What did you look at to do with masochism and kink and stuff like that? Oh,

yeah, I wrote stuff about that a long time ago. I was actually doing research. I wrote a book on how people find meaning in life. So when I was reading for that, I was just sort of looking for interesting stuff and wanted some people who have interesting lives that would lead me to give me some insight. Back then, there was hardly any research directly on the topic. So I thought, oh, maybe those people who like to be tied up and spanked and all that, I'll bet they have really interesting lives. So I was on sabbatical at the University of Texas. I remember I went over to the library and grabbed all the books they had that dealt with this stuff and spent a couple hours going through them. I could tell pretty fast that I was not going to learn anything about the meaning of life from the kinky sex literature. But it was a challenge. One of my other lines of work is understanding the self. And masochism just seemed to be directly opposite to all the prevailing wisdom about the self, which is that, you know, you want to think well of yourself. You want to have high self-esteem. You want to be regarded as a success and all that. And yet these masochists want to be embarrassed and humiliated and put down and so on. We assume the self seeks pleasure and avoids pain, but these people want to be tied up and spanked and whipped and things like that. And the self wants to be in control. That's another widespread basic assumption in psychology that you seek to establish and maintain control over your environment. And yet the masochists wanted to be tied up and ordered around and called slaves and things like that. So I wondered how to reconcile these and, you know, there must be some illusion that, you know, these facts about the self were so well known. There couldn't really be a contrary evidence. But eventually I was convinced there was. And in fact, that's one of the essential features of masochism is trying to get rid of the self, trying to escape from self-awareness. maintaining yourself and being confident and successful and all these things, that involves a certain amount of stress and people like to escape and forget who they are for a while. One of my colleagues, Jay Hull, had been doing a line of research on alcohol, obviously also very popular. And he found that when people drink alcohol, they have less self-awareness, which is why they do a lot of crazy things. I mean, you're sober. You don't get up on the table with a lampshade on your head doing a wild dance. so it seems there's an appetite for things that get rid of self-awareness and temporarily even transform you into someone else so these sadomasochistic sex scenes seem to do that i remember reading somebody was doing a research project on the call girls in Washington, D.C., thinking, oh, this must be a real interesting lot. You know, the American government is there. And so what are these women like? And they interviewed a ton of them. And, well, it turned out they were just the same as call girls anywhere else. But the clients, they had all sorts of interesting information. And there was a lot of masochism in there. Like, I think they said that, you know, these are rich men who could afford to do whatever they wanted, but requests to spank the call girl were not nearly as common as requests to be spanked, something like eight to one. So, you think these highly successful powerful men they have a lot of more stress other people are always trying to expose them and get them down they have to maintain a really larger than life image and keep up uh this impression and get everyone around them continue to believe in how great they are. And so just getting rid of all that for a while, being tied up and who knows, dressed in women's underwear and licking the toes of a paid sex worker, you can't possibly think of yourself as a senator so-and while you're doing that, that it just gets you completely out of who you are. And that escape from self seemed to be a key part of the appeal. That's the best I could figure out. So the writings I did, we featured masochism as escape from self. The sadism part, the compliment, that's much more complicated and I didn't really get as far with that. For one thing, there are a lot fewer of those. I learned this when I was doing the research, like the clubs for S&M, they typically have four times as many submissives as dominant. And a lot of the dominance started off as submissives and then just thought, well, I could give a perfect experience to someone else by dominating them. And so it's kind of a vicarious submission for them. So the dominant person, they might have their partner across their lap and be spanking them, but they're really empathically connecting with a partner and doing it just right to get the person. Spanking is part of a sex game. It's a dicey business. If you do it too much, it will spoil the mood. If you do it not enough, it will be like, what was that for? So, again, it's hitting the right, hitting the middle, getting it just right. So it requires a high degree of sensitivity and empathy and attunement to the partner. And people who've had that desire and done those things themselves, they feel better able to do that. I met this guy from the Kinsey Institute, I think, when I was doing this research. And the Kinsey Institute, they encouraged their people to not only collect data, but to actually go and participate in these things, which is not part of the research program. That's one

hell of a request from your research candidates. Well,

you know, he wanted them to be welcome. This goes back to Kinsey himself. He said, yeah, we're trying to learn about this phenomenon that everybody does, but there's no scientific knowledge about it. So go ahead, explore.

