To quote from a post on Beyond The Valley of the Femdoms:
Something that gets lost a lot in conversation about female dominance is how we feel. There’s a lot of talk about “using subs for our pleasure,” but our pleasure is rarely talked about. No one talks about what it feels like. The model of pleasure in female dominance is centered in male fantasy. We’re so often actors and objects in submissive male fantasy, rather than subjects of our own.
Sad but true. We hear so much about what men want, what turns them on, what they wish dominant women would do, what we don’t do enough of, but so very little about what actually does it for us. To be fair, when I’m reading porn I’m generally pretty focused on the bottom, but the dom’s reactions to him are a big part of the story.
And part of it, of course, is not enjoying feeling vulnerable. Talking directly about what I want is scary. What if people think I’m weird or creepy or boring and pathetic? It’s still important, though. If we ever want the scene to be more welcoming to potential doms (like potential slayers but pervier), we need to talk about what they get out of the whole kink deal.
So, let’s talk about sadism. It’s easier for me to describe since I have so much more experience with sadism than I do with dominance, and I haven’t gotten to play for a while and oh god I want to hurt someone who wants to suffer for me.
It’s kind of physical hunger. The longer I go without getting to hurt anyone, the more I think about it. Not unlike obsessing about food when you skipped breakfast and lunch is still hours away. I get restless, and I feel something like an itch in my teeth that can only be soothed by sinking them into someone. Yes, I read far too many vampire books as a kid 🙂
There are a lot of reasons I enjoy sadism: reactions, power, trust. I absolutely love the noises people make when they’re in pain. My very favourite place to bite someone is the place where the neck meets the shoulder because it puts my ear where I can hear even the tiniest whimper or catch in their breath. I love the way people squirm and struggle when they’re hurting too.
Aside from the obvious hotness of whimpering and struggling, it’s a rush to have the power to hurt someone. To break such a fundamental taboo and be thanked for it afterwards never gets old. It’s not nice, and not easy to explain to people who don’t feel it, but having that kind of power over someone is as satisfying as it is dangerous. Inflicting pain is just such a visceral way to show who’s in charge and who isn’t.
Finally, someone letting me hurt them is the most incredible display of trust. It would be so easy to go to far, or make a mistake and really damage someone, but they trust me to take care of them even as I hurt them. To me, it’s one of the most intimate things I can do.
Thanks for this. I don’t think I’m a sadist specifically (more perhaps as an occasional byproduct of other desires?), but your description makes it very understandable why someone would be. I definitely like the whimpers and squirming, and the power and the trust. Hotness.
I want there to be so much more discussion and stories around what women want, and what women who aren’t submissive want, in particular. So often what I hear is either what men want, or that doms should be careful not to be rapey. Which we should! Clearly. But what we get out of this isn’t described very much.
(She says, perving on some hot men in NaNo smut and finding that having picked an evil queen to do it with is making her brain hurt. 😛 *wanders back to the CFNM tale instead*)
This makes me ache. I’ve only ever had one encounter, one in 36 years, where I got to hurt someone for fun, and this is such a perfect evocation of why I enjoyed that so much, and fuck me how can I miss something I’ve never really had so very much?
A domme friend of mine says that in an ideal world, the dom/sub relation resembles a Moebius strip. Dom and sub appear to be on separate planes, but in fact are on the same surface and headed towards the same place.
The name of that place is ‘transcendence’.
What’s interesting in the way you describe the joy of sadism is how it maps on to the universal human need for trust, acceptance, intimacy, release from taboo, and the experience of total vulnerability, because, as you point out, the dom is as vulnerable as the sub. The fear of having one’s inner monsters rejected is part of the emotional baggage that is carried by both.
That fear is exorcised on those blessed occasions when one is totally accepted by the Other.
In short, the hunger you describe is as much a psychological as a physical need.