How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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the perversions ; (2) those which consist in the misuse of
the sexual life to some false social or vocational ends, which
might be called the diversions; and finally (3) those in
which sexual activity is substituted for activity in one of the
other spheres of human endeavour. These might be called
the conversions of sex. They include those forms of sexual
neurosis in which men and women find their chief work
in consulting one physician after another because of
sexual neurasthenia, whose maintenance in the face of all
treatment becomes the fundamental premise of their
existence.
Of the true perversions of sex, sadism and masochism
are the clearest examples. The common denominator of
all sexual perversion, as Wexberg has pointed out, is that
the sexual partner is degraded into an object of ego-
satisfaction.1 In any perversion we find that one individual
misuses another’s sexual constitution in order to bolster
up artificially his own feeling of self-esteem. This
mechanism is beautifully demonstrated in that perversion
we call sadism, in which sexual satisfaction is only possible
after the sexual partner has been brutally mistreated,
physically or mentally.
The sadist wants to feel his personal power, and has no
interest whatsoever in his mate. The brutal “ he-man ”
and the sexual “ gorilla ” are common examples of this
perverse sexual type. It is not our purpose to describe the
horrible crimes that sadists commit in the name of sex.
If you can experience sexual gratification only after you
have beaten or cut or maltreated your mate, you are a
very discouraged human being. Only an arrant coward
could secure self-esteem at such a price.
The masochists, who seem to be at the opposite pole,
because they can be sexually gratified only when they
have been maltreated by their sexual partners, are in
reality not very different from the sadists. Both sadism
and masochism betray a hidden striving for superiority at
the expense of the humiliation of the sexual partner. The
1 Erwin Wexberg: The Psychology of Sex: An Introduction,
translated by Dr. W. Beran Wolfe.