Pleasure and love are intrinsically bound to cruelty and pain, not tenderness.

Evidence

In this experience there survives an intention of something other than nature, of love which is not restricted to sex. Tenderness, however, by far the least physical form, is transformed sexuality; the passing of a hand over a head of hair, a kiss on the forehead, which express the delusion of spiritual love, are pacified forms of the blows and bites of the sex act as performed by Australian aborigines. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 88 (#expands, via linked claim)

It must first be pointed out that attributing erotic value to pain does not in any way constitute behavior of passive submission. Pain often serves to raise the tonus of the individual who experiences it, to awaken a sensitivity numbed by the very violence of arousal and pleasure; it is a sharp light bursting out in the carnal night, it removes the lover from the limbo where he is swooning so that he might once more be thrown into it. Pain is normally part of erotic frenzy; bodies that delight in being bodies for their reciprocal joy seek to find each other, unite with each other, and confront each other in every possible way. There is a wrenching from oneself in eroticism, a transport, an ecstasy: suffering also destroys the limits of the self, it is a going beyond and a paroxysm; pain has always played a big role in orgies; and it is well-known that the exquisite and the painful converge: a caress can become torture; torment gives pleasure. Embracing easily leads to biting, pinching, scratching; such behavior is not generally sadistic; it expresses a desire to merge and not to destroy; and the subject that submits to it does not seek to disavow and humiliate himself but to unite; besides, it is far from being specifically masculine. In fact, pain has a masochistic meaning only when it is grasped and desired as the manifestation of enslavement. As for the pain of defloration, it is specifically not accompanied by pleasure; and all women fear the suffering of giving birth, and they are happy that modern methods free them from it. Pain has neither more nor less place in their sexuality than in that of man. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1005 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

If research now indicates that the brain is the source and not the terminus of pain sensations, the latter can be thought of as actions that are sited at once in cultural and neurophysiological contexts. In an important sense “cultural” and “physical” cease to be dichotomies, although for analytical purposes they can be distinguished. What a subject experiences as painful, and how, are not simply mediated culturally and physically, they are themselves modes of living a relationship. The ability to live such relationships over time transforms pain from a passive experience into an active one, and thus defines one of the ways of living sanely in the world. It does not follow, of course, that one cannot or should not seek to reform the social relations one inhabits, still less that pain is intrinsically “a valuable thing.” My point is that one can live one’s pain sanely or insanely, and (although ideas about insanity change) that the progressivist model of agency diverts attention away from our trying to understand how this is done in different traditions, because of the assumption that the agent always seeks to overcome pain conceived as object and as state of passivity. The secular emphasis on the integral human body as the locus of moral sovereignty makes it difficult to grasp the idea of pain as an imagined relationship in which such “internal” states as memory and hope mediate sociality. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 410 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pain is a mode of living a relationship, not merely a passive bodily state. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 410; Erotic pain expresses a desire for union, not passive enslavement — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1005; Pain can be embraced as passionate engagement rather than calculated means (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Tenderness is a pacified residue of violent sexuality #expands (0.88) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 88
• Erotic pain expresses a desire for union, not passive enslavement #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1005
• Pain is a mode of living a relationship, not merely a passive bodily state. #expands (0.82) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 410
• Pain can be embraced as passionate engagement rather than calculated means #corroborates (0.78)