The dichotomies dominant-submissive and sadist-masochist are poorly understood if they are reduced to complements of one another. They are often interlinked: for the sadist to get what they want, they must hurt and control someone. For the masochist to get what they want, they must carefully select someone to surrender their agency to. This accounts for their statistical correlation, but using them interchangeably is simply bad psychology.
Deleuze has written admirably on the topic of masochism, unveiling its nature as essentially contractual and ritualistic. The masochist plays at victimhood and, in so doing, educates and dominates their torturer — hence the system of safe-words, boundaries, rules, penal codes, images and signs. A specific fantasy for a specific state of the body. In this sense, the masochist has a natural alignment with dominance, and the ideal torturer is a kind of submissive. This is acting — anyone can see if it they know the lines.
Sadism is something different altogether — a direct and brutal assault on reproductive and gregarious “reason” in service of baser, “realer” instincts. No room for law, contract, or theatrics. A true sadist and a true masochist have no business coming together — the last thing the sadist wants is a willing victim. But what dominates here isn’t personal whim or idiosyncratic desire, but an impersonal, even pre-personal force of violence that the sadist gives themselves over to. The sadist “submits” to cosmic and universal vectors on one side, and “dominates” earthly and individualised bodies on the other.
Have you ever really hurt someone, reader? In that moment, you feel yourself to be a conduit for something ecstatic, awful, and sublime.
There they are, exhausted from days of fasting, their hormone levels crashing, their throat dry. Poor thing, in over its head. The last time you bruised them, and the time before that, their fear started to sound real, and you knew they finally understood. But if they’re regretting their choices now, they’ll soon learn to affirm them. Every victim knows intimately the way things go: they all crave hurt they can’t control.
No more games, no more theatrics. The skin splits under the razor — and the sun smiles.
