Do you believe that we only are masochists? Or do you believe that those only are masochists who have themselves trodden on by a prostitute, have had their ears boxed, have been whipped, befouled, and have let the prostitute spit in their faces?
Oh, idiots! I say to you all love is masochistic, and all which leads to it is associated with it, or results from it, bears the imprint “pleasure and pain.”
Nature never fails. Who, then, believes that it was caprice, chance, or irony, on Nature’s part, when she associated love with so much torment?
Who does not think of all the tragedies of unhappy love, with its murders and suicides, all its physical and spiritual martyrdom, which every day brings to us?
Who does not think of the tragedy of sexual love which is offered to us in the hospitals? all the hundreds of thousands who have to pay for the licentiousness which results from sexual lust—all the tabetics, syphilitics, general paralytics, etc.?
Who does not remember the torments which the sexually perverse have brought on themselves and on humanity? All the lust-murders! And all the punitive measures? The lust-murders which we commit—to prevent lust-murders!...
Who does not think of the torments of pregnancy? its risks of life and death?
Are all these mistakes of Nature? No! No!! The accompaniment of pleasure by pain must have some definite purpose. This purpose is: That pleasure, without its opposite, pain, would not be perceptible, would be unthinkable, would be inconceivable—just as cold could not be apparent to our consciousness without heat, or light without darkness. Thus pleasure, in the absence of pain, would not be perceived as pleasure. Therefore, by increase of pain, pleasure becomes of greater value, for the greater the contrast the more readily do we perceive it.
“Masochism is thus a natural law.”
The more fully it is developed in any individual, the higher, the more superhuman is that person.