A few incidents of his life describe well his perversion.
Love of the Whip. Once, according to Havelock Ellis, in the course of an innocent romp in which the whole household took part, Sacher-Masoch asked his wife to whip him. She refused. Then he suggested the maid should do it.
His wife did not take this seriously, but he had the servant whip him to his full enjoyment. When his wife urged that it would not be possible to keep the maid after this, Sacher-Masoch agreed and she was discharged.
He constantly found pleasure in placing his wife in awkward or compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too normal to share.
This led to much domestic unhappiness. Against her wish he persuaded her to whip him with whips to which nails were attached. This he claimed was a literary stimulus.
Dr. Eulenburg tells of a young woman with whom Sacher-Masoch corresponded for a while and to whom he wrote that "his greatest joy would be to be whipped by a woman." Later on, Sacher-Masoch met her in Vienna and asked her to don a fur coat and to whip him. She however, pretended to treat the matter as a joke, and dismissed him.
His numerous books of fiction present over and over again the same theme: the domineering woman, "clad in furs," who tortures a weak helpless man.
We behold in Sacher-Masoch a clear case of physical weakness and glandular insufficiency. His endocrines, in particular his adrenals and gonads, required the actual stimulation of pain (whipping) before they could react properly to a sexual stimulus.
It is a curious coincidence that among all forms of stimulation used to accelerate the gait of beasts of burden or draft horses, the whip is the most commonly used the world over and that, on the other hand, perverts of the masochist type have, the world over and at every age of history, more frequently resorted to the whip to torture themselves than to any other means of physical punishment.
The Masochist is Like a Weak or Tired Horse. Why does whipping make a horse go faster? Not merely on account of the fear or pain which the beast experiences, but because that fear and pain MAKE HIM STRONGER.