Oh heck, I'll answer seriously. Caveat emptor: I'm asexual, so my fascination with kink is purely intellectual. As a result, my experience is more of an outside observer trying to understand alien behaviors than anything else. If I sound like a weird scientist treating kink-enjoyers as experimental subjects, sorry. It's inherently all theoretical to me.
So, in answer, kink is a broad space that goes well beyond just submission, so without even getting into just the question of submission, it is not all the sublimation of the desire to be submitting to capital (domination, for instance, is not the sublimation of the desire to submit to anything). Submission itself is still not a narrow space, and the wants of submissives vary enough that it seems extremely unlikely that all of them reflect a desire for submission to any one thing. That said, I'm sure that capitalism does shape kink in a lot of ways (beyond, of course, the obvious commodification process and commodity fetishism lending absent meaning to consumption).
I'm sure that the experience of the untrustworthy nature of power informs and shapes the desire for there to be an authority that can be trusted with power. Similarly, I'm sure that the inherent betrayal of discovering that you can't trust power creates a nostalgia for when that trust existed. I imagine that some forms of play can help serve as a form of exposure therapy in a controlled environment, too.
There is a confounding variable. Watching a bunch of adults play with coloring books at a little playspace party does give that impression. And there are subs that are so crushed by the weight of the world submission is a release from the stress. Similar doms so comodofied being able to experience controll is profound. We must also consoder it is fun and hot. We are alienated from our selves so badly that we can't accept that aometimes having fun is a goal in itself.
I think the psychoanalyst's counterargument is that what is or is not fun is shaped by the same social forces that shape all preference, and that therefore, something being enjoyable cannot be extracted from the same motivating factors as other actions.
I'm not a psychoanalyst, though, so I'll acknowledge that 'it makes my brain release lots of endorphins' is at least partially a justification in and of itself, and that kink tends to involve actions that create very large spikes in endorphins even in comparison to vanilla sex, so there's definitely an element of 'it just feels good' (where 'feels good' isn't necessarily invoking pleasure, merely some pleasant experience) that needs to be acknowledged. What is interesting about that to me is that it means that we build a lot of social constructs that abut behaviors that 'just feel good', and, as a result, those social constructs tend to be very instructive w/r/t the relationship between broader social behavior and more instinctively hedonistic behavior. Therefore, the socialization and society of kink become the place where we can try to rectify the confounding inputs.
I think it'd be ibteresting to try to figure out the incidence of kinks across societies. Anecdotal we see more repressive societies have a higher incidence of kink typenactivites but I have no idea how the data actually is. You aeen any numbers?
I've seen some numbers from the US and some from Japan, but there's an incredibly high level of unreliability in surveys on kink because people both lie and do not respond at higher rates with them, and it's hard to remove the selection biases such studies produce.
Not sure - normally, being a 'nerd' connotes participating in a thing, and I explicitly don't. On the other hand, some definitions of 'nerd' are characterized by not having sex, in which case, I qualify. I guess that makes me Schrodinger's sex nerd?
Oh heck, I'll answer seriously. Caveat emptor: I'm asexual, so my fascination with kink is purely intellectual. As a result, my experience is more of an outside observer trying to understand alien behaviors than anything else. If I sound like a weird scientist treating kink-enjoyers as experimental subjects, sorry. It's inherently all theoretical to me.
So, in answer, kink is a broad space that goes well beyond just submission, so without even getting into just the question of submission, it is not all the sublimation of the desire to be submitting to capital (domination, for instance, is not the sublimation of the desire to submit to anything). Submission itself is still not a narrow space, and the wants of submissives vary enough that it seems extremely unlikely that all of them reflect a desire for submission to any one thing. That said, I'm sure that capitalism does shape kink in a lot of ways (beyond, of course, the obvious commodification process and commodity fetishism lending absent meaning to consumption).
I'm sure that the experience of the untrustworthy nature of power informs and shapes the desire for there to be an authority that can be trusted with power. Similarly, I'm sure that the inherent betrayal of discovering that you can't trust power creates a nostalgia for when that trust existed. I imagine that some forms of play can help serve as a form of exposure therapy in a controlled environment, too.
There is a confounding variable. Watching a bunch of adults play with coloring books at a little playspace party does give that impression. And there are subs that are so crushed by the weight of the world submission is a release from the stress. Similar doms so comodofied being able to experience controll is profound. We must also consoder it is fun and hot. We are alienated from our selves so badly that we can't accept that aometimes having fun is a goal in itself.
I think the psychoanalyst's counterargument is that what is or is not fun is shaped by the same social forces that shape all preference, and that therefore, something being enjoyable cannot be extracted from the same motivating factors as other actions.
I'm not a psychoanalyst, though, so I'll acknowledge that 'it makes my brain release lots of endorphins' is at least partially a justification in and of itself, and that kink tends to involve actions that create very large spikes in endorphins even in comparison to vanilla sex, so there's definitely an element of 'it just feels good' (where 'feels good' isn't necessarily invoking pleasure, merely some pleasant experience) that needs to be acknowledged. What is interesting about that to me is that it means that we build a lot of social constructs that abut behaviors that 'just feel good', and, as a result, those social constructs tend to be very instructive w/r/t the relationship between broader social behavior and more instinctively hedonistic behavior. Therefore, the socialization and society of kink become the place where we can try to rectify the confounding inputs.
I think it'd be ibteresting to try to figure out the incidence of kinks across societies. Anecdotal we see more repressive societies have a higher incidence of kink typenactivites but I have no idea how the data actually is. You aeen any numbers?
I've seen some numbers from the US and some from Japan, but there's an incredibly high level of unreliability in surveys on kink because people both lie and do not respond at higher rates with them, and it's hard to remove the selection biases such studies produce.
does this make you a sex nerd
Not sure - normally, being a 'nerd' connotes participating in a thing, and I explicitly don't. On the other hand, some definitions of 'nerd' are characterized by not having sex, in which case, I qualify. I guess that makes me Schrodinger's sex nerd?
Mhmm... tell me more, go on. Describe exactly how you would approach the experiments, please. Include as much detail as you can ...