A sadist is a person who feels pleasure in inflicting emotional and physical pain on another person. For the sadistic personality, the emotional pain that is inflicted on another person for the sadist’s own pleasure need not be associated with sex because emotional or physical pain is broader than that which can be inflicted sexually. Hence, the bottom-line for the sadist psychology is that pleasure that is felt by harming another person, who thus feels pain as a direct result of the sadist, lies in the making suffer. A sadist who does not permit oneself to feel emotion is particularly dangerous because no sympathy or compassion operates as a constraint on how much hurt is inflicted. In such a case, the sadist is like one of the androids in the film Ex Machina as the knife is coldly inserted into the torso of the programmer who built the intelligent machines. Indeed, the narcissistic sadist can be very intelligent in knowing precisely how to inflict emotional pain especially in an emotionally vulnerable victim. Once discovered, such a sadist will endeavor to avoid such a victim, but not because such an unemotional sadist has a conscience and feels guilty. In the film, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Anastasia Steele’s life changes forever when she meets the emotionally-tormented billionaire, Christian Grey. She falls in love with the sadist, and, because she wants to be with him, at some point she willingly assumes the masochist role even though she does not feel pleasure from physical (or emotional) pain being inflicted on her person. She loves him so much she wants to enter his deviant world; she even embraces that world. I could see myself doing that were I to fall deeply in love with a sadist, for accepting a person even in spite of that person’s flaws is part of love— unless, of course, lies, sidelining, and emotional betrayals are too much for any trust to be possible. Anastasia may come to treat Christian’s dungeon as a playroom of sorts in which she is his so they can be a couple with an opportunity to connect even more, rather than as a place where he acts out his severe emotional issues in which violence and sex are too closely related in his brain, whether psychologically or physically. Love is to a certain extent, blind or at least purblind. Given how toxic human life can be, can we be blamed for valuing deep connection so very much even in cases in which meaning-from-personality comes with such a high cost?
The full essay is at "Fifty Shades of Grey."
