By: wren

In reply to Trying to Understand, But….

I really like the martial arts analogy, and I don’t have anything near that good, but I have a few thoughts I can share…

I’m a Buddhist and a survivor of child abuse. So I totally understand where “all violence is bad” and “violence and sex do not go together” come from. As a survivor, sex of any sort used to be a minefield. Though I’ve worked through most of that, there are still certain vanilla acts that I refuse to engage in and the idea of doing them with someone I love fills me with ick. It’s totally fine to not get why people are into some strange thing or other. Humans are weird.

There’s a phrase in the BDSM community: “hurt, not harm.” To hurt someone is to cause a physical sensation. Yes pain, yes even physical injury, but ultimately it’s about sensation, and sensations in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. Something can be hot or cold and there’s no moral judgment there; all objects have temperatures, and human bodies are capable of perceiving those temperatures. However, to harm someone is to cause distress, suffering, emotional turmoil, lasting damage; and this sort of thing is unacceptable. Sure non-consensual violence causes harm, but so do plenty of other things. Indeed, one can harm others without causing any physical sensation at all, and people do it every day outside of the bedroom.

But just as harm can exist without hurt, so too hurt can exist without harm. Consider surgery which, by definition, requires causing physical injury to one’s patients. And yet, surgeons, like all doctors, take a hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm”. How is it that stabbing someone, removing organs, etc, how can any of that be allowed?! It’s because we do not perceive these things as causing harm. We believe that causing these sorts of injuries is beneficial overall as a means of dealing with certain severe situations. But notably, we in Western cultures only think of this as natural because we were raised to. There are numerous other cultures where surgery is viewed as a great evil that does cause harm. I bring up cultural aspects because I think this question of what causes hurt vs what causes harm is ultimately a question of culture. But one’s own culture is often invisible until you’ve learned how to see it.

Another thing to bear in mind about pain is that it’s a physiological response. Among other things, that response includes a rush of endorphins. Just as people enjoy the endorphin rush of running, or extreme sports, or sex, or rollercoasters, so too they enjoy pain for the exact same reason. Endorphins, like any drug, leads to altered states of consciousness, and humans really enjoy those. The only difference is that it’s a drug your own body makes. To bring up a really contentious topic, this is also why people engage in self injury (SI) as a coping mechanism. The rush of endorphins can serve to calm psychological distress. Thus, SI is like any other form of self-medication.

Even though I bring up things like surgery and SI, I don’t think s/m is all about catharsis. For some folks it prolly is, sure, and that’s fine, but I doubt it’s the primary thing for most folks. Certainly it isn’t for me.