Masochism: The tendency to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from one’s pain or humiliation. It presents an explicit negotiation of consent: recipient, ritual, practice.
Electromotive: Produces or tends to produce an electric current.
For most, being gay is having gone through tremendous suffering – developmentally, culturally, and even within our own relationships, romantic or otherwise. We have been abused individually and collectively, largely at the hands of other men in our lives, leaving us feeling powerless.
A significant way to depower our abusers is to exert control over exactly when and how we feel pain. For those who like to ask for punishment, the reward can be an experience that bridges the paradox of our human experience: the union of opposites, the collapse of right and wrong. The embodied message of our formative years – I suffered for being who I am – is then transformed into: I suffer because I want to feel even more.
