Sadists Made Me Believe In Magic.

When I was younger, I was extremely attracted to anger. I’m not an angry person myself, it takes a lot to stoke my ire, nor am I fond of angry people, anger was a means to an end for me. As a child, I learnt that anger led to my father beating my mother, and when my parents beat me, it was usually rage-induced, so I figured, if I wanted to be beaten, I had to make people angry. Anger reified pain. I first tested this with my parents and after gaining immediate success, that lasted years, I started to bring it to my romantic relationships.

My first (consensual) relationship witnessed me at my absolute worst. He was a nice, sweet guy who loved me and if you ignored the illegal age-difference between us, he demonstrated absolutely no intention to do me wrong. For a second, when I was lost in his spearmint-flavoured embrace and kindness, I believed I could do normal, but when he touched me, I felt nothing. None of the gratification of pain and violence to which I had become accustomed and always been drawn. So, I started trying to make him angry. First, I lied. I lied about things that were just consequential enough to be concerning and I did it poorly so that I always got caught, but he was just understanding about it. So, I started cheating. To be clear, I think I was always going to cheat because monogamy was never, not even at that age, something I wanted, but I didn’t know you could ask for something else. That relationship was the only mono-relationship I ever attempted, and I regret it, because I wasn’t even cheating for desire, I was just doing it so I could go tell my boyfriend I did it, and make him angry. I made an elaborate demonstration of the admission every single time. It didn’t work. He fought with me, he felt bad for me but he didn’t even get a little bit angry. So, I did it more and more, I told him the details of what I was doing in the beds of other people, I started suggesting that he would feel better if he expressed his anger at me, I even suggested he express it with his belt. He caught on, eventually.

I think he felt sorry for me.

I think he also believed that by refusing to hurt me he was fixing me in some way. It became a contest to see who would win. I would err, he would forgive. Sinner and saint in battle to turn the other to their kind. Sadly, he broke before I did. He finally got angry and he hit me. I got what I wanted but it was horrible for him, I wanted to make people feel horrible like that, but not him. I learnt the somewhat wrong lesson from that experience, I learnt that anger always works but I should probably direct my instigation at bad men (and also stop cheating, which I did). Men who deserved it. I guess, on some level, at the time, I believed that when I made people beat me, I was doing something horrible to them (because being beaten really didn’t feel horrible to me), and if those people were rife with turpitude to begin with, it wasn’t so wrong, and it wouldn’t feel regretful. It didn’t. Honestly, I stand by that decision in a weird way, the men I pursued for violence (and mind-games) after him, deserved to be with that rendition of me. If you were willing to fuck me while I was still attending an educational institution in uniform alongside your daughter, you deserved to have me fuck with your sanity. And I know, I know I was young, and these men never should have been with me in the first place, they were often married as well (and I chose that kind, the known cheaters, the ones who had “cases” going on in courts that involved women, the creepy, the ones I knew had beaten their wives etc) and ultimately, even when I was being a little tyrant, it was still wrong for them to hit me or fuck me. I knew this all too well back then as well, it made me feel so powerful and completely free to act with impunity. They would always hit me, and I would always weave a web of victimhood around myself so deep, they’d start to unravel. First, I let them scare me, then I scared them. I threatened, I taunted, I insinuated that I could disclose myself as their secret to the world. This situation is so difficult to view through an ethical lens, everyone was wrong here. This is not the sphere of sexual liberation; it was the liberation of sexual violence.

But I got what I wanted.

I got pain.

The anger and the moral ambiguity felt like the price for pain and I was willing to pay it because I cannot adequately explain how important the quest for pain was for me. It was one with the quest for love and comprehension of oneself. If there is one thing my body has always told me, and I have interpreted for sure, it’s that I want pain. I had to get it and at the time, I was sure that there was no other way, and of course, I had watched pornography, but in that phase of the evolution of the internet, it was still the norm to treat porn as entirely fantastical (unlike now when you still have fantastical porn, but also the kind where you can really know the person who is making it in a way that makes it feel real and sometimes, achievable). BDSM porn/erotica was my version of rom-coms or Disney movies, it felt good, but there was no way it was meant for real-life.

Where were these people, anyway?

Funnily enough, the angriest man I ever loved was also the first person who ever showed me that you did not have to be angry, morally-compromised or hateful (though he was, all those things) in order to hurt or beat a person, you could just do it because you enjoyed doing it as much as the other enjoyed receiving it. I think that’s why I loved him. He led with it. When I expressed desire to fuck him, he told me, in so many words, that he was only interested if I wanted to be beaten and bloodied as well. It felt serendipitous. I still remember the words he said, I remember the smell of the room, I remember the hair on my neck buzzing with eerie familiarity. I often say that it was life-changing for me to discover the word “masochist” but it was doubly so, to meet my first sadist, and to love him. We tell many stories of love, the kind where circumstance acts as the prime antagonist in keeping lovers apart, but here, circumstance brought us together. We weren’t looking for each other, we were both using our terrible hacks to get what we needed, and in that, we somehow found each other. Just, accidentally there, in the living room of another person. There is a lot to our relationship that isn’t relevant to this, but the from the union of sadist and masochist that I experienced with him, I think I learnt a very good lesson.

There is nothing hotter or more magical than a person who hurts you because they want to.

Sadistic intent is the drug I never meant to discover and the one I will never stop seeking. All the other things I used to seek pain—anger, justice, punishment—lost or changed allure in time, much more easily when I started to understand the familial and socio-political impacts on my sexuality, but the thing that never lost its charm was the directness of the transaction between sadist and masochist. It’s like the Disney movie that never was. Until I experienced the directness of a person who wants to hurt you because they like it as much as you do, it felt like a distant and impossible dream, and once I did, it felt like magic. Like finding an oasis. Over time, any other intention started to feel burdensome and unnecessary. I no longer wanted to be hurt because I did something wrong, I didn’t want it because I needed to be punished or they did, I didn’t want to evoke anger in order to get it, I didn’t want to do on quests of justice against evil men (in any way, anyway). Some of the habits took years to lose, some associations had to change form in order to still be attractive, but here, seventeen years later (what the fuck), only one thing works for me when it comes to a person who wants to hurt me.

They have to enjoy it. They have to want it independent of their want for me.

While I certainly understand people who enjoy hurting their partners for their pleasure even though they don’t enjoy the act of hurting and I also understand being the recipient in that equation, I cannot do that at all anymore. Not for a long time. The escamotage of a sadist who is out for their pleasure is breathtaking, and to know it exists, it reassures a very insecure part of you, the part that once believed that what you want from life is strange enough that you may never get it, you may have to die for it or you may have to trick people all your life to secure crumbs of it. It is the physical reassurance that there is a key for every lock. Every time I see evidence of the desire to hurt, the pleasure of hurting, and the will to do it in a sadist, it reminds me that you can find the treasures you seek in life. They exist. Sadists make me believe in magic, because for me, they were the magic. They were the reason I no longer had to make a huge mess in order to cook a pretty shitty omelette.

I think that’s why I fall in love with sadists.

I think they represent hope to me.

Sadists don’t need me to be someone else to hurt me. They don’t need to operate out of their worst to hurt me. They don’t need me to play them to hurt me. I don’t have to plot or conspire, I can just be myself. They don’t have to be cruel, evil or terrible people in order to hurt me. They can love me and hurt me, sadists don’t have to recognise dichotomy in those things. Sadists don’t have to be angry or incensed to hurt me. Sadists don’t have to come at an emotional cost. Sadists will hurt me.

They were always going to hurt me, I just had to show up, and ask.

And I get what I want.

I get pain.