The Science of Suffering: Male vs. Female Masochism with Dr Roy Baumeister

Join us on Thursday, September 25h at 8pm EST for our discussion with Dr Roy Baumeister

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🔍 What We’re Talking About

In this thought-provoking episode, Dr. Roy Baumeister returns to examine how gender shapes the way masochism is expressed, embodied, and understood. Drawing from decades of psychological research, he traces the patterns that distinguish male from female masochists… not as rigid categories, but as recurring themes in the pursuit of pain, power, and release. At the heart of the conversation lies a central tension: are men and women ultimately seeking the same form of transcendence, or are their desires colored by cultural scripts about gender, control, and identity?

Baumeister unpacks the myths that cloud masochism, challenging stereotypes of pathology while exploring how men and women differently integrate suffering into their sense of self. He considers the ways control functions across gender lines—whether through surrender, endurance, or the careful negotiation of vulnerability. Rather than framing masochism as deviance, the episode situates it within universal human struggles with autonomy, intimacy, and meaning.

When society tells such different stories about male and female suffering, how do we discern what comes from culture and what arises from something deeper within us?

🎙️ Meet Our Guest

Dr. Roy F. Baumeister is professor of psychology associated with the University of Queensland (Australia), Florida State University (USA), and Constructor University (Germany). He grew up in Cleveland, the oldest child of a schoolteacher and an immigrant businessman. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton in 1978 and did a postdoctoral fellowship in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent over two decades at Case Western Reserve University, where he eventually was the first to hold the Elsie Smith professorship. He has also worked at Harvard University, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia, the Max-Planck-Institute, the VU Free University of Amsterdam, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Bamberg, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Baumeister’s research spans multiple topics, including self and identity, self-regulation, interpersonal rejection and the need to belong, sexuality and gender, aggression, self-esteem, meaning, and self-presentation. He has received research grants from the National Institutes of Health and from the Templeton Foundation. He has over 750 publications, and his 49 books include Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, The Cultural Animal, Meanings of Life, and the New York Times bestseller Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. The Institute for Scientific Information lists him among the handful of most cited (most influential) psychologists in the world, and Google Scholar indicates that his work has been cited over 300,000 times in the scientific literature, with over 60 of his publications having been cited a thousand times each. His awards include the William James Award (the highest honor for lifetime achievement by the Association for Psychological Science), the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (highest honor by Humboldt Society), and the Distinguished Scientist Award (highest honor from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology). He is currently president of the International Positive Psychology Association.

https://roybaumeister.com/

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