[quote=Michael D.;3133033]Regarding your RN neighbor, she's wrong. I've had my fair share of strange relationships, dominance play, and BDSM ****. None of it involved having any desire whatsoever to force someone to have sex. And none of it ever should.

Really?

Yes darling, really.

If, by example, during one's early years, one found any pleasure (need not be sexual) or comfort or affection or even escape in being mistreated or maltreated, or if one felt like one deserved to be.There are a dozen reasons why. Some have to do with power, some with powerless-ness, some with perceiving worth or lack thereof, some with wanting to be needed (or wanted). Most often these desires are the result of having experienced sexual congress with an adult in ones early years. As an adult one may go looking for that reckoning, that happening, that velocity, that violence, that whatever. In some cases, even verbal communication is almost wholly unnecessary between two such persons (or for that matter, between "victims and perpetrators") . But that's because these all belong to the same sub-set of the population. Persons who have never experienced such things (victimization and the ultimate output of the same) have no clear notion of what "this" even is...other than reading it in a book and viewing it like a barnacle on a ship (rather than as an inextricable part of someone) is to them...like you reading about someone forced to cut their arm off to survive in the desert or mountains. If one cannot palpably understand something - can only understand it intellectually - it becomes a "totem," an isolated thing, seemingly extricable from the human being to whom it happened. It is very much, therefore, like a child who has had no sexual experience whatever trying to imagine sex. They develop all sorts of ideas about it, further fueled and misguided by other children's musing (from children who ALSO haven't had sex). Sabina Naftulovna Spielrein, a Russian (I think) Jewish woman. Her thing was that she had serious symptoms (neurosis then called "hysteria" or "conversion disorder") behind her father beating her and she enjoying it (sexually). She became one of the first women psychoanalysts. Sabina Spielrein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Her research was in the destruction of the ego, primarily through what amounted to BDSM. Not radically different, in some respects, from Otto Rank, Oswald Schwartz, and Wilhelm Reich. Her work "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being" is a classic example of destruction of ego to make ego. "In my work with sexual problems one question has especially interested me: why this most powerful drive, the drive of reproduction [Fortpflanzungstrieb], houses within itself, next to the a priori expected positive feelings, negative ones like anxiety and disgust, the latter of which really has to be overcome so that one can get to the positive activity. The negative attitude of the individual toward sexual activity [Sexualbetätigung] is, of course, especially evident in neurotics..." In such a power dynamic, such play....it can be healing when the heavens open and you see the "man behind the curtain" "The person in the mirror" [come to know yourself via such exchange] and you recognize yourself therein. For, it is most assuredly a mirror.

An exchange. Not an act committed against another.

In any event I find this discourse fantastical, and luring