masochism

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy--even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.

Mental discipline, prayer and remoteness from the world and its disturbing visions reduce temptation to a minimum, but they can never entirely abolish it. In medieval traditions, abbeys and convents were always considered to be expugnable centres of revolt against infernal dominion on earth. They became, accordingly, special targets. Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism.

I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully,"that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.

There are men who have themselves whipped simply to increase their sexual pleasure. These, in contrast with true masochists, regard flagellation as a means to an end.

I__ not a notch on a belt.___ou could never be a notch, London Chantelle. You__e the whole belt, sugar.

And when he ran the blades over her she felt light as a feather, floating happily into that place where pain and pleasure walked hand in hand, fully clear and conscious and she looked out to the darkness that lay outside of their artificial day. All too soon it was gone, her vision dimming and her breaths evening as she found somewhere darker which centred around the golden light of her Master__ voice as he spoke to her.

Who am I to deny my Master pleasure, simply because it is not at the hands of myself? He is free to do as he will, because of the life that he has given me. I am thankful for him, for the fact that out of all of us, I am the one that he chooses to keep and care for as his own.

Ana was a perpetual victim in a never-ending search for a victimizer.

The thought of a comedy with paid prostitutes always seemed so silly and purposeless, for a person hired by me could never take the place of my imagination of a 'cruel mistress'.

I have also fantasised myself to be his female slave, but this does not suffice, for after all every woman can be the slave of her husband.

It is true that often she doesn't want advice; she wants a listening ear. At the same time, however, the wise wife will realize her husband's desire to help and advise is strong. She should refrain from getting angry and humor him a bit, as one wife did by saying, "Thanks for the input. I know I am not the brightest bulb on the tree when it comes to certain things. I am glad we have each other.

Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment.

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust.

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors__he living__ould attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs__hose who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact__ad been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. your life?

Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away.

He soon recognized the fact that the stimulus proceeded from the idea to be in the power of a woman rather than from the act of violence itself.

The sadist desires to command and control. The masochist desires to be freed from the burdens of liberty. That is Socialism.