The New York Times has an interesting but annoying article on the subject of sadists. Interesting because, well, it’s about sadists, my favorite kind of people. They’re the Yin to my masochistic Yang. Annoying because it suffers from all the usual problems these kind of pseudo-scientific articles often suffer from. It simplifies, conflates and doesn’t define terms clearly. I’m left with way more questions that I started with. Not to mention a desire to quit my job and do a doctorate on the topic.
The basic point of the article is that sadism is far commoner than people traditionally assume. You don’t have to be a Hannibal Lecter to be classed as a sadist. However, it seems to tangle a lot of things together in strange ways. I’m left wondering…
- What’s the correlation between sexual sadists who get off on the reactions of their consensual partners and everyday sadists who get off on hurting whoever they come across? My experience is that the former don’t strongly overlap with the latter.
- What’s the split between people who enjoy power, those who enjoy destruction and those who enjoy the suffering of others? The article conflates them all, but for the first two the sadism is incidental to the main goal. Someone watching a clip of a race car crash is typically watching it for the awe and the spectacle of the crash, not because they’re hoping the driver got hurt. Similarly I don’t think shooting a collection of pixels in a videogame necessarily identifies someone as a sadist.
- How many people identified as sadists are conscious of their sadism? And of those that are, how many seek out opportunities to act sadistically? Does being aware of the trait cause people to act on it or attempt to control and diminish it?
- How many people act sadistically in groups but not in one on one situations? It would seem to me that the dynamics of social bullying are very different, although this article conflates them.
- Are sadists typically selective in how they inflict pain? Is it the reaction of the victim that matters? Or the way in which the sadist provokes the reaction?
It’s a fascinating area, and sadly this article doesn’t get to the heart of it. I’m surprised the scientists haven’t paid more attention to people who self-identify as sadists and masochists. They can’t use them to decipher the broader story, but they’d at least be a good starting point. And it’d be way easier to set-up ethical experiments with a pool of subjects who will happily zap and whack each other for fun!
I’m not entirely sure where this shot of two sadists indulging in a little nipple torture comes from. I’d guess it’s one of the Kink sites, but my search foo is failing me.
Your points are well stated which led me to wonder where or how the word sociopath may enter into the conversation about the word sadist?
That’s a fascinating question and one that would be interesting to research. I’ve really no idea outside of a casual understanding of the terms. Given that sociopaths tends to lack empathy with others and a don’t have a strong sense of right/wrong, I’d assume that a lot of sociopaths also tend towards sadism. Based on nothing more than my anecdotal experience I’d expect/hope that the reverse isn’t true. Most sadists I know who play in a consensual manner show strong empathy and morale character. But it’d be great to dig up some real data on that.
-paltego
The problems occur when people talk about things like sadism and masochism that exist on a spectrum as if they were a simple binary on-off switch.
I did one of those psychometric tests recently that uses scaling for a number of different kinks and came up with a slight tendency towards both – 50% masochist and 43% sadist.
I’d normally be sceptical, particularly since one can’t inspect the algorithm behind the test, but the same test scored me 96% switch, which justifies a reasonable degree of confidence.
That problem of binary classification is a common one. It always crops up in these kind of ‘popular science’ articles when they attempt to simplify complex ideas into simple articles, and it’s more generally true for those particular terms. Humans also like stories and discussions that evolve along clear comprehensible lines, which tends to result in simplifying the number of dimensions to a problem space. A neat but wrong theory spreads much more quickly than a messy unclear one that may be closer to the truth. In this case not only is sadist being conflated with other personality traits, but even apparently opposing traits are not actually orthogonal to each other.
-paltego
Despite being well aware that I was kinky and liked being dominant, I didn’t know I was a sadist until I actually hit a guy with a riding crop and found it turned me on even more than the D/s games we’d played up to that point which were more about teasing and control. In my everyday life, I’m aggressive but not violent – in fact, I’m a pacifist. So how does that fit into their ‘everyday sadists’ paradigm?
I’m not sure you, or indeed any traditional consensual sexual sadist, really fits into this model. They’ve combined so many things together here it’s made the term almost meaningless. I suspect there are dozens of dimensions to think about sadism in. To think of a kid shooting characters in videogames, a social bully, a serial killer, a motor racing fan and a kinky person all as ‘sadists’ seems silly.
-paltego
Hi Paltego:
As an avid New York Times reader I must admit their articles often leave me with more questions than I started out with. I recently read one called “how to find a job with a philosophy degree.” After finishing the article I still had no idea how to find a job with a philosophy degree.
Articles on masochism and sadism in the vanilla press are usually pretty disappointing. Sadism in our world is usually equated with being a sexual sadist, a quality we deeply desire in a partner. Journalists are more apt to view a sadist as someone who wants to inflict severe and uninvited suffering on a non-consensual partner. Vanilla folks don’t understand the consensual sexual connection on a gut level so they are almost guaranteed to get it wrong. I think those two types of sadism are so different there should be different words to describe them.
Hey hmp,
I agree that different words are really required here. As I said in the post and in other comments, they’re really conflating too many different things here to make the discussion meaningful. I think your comment about the lack of a gut level understanding is a perceptive one. There’s no conception of consensual sadomasochism, so the idea of consent doesn’t get baked into the term we use for it. That’s not true for other labels we use.
-paltego