Growing up, my mother always put a strong emphasis on the fact that there’s a monster in all of us. Her own fascination with torture bled into the philosophy she imparted, that hurting people could feel good.
So the question for me is not why I’m a sadist, or puzzling out the duality that seeing most examples of suffering pulls up the maternal care taking, while hearing a guy go ‘please don’t!’ about torture makes me smile like the Cheshire cat. The question is why is the glee I feel in torturing someone attached to my libido.
Various theories are posited. Mine is that this stuff is genetic. My mother theorizes that she accidentally traumatized me as a child, triggering masochism and awareness of how truly good seeing a person in distress can feel. Other people suggest I’m working on my psychological issues through a safe filter. But sex is a very, very odd place for things to end up when it could have easily gotten stored with competitive enthusiasm for violent sports (which I have, but I like to participate, not watch and there’s a sexual component that many people don’t have) or fascism.
Maybe what I’m looking at is basically a female desire to rape people. Not all sex is sensual, by candle light and with rose petals, and if you posit that there’s a feedback system that positively rewards organisms for unkindness, to risk hauling in that bastard child of fuzzy science and cultural ideals: evolutionary psychology, this kink encourages me to screw people I’m victimizing so I can harvest their genetics. While people natter on about good providers, and wanting a man to look after me ‘cuz I’m a poor weak woman, maybe one of my reproductive strategies is to go the rounds with the tribe’s war captives or hunt out myself a nice male who might otherwise be unobtainable to me, and ravish him.
Except evidence suggests that some of us kinky folk are getting something emotional out of it, but carnally speaking, there’s nothing going on downstairs. This is a quick reminder about the fallacious tendency to assume what is true for you is true for everybody else. And the evolutionary reproductive strategy falls flat when a partner may just be in it to feel cozily possessed. That, and masochists and men who actively seek this dynamic thrill me and make my preferred target, even as they’re begging for the pain to stop (please?). So I’m not really set up to go out and rape some poor young man unless he happens to be wandering around with the expectation that the women of my tribe are vicious amazons and sort of likes it.
New hypothesis- human brains are very fluid and flexible, violence is an inherent part of being human, and dealing with it successfully as a perpetrator or victim gives you an advantage in this reproduction of genetics game.
Still, I’d love to see how my brain is firing when I’m taking pain (endorphin rush, release of anxiety, arousal, anger) or giving it (glee, endorphin rush, love). I need an MRI system in my dungeon.