Humiliation, when done by experienced partners can be intensely
pleasurable... and very erotic. There are as many ways of
humiliation play as there are people who like it, I think.
And what one partner finds erotic, another may find insulting and
hurtful... this is why I say that getting into this "area" is best
enjoyed by partners who know one another very well, as well as the
submissive being very open about what she doesn't like and the
dominant being cautious about watching and listening for the
submissive's reactions.
Humiliation in the BDSM context doesn't mean making someone feel
small and stupid and ugly. It should, if both partners enjoy it, be
felt as a powerful internal feeling of the loss of inhibitions and
well as a truly erotically-pleasing feeling, and speaking
personally, I find it a very intimate part of a session.
I think beginners (particularly submissives) think that either
there is something wrong with them for wanting to be called, for
instance, "my little slut"... or, at the other end of the spectrum,
they don't have a concept of what humiliation is really about since
everyone is taught at an early age that humiliation is a "bad
feeling" inside and it is wrong to do to someone else...
Again, the term "humiliation" in BDSM isn't about telling someone
they look fat in those jeans or that they are stupid when they make
a mistake... It is about the power and intimacy between dominant
and submissive, slave and Master that allows inhibitions to be lost
and those wonderful dark places to come to the foreground in a
scene/session.
Being told to open various orifices of your body for inspection by
the dominant can be delicious for some submissives. Being told to
masturbate for the dominant's pleasure is another form of
humiliation that some slaves/subs find very erotic... And one of my
favorite areas of humiliation play is "denial"... denial of my own
pleasure until I am given permission to experience it. Another
thing I find quite humiliating and very "wicked" is watching a
dominant handle his own (ahem) personal "equipment" and denying the
submissive access to it as he does so... sort of enforced
voyeurism, if you will.
Many submissives also enjoy being called various so-called
"four-or-more letter" pet names at appropriate moments during the
session... it seems to make the sensation of submission more
intense somehow, for lack of a better way to put it. Being ordered
to perform tasks that the dominant enjoys is also considered
humiliation play, such as lapping liquid from a bowl, crawling on
the floor and, perhaps, retrieving a crop and bringing it back to
the dominant in one's mouth... Another form of humiliation play is
being commanded to count the spanks or blows of a whip, cat,
flogger, paddle, etc. And depending on one's desire and style,
there are many other things that fit this category.
Some other kinds of humiliation involve "confessions" in a
role-playing type session... either real or fantasy confessions,
giving the dominant lurid details. Variations on humiliation are
endless, as I mentioned.
I think that most newcomers (and I include beginning dominants in
this category) are simply turned off by the *vanilla* meaning of
the word and haven't yet realized that they may already have done
such play and not realized that it fits the term humiliation.
I've been asked about guidelines for this type of play... and there
simply aren't any because everyone is different. I stress to
everyone who reads this essay that humiliation must be a kind of
self-and-partner discovery process with everyone being honest and
no one setting out to hurt the other... after all... this is all
about pleasure, isn't it?
