I honestly don’t know. I can say I was taught, but not in a fashion I’d recommend.
I was introduced to the concept as a little kid, by an older girl who confided to me about her father’s special hobbies. Beyond the abusive sexuality and Super 8 reels that were de rigueur for ‘70s perverts, he seemed to take great care in crushing her spirit and controlling her mind. He had her absolutely convinced that the family dog was a trained spy, monitoring her for “bad behavior” and reporting back to her dad in coded barks and motions. Nothing I said could dissuade her, despite the fact that she trusted me more than anyone in the world at that time.
To this day, I consider that the most fundamentally evil act that I’ve personally witnessed; taking a little girl’s pet and turning it into a symbol of surveillance and fear is so utterly, unnecessarily hateful that I still struggle to understand it. And I’ve become pretty good at understanding some pretty awful stuff.
After that, I was through the looking glass. Other girls began to tell me their stories and –in a couple cases– teach me the mechanics, while back at home, I finally noticed some of the bizarre things happening between my own parents. It became pretty clear that with few exceptions, the men in my world were self-involved, self-indulgent monsters. As my teenage rebellion kicked in, it was focused squarely on rejecting everything those men embraced.
Even as I discovered formalized kink in my early 20s, I disavowed emotional sadism in any form. It was Very Bad, and I would have no truck with it, to the point of subjecting practitioners to long, pointless diatribes about how wrong they were.
But you don’t forget the things you learned as a child, even when you try.