A Defence of Masochism is Anita Phillips’s 1998 non-fiction book on BDSM. Published in London by Faber & Faber (ISBN 0-571-19697-7), it makes a philosophical and sociological case for masochism as something that can be a virtue rather than a defect. For readers used to medical or moral panic around “wanting to be hurt,” this is the slim counter-argument: desire for surrender and pain can be thought through, not only diagnosed.
What the book is doing
Phillips writes as a defender, not a clinician. The subject is consensual masochism inside adult erotic life — the wish to be used, marked, or overcome — and the social suspicion that still attaches to it. She treats the masochist as a thinking subject, not as a patient waiting to be cured. The cover uses the beauty calibrator, the old device for measuring a “correct” face: a joke about standards and who decides what a body is for. Author, year, Faber, ISBN, and the claim in the title are the facts. Phillips is a late-1990s voice arguing that negotiated pain does not have to be a disease, issued by a mainstream literary house rather than a fetish press.
