The Fascination With It

That, I believe, is the idea behind the fascination with it and I believe there are enough adherents that it is unreasonable to think that it's just a collective madness. No, there is sense there and there is nuance and there is something to behold, something to experience in it. There is a reason why the fixation is a fascination, and a reason why it works.

And the truth behind that fascination is that pain comes in many forms. Like a buffet of ice cream flavors, there are many to choose from. Many different methods and many different abilities, and one cannot discount the more ephemeral when considering which is best for you.

I don't know if I like pain, by which I mean I don't know if I like physical pain. Having a man be rough with me does have a certain appeal, but I'm not sure whether any of the experiences I've had thus far, even the ones that pushed the boundaries, really bridged that divide.

But pain doesn't need to be physical. Torment and **** don't need to be ripped out of a manuscript from the middle ages in order to qualify, to be effective. You can have pain be something else as well.

The pain of the heart and the pain of the mind.

Taboo. Wrong. Bad.

A concept that doesn't really exist, not in the same way that pain does. Pain is real and it is unequivocal. It doesn't really matter who you are or what you believe, **** and cutting and spanking all elicit the same physiological response. We all feel pain the same way.

But the taboo is something different. It's a category of ideas and it's not really real, not in the same way that physical pain is.

Instead it's just rules of conduct. Society deciding collectively, sometimes unconsciously, what our values are and how people should act. What people should want and what they should not.

It's an idea, determined by collective agreement, that doing something is wrong. But does that really make it so?

I think really the issue is that society has so many rules, too many rules. So many points where it says that you should do something and shouldn't do something else. Deciding that one thing is right and proper while the other is forbidden, is taboo, and deciding to come up with rules, written or unwritten, against it.

And the problem is that rules are always so very fun to break.

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