Q: Why Do I Want to be Hurt?

This is an excerpt from my pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence with a very dear friend of mine. She asked me why she craves to be hurt and used and this was my answer. Of course, there are as many rea­sons to want to be hurt as there are peo­ple; this answer is based on what I know about her. Still, the under­ly­ing cur­rents are gen­eral enough that it may be inter­est­ing read­ing for others.

I had men­tioned ear­lier in our cor­re­spon­dence that she prob­a­bly felt like vio­lent love-​making that left her aching and bruised was an emo­tional spa-​day for her. She expressed sur­prise that I had that insight into her feel­ings and that is where we come in:

A:

How could I not know that you con­sider the escape into pain and ten­der vio­lence like a spa-​day? It may leave your body sore and aching and bruised, but to your heart and your soul, this is a spa-​day.

You get to put a sign on your brain, “Gone fish­ing,” and you get to for­get for a lit­tle while about respon­si­bil­i­ties and demands. The only demand put on you then is to be all the female you can be and it feels good, doesn’t it? It is the one demand you can meet with­out think­ing because it is the one demand that requires you not to think. It is one demand you can­not pos­si­bly fail at because it is what you are.

In here, you get to strip off every­thing and sim­ply be your pri­mal, ele­men­tal self. Beau­ti­ful, pas­sion­ate, grace­ful, recep­tive, warm, accept­ing, desired. You don’t have to do any­thing but sim­ply be.

You are not even required to think. In fact, that is what feels best for you, isn’t it? You are free to feel and to con­nect with your­self emo­tion­ally. In some ways, in here, you feel more true to your­self than out there.

And don’t you dare feel self­ish. You need this. You need the recharge that comes with div­ing into your­self and con­nect­ing with the pri­mal female in you. That is where you nur­ture your­self; while you nur­ture your lover, you also nur­ture and nour­ish your­self. You become stronger from it. You per­form your every­day roles bet­ter from it.

I was going to say that it is like demand­ing that you are human. But that is not it. Demand­ing that you are the female that you are is even baser than that. Most peo­ple say that we are all human first and men and women sec­ond. They do for­get, though, that we were male and female long before we walked into the dawn of intel­li­gence and language.

Males and females have walked hand-​in-​hand, together, in per­fect sym­bio­sis, since the begin­ning of time. I can­not imag­ine how hard it is to be a woman day-​to-​day. They say it has become eas­ier but I am not entirely con­vinced of it. Some things may be eas­ier than 100 years ago but some things are also harder. Add to that, that you are co-​existing with a mas­sively par­al­lel super­com­puter that won’t shut off when you want it to.

The male brain is designed like a bat­tle­ship, with bulk­heads sep­a­rat­ing areas within. I imag­ine it is ben­e­fi­cial to be able to shut things down and com­part­men­tal­ize and focus when attacked in bat­tle or when hunt­ing. It also means, for instance, that when I put my head on the pil­low at night, I am out like a light within two min­utes. But it also means that I don’t have the capac­ity for emo­tional or ver­bal pro­cess­ing that women do.

Dif­fer­ent designs for dif­fer­ent pur­poses and roles. Nei­ther supe­rior and both with unavoid­able draw­backs, but all in all really good designs.

In the begin­ning of our cor­re­spon­dence you asked me why you like it. You asked if it is the adren­a­line or if you are just emo­tion­ally dis­fig­ured like I men­tioned in one of my writ­ings. I can’t say about the adren­a­line. You may be an adren­a­line junkie (although I doubt it), but in the great scheme of things, that rush is noth­ing to the rush you get from surrendering.

You are not emo­tion­ally dis­fig­ured, my dear. Not at all. You are beau­ti­fully and gen­er­ously fem­i­nine. You may have been exposed to a stronger estro­gen storm in the womb when your brain was formed than is nor­mal; if you think about it, you may have noticed that the men­tal and emo­tional qual­i­ties that are tra­di­tion­ally fem­i­nine (like empa­thy, nur­tur­ing, relat­ed­ness, con­nec­tion) are a lit­tle more pro­nounced in you than most other women. It doesn’t have to be much; even a lit­tle is a lot.

All of this is con­jec­ture and spec­u­la­tion, since I don’t have a med­ical degree, but I have noticed that women that have sim­i­lar long­ings as you, almost with­out excep­tion have this extra edge of fem­i­nin­ity that is above and beyond their “nor­mal” sis­ters. I spec­u­late that your brain is as spec­tac­u­larly fem­i­nine as your body is and that means that while the good fem­i­nine aspects are enhanced, so are the side-​effects. Your mas­sively par­al­lel super­com­puter is just a lit­tle bit more mas­sive and a lit­tle bit more super.

Note that even though it would be nice to be able to say it, I don’t think the super part affects intel­li­gence, per se. It does affect the parts that, well, make you a woman. You are suf­fer­ing from the side-​effects of hav­ing an über-​feminine brain, my dear.

He he.

Or much more sim­ply put; you end up spend­ing too much time in your head and not enough time in your heart and your body. As a woman, you give and give and give of your­self to your chil­dren and your loved ones and to soci­ety and some­where along the lines, you for­get to give to yourself.

