Erotic Humiliation
by MsIn10sity

From BdsmFlaOver40

People have a misconception of humiliation play in a D/s scene... and sometimes it is confused with degradation--which is, to me, a decidedly debilitating form of mental and emotional abuse.

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 as 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?

MsIn10sity