by Hermes Solenzol Everything I described in Ask a Neuroscientist: The physiology of BDSM (Part 1) – How Pain Moves to the Brain forms the so-called ascending pain pathway, which goes from the skin to the cerebral cortex. There, in the cortex, is where the pain becomes conscious, it is felt with its particular emotional…
Tag: pain
Ask a Neuroscientist: The Physiology of BDSM (Part 1/2) – How Pain Moves to the Brain
by Hermes Solenzol We need to rescue the word “sadist”. In the vanilla world it is often taken as a synonym of “cruel”, but in the BDSM culture we know this is not true. We are not cruel, we don’t like to cause suffering, just as masochists do not like to suffer. It is only…
Pleasure Spankings and Erotic Pain
by Author Unknown Erotic pain is something that is very difficult to explain unless there is something inside of you that draws you toward it. Many subs crave it, it settles them down. I’m sure you know many endorphins are released in the body when it is “stressed” during a spanking or more intense activities…
Ask a Neuroscientist: Pain Physiology, Explained to a Bottom
by Hermes Solenzol Imagine that you are being spanked… Stop getting so excited! This is supposed to be a scientific explanation! As I was saying, imagine that you are being spanked, and you are feeling that familiar stinging, warm pain in your behind. In reality, you don’t feel the pain in your bottom. You feel…
Can Role-Play Add to the Pleasure That Pain Brings?
What’s in your sadomasochist (S/m) repertoire? If you think of role-play as “I’m the stern headmaster and you’re the naughty student” then some people enjoy that kind of play and some people don’t find much in it. In this context we’re talking about role-play as making up fictional characters or putting ourselves as real characters…
A Personal Journey Into Subspace
by nightrunner378 “Subspace” and how we view it is subjective. I know what it feels like to me. And I do not care what others think of that. Anyone who wants to, can go ahead and argue that I am not in “true or real” subspace. But how silly is that? Does a hot dog…
Physical and Mental Techniques for Processing Pain
We spend a lot of time talking about pain and pleasure in the BDSM community. It’s a very individual thing, and we all have our own preferred levels, and our different responses to pain during a session. Athletes often have their own way of processing challenges to sustain themselves till the final line, and in…
Turning Pain Into Pleasure
Pain is a huge part of BDSM. We seem to talk about it all the time. But, language being the blunt instrument that it is, do we really understand each other when we say things like “hit me” or “i love pain”? For some people, pain directly equates to “abuse” or “self harm”, and there…
Subspace versus Bottomspace
Subspace is actually a mashup of two shortened words: sub – short for submissive, which can be generally defined as “person who consensually gives up control either all the time or for a specified period” space – short for headspace, slang for mental state The Merriam-Webster Dictionary might offer a better definition of submissive as…
How Kink Heals
by tydominic INTRODUCTION I remember hearing rhetoric over the years such as “What is going to happen when all these kids grow up without active parents? Or in broken homes? Or in difficult times?” Well, here we are and we hurt. We hurt so bad inside that we have to do something about it. But,…