Masochist

What is a masochist?

A masochist is someone who draws arousal or satisfaction from pain, discomfort or humiliation that they undergo themselves. The word names a person, not an act and not a rank. Almost everyone who uses it chooses it themselves: masochist is a self-label, not a diagnosis someone imposes on you.

How you can tell someone is a masochist

Usually from the request, not from the behavior.

Someone who calls herself a masochist asks for things that look unimpressive from the outside: squeeze harder, hold longer, don’t stop at the first hiss. What sets her apart is not how much she can take, but that she seeks it out.

A recognizable case: a woman who has known for fifteen years that a firm grip on her neck sets something loose she finds nowhere else, who runs into the word on a forum and then keeps it in her head for two years before she says it out loud.

Label and fantasy lie far apart. In the study by Warkentin and colleagues in Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 74% of the women in the healthy control group reported being aroused by masochistic fantasies. That many people do not call themselves that.

Where the word masochist comes from

From a concept that was there before the person.

The concept appears first: the Online Etymology Dictionary dates the English masochist only to 1895, formed from masochism plus the suffix -ist. So psychiatry first described a phenomenon, and only afterward did people get a name for it.

Anyone who now uses the word about themselves takes over a term once coined to point at someone from the outside. From label to self-name, just as with kinkster and lifestyler.

What makes someone a masochist

Not one cause, but a few traits that systematically go with it.

Annabel Vetterlein and colleagues of the University of Bonn put a questionnaire to 617 people in the European Journal of Pain, of whom 242 had a sadomasochistic preference. Two things predicted that preference: sensation seeking, and seeing pain as a challenge instead of a threat.

That same study found something that rarely gets recorded anywhere: 47.2% of those participants had chronic pain, against 29.4% in the comparison group. The researchers suggest that sadomasochistic play might, for some people with chronic pain, be a way of dealing with that pain. It is not proven, and they say so themselves.

Why people call themselves a masochist

Because it makes a conversation shorter.

Anyone who uses the word no longer has to explain that “hard” means something different than the other person thinks. And there is recognition attached to it: the word exists, so you are not the only one.

• For the masochist herself, the label saves shame: a preference with a name feels less like a defect.
• For a partner, it is a starting point: it says what the conversation is about, and that is more than most people get on the table.
• For both, it makes negotiating more concrete, because you can talk about intensity instead of about whether something is “weird”.

The word explains nothing. It doesn’t say why you like this and not how far you want to go. And you can set it down again. A preference is not a contract with yourself.

How masochists go about it in practice

By describing their preference as precisely as possible, because the word alone says too little.

Many masochists fill in a kinklist, or write down which kind of pain works: sharp or dull, building or sudden, on the skin or deeper. That distinction is the real work. Someone who loves caning can find clothespins terrible.

They also often make a separate agreement about stopping, because a masochist who keeps asking for “more” slips past their own limit more easily than someone who doesn’t seek the stimulus.

Misconceptions about masochists

“A masochist is a sub.” Three separate things. What someone wants to feel is masochist; who makes the decisions is D/s; who undergoes the act is a bottom. A masochist can run the entire show in a scene.

“Masochists are damaged.” That has been looked at. Wismeijer and Van Assen compared, in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 902 BDSM practitioners with 434 others and found the BDSM group less neurotic, more extraverted, more open, more conscientious, less sensitive to rejection and happier. With a nuance you rarely hear: where there were differences between the roles, the dominant role scored more favorably than the submissive, but both still more favorably than the control group.

“If you have masochistic fantasies, you’re a masochist.” No, and the difference is large. With Warkentin and colleagues, 74% of the healthy control participants were aroused by such fantasies. What set the women with a psychiatric diagnosis apart was not the fantasy itself but the distress from it: 53% against 21% reported clear tension around it.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. The word masochist I rarely hear at the start of a conversation. People first say “I don’t know if this is normal” and only much later “I think I’m a masochist”.

Masochists dose themselves badly. They are so used to asking past their limit that they don’t notice it themselves, which means the other side of the scene has to do the braking. That is not a flaw; it comes with it.

And one thing I see almost always: someone who calls herself a masochist gets calmer. Not because anything has been solved, but because nothing has to stay hidden anymore.

