My last post touched on humiliation as a kink and elicited some interesting comments. It reminded me again that what looks like a single kink is always really many kinks hiding under a single title. It’s never a case of someone simply being into X. It’s always X done in a certain way for a particular reason.
Take watersports for example. If you’re not into it then piss is just piss. There’s only one way to not like it, but hundreds of different ways to be into it. Maybe it’s the animalistic primal nature of it. Or maybe it’s being objectified as a toilet. For one person it could be demeaning. For another it’s worship. Someone into wet messy piss play will have a very different scene to someone who dreams of being turned into a piece of toilet paper.
Humiliation is another example of a kink that’s simple on the outside, many things on the inside. A kinkster might enjoy a bullying dynamic that humiliation enhance. Alternatively, humiliation could be a cathartic release via an ego death. Maybe it’s about enhancing the domme by diminishing the submissive. Or maybe reliving an adolescent trauma that’s been eroticized over time. If you’re into objectification then humiliation might be all about reinforcing that reduction of self.
To horribly rework Tolstoy’s comment about marriages – every unhappy kinkster is alike, but each happy kinkster is happy in their own way.
My personal humiliation kink is very mild, but aligns a little with this kind of caption. It’s a positive and upbeat kind of humiliation.
This was a from a tumblr that had a bunch of similarly themed images. It’s sadly vanished, gone the way of many tumblrs. I wish I could find the creator again, as they authored a lot of well written femdom captions.
Spot on! Kink is so, so much more, than just 50 shades of gray. Delving into kink is like discovering that one’s old 6-bit color-depth monitor was ignoring millions of shades of “true” color, and once upgrading one’s “hardware” to 8-bit color-depth realizing that there are still a billion more shades hidden away to be revealed if one could only afford the time and money to invest in just a couple of more bits per component.
Yes to all that, although my own monitor was trying to show colours before it even really knew they existed.
I’ve often wondered how vanilla types sustain interest. I have a series of captions on my blog themed as ‘femdom vs vanilla’ contrasting the two. One of them is about scripting a porn shoot: the femdom one detailing the slow build-up to the various fiendish punishments and humiliating activities she has in mind and the menacing psychological elements she wants to bring into the scene, while the vanilla scriptwriter just writes “And then they fuck.”
Perhaps there’s more to it than that, but it seems pretty monochrome to me.
Best wishes
S
The software engineer in me has to pedantically point out that even with 8 bits of color, you’re still only at 16.7M shades :-), but other than that yes, spot on! There’s endless depths to explore not just in kink in general, but it each activity and dynamic. Lucky for all of us!
-paltego
I have to say I prefer my humiliation more severe most of the time but then YKINMK, and I know this to be true, Paltego because you’ve described some of your more pain-related kinks on this site and they’re truly horrible, you’re obviously a very strange and twisted person, so there you go.
Personally I’ve never experienced anything traumatic… that would make me think any worse of myself. Maybe that’s quite a high bar. I think just once I had to tell a domme afterwards that the verbal humiliation had gone too far (I had asked her in emails to really go for it) when she started mocking me about how my family would feel if they could see me doing what we were doing. Yeah… so not that. But no long-term damage!
I do like to go straight into the scene and I recently saw a lovely lady for a domestic discipline scene in which I had asked her to be unreasonable and hectoring and scolding from the start – and she was, brilliantly – but afterwards she was at great pains to point out that she actually really appreciated the little gift I had brought along with my tribute and she hoped I realised she was just being in character when she sneeringly dismissed it – as of course, I had.
Best wishes
S
I’d much rather have needles shoved in my genitals than get verbally insulted, so I guess that does qualify as strange and twisted. Definitely not a subscriber to the old adage about sticks and stones.
Bringing the family into it does seem a bit of a low blow. Do you ever safeword out of that kind of thing? A safeword for non-physical stuff seems odd on one hand but also kind of useful if you’ve asked someone to really go for it.
I have a bit of an OCD brain that can endlessly dwell on stuff. I still cringe when I think about mildly embarrassing situations from 30 years ago. So want to be careful to not to add to that catalogue of memories.
The idea of a domme sneeringly dismiss a gift I’d brought … ugh. Now that really is strange and twisted stuff!
-paltego
Oddly, I also cringe very badly at almost any memory of gaffes I’ve ever made or slighting comments I’ve overheard in real life. But I have never felt remotely the same way about anything in session. Oooh – deep psychological insight: maybe the session is a safe space to be humiliated? Never thought of that.
Best wishes
S