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Silence8 -> The Psychology of the Sadist (5/1/2010 9:06:14 PM)
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This occurred to me last night right before hitting the sack, which seems to happen a lot, so I never get to sleep on time.
Thoughts? Does this ring true, at all?
If anything I might be too easy on the sadist, and too harsh on 'normal people'. Also, maybe I miss the essential relationship between the two, how normal and sadomasochistic sex exist as two sides of the same (arguably 'fucked-up') coin.
Sexual sadism, I think, represents a fundamental reversal of the standard modern objectification of the sexual partner. This standard objectification, that most individuals in modern society perform, entails using the sexual partner as a purely physical device from which to dissociate while mentally projecting one's living fantasies, whether of other women, men, or something else altogether. In this sense, sex merely extends masturbation from a solo act to a mutually solipsistic activity for two or more disconnected partners. In modern times this disconnection is of course reinstantiated in the distance of the condom's thickness. You masturbate inside of him or her, and this you call sex.
The objectification enacted by the sadist occurs much more ambiguously. In one sense, the sadist's joy demands that the tension he or she imposes categorically finds himself or himself the only possible agent of resolution; in this sense, one might argue that the sadist's imposed form of objectification exceeds that embodied in the standard sexual mode, that is, if we immediately relate objectification to one's position in the appearance of power structures. Yet we miss here the entire point. Not only does the sadist very consciously address the partner's role as an object -- and we can argue whether in this way the sadist contrasts with the norm -- most importantly, the sadist consciously and quite essentially produces his partner's failure as an object. That is to say, straightforwardly, that the sadist establishes his or her partner as an impossible object, or, rather, not an object at all. In the case of heterosexual sexual sadistic men, we arrive at what appears a rather unlikely and unexpected solution, the sadistic male suddenly representing an almost uncanny feminism where one would immediately expect the opposite, the most derivative misogyny.
What is more, the state of the mind that the sadist attempts to manifest in the sexual partner more often than not represents an engagement of his or her own state of mind displaced over time. So whereas the partner in the standard sexual mode serves an an empty symbolic conduit through which to pursue strictly external fantasy coordinates, (just as money serves as an empty conduit through which to activate labor value), the submissive partner in the sadomasochistic mode becomes the endpoint itself, the ultimate object Herself, that is to say, the mutual simultaneous means and ends for engaging the humanity of one's experience in its extremities, in the emotional force of impossible predicament in the face of impossibly boundless human will.
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