PairOfDimes
Posts: 324
Joined: 7/20/2006 Status: offline
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You might want to identify as a sadist if you enjoy beholding pain or discomfort. Typically sadists get around to causing the pain or discomfort, too, because it's an easy way to access it. ("Emotional sadism" is fuzzy--I tend to call plain old physical sadism 'sadism' and modify it with 'emotional' only when I mean emotional.) There is definitely a difference between what I think of as an "SM top," (and what I think LA, being much cuter, is calling a "fluffy sadist") which can be a person who enjoys causing pain that the bottom enjoys (or enjoys causing sensations *because* the bottom enjoys them) or a person who enjoys causing pain irrespective of whether the pain is appreciated by the person pained; and a "sadist," typically a subset, a type of SM top, who likes to cause pain irrespective of whether the pain is appreciated, and often prefers for the pain to be disliked. I'm a sadistic SM top. I'm also dominant--that means that I prefer to run the scene as well as hit people. I tend to think people who like pain as a means to something should identify themselves more closely to whatever that thing is that pain affords--be it submission, or endurance, or tears (yay dacryphilia!) or a sense of punishment, or whatever. People who like pain in its own right, by itself, ought to call themselves sadists and masochists. This isn't because sadist and masochist are special, elevated labels--it's not a *better than* distinction, but a *different from* one.
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