Pleasure and Pain and no SM?

Just watched a fascinating programme on BBC1 in which Michael Mosley (not to be confused with Max Mosley, whose choice to mix pleasure, pain and Nazi roleplay was the subject of a tabloid scandal and lawsuit and stuff a while back!) explored the connection between the two, and how they work in the human brain, neurochemistry and so on.   He covered all the things about oxytocin, dopamine, seratonin, endorphins etc.

I was surprised that he didn't talk about masochism in particular, because with "sex" appearing as the number 2 "most pleasurable thing" (right after "family and friends") in the programme's survey, you'd think that the question of "what about people who get turned on by pain?" would have occurred to the producers, given that the title was about both pleasure and pain.

However, there were several points that helped me understand a bit more about how my own masochism might work.

Mosley talked about the role of dopamine in sexual pleasure, and in particular mentioned about how it gets turned off once orgasm is reached with seratonin being released to bring you down (which helped explain why my SSRIs inhibited my ability to achieve orgasm when I was taking them, I didn't know that it had that role).   He also looked at oxytocin, and the ways in which this functions as the bonding/love chemical in romantic and familial relationships.

In a test on "who handles pain better?" they had a loved-up couple as one of their test variables to test whether oxytocin also had a pain-inhibiting role, which it seemed to do quite nicely - more on that test in a minute.   He also spoke about dopamine as having a pain-inhibiting role to help in "fight-or-flight" situations.   The role of endorphins was explored by looking at the "high" reported by chilli-eaters (capsaicin being a good way of stimulating endorphin release).

It's quite common for masochists to need "warming up" to handle more pain, or handle it better, and the release of endorphins to deal with the pain enables us to take more.   It's also reported often that being turned on already (i.e. having a good dose of arousal chemical dopamine in the blood) also makes a difference, even if you haven't been warmed up properly.

What was more interesting was when he talked about "higher-level" processing of pain, and I was disappointed that this psychological as opposed to neurological or neurochemical branch received quite a short amount of time in the programme.   It would have been really interesting to learn about the difference between the common "subdrop" (come-down after an endorphin high) after a really good session, and the less common but also reported "subdrop" after a heavy but not enjoyed punishment - one that didn't seem to involve a pleasurable "high".   But it did raise some points familiar to masochists everywhere about some of the differences between consensual/pleasurable pain and non-consensual or non-pleasurable pain.

Our intrepid presenter went to have his legs waxed, which I am sure I would have enjoyed more than he did.   Here, he talked about how anticipation (apparently, there are people who kink on it - called "extreme dreaders") and context affects pain response.   Mosley explained that whether we perceive the pain as maliciously caused can have an effect (so, the fact that he was in a professional, caring environment made the pain easier to bear), as does the perceived cost-benefit (or "reward" as he put it) balance works (which for him wasn't that great because he had no real desire for smooth legs - I, on the other hand, would love to have smooth legs so probably wouldn't suffer as much as he did!)

Again, much of this is familiar to masochists and submissives in the BDSM world.   The difference in sensation or response between a spanking for fun or for punishment is a common topic.   One thing from the world of masochism that didn't get a mention was the effect of how in control one feels over the pain.   When we talk about "good" or "bad" pain, one of the most common distinctions masochists make is between medical conditions and deliberately caused pain.   For example, my gout when it was bad was not something I could persuade my brain to enjoy, because it was indeterminate in length and out of anyone's control.   (It also happens to be caused by tiny needle-like crystals in the joints, and needles are a type of pain that I don't enjoy under any circumstances - I tried eroticising the blood sample needle at the GP and it still didn't work for me.)   The programme only talked about chronic pain in the sense of painkilling drugs and prescription medication.

That last parenthesis brings up another issue that would have been really interesting to see discussed in more detail.   While Mosley mentioned a couple of times that the systems that control pleasure and pain stimulate the same areas of the brain, which is why one person's pleasure is another person's pain and vice versa, it wasn't in any way explored that there are some types of pain that we enjoy and others we don't.   For example, the capsaicin kinksters at the chilli-eating contest presumably really enjoy the burning-tongue sensation produced by that chemical.   But I wouldn't presume that they would also enjoy a good caning!   Some of them might, others might not.   For me, needles and cutting are complete no-go areas for pain, but others really enjoy them.   I love to take spanking and hot things, and suspect I might really enjoy a caning as long as I can actually manage to take it.   Others, again, don't like those.   So I would have loved to know how brains work differently between good pain and bad pain.   (I did volunteer for a study that was going to explore the difference between masochists' brain responses and non-masochists, but it never got the final go-ahead.)   This isn't just about anticipation and the rest of it, because I never know what sort of pain I will enjoy until I try it for real (for instance, I didn't know I would enjoy being scratched hard until I tried having someone do it to me.   That moment also involved a lot of dread/anticipation just before!   (The sadist who did it to me said "you enjoy it too much!" when I asked for another go **grins**)   I'm sure there must be 'nilla examples they could have looked at  (for instance, the capsaicin kink and Mosley's experiment with bungee jumping) to study this difference, or at least mention it.

I mentioned the experiment/stunt the programme did to explore who can take the most pain.   The categories that they compared were: men, women, loved-up couple, redheads and foul-mouthed students.   Apparently, redheads are supposed to have a genetic connection with higher sensitivity to pain, whereas cursing or swearing while apparently experiencing pain is believed to have a genuine pain-relieving effect.   This last theory was emphatically not upheld by the experiment results!   The redheads did appear to be more pain-sensitive (which may be one reason why I have a particular "thing" for redheads - as a sadist, I like it when my partner feels it more!) and, as mentioned, the loved-up couple seemed to cope very well (which means that a loved-up S/M couple will presumably get more done before the safeword gets used).   Men seemed to manage a lot better than the women did in this particular experiment, but I don't know how that reflects what happens in bigger and more properly controlled experiments!

I appreciated that Mosley made it clear that pain and pleasure are multi-dimensional in the neuro-chemical side as well as in the psychological side - a lot of pop-science things treat it as if it's just one chemical variable "more is this, less is that" kind of thing, but this show managed to explain that it is complicated.   As I've discussed here, it seems there may still be more that we don't yet know about how pain and pleasure works.