The (New and Improved) Loving Dominant Read Online Free

sex; of being treated by this person as by a master…”
    Aside from the near miss of failing to recognize that submission is independent of hetero- or homo-erotic orientation and throwing in the term perversion, he came fairly close to how many submissives would describe themselves. However, after that good start, he ruined it by adding three words, “humiliated and abused,” at the end. With just three words, he narrowed the definition to include only the small percentage of submissives who do enjoy humiliation, and convicted the master, a person who is doing what the submissive wants done, of being abusive.
    Krafft-Ebing was even less kind to dominants and tops, who he implicitly lumps with sadists.
    “Sadism is the experience of sexually pleasurable sensations (including orgasm) produced by acts of cruelty, bodily punishment inflicted by one’s own person or when witnessed in others, be they animals or human beings. It may consist of an innate desire to humiliate, hurt, wound or even destroy the others in order thereby to create sexual pleasure in one’s self.”
    Unfortunately, aside from some amusing — or horrifying — examples (depending on your point of view), Krafft-Ebing is almost useless to anyone looking for insights. Sadism is simply seen as “a pathological intensification of the male sexual character,” and females are seen as anxious, irritable and weak. (I wonder how Mistress Mir, Goddess Sia or any of the other myriad dominant women feel about that?)
    Freud, the father of modern psychology, took the ball and ran with it. Not one to do things by halves, he came up with three separate and sometimes contradictory theories. In “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” he claimed that sadism is a component part of the sexual instinct, an “instinct for mastery” that is inherently masculine, and masochism is “nothing but inverted sadism.” Freud declared that sadism and masochism are interchangeable. Masochism is only sadism that has turned inward upon the self.
    Sadists behave as they do, according to this theory, because, during childhood, they were trapped in the anal stage of development, attempting to control the parent figure by releasing and withholding feces. (Does the term “crock of shit” come to mind?)
    In his later essay, “A Child Being Beaten,” Freud shifted the birth of sadomasochism to the child’s first oedipal conflict and linked it with parental punishment and punishment fantasies. His argument was that the child links forbidden, sexual feelings with the fear of punishment. In effect, pain is the payment for pleasure.
    With better footwork than a running back, Freud next feinted toward his first theory but then went wide and, in “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” hypothesized that masochism, not sadism, is the primary component and linked it with the death instinct. For one thing, masochism, in his eyes, was necessary so that women could endure childbirth.
    Eric Fromm, a leading light of the Frankfurt School, a group of German intellectuals who desperately tried to explain the rise of Nazism, moved the discussion of sadism and masochism from the individual, where Freud had staked his claim, to society, or at least to the individual’s reaction to society. In The Fear of Freedom, Fromm postulated that freedom itself was frightening in that it caused intolerable loneliness and that individuals adopt various strategies to escape from it. He maintained that sadomasochists use control as such an escape hatch.
    For example, masochists were described as consciously complaining about being weak, inferior and powerless, while at the same time seeking circumstances where these feelings were intensified.
    Fromm argued that the masochists, failing repeatedly at being strong and independent, became even more weak and passive to reduce the conflict between what they want and what they could accomplish, like someone who says, “If I can’t play perfect baseball, I’ll