Songfacts®:

• The Divinyls are best known outside their home country of Australia for their 1990 hit "I Touch Myself," but their first charting song in America was "Pleasure And Pain" from their second album, What A Life! in 1985. Like the John Mellencamp song "Hurts So Good" three years earlier, there's a touch of masochism in the song, which explores the fine line between pleasure and pain.
• This was written by the songwriting team of Mike Chapman and Holly Knight, whose credits include "The Best" for Tina Turner and "Love Is A Battlefield" for Pat Benatar. Knight told Songfacts: "It's a great song, I'm a big fan of the Divinyls. I just like the lyrics. I like that it's a little bit darker and still very sort of poppy. And I was a huge fan of Christina Amphlett from the Divinyls. And I just liked the tune. It's sort of more in the line of "Invincible," but a little bit darker."
  
  Regarding the song's meaning, she said: "It can be so good and it can be so bad at the same time. If you're going to go for the good then you better expect that the bad is going to be just as strong if it happens. That's something I use a lot in my songs, that dichotomy."
• The song gets a little intense with these lines, which were written by Mike Chapman:
  
  Break my body with the back of your hand
  Doesn't make sense from where I stand
  
  The song's co-writer, Holly Knight, addressed this, telling Songfacts: "There was some brutality in there - it is a very brutal line. A lot of the lines in it are pretty brutal, but I don't know if he was being literal when he came up with that line. I just liked the way it sounded."
• The Divinyls were led by lead singer Chrissy Amphlett and guitarist Mark McEntee. Amphlett, who died of breast cancer in 2013 at 53, was very expressive, as shown in the video for this song where she throws her whole being into her performance. The group kept making hits in Australia, but outside of this song and "I Touch Myself," didn't have much impact elsewhere, and they split up in 1996.