THE POWER DYNAMICS OF EROTICIZED SURRENDER
Although it may seem strange, exotic and highly unnatural to many, I believe sadomasochism is actually deeply instinctual. Domineering role-playing in S&M sex resembles in significant ways the power display among some primates to establish and maintain social hierarchies in a community (i.e. chest pounding to assert dominance).
Submission in human sexual play likewise has its affinities with instinctual social behavior: the appeasement gestures observed among primate subordinates that demonstrate their acknowledgement of the dominant individual's superiority and their acquiescence to his authority (e.g. lowering the head in response to the chest pounding of a higher-ranking individual). For the most part, these interactions in primates are social, psychological and interpersonal but are not sexual (and they are instinctual, not learned).
This type of instinctual understanding of and response to signals of hierarchical power and appeasement gestures is also abundantly evident in human society and can be observed among work associates, friends, sports teams, and even among groups of strangers. But in sadomasochistic recreational play, the hyper-masculine display postures and servile appeasement gestures are self-consciously removed from their original social function and commandeered solely for purposes of heightening sexual arousal to a frenzied pitch by combining crude expressions of aggression and domination (or surrender) with sexual stimulation for an exciting and volatile mixture, occasionally indulged in for the sheer thrill of it.
For the dominant partner in the scene, this power play is very straightforward and easy to understand: dominating a subordinate gives vent to his frustrations and feeds his innate need to assert power and control and mastery over his surroundings. It is a very crude, primal, raw expression of mastery that is deeply instinctual and that's what gives it its edge. However, for the willingly subordinate partner, the reasons for the sexual arousal in being dominated or abused are not nearly as apparent.
Subordination is ultimately also a way of feeling the exhilarating power experienced by the top, only it is arrived at by an alternate, circuitous route. In fact, to the degree that the sadomasochistic encounter is humiliating, debasing or simulates shame, the sexual dynamics for the bottom are an enactment of gestures of surrender not so much to the actual other guy as to the idealized and longed-for masculine "Other," the stern, iconic machismo that the sadistic partner represents in the encounter. Each partner temporarily leaves aside their real selves in order to pursue together this mutual fantasy of sexualized, narcissistic power display on the one hand and abject, humiliating worshipful servitude on the other.
In the power-fueled sex act, the subordinate partner seems not only to sacrifice his own self-respect, allowing the dominant partner to insult his manhood or order him to do humiliating things for him (like licking his boots or kissing his balls). To a certain degree the subordinate loses his very sense of self in enacting the dom's sadistic whims, at least for the duration of the encounter. Slavish, demonstrative submission is welcomed by the masochistic partner as an opportunity to merge with and thereby incorporate the dominant Man's inflated ego--his bloated sense of power and authority. This sexualized power exchange is acted out in the scenario as the dominant/submissive sexual roles of "The Man" (who mistreats the other) and the "fag" (who adores the other despite the mistreatment).
The role of the dominant partner in this scenario, is as the "Real Man" in contrast to the inauthentic manhood of the fag he's abusing. The dominant, aggressive partner is "All Man," while the other guy, the subordinate, is not a man at all. Everything is sharpened, heightened and thrown into high relief in this exaggerated, role-playing sexual dyad of gross inequality: all or nothing, straight or queer, Man or fag, master or slave. It is a staged, highly artificial form of hyper-masculine display and gestures of pure animal appeasement acting together and working towards an attenuated, ecstatic mutual sexual release.
In the sadomasochistically-tinged, unreciprocated blow job, a temporary, almost mystical union is effected between the two roles, an "at-one-ment" between the subordinate sucker and the superior object of his submissive desire, a transitory enmeshing-together. Through submitting to this powerful icon of manliness, by debasing himself shamefully in slavish sexual servitude, the subordinate maintains an illusion that he and his abuser are amalgamated into one powerful will or entity in the harsh and brutal but erotic enactment of his basest desires. He arrogantly demonstrates his superiority by crude gestures directed towards his inferior underling, like spitting at him, calling him names, or ordering him to do humiliating things and then ridiculing him for doing them.
The iconic and exaggerated masculinity of the top in effect "eclipses" the manhood of the bottom, who nonetheless assimilates the Man's power by orally engulfing his erection, which he either slavishly sucks, or else merely submits to being used roughly as the Man's fuck hole, gagging on his engorged prick as he rudely shoves it in and out, eventually swallowing the slimy ejaculate the Man deposits deep in his throat. This temporary merger is therefore in some ways a form of "atonement" for the masculine shortcomings of one or both partners (atonement and "at-one-ment").
Masochistic sexual surrender to and servile worship of a seemingly cold, brutally contemptuous hyper-masculine Man, although it may seem like self-victimization at first glance, is actually a highly subversive strategy to merge with a powerful, masculine "Other," capturing, importing and infusing his virility like a powerful drug. The operative sexual "economy" here is the deviant sexual "outlaw," who by his own capitulation to sadistic domination, stealthily "pirates" the virility of the iconic object of his abject surrender. This, however, does not at all diminish his abusive partner's mutually-acknowledged superior manhood, who gloats over his unchallenged supremacy and the subordinate's willing surrender and acquiesce to his own inflated, narcissistic manhood.