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falenas108 comments on Open Thread, May 26 - June 1, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Consensual sadism isn't a goal of raising the sanity waterline any more than having better sex is, but many people consider both to be enjoyable things. We can't say anything that does not strictly raise the waterline is automatically bad, or even a neutral thing.
In my experience, this is very much the opposite of what happens. As a sadist, I need to be more aware of what my bottoms are experiencing. In most cases, it isn't that people who are bottoming enjoy all pain, I had to learn to recognize the difference in reactions between pleasure, good pain, bad pain that they like, and bad pain that they don't like. This is much harder than in vanilla practices, which just needs to differentiate between any type of pain and pleasure.
As for sociability, the BDSM community is very much a social one, and I don't see how being in it would decrease this.
What do you mean by “bad” for that to make sense?
For some people, certain types and amounts of pain is actually processed as a basically enjoyable thing. Other types of pain are still processed as pain, but is still something they want to happen and enjoy on a different level.
The distinction that I make is physically damaging versus not. So good pain that I like is pretty simple (hair-pulling, spicy food, moderate heat, etc.); good pain that I don't like would include a lot of the pain caused by exercise; bad pain that I like would include excessive heat (for some reason damaging levels of heat are easier for me to enjoy than other sorts of injury; I've burned myself before by walking on hot pavement that wasn't quite too hot to enjoy), and bad pain that I don't like would include stubbed toes, sprained ankles, and the like.