Is masochism necessary?

I might try and make a top-level post about it.

Please, do.

OK; sorry for misreading your tone. (And thanks for the extra data point about that hypothesis.)

The "very unlikely" theory is the model by which an awful lot of people interpret the existence of sexual variation. See for example this dictionary definition of the word fetish against which I'm not a fetishist, which would seem like a rather counterintuitive conclusion. Or consider the standard diagnostic manual for mental illness in the United States, the DSM, which AFAICT uses the same model to discuss my "disorder".

I could've sworn there were some fairly recent studies on brain activity in BDSM practitioners, but my Google-Fu is failing me.

No, I say I think it's extremely unlikely to be right, and I wouldn't use the word "know" to describe my epistemic situation about this. (Else I wouldn't have brought it up even as a hypothesis worth considering.)

I do know this site very well, and I have to say the way the article refers to masochism got up my nose too. I think if we were going to discuss stuff like why straight people are straight, we'd take care that our audience didn't misunderstand our intent.

:::::::::: You don't know this site very well. We would discuss those questions if they seemed relevant. ::::::::::

Good!

I just think it's important for people who have these conversations to consider the point that "what's relevant" or "what's worthy of examination" is often, itself, socially constructed.

:::::::::: Can you see how this might reasonably connect to masochism in particular, and not sexuality in general? ::::::::::

Yes. But my concern is not masochism in general. I am responding to the ways in which sexual masochism has been framed in this discussion.

Sexual masochism is relevant -- it was brought up in the original post. I recognize that my comments may not directly address the main questions of the original post. But what I am hoping is that my comments shed some light on some aspects of the post, and encourage the writers here to consider what biases they are bringing to those aspects.

I made no moral accusations and I threatened no social rejection. I pointed out your bias. I did it with strong words; maybe I should apologize for that; I'm an orator, I don't usually run in specifically "rationalist" circles, and I'm used to a different kind of conversation.

In terms of discouraging discussion, here's what I think discourages discussion:

1) Any request for ideas that implies that people who have some experience with the matter at hand are "perverts" -- this insults and scares off people who could contribute to your discussion.

2) The implication that telling people they're being judgmental is the same as "threatening people with social rejection" or "making moral accusations" -- this tells potential commenters that if they call you out on your bias, you'll refuse to listen because you feel so hurt that someone called you biased.

I've got to say, I was reading the original post and rolling my eyes, but it looked more like "Someone so square as to compare sexual masochism to eating spicy food" than "Someone actively prejudiced".

Does anyone know of any actual case of a sexual masochist having been produced by learning/training/conditioning in which the person definitely was not a masochist to start with? (Begs the question of how, exactly, they ended up undergoing the said conditioning...)

Actually, it raises another question, which is, how can you establish that a person was "definitely not a masochist to start with"? After all, if you've never tried it, how would you know?

Does it count if the person was curious before you brought up the subject? Expressed an interest in trying it after you brought it up? Had prior rape fantasies?

How would you consider the analagous situation, where somebody's never tried a spicy food before? How do you know they're not already predisposed to like or dislike spiciness?

It might be more useful to ask, can you increase a person's sexual response to pain through learning and conditioning... but of course the answer to that is not just yes, but hell yes. (Same for sexual response to sadism -- many people learn to become aroused as dominants or sadists simply through repeated exposure to their partner's arousal and happiness as the recipient of their attentions.)

Just give me a sec while I get my proposal past the ethics committee...

I once met someone who claimed to have trained people to be masochists. (It was at a rather weird convention, and he was demonstrating "knife play" - stimulating someone by lightly running knife blades across their skin without cutting them.)

It might be possible to get people who don't self-identify as masochists to volunteer for such a test. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to distinguish the actual non-masochists and the people who have weak tendencies in that regard.

Sounds ripe for self-experimentation. How curious are you? ;-D

With sexual masochism, I think the conditioning generally starts with fantasies. Obviously this is hard to test, but I still like the explanation because of the parsimony with developing a taste for spicy or bitter foods, learning to enjoy frightening experiences, and so on; in those cases the progression from nonenjoyment to enjoyment seems obvious.

Edit: To (hopefully) avoid seeming naively square, I'm not saying these experiences are comparable or that anyone can learn to be sexually masochistic, only that the formation of these preferences could share a common mechanism.

Not me -- personally I'm all the way over at the tame end of the spice/tame-continuum.

If so, what should we call the more general phenomenon of "deriving pleasure from one's own pain"

I don't know, but not "masochism." Whether these behaviors even hang together as a "general phenomenon" is an empirical question that is not yet answered. Let's look at some of Phil's examples:

• Listening to music turned up so loud that it hurts

Are people who do this actually enjoying the pain, or they merely tolerate it because they like loud music?

• Movies, especially horror movies
• Roller coasters

I once read that one of the main enjoyments in horror movies is not watching it, but the relief afterward; if true, this would be a difference from masochism. Another difference from masochism is that horror movies may be experienced as scary, while in masochism, sensations that would normally be painful are not necessarily experienced as painful.

However, a component that horror movies share with masochism and rollercoasters is arousal of the sympathetic nervous system (i.e. fight-or-flight). Whether horror movies also result in release of endorphins, like exercise and masochism, I don't know.

• Enjoying exercise

My guess is that in painful exercise, people aren't really deriving pleasure from their pain. Rather, pain is signifying that they are getting closer to their exercise goals, and is linked to feelings of accomplishment. People may derive pleasure from endorphins released during exercise, which would be a similarity with masochism. Furthermore, exercise may involve an altered state of mind, like masochism.

