Why I am a Sadist

I like a wide range of kink: leather, bondage, piss play, role-playing scenes, and so on. But at heart, I am a sadist. I like to inflict pain on a willing boy. I enjoy a lot of different types of pain play: spanking, crops, paddles, tit torture, cock and ball torture, flogging. I also like biting. Sometimes when I fuck, I just want to be able to sink my teeth into my boy and make him scream.

Exactly why I want to inflict pain is something I can’t quite answer. I can’t put my finger on the root of that desire. We don’t choose our kinks–they choose us. So I have to accept that the origins of my sadism are shrouded in the mists of my deep psyche.

But I do know what it is about inflicting pain that I like. For me, pain is ultimately a form of control and an expression of dominance. Being able to hurt a boy is a profoundly empowering act. Pinching a boy’s nipple or applying a paddle to his ass when I want to says that I am in charge and that I can express my control not just over his behavior but over his body. And I can express that control in ways that makes him uncomfortable.

There is also something raw and honest about pain. When I am applying the right amount of harshness, the boy’s body will reflect that. His eyes will widen, his muscles will clench, his breathing will tighten up, his back will arch, or he will offer some other sort of physical tell that he is in pain. When that happens, I know I’m seeing something honest. He’s not pretending to be in pain; he’s not playing a role just to please me. He is genuinely suffering and he is suffering for me.

As the pain increases, the boy will eventually want it to stop. He may start squirming, hoping to evade the blow of my crop or control where it lands. He may start begging me to stop. He may be clenching his muscles and straining against the ropes because that makes the pain easier to manage. In those moments, he is totally honest–foremost in his mind is the pain and when it will end and how much more he can take in his efforts to please me. Here too, I love the honesty. He is totally present and in his body. He’s not thinking about work or social media or his parents or anything else; it’s just his body, me, and the pain. In those moments, he is all mine and I am all his.

And unless he safe-words, I control the frequency and intensity of the pain and how long he will have to endure it. I have total control over when to strike the next blow and where to land it and how much force to use. For me, there are very few things that rival the sense of power this gives me. It translates to my dick in an almost straight-line way. Sadism is power is hard-on.

More often than not, the sense of power is not diminished by the boy’s limits. If a boy can only handle moderate tit torture or spanking, that’s ok. For me, the amount of pain isn’t exactly the point. It’s the fact that the boy is giving me control within the limits his body allows. Over time, a boy’s limit will probably increase, unless he’s just not able to eroticize pain at all.

That’s not to say that I don’t like being more intense. I do. I love it when I find a boy who can take more of a beating than I can give (unless his limit is so high that I can’t hit that point where he’s genuinely in pain, but that’s rare). When a boy pushes me to hit him harder, I get to challenge myself, to discover how much deeper my sadism goes than I realized. And that’s a powerful thing too.

Of course, it needs to be said that I want to hurt my boy, not harm him. I want to inflict temporary pain, not a serious injury that requires significant healing or serious medical attention. It’s possible I’ll leave a bruise or a tender spot (I particularly remember a spanking session with a vampire glove that my slave still felt three days later), or that a welt from a caning or flogging will start to bleed and need some attention. But those are recognized risks of play, and not an intentional purpose on my part. I’ve read up on where it is and isn’t safe to strike the body, and I’ve practiced hitting my target spot.

What I wouldn’t want to do is cause an unintended injury that fell outside the reasonable risks of play. If something went truly wrong (for example, if a blow from my crop went badly off-target and broke the boy’s nose or hit his testicles hard enough to make him collapse from pain), I would feel deeply guilty and would probably struggle for a while to feel like I could be dominant. Sadism is no excuse for causing injuries that require a visit to the hospital.

For me, sadism is a deep and feral feeling. Sometimes during play, I feel my Beast awakening inside it. The Beast is the piece of me that just wants the boy to hurt. It wants to inflict pain, to make the boy shriek in discomfort. I used to be afraid of letting it out too far, because I thought that if I did, I would lose control and injure the boy. But as I’ve explored it, I’ve learned that no matter how liberated it gets, it always knows where to draw the line. It knows the difference between intense pain and injury and craves inflicting the former but not the latter. (I explore this a little bit in my novel Claiming the Slave, in which I describe a lightly-fictionalized account of grappling with that fear and the moment I transcended it.)

So what about you? What is it about pain play that turns you on?