ABSTRACT
Sexual sadism refers to an aberrant sexual behavior where the person derives sexual excitement from inicting pain-psychological or physical or both-on his sexual partner. Sadistic fantasies or acts may involve activities that indicate the dominance over the victim (e.g., forcing the victim to crawl or keeping the victim in a cage). They may also involve administering electrical shocks, beating, blindfolding, burning, cutting, mutilation, paddling, pinching, rape, restraint, spanking, stabbing, strangulation, torture, whipping, or even killing. It is the eroticization of dominance and control, as opposed to masochism, which is the eroticization of submission. It is the suffering of the victim, not the iniction of physical or psychological pain, that is sexually arousing.1,2 For sexual sadists, inicting pain is just a means to create suffering and to elicit the desired responses of obedience, submission, humiliation, fear, and terror. British sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) preferred the term “algolagnia,” viewing sadomasochism as a love of pain. He noted that “the sadist desires to inict pain, but in some cases, if not in most, he desires that it should be felt as love.”3