Go be spanked. Go forth and be hit on the ass. Anyway,

what he said was that he found that if he could go up to usually a woman, although maybe a man too, he probably did both, who was in the dominant role, who was sort of playing atop, and he would tell them, I really have this desire to dominate you. exciting to them because they remember that even though they're very much at present playing the dominant role. Often they'd started out with the other and they still had that kind of excitement at someone proposing the idea to them. It

seems to me like a lot of the exciting stuff to do with these sexual taboos is crossing a taboo line, right? It's reversing the polarity of a role. So you have the high powered boss bitch or CEO that wants to play the other role. And I think that the cute girl next door that dresses up in leather and has a whip is an archetype for a reason, because you think, that's her reversing her sort of polarity her identity a little bit did you look at um paul bloom's work about the sweet spot because he interviewed a bunch of dominatrix's dominatrix for that and uh he was telling me that he spoke to one that was a professional dominatrix and she said nothing captures attention like a whip and what she meant by that was that if you've been hit in the face for a few seconds afterwards you're not thinking about anything and that kind of leads back to what you were talking about there that it's people want um peace from mind right they want to escape it's a type of escapism it's the same as using drugs or alcohol it's to get them out of their headspace you know they've got this high-powered executive who has to do things and he needs to be executive function is through the roof and then he's tied up and what can he do he can't do anything he literally can't do anything yes yes

uh i uh i i did this work long ago before i knew paul bloom and uh read his stuff um but that's true and i i did read some of them make the same kind of comment. One said, I think, a whip is a great way to get someone to be here now. They can't look away from it and they can't think about anything else. Now, they don't usually hit them in the face, I think, because they don't want to leave marks there. And plus, that's risky. I learned the S&M communities really carefully want to administer pain but not cause any injury. So and dominance who actually hurt their partners are often then shunned and not welcome anymore. But wherever they whip them, the bare ass was I guess the popular place, that it's the same thing, and it certainly gets one's attention.

What about pornography? You looked at that. All

right. Well, what about it? It's certainly been a huge and revolutionary change. A couple centuries ago, there always have been some erotic drawings going back into prehistory. But the availability has been quite low, and I assume the quality was too. I forget it was a remark that a young man today can go online and see more naked female flesh in 10 minutes than his great-great saw in an entire lifetime. So, clearly it's here to stay. I was young when people were still debating, should it be made available? Can stores sell it over the counter or only in the mail. And if it's too pornographic, it should be suppressed and censored and even people put in jail. Now, I think they've given up on most of that. There's so much sexual stimulation available. Well, that's, I don't know, for better or for worse. Probably some of both. Interesting question for me is to think of novelty as a limited resource, that you can get excited by new things, whereas things that are the same, the same sexual stimuli year after year will become somewhat less exciting to you. So young men already have high sexual desire. It doesn't take much to turn them on. In a way, it's kind of a waste to look at all that pornography and get turned on because what novelty are you going to find in your 40s and 50s and 60s uh to produce uh arousal there there's a writer

from the uk called mary harrington and she did an article called the three laws of porno dynamics and the second law of porno dynamics is the law of fap entropy, which states that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more weird and novel over time. And she's basically highlighting this, the fact that this isn't true. This definitely isn't true for all men. a particular subsection of men need to continue to amp up the extremity, the novelty, whatever it is. And then before you know it, you're down in the annals of Pornhub watching blueberry porn or whatever it is that you can manage to get yourself into. I think that that's a dynamic. You're right that males overclocked sex drive gets really sort of weaponized and then downregulated. And then you've got to go again like we need to ratchet it back up again. Then it gets downregulated again further because it just continues to adapt.

Yes. The novelty is there. It's probably a stronger factor in the male than the female sex drive. But in some degree, new things are exciting. New practices, new partners, new things. Women just were covered head to foot pretty much. And I say, like, if the woman's skirt came up and showed her ankle, you know, like the man might get an erection. It's a turn on, a big deal. You know, ankles are nothing and knees and all that. At least, though, if you're getting turned on by a glimpse of an ankle as a young man, then there's still plenty that's going to be new.