" Like literature, sex is a space of imaginative play, in which dangerous forces can be encountered and sampled. And like illness, sex is a descent into what Edward St Aubyn once described as ‘the darkness of the pre-verbal realm’, where uncertain ecstasies and terrors lurk. BDSM, the volitional version of the Sadeian revel, is one of the ways of getting there, a route back to the immense feelings of infancy, to the body before language intervened. "

― Olivia Laing , Everybody: A Book about Freedom