We’ve all heard about those test animals that are given a treat followed by a painful shock and how they come to associate the treat with pain, even when not given the shock. Interestingly, the converse can also be true — if given a shock and THEN a treat (or a certain smell, or something else pleasant), the test creatures come to associate the pain with pleasure and not the other way around. Awesome.
According to Marta Andreatta from the University of Wurzburg, it’s a question of timing. After we experience pain, the lack of it is a relief. Andreatta thinks that if something happens during this pleasurable window immediately after a burst of pain, we come to associate it with the positive experience of pain relief rather than the negative feeling of the pain itself. The catch is that we don’t realise this has happened. We believe that the event, which occurred so closely to a flash of pain, must be a negative one. But our reflexes betray us.
This article doesn’t talk about BDSM or even allude to it, but there’s such a gaping hole left by its absence that it seems fairly deliberate. In any case, I think we can draw our own conclusions about the intersections of pleasure and pain in sex play. For example, if the pain is given, followed by/in conjunction with a caring consensual partner, well, it’s easy to see where those positive sensations and associations might be coming from.
