Pleasure

It sometimes seems as if the carrot of pleasure and the stick of pain herd us through our lives like cattle.  And in a sense, they do...  it's part of being living creatures.

There are so many things that can bring a rush of pleasure — being able to help a friend, the taste of chocolate, the sight of a sunset or a beautiful face, feeling successful at work, the wind in your hair, standing cold and tired under a hot shower... the list goes on and on.  Life may be full of pain, but it's also just brimming with pleasures. 

Stoics and ascetics have observed for millennia how ephemeral pleasure is:  it's here, and then it's gone.  The same is true of pain, of course, which we also quickly forget once it's over.  We ourselves are ephemeral too, sweeping from birth to death like Bede's sparrow passing through the great hall in winter.  Being ephemeral is not so bad. 

I'm surprised, though, how hard it is to recall acute sexual pleasure.  I can remember a touch or a smell or a taste, and I can remember having had lovely sex last night, and I can remember what we did, but it's just not easy to recall the core of it.  Sometimes, remembering sexy things I was doing will make me horny all over again, but that's not the same.  If I try, I can remember a feeling of wildness, and nice musky sexy smells, and the wonderful genital sensations that gradually become whole-body sensations, and how that gathered into the transports of orgasm, but remembering takes surprising effort given how nice the experience was, and the recollection has an abstract quality.  Once the transcendent part passes, some essential part of it seems unrecoverable.

I suppose that's why some people feel sex isn't very important — it's just a "momentary pleasure"  that you barely remember in the morning.  The same may be said of a good meal, and it's worth keeping in mind that in both cases, even if the actual experience doesn't stick in your mind, the nourishment you receive does endure.  The same is true of pain, too — even if you don't remember the sensation of it, it may well create in you an enduring visceral aversion to whatever caused it.  Pleasure and pain may themselves be fleeting, but their effects are not.  They are our guides. 

Pleasure Mixed With Pain

When people mix pain in with their pleasure and it turns them on, they are practicing sado-masochism.  While sado-masochistic activities have become much more socially acceptable in recent years, and have even become quite fashionable in certain circles, they continue to be regarded with considerable fear and loathing by some of the people who don't practice them. 

BDSM (bondage, dominance or discipline, and sado-masochism)  is a complex topic, and encompasses a whole bunch of very different fetishes, but it's worth considering a bit, in case you feel drawn to this side of pleasure but are apprehensive about what it means. 

First of all, are people in the BDSM community all nasty weirdos?  No, not at all.  There certainly exists a small subset of unpleasant people, as in any group, and you certainly don't want to find yourself tied up by one of them with no one else around, but all the folks I know are well-intentioned, ethical and trustworthy.  Let's put it this way — I'd feel a lot safer in your typical dungeon than at your typical frat party. 

Secondly, is liking pain really strange?  No.  Pain and pleasure, as discussed above, have a lot in common.  Most masochists, people who find it sexy and pleasurable to be hurt, don't actually like the pain, what they like is the pleasure, the sensation of pleasure, that can be achieved by combining just the right level of pain with sexual arousal.  The pleasure is what's nice, and the pain is a way to get there.  Pleasure is what sadists and masochists conspire to achieve. 

Of course, there's a lot more to it, because most BDSM goes on in the head, and for many serious practitioners, it has to do with coping with and healing childhood abuse of one form or another.  If that's not you, don't worry about it — just know that a great deal of it is uplifting and beneficial to the people who practice it, and it's their business to make it work for themselves, so you don't have to be concerned. 

But if you're interested, you can play around with the sensation part of it quite easily without being the least bit kinky yourself. 

Try spanking, for example (interestingly, it does help if you were spanked as a child).  Have your partner get you aroused, and then, while continuing to stimulate you genitally, begin to spank you lightly.  Set up some signal ahead of time to indicate lighter or harder.  Work up gradually from the "doesn't feel like anything" to the "ow that's beginning to sting" and stay there for a while, easing off when it begins to hurt and increasing the intensity when it falls away from the boundary of pain.  It's harder than you might think, but most people fairly quickly find it at least interesting, and some people find it very nice indeed.  What you're doing at a biochemical level is adding endorphins to the erotic stew of your brain chemicals. 

If you're drawn to explore this area further, there's a lot of good information available — see our links and resources page for places to start.

Pleasure and Spirituality

Pleasure is something that many spiritual traditions take a strong stand on.  Ascetic groups such as the Manicheans, the Jansenists, and many Christian subgroups view pleasure as something to be shunned in the pursuit of transcendence.  Various other traditions regard pleasure as an essential ingredient of transcendence. 

It's worth noting in passing that quite a few ascetic traditions embrace activities that most people in the BDSM community would consider hedonistic, but because they involve pain, humiliation and self-denial, the ascetics don't associate them with the fearful negative consequences of pleasure.

Words are thrown around with such contempt sometimes that we don't bother looking at what they really mean.  Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure, has so long been vilified as irresponsible and self-indulgent by ascetics that many people accept without thinking that hedonism is despicable and selfish. 

In a way, most debates over selfishness and altruism are just plain silly, because everyone makes decisions so as to gain pleasure and avoid pain.  For most people, the long-term pleasures of helping others frequently outweigh the short-term pleasures of acquisition or laziness — most people behave altruistically reasonably often, and it gives them great pleasure to do so.  Also, the desire to avoid pain is a universal motivator.  When you really feel like harming someone else, often what holds you back is that you would suffer a painful loss of self-respect if you did.  Is that moral and righteous?  Perhaps, but it's also straightforwardly animal — it's how we're made. 

We all seek pleasure at least unconsciously in our decision-making, and seeking it consciously doesn't have to be selfish or simplistic or degrading.  On the contrary, intelligent pursuit of pleasure usually leads to the same behavior as is advocated by traditional morals.  You may think of an epicure as someone who is devoted to luxury and fancy food, but in this you're the victim of ancient and persistent propaganda — Epicurus himself lived extremely simply, and advocated a life-style of restraint. 

So let's take the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain out of the realm of "right" and "wrong" and assume instead that they're natural (and virtually universal) ways of behaving.  Doing so let's us focus on much more interesting questions, such as what pleasures are most satisfying to pursue, and what pains most important to avoid.  Once we start thinking along those lines, we almost immediately find ourselves agreeing with a lot of familiar ethical and moral precepts.  What we don't find, though, is that anyone else has a right to dictate to us some absolute version of right and wrong.  Infuriating as it may be to people who seek to avoid their own problems by meddling in other people's, every one of us really does have a right to try to figure this stuff out for ourselves. 

Advice can be helpful, but it's the pleasures and pains of our own lives that are our touchstones, our markers on the path to transcendence.  Yes, they are rooted in our animal heritage — and my personal experience is, they're also our best signposts to the divine.