CaringandReal
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Joined: 2/15/2008
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... but there is a clear line between swan diving into wanted degradation vs. real damage to dignity and self-respect.
--MarcEsadrian
I'm glad you made that distinction, it's a very important one, IMO. And I'm very glad you said more about it later in your conversation with Porcelaine. In a minute, I'm going to pull out of a few pieces from this discussion that really struck home to me. You really made some excellent points.
But first, a question. I've known some submissives who seemed to like what I term "bad humiliation." I was in a little private group on Yahoo once that played with this concept. There were overweight submissive women who liked to be torn down and called fat cows or pigs or much worse; older women who liked being called wrinkled old hags and being forced to wear garish clownish makeup and ridiculous clothing that emphasized their age, women who liked racial humiliation, even a woman who was large and old and who also relished taking out her false teeth and being humiliated for that. How do you explain this: do you think such submissives do not feel torn down by this sort of treatment? That for them, it's become like the word "slut" is for some of us? Just another form of erotic humiliation? They really seemed to like this treatment, and take it to a degree that would have had me curled up in a natal position, moaning to myself.
That aside, the love of being "humbled" seems more reliable in both theory and practice than claiming to love repeated injury to the very core of one's self-respect. That is not a supposition, but an empirical observation, I'm afraid. Only a select few are wired to embrace the real McCoy here as a positive by default, just as only a select few are cut out for 100% servitude not from concentrate.
That's a really good way of putting it. I believe from reading this thread and also from listening to my own feelings that many of us would suffer horrible humiliation if it meant pleasing our dominants or masters, we would either obey and trust that they would put us back together again, like Humpty-Dumpty... or we would just obey. But I don't think that bad humiliation in and by itself would be an interest many of us would voluntarily seek out. Even the submissives I've known who were extremely self-destructive and who sought out abuse, tended to look for physical destruction not emotional destruction.
"100% servitude not from concentrate"
LOL! OK, that is too perfect. May I please, please, please steal this line? If I ever decide to put my profile back up, I want that at the top. In Large Letters. :D (Well, I may also add "freshly squeezed" below it in the fine print. ;0 )
But finding that real button can take some digging and intent, particularly with those who fetishize being made a spectacle of in the limelight.
If by "button," you mean what is deeply, badly humiliating for any given person, I agree. It varies so much from person to person, and with a lot of people, the common humiliations, the obvious buttons, like something to do with an appearance flaw (if female) or their career/earning potential (if male) have no effect. When I was new to slavery, I kept mine pretty closely hidden from my master. He found them out, nevertheless, and then he made me talk about them, which was very hard to do (I think I had to change the pillowcase twice that night) but he didn't hurt me with them.
That certainly stands to reason, but exploring just how far that logic extends is always worth a second look. Would you resolve toward only looking through your Master's eyes when he abjectly humiliates you, say, in front of your relatives during a cozy family dinner at your Mother's house? Or spreads images of your mouth made urinal around to all your co-workers/clients? Probably not. Of course those examples are a little extreme, but they are offered to test the "if he thinks it's great, end of discussion" idea...
These examples certainly work for me. (a) I work and pictures like that would be ruinous and (b) I dislike my family intensely and seeing these despised ones gloating over my humiliation (while pretending concern for me) would be very hard to bear. Could I suffer it if I were owned and my owner wanted this for some reason? I'd like to think that I could, but I won't know for sure unless it ever happens. I would not enjoy it in the least, no matter how great my owner thought it was, just like I would not enjoy very extreme pain (burning/branding) even if my owner thought that was wonderful. I imagine that after such extreme humiliation, I'd be something of a mess.
You said later about these examples:
The scenarios were theoretical examples, and ones I think many can relate to as deeply violating and terribly humiliating, but they are by no means the only ones available. Not by a long shot, considering the deviant creativity of the human mind. The overall point I'm asserting is much of this isn't theoretical to me. I've seen and experienced a great variety of actors and stages, and have been on those stages myself. I have yet to see anyone who isn't capable of being "mind hacked" to the negative.
Precisely. It's simply a matter of finding those things that affect any given individual most profoundly. Actually that's not a simple matter, some people have them very deeply buried, even from themselves. When people talk about abuse, whether in childhood or with an adult partner, it's the emotional jabs they remember the clearest and with the most horror, that have the most profound effect. Sometimes such things come out during beatings. Physical violence brings up some strong and totally unexpected emotions at times. A submissive will start to sob strongly even though they're not being beaten very hard or will even go speechless/catatonic for a while and feel a terrible dread. If you can get someone who goes into that mindset to talk about it, they'll often reveal one of those very tender places. But you can find these places by other means, as well.
Mind-hacking is an excellent term for it. My former master was very good at this and, luckily, did it for good reasons: so he could help me or someone else face and deal with things that he believed made us overall more dysfunctional and unhappy. He was very skilled at extracting information: his gentle, soft questions wafted through a lot of normally impregnable barriers, like smoke through almost invisible cracks in a stone wall.
It sounds like you've been a few theaters of horror, by the way.
To bend and break? Too condition? To reduce? That I'll buy.
Are you talking about humiliation(bad) doing this, that these are reasons for using it? If so, it's a fascinating idea, one I hadn't thought of before, but I imagine it might work in the hands of an expert. It does strike me as a rather delicate operation, but if it worked, it would certainly be effective. I believe you are the only one I know of who would think of using humiliation in this manner. I am not sure if this is bad or good--maybe both! ;) Er, have you ever actually done this?
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Thanks, by the way, to both you and Porcelaine for keeping your discussions so civil. You clearly disagreed on some points but you just kept talking about it like...well, adults. :) It's great to see that on a message board, as most of these things reduce to idiotic flaming and brawling. And what emerged from this discussion, even if I didn't fully understand all of the arguements, was very enlightening, at least to me, and, I suspect to others. WTG, both of you. :) As I said to Porcelaine, I just turned over the rock just outside my hermit's hut and pulled out the dusty laptop to peek in on the rest of the world. Collarme was one of the first places I checked. It was great to find a thread on one of my favorite subjects on the front page and to see so many insightful replies to it, but this exchange has been particularly valuable in helping me get my head around the concepts of good humiliation, bad humiliation, and the contexts in which both might appear. If anybody ever asks me "What is humiliation?" I'll save myself some time and just point them to this thread. :)
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"A friend who bleeds is better" --placebo
"How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home." --thomas harris
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RE: Humiliation - I really don't understand it. - 
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RE: Humiliation - I really don't understand it. - 
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