• Being Bruce

For this point, we do have a name: self-defeating behavior. There may be many motives for self-defeating behavior, such as insecurity, negative self-concept, or desire to be right about beliefs that limit oneself. Although these factors may coexist with masochism in some people, there is no reason to believe that the link is necessary or that they are part of masochism. There is also currently know evidence that self-defeating behavior is linked to certain factors in masochism, such as arousal of the sympathetic nervous system or release of endorphins.

As for masochism itself, it's misleading to describe it as "deriving pleasure from one's own pain." Sensations that non-masochists might experience as pain (or masochists themselves when not aroused), masochists might not experience as pain, but rather as pleasure or stimulation. In The Social Dimension of Sex, Roy Baumester suggests that masochism involves temporary escape from the self (which to me, is plausible as a factor in masochism, but not as a complete explanation). This would be a similarity with exercise, videogames, and perhaps horror movies. However, the particular self-escaping mental state would be different: the flow state) of exercise and videogames is not the same state as subspace. Escaping oneself is different from defeating oneself, which requires a self to defeat.

In Phil's supposedly masochistic pursuits, there are actually a bunch of completely different factors:

• Experiencing typically painful sensations as pleasure
• Experiencing pain, but as information about one's success
• Seeking pain or failure as confirmation of one's insecurities
• Escaping the self
• Enjoying sympathetic nervous system arousal
• Enjoying endorphins
• Enjoying the relief you feel after pain or discomfort
• Sexual pleasure

Something else to emphasize about masochism is the sexual element, particularly the link to sexual submission (though submissiveness and masochism are not the same thing). In my view, there is something fundamentally different about the psychology of masochists from typical "vanilla" people, and perhaps a biological difference also; that's why I like the description of BDSM interests as a different sexual orientation, or set of sexual orientations. It's problematic to take the psychology of this taxon of people, and generalize from it to the psychological traits of the general population.

Most of Phil's items, including sexual masochism, have some similarities with all other items, and fundamental differences from all the other items. Not all these phenomena are accurately described as deriving pleasure from one's pain, and they can't be fit into the term masochism; doing so will lead to more analytical confusion than clarity.

and, for sadism, "deriving pleasure from other people's pain")? The latter thing, especially, seems to me to be just about the worst thing in the world, and it would be a great tragedy if, out of an overzealous desire to avoid bigotry, we lost the ability to criticize and be emotionally resolved against it.

First, I should say that my objections to Phil's post are not on the grounds of bigotry. Second, I agree with you we should not lose our ability to criticize terrible things due to a politically correct avoidance of "labeling" and necessary categorizations.

Yet the need to morally condemn something shouldn't make us careless about how we categorize it. Like masochism, "sadism" is often used in a non-rigorous way. Enjoying giving someone pain in a safe, sane, and consensual context, is different from the behavior of sexually-motivated serial killers, who do not care about consent and have genuine impulse-control problems. And giving sexually-motivated pain is different from enjoying giving pain out of hatred, experimentation, or political motivations.

In my view, the word sadism should be reserved for when there is a sexual motivation. Otherwise, describing killers and mass-murderers as "sadistic" obscures the many non-sexual motivations behind killing. Although sexually-motivated serial killers are highly cognitively accessible due to the availability heuristic, the "worst thing in the world" (at least in the sense of the body count caused) is probably not sexually motivating killing, but rather political and ideological related killing.

virtually every death is caused by pure player error.

Wow, that is not my impression. Nethack inflicts random sudden death. Nethack works dramatically by repeatedly putting you in situations where you have to choose between certain death and possible death.

I've never read the source code, so my perspective is limited. Does your view of nethack as a rationality game consider reading the source code to be cheating, or to be a prerequisite for playing?

I'm undecided on whether to call optimal Nethack playing "rational" or "using a big lookup table".

Sometimes history moves slowly. During his life, Bach was best known as an organist; sure, later composers studied and loved his work, but it wasn't until the mid 19th century that he started to get the reputation that he has now.

I think komponisto is implying that there was plenty of popular music back then as well, but most of those composers/performers didn't enter the canon.

However, I think there's another factor at play here - "art music" experienced the same academization and post-modernization that we saw in the visual arts. Serialism, musicque concrete, aleatory composition - all these things pushed the boundaries of what "music" actually meant, going against popular sensibilities in ways that (and I could be wrong here) the "art music" of previous centuries did not. The idea of linear stylistic progression totally breaks down once you get to the mid 20th century, so if you want to construct a convenient narrative, you've got to grab onto popular music or jazz.

I think the Second Viennese School tends to get singled out, because they are the major overlap between "music that some devotees of 'art music' really enjoy" and "music that some devotees of 'art music' think is too bizarre." If you go earlier, Mahler has too many fans, and later, people like Xenakis don't have enough.

In one of Robert Greenberg's music histories, he said, IIRC, that around 1800, 1 in 20 people in Vienna were professional musicians.

Even granting this statistic, this is highly selective reporting. Vienna has historically been a musical center, and was especially so at that time. The situation there was hardly typical of European society as a whole. And the phenomenon of high-quality music being played in gathering places hasn't disappeared either: buskers play Bach, and recently I heard Beethoven's 7th symphony come on between jazz selections in a coffee shop.

Mozart and Beethoven are popular today, while Schoenberg is not; history has already given its verdict against the 2nd Viennese School

That is silly and presumptuous. "Popularity" is hardly an appropriate metric for judging "the verdict of history" on a form of advanced creative intellection. I can assure you that the Second Viennese School is held in high esteem by expert composers and music theorists.

Besides -- if "history" has "ruled against" the Second Viennese School, why are you complaining about the "death of great music" resulting from their influence?

I don't say these things in order to offend you. I apologize for using inflammatory language.

That's good; but there's also a larger issue here. Assertions about music should be held to the same level of scrutiny as assertions about anything else. (As a result of discussions like this, I may be tempted at some point to do a post on rationality as it relates to the arts.)