Prompt for today: If SM is part of your dynamic, explain how pain works for you. Is it a sexual turn-on, a healing release, a spiritual moment, a session of giving? So I read this question and then had to realize that pain is not a part of everyone’s dynamic. This may be one of my longer responses recently. Pain is everything. If I’m being flogged, fisted, spanked, paddled, scratched, hit or what have you the release of endorphins both gives me peace and makes me horny. Yeah it’s a weird contradiction but I can’t really enjoy you if you cannot hurt me. There’s a momentary exception for rope play but not really because I zone out from the restriction and we’re back to happy town and orgasms. Generally speaking in exchange for taking the pain my partner inflicts, their sadism needs are fed. It’s a welcome exchange of needs and gratification. If the right notes have been hit as it were the whole thing will make me cry which is another kind of release. Not the sad tears, not even pain tears, just relief tears. Pain is one of the few things that slows me down enough to sit still and feel. One of my non kinky friends told me a million years ago that the men that willingly hurt me probably won’t fall in love with me and I’m gonna be honest I was offended at the time. Looking back on it now I can’t say he’s wrong. GN liked stretching me out and choking me but nothing that ever really sent me off into ridiculous pain town. Mr. Wolf spanked me and tied me up and I enjoyed both of those things. He fisted me a few times as well. I came hard but that was the point. He wanted to make me cum. If he was trying to hurt me that never really happened thus there was not cathartic pain release involved. The one time I cried with him wasn’t tied to him hurting me but rather the Dutchman hurting me and then leaving without doing it again or allowing my brain to adjust to what was happening. So that wasn’t the good cry, it was the abandoned cry. But I guess to get back to the prompt, pain for me is an integral part of the whole process. I can still enjoy lots of things related to our play but nothing that comes close to if the pain is actively a part of the process.