My aunt recently said to me, that the reason masochism and BDSM relationships are wrong and are not real free and equal relationships, is because masochists (and sadists as well in fact) use contracts, and that contracts are not real authentic and intimate nor real shared and free and equal agreements. In some ways, my aunt made a good point, but she doesn't know where this idea of contracts with masochists and sadists comes from, and I don't think she really understands much about it all in a wider social and interpersonal context, along with all the social and interpersonal causes, issues, and applications of it all about masochism and sadism and BDSM matters, and in other contexts and implications to other things.
To give an example about these matters, I recently watched an episode of the politicians and the public questions discussion and debate TV programme Question Time, and one question which was raised by a member of the public and the audience, was about the conservative government's policy of giving tax-breaks to married couples, in order to subtly coerce and persuade them to get married, because the conservative politicians and some others, say and believe that marriage is better for families and children, and what's more than married couples are much more happier.
To use my aunts example here, most people in marriages, do not either love nor desire each other, and they are not happy at all, and quite the opposite to all these matters and things. The reason for this, is because as my aunt said about masochism and BDSM relationships, because marriage is a contract without real authentic shared agreement and authenticity, and it is based upon coercion and social engineering and social control without genuinely free and equal shared agreements, with all the negative and destructive social and interpersonal rules and rigid and narrow roles, acting and inauthentic role-playing, and the love and emotional and sexual repression of both men and women (or with same-sex people in the case of gay or lesbian people who get married).
However, there are still quite a lot of people, who appear at least to be very happy within their married relationships, and who genuinely love and desire each other, but these couples who are married in these ways, only appear to others to be married in a microcosmic social, and economic sense, but they only get married to please society, and then to create new ideas of marriage, but in a more social and interpersonal sense and in terms of true love and desire, they are in fact not married at all. The reason their appear to be fully married, and they genuinely love and desire each other and are happy, is also because whilst they are married in a social and economic sense, they do not conform to the very narrow, rigid, and destructive rules and roles of love and desire which destroys true love and desires.
So the idea of contracts that masochist and sadist and other BDSM people use, isn't a deviation, and it doesn't grow on trees, as my aunt said and suggested, but it actually comes from vanilla and non-BDSM and non-masochist and non-sadist relationship and society, via things like marriage and other types of relationships abstractions and social control, and what's more, neither love and desire or relationship contracts, nor marriage is not really the problem, because all of these things are of value or not according to ways they are negatively conformed to, regressed or progressed, combined with other things and how these things are either ironically or too literally put into practise and applied.
Peter H. Donnelly
2010
