(Illustration from SallyNixon)
On March 4th, 20 18, I accidentally got caught in the door on the subway home. On the way home, I have been thinking about a problem, one person gets pleasure from pain, and the other person gets pain from pleasure. Do they get the same ultimate feeling? Do you have an identity?
In the whole bdsm category, the relationship between sadomasochism and pleasure in a broad sense has always been the most difficult and fundamental problem. This is also the key point that this minority group is not understood.
Why do some people like to be sadistic in love and try to be sadistic?
And why do some people like being abused and fight for it?
Is this a challenge to the bottom line of human social ethics?
In the words of Havelock Lock Ellis, a sexual psychologist, if this problem is solved, we can almost make clear the general theoretical basis of those extreme loves.
There are many psychological analyses about bdsm in history, but why do people like bdsm? So far, there is not an explanation accepted by most psychologists.
So I want to find a new way, from a biological point of view, when people enjoy bdsm, what happens to their bodies.
After consulting all kinds of materials, I found that no matter what research I do, there is always a part in everyone's brain, the amygdala. It is the little tomato that looks delicious in the picture below.
It is basically the birthplace of human emotions. Whenever you want to produce an emotion, you need it to initiate a primitive emotion and inform your cerebral cortex, and then your cerebral cortex will transform your primitive emotion into joy, sadness, anger and so on according to the current situation.
If the environment is dangerous and may endanger life, that person's consciousness naturally classifies the original emotional stimulation as fear, and if a relative leaves in the environment, consciousness classifies the original emotion as sadness.
The relationship between amygdala and cerebral cortex is like gasoline and engine. When the mood comes, the amygdala will add some oil to the engine, and the engine will decide its speed according to the actual situation after adding oil.
But this does not explain the confusion and entanglement between pain and happiness. So a scientist named Van Cello did an experiment in 2003, and the result was very interesting. He found that when people feel pain and sexual pleasure, the amygdala secretes the same hormone adrenaline.
That is to say, when people feel pain or sexual pleasure, the amygdala only secretes adrenaline, which reminds the cerebral cortex of the primitive emotion, and the cerebral cortex will judge whether this primitive emotion should be classified as pain or pleasure in combination with the current environment.
This gives the consciousness of the human brain the possibility of transforming emotional deception in the cerebral cortex into results after receiving the original emotions.
Under the conditions of self-abuse/self-abuse and BDSM, slaves clearly know that their own safety will not be threatened, so they can transform their subconscious primitive emotions into other emotions through conscious processing. Abuse or pain should produce fear, but the initial emotion is produced by the amygdala and transmitted to the cortex. After people realize it, they clearly know that there is no need for fear, so the subsequent emotional transformation process is redirected by consciousness. Coupled with the change of adrenal level, the human brain tends to redirect the original emotions to sexual pleasure similar to pain response. Therefore, the most important principle in SM is mutual voluntariness, that is, the master (Dom) should clearly make the slave (Sub) feel safe, and the compulsion of either side will make the emotional redirection fail.
Simply put, why do some people like bdsm at the micro level? Because your cerebral cortex has superpowers, you can redirect the emotional perception caused by pain and abuse to sexual pleasure through the same hormones. Think about it, what happened in your body during TJ was that your cerebral cortex was deceiving your amygdala, and your cerebral cortex was possessed by Chen Duxiu, which made people want to move an orange tree to it.
Think again about the question I asked at the beginning. One person gets pleasure from pain, and the other person gets pain from pleasure. Are the ultimate feelings of the two the same? Seems to have gained a new understanding.
But so far, I have found a new problem, that is, pain and sexual pleasure, which is only part of the bdsm category. Some people don't need pain and sexual pleasure in bdsm games, but enjoy dominance and submission. Some people just need to be with their own masters and feel very comfortable.
Why is this? The above theory still cannot explain this phenomenon.
This has to mention the aphrodisiac in the brain, ah, morphine and endorphins in the brain. It can make people relax and feel happy. During sexual behavior, the level of endorphin is inhibited, but after slapping, the level of endorphin will increase greatly.
But some BDSM have no sexual behavior, and the source of endorphins lies in the master-slave relationship. In the biological world, especially in social creatures, there is a certain master-slave relationship: strong individuals are easy to become leaders, while weak individuals obey it.
When the master-slave relationship in the group is clear, simply putting followers and leaders together will increase the endorphin level of followers, which is probably the source of the so-called sense of security. For example, it is easy for a group of hens to fidget together, but putting a rooster can make the chickens much quieter.
In the case of abuse, the relationship between master and slave is obvious, while in the case of abuse, there is no actual relationship between master and slave, and the imagination of the parties is needed to promote the secretion of endorphins.
From the above analysis, we should know why some people like bdsm at the micro level. Because everyone has the mechanism of emotional redirection, in theory, anyone can develop this mechanism, that is, become a BDSM enthusiast, provided that both parties are willing to give each other enough trust and security.
Since anyone can become a bdsm fan in theory, I'm going to ask a further question and then broaden the scope. Could other species become BDSM?
After literature search, we found that Bdsm behavior can be seen everywhere in nature.
Grey geese are used to mating in water. The mother goose will straighten her head towards the male goose, indicating that she is willing to die for love now. The male goose will climb up the female goose with the hair on its neck. In the process of mating, male geese often pull feathers off the neck of female geese, but female geese will not stop mating because of this.
Grey goose | mating
Lions, tigers and other big cats are usually accompanied by different degrees of biting, scratching and other minor attacks during mating, and females are also in a state of acquiescence and will not resist.
Lions | mating
Gebhard observed in 1953 the biting behavior of more than 24 different mammals similar to bdsm during mating. In addition, Gebhard( 1976) mentioned that from an evolutionary point of view, it is not surprising to find SM sadists.
In fact, BDSM, as an optional sexual preference of mammals, is more like a natural human right than a perversion and fallacy from the perspective of evolution and biology. Unfortunately, the social stigma of BDSM is so great now that most people are more or less under psychological pressure after discovering this hobby, and few people are willing to admit that they are interested in it.
Am I normal? According to statistics, this is the most frequently asked question by participants in all researches related to bdsm so far.
Although it has long been recognized as normal in medicine.
In 1960s, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) deleted BDSM from the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders.
The latest version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) published by the World Health Organization (WHO) is 1 1, which excludes BDSM from the disease category.
Even in China, according to the fifth edition of the Popular Handbook of Diagnosis and Statistics of Mental Disorders, if a person's BDSM behavior is to be defined as a disease for treatment, the following four points must be met at the same time:
(1) lasts for more than half a year.
(2) Behavior will bring self-indigestible pain.
(3) Damage the normal life of yourself or others.
(4) Sexual abuse of people without consent.
So finally, I want to tell everyone who is reading the article that trying to understand every thing and hobby that doesn't hurt others is actually the most abnormal thing in the world, that is, people always have an idea that it is normal to think that they belong to the public.
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