🔥 THE SADIST: IS HE BORN, MADE, OR CREATED BY THE PATRIARCHY?

Talking about sadism —the pleasure of inflicting pain, humiliation, or control over another— is not just about addressing a paraphilia or a sexual practice within BDSM. It is opening the door to a dark dimension of desire, where personal history, gender models, power structures, and, in many cases, the traumatic mark of childhood intersect.

Psychoanalysis, especially since Freud (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905), understands sadism as a primary perversion linked to the death drive and the need to dominate the other as an object. But not every clinical sadist is an aggressor, nor is every aggressor a sexual sadist. It is more complex.

According to Wilhelm Reich, a dissenting disciple of Freud, sadism is not explained solely by sexual drives, but by chronic emotional repression in childhood. In his work The Function of the Orgasm (1942), he analyzes how many men rigidly educated in authoritarian environments end up eroticizing control and projecting their childhood pain into dominant practices.

"The sadist is a diverted masochist: he punishes outside what he cannot bear to feel inside." — W. Reich

From a contemporary reading, the sadist is often not born, but constructed: he is the child who learned that he was only visible by dominating, that he could never cry, that he received indifference or cold punishments as a form of love. This type of emotional wound becomes a desire for control, but not out of strength, but out of fear of abandonment. Domination appears as a shield against vulnerability.

Psychiatrist Donald Winnicott suggests this indirectly in his theory of the "false self": some people build a coraza of emotional hardness to protect a real self that was damaged. The sadist, from this perspective, is not strong but fragile and armored.

Sadism, when it intersects with traditional masculinity, often becomes a tool of eroticized patriarchal power. In societies where men are taught not to feel, to dominate, to possess, control becomes a language of gender. And when that is sexualized, the figure of the "dominant" appears as a model of virility.

Pierre Bourdieu, in Masculine Domination (1998), affirms that male desire has been historically configured from the logic of conquest, superiority, and the instrumental use of the woman's body. This does not mean that all sadists are aggressors, but rather that culture facilitates and eroticizes forms of symbolic sadism such as contempt, humiliation, or emotional control.

"Symbolic violence does not need a fist to hurt: indifference is enough." — P. Bourdieu

Sadism, in this key, becomes the sexy form of domination, and is often socially accepted if it disguises itself as virility, success, or "character".

It is important to distinguish here between clinical or symbolic sadism (with potential for violence or social oppression) and consensual sadism within BDSM, which implies clear rules, emot...