some scientific thoughts about bdsm

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some scientific thoughts about bdsm - 6/29/2013 8:57:21 AM

galleyslave

Posts: 18
Joined: 6/25/2013
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First of all, I consider sadomasochism as one complex biological phenomenon the evolution provided the human (as a species) with for self-improvement. As far as we know, no other biological species were yet given such a mechanism (like a pain-into-pleasure, or humiliation-into-pleasure, or tiredness-into pleasure etc. transformation assisted by hormones). Let me just refer to a number of web sources (some of them you may well-know, though)

http://www.rosecoloredasses.com/sirreal/bdsmscience.htm
http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/27326-bdsm-and-biochemistry/
http://ru.scribd.com/doc/26957524/BDSM-Psychobiology

But the principal thing, in my opinion, is that the modern science tries to study BDSM as just a sexually arranged transformation of usually/regularly/non-sexually unpleasant activities and experiences into pleasure, while I suggest to understand it as an evolutionarily developed mechanism of the organism's self-strengthening and, by the way, fighting against aging. If we still assume the human to be the most perfect living being we're aware of, we can easily agree that no complex phenomena like BDSM could appear merely by accident, with no proper application and purpose.

If we try to classify each activity of a human being as "healthy" and "unhealthy", any classification of that sort would depend on what result we'll consider "ultimate". While some seemingly "unhealthy" BDSM activities like whipping etc. may be classified as, say, "not very healthy" (depending on the whipping's form, though), when combined with a kind of forced physical training, they become somewhat a whole new complex activity whose "healthiness", actually, is just some mathematical function in the precise parameters of the physical training, whipping, and other BDSM activities involved. Hence we can talk about such a very delicate notion as the summation of activities. Generally speaking, BDSM itself is a sum of the sexual activity and "causing pain, discomfort and tiredness" coupled with, say, humiliation and other purely mental activities. While some "summands" may damage the body, the whole sum is often what the person needs for eventually feeling better and just becoming healthy in the common medical sense! A masochist's brain quite often subconsciously solves an extremely complex optimization problem of finding the best sum of activities whose parameter vector satisfies his/her organism's needs in the best possible way! Such an optimization task, I suppose, might be even formulated as a minimax problem (one of the principal mathematical terms related to the continuous optimization theory). By the way, we can also notice that the "summation" of quite a number of activities is inherent exclusively to the human as a species as well, no other biological species are able to combine so many activities and hence we can consider the activity summation as an evolutionary "trend".

Secondly, the role of hormones in BDSM may be re-considered or, to formulate more precisely, determined with a greater accuracy too. While the hormonal mechanisms standing behind the pain-into-pleasure and similar transformations are already pretty clear to scientists, the hormonal processes caused by certain "purely psychological" BDSM phenomena like those happening inside the bodies of dominant partners, or submissives awaiting a "punishment", or just sadomasochists (including switches) looking at an S/M picture or watching an S/M movie, were not yet, I guess, studied so rigorously. My conjecture is that all the just-mentioned hormonal processes are of nearly the same nature and their purpose is a preparation of the body for the pain-into-pleasure and similar hormonal processes and, actually, a pain/discomfort itself. Yes, though strange, it concerns "pure" sexual sadists and dominants as well! The nature didn't yet invent a better mechanism for strengthening a body than undergoing certain "ordeals" , and subconsciously we (actually each of the human beings) are just looking for the "optimal ordeals" not causing any permanent damage, somewhat like "the hardest healthy ordeals" (if we wish to formulate it in the minimax language), or, a funny thing, "the best ordeals"... :)). By the way, it's well known that the probability of becoming interested in BDSM depends on the person's intelligence and even education. The intensity of one's brain work influences his/her "highest sexuality" aimed at self-improvement, not reproductivity. I just want to emphasize all the complexity of the interconnection and interaction between psychology and physiology in humans and the role of sexuality as a chief mediator between these two fundamental groups of activities. And we should also suppose, I think, that every activity, either psychological or physiological, does have its own hormonal "reflection" in our blood, so that hormones always play a special mediator role that, actually, can be well-registered by the modern medical devices hence allowing to formalize such an infinitely complex human phenomenon as BDSM.