Masochism: The tendency to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from one’s own pain or humiliation. Features an explicit negotiation of consent: container, ritual, practice.

Electromotive: Producing or tending to produce an electric current.

For most, to be gay is to have endured tremendous suffering–developmentally, culturally, and even from within our own relationships, romantic or otherwise. We have been abused individually and collectively, largely at the hands of other men in our lives leaving us feeling powerless.

One significant way for us to take the power back from our abusers is to exercise control over precisely when and how we experience pain. For those who enjoy asking for punishment, the reward can be an experience that binds together the paradox of our human experience: The union of opposites, a collapse of wrong and right. The embedded message of our formative years – I hurt because of who I am – is then transformed into: I hurt because I want to feel even more.