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Darkfeather -> RE: BDSM in nature (10/18/2012 12:22:06 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: CuriousFerret
Okay, I've seen at least one example of this mindset, "animals are only acting on instinct, and they can't have the kinds of sophisticated desires that a human can." Stop feeding the world that ignorant garbage. Human and animal brains do have morphological differences, but they operate based on similar principles.
In colloquial usage, the term "instinct" makes the erroneous assumption that instincts are like some sort of computer code that is built into an animal's firmware. It's really not that tidy. The closest thing to this is found in the hypothalamus, which is involved in anti-predatory behavior, sex, and social defeat reflexes, among other things. The hypothalamus may also control sexual orientation. Primitive organs like the hypothalamus govern most of the near-reflexive instinctive behaviors we see in the animal kingdom.
As I said, though, it's not as tidy as if it were a purpose-written computer program. Instead, behaviors that require a similar response can become mucked-up with each other. For example, let's take the freeze reflex, or "playing opossum." When you encounter something that is too big for you to have a chance of either defeating or running away from, your natural reflex, which is rigged into your hypothalamus, is to freeze and sit perfectly still.
The freeze reflex, in response to overwhelming fear, can actually get mixed-up with the female instinct to get herself still in preparation for being mounted and bred, and you can see this manifested throughout the animal kingdom. Mustelids, in particular, are notoriously violent in their mating habits. If you were to watch a few videos of ferrets breeding, you will notice that the jill is in a total stupor when the hob is breeding her. They are like rag dolls.
Now, why would ferrets need to put their females practically into a coma when breeding them? Look at their bodies, and it's easy enough to sort this out. Their bodies are so whip-like, the slightest agitation on the part of a female could thoroughly ruin an attempted breeding. Therefore, a necessary aspect of breeding, in ferrets, is for the male to actually violently dominate the female, into total submission, before attempting entry.
And it's not just in our sexuality that fear-related stimuli get mixed-up with pleasurable reactions. Let's take the enjoyment derived from watching a horror movie. We're doing this when we're children. The excitement of watching a good horror film is extremely intoxicating. When we are strapped in and helpless on a roller coaster ride, we feel pleasure even though the ride is designed to incite feelings related to fear. It goes back to the hypothalamus and similar organs.
When you get right down to it, tying up your wife and beating her with a cane to provide sexual excitement is not much more strange than taking your children to a haunted house on Halloween. Telling your wife horrible things like, "you're a pathetic slut whore," and all that kind of bull crap is not really far removed from telling your kid a scary story around a campfire. You are simply hijacking a pain and fear-related reflex for the sake of producing tingly feelings of excitement and delight.
Of course, it's always withering when your kid tells you, "Dad, this really isn't all that scary."
These may sound similar on the surface, but they are remarkably different. It take actually quite a bit of higher brain processing to equate a similar action "I whip my dog with a cane" to an emotion "he enjoys it" to a psychological pathway "he therefore comes back every time he wants to get the cane or enjoys it when I cane him. Now that is not to say animals cannot be trained, but that is also different. It took a LOT of evolution to get the human brain as complex as it is. Heck, there are only a few species f animal on the planet that have sex for something other than procreation, and that is a huge step forward. That show just how rare it is for animals to develop the cognitive thinking needed to break from instinct to desire or want.
As for the horror to kink analogy, this too can be in some cases but for the most part they are dissimilar. For the most part, people still have very clear defined separations between survival stimuli, and pleasurable ones. The fear induced by walking in a dark hallway, or watching a serial killer knife that co-ed, is completely different from the fear one feels when blindfolded with one they trust and is dragging a knife across their skin. The brain distinguishes the two. An easy example is, even a masochist would not find getting stabbed in the gut, or breaking a leg pleasurable. Pain for pain's sake is much different than pain for pleasure
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