Robbins on masochism and the apocalypse
“We are now in the dark times, and there is also kink. About the dark times. Climate catastrophe, fascism, ecocide, genocide, mass violence, “BookTok”: the world is fucked. We all know we’re headed for a crash — everyone feels that the bridge is out up ahead — but we shop and post and comment and text and work as if everything were normal. We seem to enjoy ruining the future. Masochism and the apocalypse are deeply interconnected for me, their common denominator anxiety. The question I want to ask is not, How are masochism and apocalypse related? That’s easy. Marilynne Robinson has said, “If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.” In the curt phrases of the *Textbook of Psychoanalysis…
Robbins on masochism and the apocalypse
“We are now in the dark times, and there is also kink. About the dark times. Climate catastrophe, fascism, ecocide, genocide, mass violence, “BookTok”: the world is fucked. We all know we’re headed for a crash — everyone feels that the bridge is out up ahead — but we shop and post and comment and text and work as if everything were normal. We seem to enjoy ruining the future. Masochism and the apocalypse are deeply interconnected for me, their common denominator anxiety. The question I want to ask is not, How are masochism and apocalypse related? That’s easy. Marilynne Robinson has said, “If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.” In the curt phrases of the Textbook of Psychoanalysis (third edition):
To destroy our planet as we are currently doing is evidently masochistic, yet we know that masochism, an omnipotent survival strategy, is unamenable to change based on facts alone and that something else is required if our extreme anxieties, which we continue to marginalize, are to be addressed.
I want to ask what masochism and apocalypse can tell us, about our extreme anxieties, about anxiety in general, about living not just in but with the end of the world. In October 2024, onstage in a theater at the CUNY Graduate Center, I spoke with my friend Julia Juarcho about her new book, Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism. During the Q and A, a young woman asked us an amazing question: What is the cure for masochism? The problem, as the passage above recognizes, is that masochism is itself a cure, a “survival strategy.” It would be reductive to claim that masochists want to be hurt because they have been hurt. And yet they aren’t masochists for no reason — there is something masochism is doing for them, or allowing them to do, letting them work through or get free of. So the only cure for masochism would be a cure for whatever it is that masochists are trying to survive. Which would, perhaps, also a cure for society itself — society, both the patient and the disease.“
— The Domme Songs: Kink in dark times by Michael Robbins in the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Magazine.