The significance which produces the arousal ismultidimensional in practiced or watched intense sexplay adrenaline excitement is produced notonly bythe facts Erich Fromm, 'The Fear of Freedom' (1940), p 134, ARKPaperbacks 1984 of having control over someoneorof relinquishing control overoneself, but also by the gradual side of the process - the surrendering of ego territories step by step bythe passive participator, the "struggle". Not onlybeing in power or powerless, but overpowering or being overpowered, are activities of utmostdeepest significance to humans. The adrenaline trip of real ordepicted hard pornstyle sexual situation allows repressed 'Id' impulses to emerge.
The facial muscles of all humans must produce certain "expressions" at certain
occasions, and the expressions maintained by female humans which signify "passion"
in sexual context and something similar in "high culture" context (European and east
Asian opera,ballet, dramatic poem reading, etc.) are facial expressions which in any other context
wouldbe interpreted as signifying "unhappiness" and "suffering".
The arched eyebrows,
the movements of the mouth, and in sexual context the sounds comingfrom the
oral opening correspondto "suffering", yet seem to represent the
highest pleasure. The facial expressions taken commonlyto signify complete
abandonment to the sexual act, also when evaluated
from outside of an arousal adrenaline trip, correspond to 'anxiety' and 'pain'.
Anxiety, Pain, Arousal
The behavior duringintense sexgames is shocking from a Superego
point of view.
The very sounds and facial expression even, banished fromreality in childhood only to
reappear in momentsof 'loss of control', produce rocketinglevels of acutely felt anxiety
(disgust, horror, shame, etc.) in any observer outside the arousal of the couple. Not least of all
-anobserving child, but also adult humans. But within the arousal of the sex situation, the
anxiety and pain is not experienced as it is in the 'real world' (or respectively 'vanilla' world)
-it is not felt, a 'sexual arousal' is felt instead.
Here is a graph, an attempt todepict in two
dimensions the patriarchal ideal situation of the sexual interaction of
a sadistic dominating male and masochistic submissive female, the ritual of male domination and female surrender:
Point 'A'oncurve 'y' is the moment of the male advances in which the female reacts with
struggle against them. In a 'consensual' sexual act this struggle facilitates the rapid increase of
the arousal, until both enter the zone of no yesterdayand no tomorrow, shown aspoint 'B',
which signifies the fusion of the sadistic impulse of the male with the masochistic
impulse of the female, which manifests itself at the end of the struggle.
The passive female has the freedomto not repressthe masochistic
impulses, and the male - the sadistic such. Point 'A1' corresponds to the
criminal situation inwhichthe struggle between a predator male
and a victim female culminates in the female beingraped, beatenor murdered.point 'B1' signifies
the sphere of theatrical representations of the 'A1' crimes, whichare acted out as a ritual for
heightening the sexual frenzy, it also includes the possible intense humiliation rituals
developedupon the 'B' type masochistic affect - includingbeing called 'bad names', being
forced into 'humiliating' positions.
The loss of the everyday personality (or the imitationof thisloss) is one dimension of
the domination/submission rituals, in a way to be summed up in "you like it bitch!" -this
sentence containing not only the act of accepting the sexual punishment, but also the turning
into an animal, as opposed to a 'cultivated human'. It is temptingto see in boththe active and
passive actors in a real sexsituation, aseach inhis/her waystriving to
ease the miseryfrom the initial shocks in the earliest childhood, the unpleasant and abrupt interventions from
outside, which create the first Superego patterns, in a way 'scars',
within the individual's then fragile and unorganized psyche.