SM, a practice “trendy”
SM practices are now very “fashion” is the new chic perversion. Women’s magazines are promoting it by telling their readers the shops where they can obtain the best price a little dress in black latex thigh in stiletto heels or a good old martinet families. “A good little spanking: this is perhaps what we need” recently headlined the Cosmopolitan magazine.
SM, contracted form of sadomasochism, says a priori the idea of a relationship between opposing characters or even contrary. Krafft-Ebing it is who first coined the term in the late 19th century, referring to the writings of two great writers, Sade and Sacher-Masoch.
Inventory festivities
sado_maso SM contains a spectacular dimension that requires an appropriate costume, a disguise which sets the precise status and role of each of the protagonists. Modern SM includes several types of practices: floggings with crops, whips or other swifts; inserting objects in vaginal orifices, anal or oral; links that are intended to coerce and to immobilize the subject; rituals of humiliation and domination in which the subject is required to take all kinds of positions.
Finally, in a more extreme form, it inflicts on the subject of temporary or permanent body modifications such as piercing, scarification or tattooing. The ritual takes place in a “dungeon”.
The reversal of roles eroticized
In its “soft” form, the SM is a fun reversal, controlled and temporary positions that each occupies in society. This is how men of power have often been big fans of SM liabilities, in which they can at will occupy the position of the dominated. Women fulfill the role of dominatrix as a corollary of their lower social position. This is because women have achieved positions of social power they can now also occupy the position of the subject in the rituals of the SM. In this perspective, the SM is a sort of safety valve where you can play the other.
A lot of noise … for few followers
But if there is much talk now of SM in the media and the fashion aired paraphernalia domineering, practitioners are few. There are two clubs in Paris that offer dungeons followers of these games as well as several dozen prostitutes who offer “therapy” SM for gold.
Eroticized pain or ability to control it?
We find in this type of relationship, the idea that violence and the resulting pain would be a source of intense pleasure for the person who administers much as for the one who receives. It is therefore an eroticized violence and pain. Sadomasochism also includes domination, mental anguish and humiliation. Freud is the one who most emphasized the connection between the opposite dimensions of sadomasochism and their presence within the same individual at the same time and in terms of the relationship between two people where one can embody one either of these lines.
Stoller has proposed another interpretation to the eroticism of pain. According to him, this is not the pain itself, but the ability to effectively control pain, which is the source of masochistic pleasure. People who feel this type of use would have experienced intense physical pain during their childhood and learned to control them: the pleasure comes from the possibility of control.
Perversion psychopathology of everyone
Originally, sadomasochism was considered reprehensible and pathological sexual perversion. Freud and psychoanalysts have expanded the meaning of the concept by considering that the couple “activity – passivity” is opposing and inseparable fundamental characteristics of sexual life in general.
Towards a dialectic of master and slave
Challenging prejudices underlying the clinical psychopathology, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze considered sadism and masochism, as have been described in the works of Sade and Sacher-Masoch, are not the “couple of opposites “psychoanalysts. According to Deleuze, sadism would refer to the omnipotence of the master who willfully ignores the presence of the object to which it requires all of its desire to almost impersonally. Sadism and would be a form of absolute power over the other up to its negation.
Masochism would report to a different logic, that of the contract. The subject would be looking for a dominant (or more often a dominatrix) he would need to train and educate through a contract with him. Masochism would be the expression of a contractual relationship between two free beings whose contract between them sets the limits of what is lawful to do and not do. In this contract, the masochist causes the dominator to bring along to comply with its terms and waived. The dialectic of master and slave, dear to Hegel, finds its full expression here and sadism masochism would not be as extreme and sexualized forms of social relations.
A fully granted and contractual relationship
SM fashionable now is part of a consensual relationship between two free beings. And that is the signature of the contract between the two partners which sets the course of the ritual and its limits, making it an acceptable practice in an era that places legal and negotiated dimension of social and interpersonal relationships at the top of its values
Eve Maitresse 