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anon - thanks for your concise re-cap - also you raise an interesting question and one which the mindful among us often wonder about around here. Namely, why the desire for a beating and the like? So I poked around and did some research, and I found this from a very reputable source (Psychology Today - a leading psych magazine):
"Also, some bottoms want to be beaten because they have low self-esteem and think they deserve it."
Notice that the quote says "some" - what they're getting at is that submissiveness exists on a continuum. Towards the more moderate forms it is considered an acceptable form of "play," but towards the extreme end of the spectrum it is considered pathological (i.e. a problem). Aside from abject abuse and actually receiving beatings, it's unclear whether mere fantasies would ever be considered pathological - but the implication seems to be they are not. On the other hand, I would argue that low self-esteem is probably a major root cause even among less extreme cases. Of course, there is an additional psychological complexity present here where an aesthetic desire for the female to be hard and muscular is present too. What's puzzling is that I'm sure that many among us are quite well-adjusted and reasonably self-confident people with healthy self-esteems, in which case, why is submissiveness and catering to low-self-esteem tendencies deemed a drug-like treat? I'm not sure by any means, but I will posit one potential explanation: reversion. We may be reverting to a prior psychological state perhaps from childhood or adolescence at which time we were weaker than we are today.
Anyway, that's my musing for the day :-P