow self and consuming beautiful things. Enjoy xxx  

I’ve always loved BDSM as a form of alternative sexual imagination, the possibility to question what sex is. Leathersex often relies on energies, power exchange, or activities that don’t involve genitals. How do you know it’s still sex? Your body knows – and it can sometimes throw back at you a low-key revelation of who you are. Or so it happened to me one afternoon, as I pushed a needle through someone’s skin in the beautiful fading light. 

There is an adrenaline rush at first. I hold my breath and then slowly exhale as the tip of the needle goes in and out. After I put five in, it turns into a full-body high. Like a low-frequency soft hum all over my skin. With each one, there is anticipation and release, as the feeling slowly rises. I see the high in his eyes too, a much more intense one, and it feels like it seeps into me from where I touch his face or kiss his neck. I stand back wearing not much else apart from pale blue single-use gloves and realise that I’m completely wet. I don’t think I’ve ever been this wet.

I think of the unbelievable softness of medical needles going through the skin like butter, and how it echoes through all my senses, down to the deepest most secluded parts of me. I think that there is no way back from the knowledge that I’m a sadist – and how it is so strange, beautiful and addictive. 

Sadists don’t have a great rep. After all, we are twisted pervs who enjoy other people’s pain – what could possibly be good about that? The term “sadism” comes from the name of the French author Marquis de Sade, coined in 1834, and later popularised through a range of psychological texts, including Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis” and Freud’s “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”. Being a sadist is not only about enjoying pain, but sexually getting off on it, as confirmed by Cambridge dictionary: “A sadist is a person who gets pleasure, sometimes sexual, by being cruel to or hurting another person”. But what happens if we step into the dimension of BDSM? What if the pain inflicted is erotic, desired and consensual? What are the role and the pleasure of the sadist then? 

I liked playing with sadists long before I was a sadist myself. Sadists were my favourite tops because they seemed to be the most empathetic. They watched my reactions closely because they got off on them, they were attentive to signals emitted by my tormented body and challenged mind. It felt like a dialogue: they gave me pain and it returned as emotion, tension, release and sexual pleasure.  

The first scenes I really enjoyed as a top involved pain. It was easier to step into giving pain to others because I was able to filter it through my own previous experiences as a masochist. With a riding crop in my hand, I could be in both places at once: my hand clutching the handle, my body responding lovingly to the burn of leather. Gradually over time, I stopped relying on this idea – but I believe that the essence of it still stayed. 

In the brilliant book “Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art”, American author Andy Campbell explores the nature of sadism and masochism through Monica Majoli’s paintings of hanged rubbermen. Drawing from the writings of Larry Tonsend ("The Leatherman’s Handbook") and Tony DeBlase ("Dungeon Master") he insists that these two seemingly opposing perspectives often merge not only for the viewer but for the people practicing BDSM as well.  

“Townsend and DeBlase, for as much they are different in their approach and general assessment of leather, share in the belief that to be an empowered and effective sadist, one must first occupy the masochist’s position. Or as Townsend writes, ‘the M component is there in all of us, whether manifestly displayed or not’. In his view, the experience of being a masochist is always embedded within the practice of sadism, and serves as the stop-gap between erotic possibility and nonconsensual, sociopathic cruelty. This would suggest that a viewer of Majoli’s ‘Rubbermen’ is meant to both identify with the encased figure and the absent sadist, understanding these positions as profoundly relational, and equally caring, loving and sexy,” he writes.  

But why do I identify as a sadist specifically rather than just a domme or a top or a switch? Not only because I love playing with pain, but because I rely on pain to create enhanced states of mind both in myself and people I play with. Pain is a door. You walk through the door and you leave your mundane self behind, entering an altered space. Pain is not the only door – latex or bondage possess the same portal-like potential. But if you’ve been through the door enough times yourself you kind of know what’s on the other side. For someone on a receiving end – an endorphin high, uncontrollable tremor in the muscles, burning skin, bruises, ecstasy. But how about for the one who’s giving?  

In her text “The science of giving pain”, Daemonum X describes the sadistic high as something difficult to pin down yet deeply intoxicating: “Maybe I can’t explain with science what happens in my brain when I’m giving someone the pain they have asked for. It would be cool to understand more about why I find such pleasure in making hot babes writhe in pain, why I love sinking my teeth into juicy thighs until they bruise (ok we’re getting horny again!). To physiologically define the joy in the feedback loop of hand, to cane, to ass, to scream, to moan, to ears, to brain, to pussy, and back to hand feels like an impossible feat. I can only share my perspective on how fucking wild it is that people trust me to do things like put a knife to their throat so they can feel turned on by the possibility of death. Me, the death bringer! The smell of fear mixed with desire is intoxicating. In a way I get to play God, not the biblical vengeful version but a new type of deity who feeds off the loving offerings of screams and tears”.

I remember the moment when I realised that the kind of pain I give people would have been too much for me to handle on the receiving end.  The idea strangely excited me. It was like a growing appetite I only had a certain control of. There was no immediate safety of “I know how this feels” anymore. Just a free fall into the soft shadows. In being a sadist, there is a power trip which is a test of character: are you going to be good or bad? Could you push that boundary a little bit more? The senses are heightened, and it’s just your shadow self, having a good time with controls of an E-stim box. 

What does being sadistic actually feel like? It feels pure like the most honest exchange. It feels sensual. Maybe like eating something very beautiful. Looking at someone attractive and thinking how would it feel to hurt them – the same category of slightly wrong but delicious. Most importantly, it always feels intimate and warm. Being a sadist is supposed to be a cold ego-trip, but for me, it’s always been the opposite – the heat, the joy, the laughter, the extreme closeness. Up there, you’re almost never alone. 

Photo by Anya Gorkova.