More on harm

Sofia writes, “I’ve never thought about this from the perspective of the men who fuck me. I want them to feel a hundred percent good about me, about our relationship, but at the same time I want them to want to harm me somehow. Which I guess can be complicated. Or not. Well, I don’t know.”

I think this is part of why dominance of this sort can be so challenging in an emotionally intimate relationship: the wish to harm someone you love is difficult, painful, even impossible. And even if it’s an attenuated harm, a metaphorical harm, it’s best, sexually, when that attenuation is remote, when it feels, to both parties, like the real thing.

2 comments

    1. I agree they often overlap, and I agree they’re different, but I don’t think I’m conflating them. Maybe I’m talking about a certain, less sensual, form of dominance. But it’s aggression that I think is hard to reconcile with intimacy, not sadism.

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