Philosophical critique of masochism argues against intrinsic desire for displeasure based on BDSM literature.
Masochism has recently been used to defend the controversial views that displeasure is not necessarily intrinsically undesired and not always bad. In this paper, I will argue against these arguments by showing that masochists do not intrinsically desire displeasure. To do this, I will draw in particular on the existing empirical literature on BDSM, which has been unduly overlooked so far by most philosophers.
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Antonin Broi (2026) studied this question.
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