I recently came across a status with concerns about classes with titles like the one for one of my own most popular classes, “Make Me a Masochist: Changing Your Relationship with Pain.” I don’t begrudge the person who wrote it (or anyone who replied to it feeling similarly) for their concerns. Nevertheless, I *do* stand by the title, and I want to tell you why — partially for people who might not be sure if the class is for them, and partially for anybody who thinks there’s nothing they can do for their pain tolerance.
This is a slightly edited version of my response to that comment. A warning: I’m going to spoil the magic.
I agree. You can’t just make someone a masochist in the pain = pleasure way. More on this in a second. The “Make Me a Masochist” title is a quote of something that gets said to me pretty often and why the class was originally developed and I think it’s an actively bad/impossible request.
I *also* think the “I want to take more” rhetoric is actively dangerous and harmful… very much so. Even more so, the desire to get bigger bruises. It’s a huge problem and [something I write and speak against pretty frequently.](https://fetlife.com/users/3055227/posts/3428272) That said, a friend corrected me years ago on a misbelief that masochism could only mean directly interpreting pain as pleasure. In how “masochism” was initially defined, when it was considered a mental illness (another issue entirely, but I digress!), it simply meant enjoying or desiring pain. That’s it. The definition, it turns out, did not actually differentiate between if it’s actually enjoying pain physically, just enjoying suffering, or enjoying receiving pain for other reasons.
If someone is taking the class, I assume they (or their partner(s) on their behalf) are already interested in this. They all have their own reason why they want to enjoy their S/m scenes more or have them last longer, be that intimacy, suffering for service, or whatever it may be. So they’re masochists. Congrats: if you’re coming to the class, you’ve likely already qualified for this category without me.
There are 100% real pain processing techniques that can be used in the moment to help get past the catastrophizing of pain to help you be able to focus more on those reasons. A real-world case-in-point? Lamaze breathing. Now, acute pain is very different from other pain processing techniques, something I know well as someone who is disabled. Pain in scene is a totally different ballgame from pain when I’m balled up in bed unable to move, but those acute processes certainly can be helpful and taught for some (though I’m sure not all) — I’ll never forget after teaching this class at a convention when, the next day, someone told me they used something they learned in class to get their heavy luggage out to their vehicle! Moreover, there are small things in how bottoms warm up for, move and operate within, and treat their bodies after scenes that sets them up for failure. Knowing these things can help more than we realize.
The class description itself usually gives a fairly accurate rundown of what I teach in summary. That being said, here are a few of the concrete things that I go over:
- The kinds of habits that help us to recover from and evaluate pains in daily life, so that we can start scenes from the best possible place for our individual bodies (rather than from elevated pain levels that already decrease scene time to get to our personal limits)
- Body awareness and what the physical differences are between “good pain” and “bad pain” so that we can talk our minds out of catastrophizing things that aren’t emergency issues and that we can better evaluate when an actual physical “I have to stop this now for my own safety and future scenes” occurs
- Mobility and warm-up techniques, one of my areas of actual expertise, as the way many kinksters stretch before scenes actually creates micro-trauma in muscles that will again change the “starting point” of a scene and decrease time to personal limit
- Ways to collaborate productively and additively with tops during and post-processing scenes based on our own experiences so that they are setting us up for success, too
My own philosophy as an educator here is that managing your relationship with pain is multi-systemic and involves behaviors that are both constant and consistent. There *are* in-the-moment techniques that work for some, but that’s just one portion of my class and I think probably the case for most who get asked to teach this sort of thing regularly. If someone doesn’t want to enjoy S/m, I can’t make them. But if something is getting in their way? Maybe I have strategies that help.
Body/mind/exercise science, communication and relationship skills, and personal mindfulness and body awareness are certainly all teachable. Nobody should ever feel obligated to learn them. Nobody should ever feel like being able to “take more pain” is needed for anyone, themselves or anybody else. But if they want to? If that’s an active desire? There’s nothing wrong with learning or teaching the above. That much, I feel sure of.