It is actu­ally not so much that you need a break from giv­ing. You are prac­ti­cally lim­it­less in the radi­ance you can pro­vide to every­one around you. It is not that you don’t have enough to give. It is just that there is one per­son left out from your radi­ance; yourself.

It is about bal­ance. You are bear­ing such heavy bur­dens as a mother and as a woman, and there are hardly any demands placed on you as a female, as a lover. And that is what you yearn for.

It is not rest that you long for; instead, you long for exer­cis­ing all your emo­tional mus­cles. As a female, you are an emo­tional ath­lete that is pre­vented from exer­cis­ing your entire body by day-​to-​day demands and tight sched­ules. As a female, you need time to recon­nect with your­self, to nur­ture your­self, to give some of your own radi­ance back to yourself.

If the demands will not ease on your other roles in life, at least the bur­den should be bal­anced so that you can stand up straight. This is what strikes me as mag­i­cal about you and your sis­ters; in all this over­whelm, what would straighten your back and lift your face towards the sky is not less but even more demands. More demands of you as a lover, as a female. In fact, you yearn to give of your­self. In all this, where you con­tin­u­ously give of your­self, you still yearn to give even more.

You intu­itively know that by giv­ing of you as a female, as a lover, you do in fact find the bal­ance inside that you need, and through that bal­ance, you find peace, reprieve, and a way to recon­nect with your­self. You are a good mother but you are more. You are a good pro­fes­sional and provider, but you are so much more.

It is like your breasts are engorged with milk, and yet only one is nursed from, leav­ing the other painfully burst­ing. To stay with that sim­ile, you need some­one to nurse from that other breast, to release the pres­sure that is build­ing up and threat­en­ing to harm you.

You need to feel like all of the woman that you are. To come home to your­self again. To be reminded of the lover in you. You need an emo­tional spa-​day every once in a while. Or, as Paul Simon says in You Can Call Me Al, “I need a photo-​opportunity.”

So why do you crave to be hurt? Frankly, I don’t think that you are actu­ally crav­ing the hurt itself. You are crav­ing what it brings with it.

You said that you hate it when it’s hap­pen­ing, but as soon as it is over, you love it and want more and more and more. That makes per­fect sense because of the way he hurts you. He doesn’t beat you up and leave you bleed­ing in the cor­ner; he hurts you in a pri­mal way that com­mu­ni­cates directly to the pri­mal female in you. When he takes you, she expe­ri­ences his desire for you, for the female in you, for every­thing female in you. His desire and his pas­sion bring you along on the jour­ney that takes you both inside yourself.

His pas­sion­ate (and not abu­sive) assault punches straight through the cob­webs of the day-​to-​day sed­i­ments of shoulds and oughts and to-​dos. He gives no quar­ter, and the sheer force with which he does it helps you release your invol­un­tary hold of every­thing intel­lec­tual and allows you to spread your emo­tional wings and fly.

Sim­ply put, there is no way your brain can han­dle his assault, so it doesn’t try to. It shuts down and leaves the pro­cess­ing to your heart and your body. Exactly where you need to be, because that’s the spa. Your emo­tional spa is in your body.

So much of the female expe­ri­ence is to bring the exter­nal inside and expe­ri­ence them as emo­tions, and even as emo­tions about emo­tions. It is heart­en­ing to see that you aren’t cut­ting your­self off from feed­ing the crav­ings you feel, depriv­ing your­self of expe­ri­enc­ing the emo­tions you seek. Not being female nor sub­mis­sive, I still have a fair idea how calm­ing and ful­fill­ing, even ecsta­tic, it can feel to be claimed and taken and used by some­one devoted to you and wor­thy of your own devotion.

In the larger pic­ture, the fact that he’s hurt­ing you is imma­te­r­ial. We don’t remem­ber pain. We remem­ber the fact that we felt pain, but we don’t remem­ber the pain itself. That’s why you hate it when it hap­pens, but you want more when it stops. All you remem­ber when the pain stops is how free­ing it was to not think and to just relax into being a radi­ant, beau­ti­ful, and incred­i­bly desired female. So desired, in fact, that your lover needs to devour you and bite you and claw at you and, yes, reach inside you with his hand just to get to touch you as inti­mately as possible.

When a woman has expe­ri­enced being that desired, how can she ever cease long­ing to return there again? When a woman has expe­ri­enced the mind­less­ness of being purely and pri­mally female, exer­cis­ing all her emo­tional mus­cles the way she was designed to do, how can she ever for­get how peace­ful that made her feel?

You are not emo­tion­ally dis­fig­ured, my dear. You are put together exactly right. You are the arche­type of the per­fect female; you just need to be prop­erly main­tained like the pure­bred race-​horse that you are. You need to let a Fer­rari stretch its legs some­times; only let­ting it put­ter around on bumpy dirt roads will clog its engine and wreak havoc on its sus­pen­sion. It is designed to rev into the red; it is designed to scream and be dri­ven hard and fast. That’s when it’s doing what it was designed to do.

Emo­tion­ally, you are that horse. You are that Fer­rari. You need to be prop­erly cared for and used. Every sin­gle ounce of you. That’s when you shine. That’s when you nur­ture your­self; when you are forced to be all the female that you are and let the woman take a break.