Pain Is Not Submission: Untangling Sadism, Dominance, Masochism and Submission
There is a surprising amount of confusion around BDSM terminology—not only among people outside the community, but within it as well. Part of the problem is that we often use one word to describe a technique, another to describe a relationship dynamic, and a third to describe an emotional response, as if they were all interchangeable. They are not.
You can enjoy inflicting pain without wanting power over someone. You can enjoy receiving pain without wanting to submit. You can dominate someone without hurting them, and you can engage in intense impact play while relating to your partner as an equal.
The same flogger, the same strike, and even the same physical sensation can mean entirely different things depending on the people involved and, perhaps most importantly, on why they are doing it.
So let's untangle a few concepts.
The Impact Play Top and Receiver
An Impact Play Top is simply the person who initiates the impact. They are the one wielding the flogger, paddle, cane, hand, or whatever tool is being used.
This person is sometimes called the Giver, which is my prefered term to use. Another term occasionally used is Active, although I personally don't like that word, because it implies that the partner is passive, which it is not.
The other person, then, is the Impact Play Receiver. Traditionally, they might be called the Bottom or the Passive. Those terms are widely used and perfectly meaningful within BDSM culture, but I personally find them limiting in certain contexts. I am not interacting with an abstract role; I am interacting with a person. And ideally, that person is not simply lying there while something is done to them. Even when they choose to surrender control, they are still participating in the creation of the experience. Receiving impact can be an extremely active process.
This distinction matters to me because receiving is not the same as being passive, and giving is not the same as having all the agency.
Sadism Is Not the Same as Dominance
A sadist, in the consensual BDSM sense, is generally someone who enjoys causing pain, discomfort, intensity, or even suffering within an agreed context. The key word here is consent.
In clinical psychology, sadism means something more specific. The DSM-5-TR describes Sexual Sadism Disorder as a persistent sexual interest in another person’s physical or psychological suffering that causes significant distress or impairment, or involves acting on it with someone who has not consented. That is very different from consensual sadism in BDSM. In other words: consensual sadism does not, by itself, constitute a mental disorder.
But even within consensual BDSM, being a sadist does not automatically mean being dominant.
You can enjoy the sensation of causing pain—the reactions, the marks, the sounds, the intensity, the physical and emotional exchange—without particularly wanting authority over the other person. You may be interested in reaction rather than obedience. You may want to create an intense experience rather than establish a hierarchy.
This is actually close to how I approach much of my Bodywork sessions. There is certainly an element of leadership involved: someone has to hold the container, make decisions, pay attention to safety, and guide the experience. But taking pleasure in leadership alone does not necessarily create a Dominant/submissive dynamic. Sometimes I am simply fascinated by the question: What happens when we bring this person to this particular intensity? What emerges when they are given enough space to stop performing and simply react?
That is not necessarily about making someone submit to me.
In my Seduction & Surrender sessions, however, the dynamic shifts. Here, the experience is not only about sensation, but also about the relationship and the power between us. I take a more consciously dominant role: I lead the interaction. Sometimes the most powerful tool is not the flogger at all, but desire, anticipation, frustration, shame or the simple realisation that, within the world we have created together, I am the one in charge.
This is why I offer different packages: because Bodywork and Seduction & Surrender (and the other packages…) may use similar tools, but they are designed to create fundamentally different experiences.
Masochism Is Not the Same as Submission
A masochist is generally someone who enjoys pain or certain forms of intense or unpleasant sensation. Pain may render someone towards submission, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Pain has many faces: it may feel sexually exciting, it may produce an emotional release. It may help someone become present in their body. It may create emotional catharsis. It may feel meditative, grounding, challenging, rewarding or simply interesting. Pain can make one person surrender while making another person fight.
This is one of the reasons why I find working with pain so fascinating: the physical stimulus does not dictate the emotional response.
Two people can receive the same kind of impact and have completely different experiences. Even the same person can respond differently on different days, depending on their mood, their body, their menstrual cycle or the chemistry between us in the moment.
I don't necessarily want everyone to become submissive. I don't want every intense scene to end in the same emotional destination. Often the most interesting thing is to give someone enough structure and safety to stop performing a role and simply see what is actually there.
The Technique and the Feeling Are Not the Same Thing
This is where much of the confusion begins. We tend to associate certain techniques with certain dynamics: flogging with sadism, kneeling with submission, punishment with dominance. But the technique itself does not define the experience—context and intention do.
I can flog someone to explore intensity, rhythm, adrenaline, or a pain high. Or I can use the same technique as punishment within a power dynamic. The action may look identical from the outside while meaning something completely different to the people involved. Likewise, one person may experience pain as a reward, another as punishment, and someone else may enjoy it without any desire to submit. The reaction to the sensation creates a different scene and a different buildup.
“I Like Pain, But I’m Not Submissive.”
Many of my guests—actually, most of them—come for pain, not submission. I often hear, at the beginning of a session, the familiar sentence, sometimes sounding almost apologetic:“I like pain, but I’m not submissive.”
And it comes from the confusion of concepts in BDSM: the melting of sadism of dominance and masochism with submission. So being a masochist without a desire to submit is perfectly valid. Sometimes overlap happens, but it’s perfectly valid to trust someone to guide you through an intense experience without wanting them to have psychological power over you.
The takeaway is simple: a sadist is not necessarily Dominant, and a masochist is not necessarily submissive.
The more precisely we can distinguish between technique, sensation, emotion, intention and power, the more freedom we have to create experiences that actually reflect who we are and how we experience pleasure. And perhaps that is the most important point: there is no need to force yourself into a role simply because you enjoy a particular sensation. Whatever your path through consensual adult play may be, you don't have to justify it by fitting into someone else's idea of what a sadist, a masochist, a Dominant, or a submissive is supposed to be.