A Taste for Pain: On Masochism & Female Sexuality

by Maria Marcus

Female masochism is a fundamental and disturbing subject. Addressing a conference in Copenhagen in 1972, Germaine Greer said, " We know that women are masochists—that's what it's all about! " Yet masochism, both sexual and emotional, marks a blind spot in feminist literature. Almost no one has dared to explore it.Maria Marcus, a noted Danish feminist, thought about this problem for years before she could bring herself to write this book. A Taste For Pain describes her struggle to understand and come to terms with the various forms of masochism that have seemed to shape her emotional makeup from earliest childhood.Although her approach starts out as personal, her outlook and conclusions are universal. She explores the thought of such eminent psychologists as Freud, Horney, Kinsey, and Reich. She looks at the relationship between pleasure and pain and wonders whether a 'masochist' really needs a 'sadist.' She also examines the works of important feminists such as de Beauvoir, Greer, and Millett, and she looks closely at the classics of sado-masochistic pornography from de Sade to The Story of O .She does all this in her search for the answer to the basic, nagging Is masochism, with its elements of passivity and helplessness, part of woman's essential nature, or is it a part of a dangerous process of socialization?

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