EDITORIAL GAYLES.TV.- We have put an end to the eastern with his heartbreaking images, his self-inflicted penances and his painful Friday. And the curious attraction that the vision of Crucified and Painful Christs broken by grief exerts is curious.
There is a Czech proverb that ensures that "Pleasure and pain lie down in the same bed" and it is not clear if it has a metaphorical or literal sense. The interpretation is a little to the consumer's liking: if we talk about feelings it can be understood that love is always accompanied to a greater or lesser degree of pain because nothing is forever and the only thing that remains is the change, that is, later or earlier that which today produced us
Your pleasure will end up making us cry.
But today we want to talk here about the literal sense, the relationship between pleasure and pain. BDSM, bondage practices or, more simply, the sadomasochism had become part of the list of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it was withdrawn from it and today we can speak of a growing social acceptance of this type of practice. For many couples, regardless of their orientation, power games, submission, and pain are part of the relationship. But we can still talk about people who only get pleasure from engaging in extreme sexual activities in relation to pain.
Just a few days ago Shangay.com published a list of erotic toys for gays and what drew attention was that several of them seemed designed to play with pain: nipple forceps, anal hooks that seem to come from the props of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," anal spreaders that could be in any machine shop ... And all with the qualification of that "no gay should obviate."
But is there a scientific justification for that pleasant attraction for pain? Apparently yes. First pleasure and pain share the area of the brain where they are generated, the line that separates them is very small and both primary sensations activate the same brain circuit and release dopamine. Dopamine is a brain chemical that generates a pleasant drug-like sensation. In the face of trauma or extreme situations, serious news or accidents, the body produces high doses of dopamine that dampen pain and generate a pleasant sensation of relaxation and well-being. For this reason, by causing pain, we also produce that feeling of alleviating the suffering that we associate with pleasure.
A scientist called Leknes recently conducted a paper in which the universities of Oxford and Oslo. This group of researchers has succeeded in showing that the brain behaves differently when the same pain of moderate intensity is compared with a 'worse' or more intense pain or with a 'better' or more bearable one. The participants in the experiment felt that moderate pain as pleasant when compared to a more intense one. At the brain level, greater activation was observed in the reward circuit that includes the orbital and ventromedial prefrontal cortices. That is, by relieving the pain there was a greater reward and the pleasure did not lie so much in the pain itself as in the relief that comes from being released from it.
In short, we could say that practices that associate pain and pleasure should not be seen as bad or good, as desirable or demeaning. We simply can not apply a moral standard to talk about them, they must always be the result of a shared activity that both sides accept, something that is part of the intimacy and that only is for those who practice it.
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