kink pollAre you familiar with ‘intense sensations’ as specific kink terminology, and do you understand what it refers to and the implications of using it instead of another word?
discussing kink‘Intense sensations’ is a term used by kink educator, practitioner, and photographer Fakir Musafar (stage and pen name of Roland Loomis) to describe the physical sensation that is more usually called ‘pain’.
‘Pain’, he argued, is a prejudiced and stigmatizing term. If you enjoy it, it isn’t pain. Even those who call themselves masochists also the term ‘pain’ in some contexts to mean something bad. ‘Emotional pain’, for example, isn’t usually meant when we talk about ‘enjoying pain’.
But our bodies have the capability to find the sensations of being hit or pierced or shocked or burned pleasurable. The term ‘intense sensations’ is intended to reframe how we think about the physical feelings involved.
The problem for me, that I’m still working through as I try to understand and apply this change in perspective, is that it’s easy enough to explain and grasp the change in the abstract – to define a new, preferred word in terms of one’s own vocabulary – but it’s hard to actually understand how to apply it in the context of pleasure vs dislike. For example, ‘intense sensations’ as a simple combination of words could refer to, for example, (picking my words carefully) getting a hard massage that plays with physical feelings that might have been unpleasant if you weren’t prepared for them, but (being even more careful with words) doesn’t trigger the nervous system’s ‘hey, stop doing that’ reflex which can interact with the chemical soup in the brain to end up actually feeling like ‘ooh, keep doing that!’ But I think the point of the term is also to get us to rethink where that boundary lies.
If you’d like to learn more about Fakir Musafar and his work, I can highly recommend the documentary A Body to Live In by Angelo Madsen. (Warning: If you are really squeamish about seeing needles and needle play, it may not be the film for you. I have issues with needles, but I made it through and was comfortable with the imagery of them by the end. YMMV)
I must say the whole base concept ("‘Pain’, he argued, is a prejudiced and stigmatizing term. If you enjoy it, it isn’t pain.")... makes me think. it kinda goes a bit against how I try to embrace labels.
as a similar example, I lately I'm trying to embrace a broader definition of "sex". there was a time where I tried to draw a very clear boundary between kink and sex, for instance (also because of past experiences) and that'd match the normative definition of it. at some point I realized how that didn't really hold water, and now I try to see sex as something more related to emotional intimacy than anything else, which includes essentially all kink.
so, the same with pain. yeah, the normative definition portrays it as something inherently negative... but that just doesn't apply to me
