ShaktiSama
Posts: 1674
Joined: 8/13/2007 Status: offline
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This thread is probably a good opportunity to kick these ideas around a bit. I have a clear sense that subfrenzy is distinguished somehow from other types of emotional manias that are apparent in both vanilla and kinky people. In absolutely no order of importance, here are some distinctions that I would make: 1. Unlike other types of relationship manias, subfrenzy does not have a reference point in the rest of your vanilla social life--the world that includes your vanilla parents and family, your vanilla friends and people from work, and your peer group. Subfrenzy has nothing to do with the pressure to pair up in order to fit in. It is not caused by the awkwardness of worry about being single when all your friends are married/partnered. Your mother does not call you every weekend to nag you about whether you have found a D/S partner: "When are you going to find a nice dom to beat your ass and rape me up some grandchildren?" By contrast, a lot of the drive to have-a-partner-at-all-costs in vanilla life is not motivated by deeply personal needs or sexual desires. It's about social status, and how your identity is constructed around having a partner. 2. Subfrenzy is not about being lonely, having no one to talk to, having no one to spend your time with, or even having no one to have sex with. This is a state which a person with an otherwise happy vanilla marriage can get into, even if all his/her other emotional and physical needs are being met. The need to submit/dominate or experience/inflict pain can be blended very effectively with those other other needs, to be sure, and many people are looking for the Whole Package in a partner. But they can be separated, and subfrenzy is not motivated by loneliness or desperation for human contact per se. 3. Subfrenzy is not automatically connected to your ego and your sense of self-worth. In fact, it's often just the opposite; the need to experience bdsm will actually override and trump the limits that your ego and your sense of self-worth would place on your interaction with others. Many other more common sex/relationship manias are motivated by a need to overcome a sense of emptiness or worthlessness; the acquisition or conquest of another person is seen as an antidote to that emptiness. A lot of dangerous erotomaniacs (stalkers), for example, fixate on their victims because they see qualities in this person that they admire. The mania that they suffer is based in the desire to transfer the worth of the victim to themselves. Subfrenzy, by contrast, is often denoted by a lowering of normal standards. It drives the victim to endure treatment that would normally be unacceptable and tolerate qualities in a partner which would normally be very undesirable, simply for the sake of satisfying the bdsm need.
< Message edited by ShaktiSama -- 5/23/2009 3:26:03 PM >
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"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea." -- Robert A. Heinlein
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