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.
For what it’s worth, it sounds like you’re conflating dominance and sadism here. They often overlap, but not always.
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.