What you can do yourself

• Describe which pain you seek instead of how much. Sharp, dull, building or sudden tells a partner more than “hard”.
• Say beforehand that you tend to keep asking for more, so the other person knows that “more” doesn’t automatically mean it’s wise.
• Ask for a short look back afterward instead of only for aftercare; masochists underestimate more often what they’ve had.
• Tell your doctor or physiotherapist about your preference if you have chronic pain. It is more common in this group than average, and it belongs in the conversation.
• Don’t take on the word because a test says so. A BDSM test is a conversation starter, not a verdict.

More on masochists

Within this glossary, masochism covers the concept itself, and kinkster is about the same step: when a preference becomes a self-label. On the blog, why you hire a BDSM gigolo to feel pain tells you what that looks like up close.

Beyond this site, the Hamburg study by Warkentin is open on the internet; it sharpens, better than anything, the difference between having a fantasy and being distressed by it. Vetterlein and colleagues were the first to test the link with chronic pain against a control group.

Where this fits on this site

If you know what you’re looking for but not with whom, you can try it out with me without anything riding on it. I count on your description and not on your stamina, and we build up from low. What we go over beforehand, you can read on the BDSM date.

Sources

• BDSM and masochistic sexual fantasies in women with borderline personality disorder: simply on the spectrum of “normality” or source of suffering?. Hannah F. Warkentin, Rose Gholami Mazinan, Johannes Fuss, Leonhard Kratzer & Sarah V. Biedermann, Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation 12(7), 2025 (DOI 10.1186/s40479-025-00283-6, open access). Comparative study by the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf among 115 women with a borderline diagnosis and 115 age-matched healthy participants, and so the only study that measures fantasy and suffering in women separately. Gives that a comparable number of women in both groups reported arousal at masochistic sexual fantasies (77% against 74%), that far more women with borderline reported clear tension around them (53% against 21%), and the conclusion that sadomasochistic sexuality can be an autonomous, self-determined form of sexuality.
• Gaining the Upper Hand? Further Evidence of Pain as a Pleasurable Experience and the Unexpected Relationship Between Sadomasochistic Sexual Preference and Chronic Pain. Annabel Vetterlein, Sarah Kirrinnis, Merlin Monzel, Ana-Laia König Guasch & Martin Reuter, European Journal of Pain 30(2), e70230, 2026 (DOI 10.1002/ejp.70230, open access). Study by the psychology department of the University of Bonn, published in the journal of the European Pain Federation, and the first replication of this link with a control group. Gives the 617 participants of whom 242 had a sadomasochistic preference, the chronic-pain prevalence of 47.2% in that group against 29.4% outside it, and the fact that neither gender nor age explained that difference. The model explains about 42% of the variance, with chronic pain, sensation seeking and seeing pain as a challenge as predictors. Alongside that, the cautious thought that sadomasochistic play might, for some people with chronic pain, be a way of dealing with that pain.
• Psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners. Andreas A. J. Wismeijer & Marcel A. L. M. van Assen, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 10(8), 1943–1952, 2013 (DOI 10.1111/jsm.12192). Comparison of 902 BDSM practitioners with 434 control participants on the Big Five, attachment style, rejection sensitivity and well-being. Gives that the BDSM group was less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious and less sensitive to rejection and reported higher well-being, but scored less agreeable; that where there were differences between the roles the scores came out more favorably for the dominant than for the submissive role, with the control group the least favorable; and the conclusion that BDSM can be seen as a leisure activity rather than an expression of psychopathology.
• masochist. Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper. Etymological reference with first-citation dating per word. Gives the first citation of masochist in 1895 and the formation from masochism plus the suffix -ist, and so that the term for the person is later than the concept itself.

Related terms

Masochist is a word about a person, and it says only one thing: what someone is looking for. Who is in charge and what happens sits apart from it.

• Masochism. The concept itself, with the history and the research into how pain changes in context.
• Bottom. The word for the receiving position in a scene, which often refers to the same person but measures something else.
• D/s. The axis of power, which masochist says nothing about.
• Kinkster. The same kind of self-chosen word, one level more general.
• M-jo. The Japanese word for a woman with this bent, and why that letter M is much more common there.
• Kinklist. The tool a masochist uses to make clear which pain does and doesn’t work.
• Pain threshold. What Defrin and colleagues’ pressure-pain threshold is exactly about.
• Sadist. The opposite, and why that word appeared in Dutch three years earlier than masochist.
• Sadomasochism. The umbrella above both, with the history of the diagnosis.