Male Emotional Masochism & Self-Esteem

I love the old black and white photos.

The desire to be treated as worthless, dehumanized, humiliated, degraded sparks all sort of responses.

Female Rejection

Some female tops - but hardly all - are put off by this form of emotional S&M. It:

• Seems too anti-romantic.
• Requires them to behave in a manner that contradicts their sense of who they are.
• Involves acts that are physically disgusting.
• Too hurtful, too cruel.

That is easily dealt with. Tops who can’t cope with that should simply stay away from men who require it. (For some of us it is one option among many.)

— This section, addressing emotional masochistic men is really the gist of what I meant to focus on in this note: —

Male Confusion

The real problem is how men with needs or desires - with sexuality the distinction can be confusing, even irrelevant - to be treated as worthless.

If your desire to be humiliated causes you to feel that you actually are worthless then at best you are allowing what gives you an erection to color and distort your self-perception. The second greatest sexual sin.

Our erotic hungers shape some of who we are. But no one really is nothing more than the totality of their lusts. That you desire to feel lowly shouldn’t mean that you are lowly.

Don’t Fool Yourself

If you misconstrue your appetites as your sense of self then you probably will never have them met. You are presuming that someone - rather some generic entity - that you have eroticized into a glorious status - should involve herself with a person of no value. Why should she?

Really I suspect you’ll never try to experience what you imaging yourself wanting while you wank. For you asking for the experience has become the experience. And what you’ve hypnotized yourself into believing is your just deserts is so frightening that you’ll probably never risk experiencing it.

As Epiphany

As I’ve probably made tediously clear there is a portion of my masochism that craves a ritual playacting of abusiveness and dehumanization. That - given the right partner - I might want to enact scenes of exploitation and degradation has never meant that I think I am. I’m a smart, self-actualized, likable man. I don’t think I’m human junk.

But I’d never want to do this with a top that couldn’t enjoy it. As a bottom I do expect my own pleasure. But my pleasure is largely conditional on the top’s satisfaction. If she could find no joy in this then I wouldn’t want to be obliged as a favor. It just doesn’t work that way for me. (And I think some of you have never quite understood this.)

That I may have violent wishes doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten the tender pleasure of being able to say “Thank you, ma’am.” (I didn’t mean to wander into this apologia but I do get irked when one part of my sexuality is treated as the whole. We pansexual polyfetishist switches who are given to the plain and perverse hate to be thusly confined.)

In my case I think this kind of experience is something akin to the cathartic. It must reach way, way back into my infantile brain. (In leafing through a book* today I learned that as toddlers we have droplets of eroticizing hormones coursing through our system. After about age four they cease until our teens. Therein may lay the source of many of our atypical lusts.)

Inconsistency

While I know there are women who do enjoy working this part of a male masochist’s mind it seems much more consistent among gay male sadists. Almost a given. One of those odd gender things that baffle me.

And having seen a local personal ad by a man who seeks people with low self-esteem I have a real awareness there may be tops who want to exploit it for unhealthy reasons.

I guess the gist of what I wanted to say is: guys learn to think sanely about your sexuality. But I might as well be pleading for tolerance, peace on earth and economic equality.

* Worth reading: Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography.