BDSM: You’ve Been Playing All Along

Every age has its signature wound. What is ours? The suffocating sense of not being enough.

What an irony: in a world where everything lies at the tip of a finger, society has become more consumed than ever by the feeling of unbearable inferiority. Therapy reports make the pattern unmistakable: session after session circles back to the same quiet refrain. Not enough success. Not enough impact. Not enough safety. Not enough belonging. Not enough love. I am not enough. Beneath the clinical labels of anxiety, depression, or burnout, this wound repeats itself — an ache that no abundance has managed to silence.

Moreover, this sense of deficiency does not remain confined within private thoughts. It leaks outward, shaping not only one’s everyday life but the whole culture. People beg for doors to open, pursue what is kept deliberately out of reach, cling to the coldest forms of love as though they alone could prove their worth. The private cry of I am not enough swells into a cultural chorus of distorted dignity and normalized entitlement.

Can we consider it a form of addiction? The symptoms are not hard to read. They appear in the long lines outside luxury boutiques where customers wait in the heat, hoping for permission to step into a room filled with handbags. They appear in the hushed tones of private clubs and restaurants where diners endure long delays, cold service, and arrogant refusals, only to describe the evening afterward as “extraordinary.” They appear in intimate relationships where lovers quarrel, belittle, and degrade one another, before collapsing into make-up sex charged with the very shame and cruelty that should have driven them apart.

In this strange economy of desire, rejection is no longer an injury but a stimulant. It doesn’t simply wound us; it quickens the pulse, sharpens the longing, and delivers the thrill of scarcity dressed as privilege. Rejection, contempt, neglect — what once humiliated now intoxicates. Denial has become foreplay. We no longer merely endure this scarcity — we are now turned on by it.

Psychologically, these are not isolated curiosities but repetitions of a deeper pattern. Denial sharpens desire; contempt intensifies longing. Neglect itself becomes intoxicating, a stimulant that heightens craving until the eventual reward feels ecstatic. It is never just the handbag, the dinner, or the embrace that society is after — it is the ritual: the humiliation of being refused, followed by the brief exaltation of being granted. The high does not come from possession but from submission.

And yet, roles in this theater are never fixed. Today one submits, tomorrow one dominates. The client humiliated by the boutique clerk becomes the one who looks down on others once the bag is theirs. The partner diminished in one moment reverses the script in the next, turning cruelty into currency. Submission and dominance oscillate in a constant cycle, each dependent on the other for its charge, each fueling the hidden addiction to humiliation and power.

We have to admit it — we’ve heard these words before. Submission. Domination. Humiliation. Reconciliation.

This is, in structure if not in costume, nothing less than BDSM. Not the theatrical tableaux of latex, leather, and dimly lit clubs that society of hypocrites conveniently labels “perverse,” but the subtler, everyday humiliations that have been quietly eroticized and normalized.

Those daily interactions and experiences are liturgies. In shops, in dining rooms, in bedrooms, society performs the same choreography: denial, ache, surrender, reward. We call it exclusivity. We dress it up as dramatic, all-consuming love. Yet at its core, it resembles nothing so much as the psychology of bondage.

The masochistic tendencies are unmistakable. People willingly place themselves where they will be dismissed, criticized, or denied. They crave the ache of being overlooked, the heightened longing produced by scarcity. They savor the sting of humiliation as though it were proof of their worth, mistaking pain for privilege.

But masochism never lives alone. As Freud observed, it always carries its twin — sadism. The submissive is not merely a victim; they often orchestrate their own suffering, drawing out contempt in order to taste the high of degradation. And once the moment shifts, the roles reverse.

The client who was humiliated in the boutique becomes the one who flaunts the bag as a weapon of superiority. The partner who felt diminished in one breath seizes the next chance to belittle, withhold, or condemn. The cold parent is reborn in both roles — first endured, then reenacted.

This is the hidden contract: submission and dominance kept in constant play, feeding each other, trading places in an endless loop. What appears on the surface as humiliation is, at a deeper level, a collaboration. Both parties are “getting high” on the exchange. The submissive experiences the thrill of degradation; the dominant experiences the thrill of control.

Society does not simply suffer humiliation; it becomes addicted to switching between the positions of the one who kneels and the one who withholds.

Where does this pattern come from? Freud would have pointed to childhood: to cold mothers and fathers who withheld affection, who never seemed satisfied, who gave attention in unpredictable bursts. For a child, this rhythm creates an unbearable tension — longing sharpened by rejection, craving intensified by scarcity. When the parent finally offers a smile, a touch, or a rare word of approval, the relief is overwhelming. Desire fuses with humiliation; love fuses with shame.

Unless real work is done — unless one sees the light and undergoes transformation — those early lessons do not disappear. The grown child does not seek security but repetition — the familiar cycle of neglect and reward. The need to earn, to deserve appreciation, praise, love, attention, becomes the silent axis around which desire turns. The wound tightens itself to taboo and arousal: reward and punishment, once administered by authority figures, blur together in the child’s still-forming mind. What humiliates also intoxicates. What wounds also excites. And so society inherits a paradox — an addiction to the very roles that once bound pleasure and pain together.

Ignoring it does not make it less true. The truth is, the same impulses that drive a masochist into a dungeon are the ones that often drive us into boutiques, restaurants, and toxic romances. The difference is only honesty. The latex-clad submissive admits their desire. The rest of us cloak ours in handbags, tasting menus, and reconciliatory sex.

We live in a culture of humiliation that we mistake for aspiration. Freud would not be surprised.

The bizarre part is not that society endures humiliation. Not that it pays for it, craves it, and even fashions its identity around it. Not even that it returns to it again and again, like a secret drug. The truly shocking part is that it refuses to recognize the pattern — and, more than that, cannot bring itself to admit the truth: that people willingly return to the very places where they are belittled, intoxicate themselves on the fleeting high of being approved, recognized, and accepted, and then switch the script to savor an equal high in the performance of their own entitlement.

Well, tell me it is not BDSM?