Mistress Fei,
Freud is good, but I wonder what you think about this quote by philosopher Michel Foucault?
I don’t think that this movement of sexual practices has anything to do with the disclosure or the uncovering of S/M tendencies deep within our unconscious, and so on. I think that S/M is much more than that; it’s the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously. The idea that S/M is related to a deep violence, that S/M practice is a way of liberating this violence, this aggression, is stupid. We know very well what all those people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body–through the eroticization of the body. I think it’s a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization [i.e., the “degenitalization”] of pleasure. The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure, and the idea that sexual pleasure is the root of all our possible pleasure–I think that’s something quite wrong. These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations, and so on.
and
“…if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations. Because it would simply be a matter of obedience. ….resistance remains superior to the forces of the process; power relations are obliged to change with the resistance.” (again from “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity”)
There are some more, but I thought these would be a good starting off point….the creation of new possibilities of pleasure, and resistance must be a part of it.
I hope to see you again soon Fei
siggy