Face down, ass up, my face smooshed into a pillow. My husband slams the outer edge of my ass with a black leather slapper, first the one cheek and then the other, stunning me with a sting so deep I shout into the pillow. A pleasant lightheadedness begins to swirl, first in my mind and then throughout my body. There’s a gentleness to my body processing the pain, transmuting it into this fluttering, otherworldly sensation.
Or, in a public bathroom, gathered upon the toilet so the people coming and going do not spy an illicit double pair of feet. My crush fucks me there, but what makes my head explode is when they take one of their nails and press it – insistent, intense – into the skin of my sternum. The stab of it feels calm, precise, and creates a searing focal point of pain that makes me so dizzy, time simply stops. The simple reveal of their sweet sadism – they want to hurt me, and they are – causes a swoon so psychedelic I have to steady myself on the wall. It hardly matters. The feelings in my body feel cosmic.
What’s happening to me is common to submissives: the tremendous body high and altered consciousness known as subspace. And, according to the BDSM education site Sub in the City, it is an altered state of consciousness. The brackish surge of pain and pleasure sets off a complex chain of chemicals in the brain, triggering excitement and euphoria; greedy, active pleasure; accelerated emotional bonding. This is your brain on kink. But, how? I reached out to neurologist Dr. Alice Weaver Flaherty, Harvard professor and author of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, a work that helped me understand myself better as a writer. Maybe she could help me understand myself as a submissive, too?
“It might be a little related to the flow state,” Dr. Flaherty muses, from her bright, New England home via Zoom. “You might know this state from writing, or even playing tennis. You get in the zone. That’s a trance state, too.” I haven’t played a lot of tennis, but I can attest both as a writer and a person who works with writers, the state we’re in when we emerge from a bout of flow-state creativity is downright spooky. We can feel – and look! – like we’re coming out of a trance.
“I remember the first time I was hypnotized,” she shares. “I thought, ‘Oh, I know this state.’ It’s that super-focused thing, where the rest of the world disappears. Hypnotic trance is another state like that, and there’s flow space, and subspace.”
Runner’s High – that rush of bliss joggers feel after pushing themselves – also belongs in this category and has much in common with subspace. Whether your physique is roiling from a dash through your neighborhood or a prolonged flogging, what happens is the same – a flood of opioids from our endogenous opioid center gets to work optimizing our emotional responses. Our endocannabinoid system releases endocannabinoids, similarly plumping our mood, relaxing us, and soothing our emotions. Basically, runners and submissives are both benefiting from our body’s natural Quaaludes and edibles.
Trances states – a category which subspace absolutely belongs in – also involves elevated dopamine and a decrease in norepinephrine.
“Dopamine is a motivational state,” Dr. Flaherty explains. “You’re motivated about something – but not revved up. Norepinephrine is more jittery – stimulated, but not necessarily motivated. So a trance state is typically highly focused on something. Intent, but not revved up.” She offers an example: “It’s like if you’re meditating on a mantra, and everything else just disappears.” I get this; the heightened state I have found myself in after a powerful meditation can feel a bit subby. I just figured I was bottoming to the Universe, and maybe I was. And if meditation can sometimes, when it’s really great, have a tinge of the erotic, subbing, at its peaks, feels mystical, devotional.
Add to these neurotransmitters some thrilling adrenaline, and squirts of the cortisol that flood its wake. Cortisol! That rancid hormone that makes us stress-eat Doritos and chain-smoke cigarettes? Yes —but through the alchemy of BDSM, the Cortisol is transformed, bringing waves of meaningful pleasure and that trippy stoppage of time I felt when my crush asserted their dominance with a single fanged finger to my chest.
The chemical come-down is marked by oxytocin, that cuddly hormone we can get from huffing the fragrant top of a baby’s head. Oxytocin chills out the amygdala, which has been working as hard as the dom throughout, and brings the Cortisol down to levels lower than they were at the start. It also can make us feel incredibly bonded to our doms, so beware (or don’t).
“There’s also a weird thing,” Dr. Flaherty continues, “where, when you do something painful on purpose it’s actually less painful. If someone pinches you – ow, it hurts! But if you pinch yourself, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much. It’s why you can’t tickle yourself.”
I imagine that the physical confusion of it being sort of both – painful on purpose, with someone else administering the pain – adds to the swirl of chemicals rushing to regulate a novel experience.
“There’s literally a thing in your brain that goes, ‘oh, you’re doing it to yourself, it can’t be all that bad.’ All of this raises your pain threshold, and I think this is part of what subspace is.”
I’ve demystified subspace, but this talk of neurotransmitters hasn’t killed the magic. Learning that lust can trigger such intricate systems situates the magic in our very own bodies, igniting new mysteries. Are kinky folk biohackers optimizing our cortisol? Are humans deeply wired for pleasures more rarified than many of us realized? Is there a relationship between sex and pain and hormones and psychedelic feelings of oneness with the divine? I guess I’ll have to fuck around and find out.
