Humiliation
A confessional
The last time I felt humiliated was on a date. It had begun by messaging a guy I had a long mutual flirtation with online - we infrequently liked one another’s selfies or sent lazy and noncommittal fire emojis back and forth, as is often the way with Instagram flirting. The door is opened to something more, if either party can be bothered to step through it.
Eventually, I asked him out for a drink and he agreed. We messaged each other daily during the two-week lead up to our date - he was away on a holiday, yet still made the effort to ask how I was doing and compliment my writing. In turn, I read his writing and seriously engaged with his ideas even though I knew very little about the philosophy he wrote about. It is the sort of thing I only do when I am talking to a man I fancy, the same fugue state that makes me listen to an hour-long album because a he posted a 10-second song snippet to his story - a kind of golden retriever mentality.
The date went well - we were drinking and laughing (he was, crucially, buying the drinks) and after a lengthy discussion about my housemate’s cat, I asked him what his living situation was. He replied that he lived with his long-term boyfriend. The fact that he had a boyfriend had not been mentioned up until this point. I was humiliated - I felt that I’d made a fool of myself by presuming he was single and wanted to date me, rather than just a casual hookup while his boyfriend waited at home.
There is a specific sinking feeling that comes with humiliation, a slow dawning that you are out of your depth or lacking a specific knowledge that you were expected to have. In the case of my date, the humiliation hinged on my own insecurities around dating and desirability. If I didn’t have insecurities about my own desirability, I would have quickly rebuked him for misleading me, rather than seeing it as evidence of my own inadequacy. There was an implicit expectation that I should have, somehow, known he was in a committed relationship and only looking for casual sex despite the fact he did not communicate this prior to our date. I was humiliated because this impossible expectation aligned with my own doubts about being worthy of love - of course he does not want to date me, my insecurities said, I should have known that I would not be desired in that way.
While this example of humiliation was not sexual, both sexual and non-sexual humiliation relies on an internal sense of failure. My experiences of both are intertwined - my history of humiliation throughout my childhood and teen years is inseparable from my adult experience of humiliation as kink. I suspect that the majority of people are like me, and their kinks and sexual preferences are primarily shaped by their formative experiences of power. It always comes back to childhood.
My early experiences of growing up as a queer child in a deeply conservative environment meant humiliation was understood as a tool of gendered oppression and power, whereby anyone perceived as performing their gender role incorrectly could be brought back into normative behaviours. It was common practise to laugh at and socially exclude anyone who demonstrated same-sex desire (or was suspected of doing so) and anyone who didn’t act appropriately for their gender. Humiliation was, at its core, a correctional tool for women and queers who got funny ideas about deserving dignity and respect. It worked because everyone subject to the humiliation had been convinced that there was something wrong with them that was being publicly identified, and therefore went to great lengths to hide it.
Perhaps growing up in this environment is why I now seek out being called homophobic slurs in the bedroom. In my daily life, I’m not ashamed of being queer despite the environment I grew up in, but you could posit that I am compulsively returning to early trauma and inflicting further damage on myself, stuck in a cycle of re-traumatisation by letting partners call me a f*ggot because, deep down, I believe there’s something wrong with me. This theory is extremely boring, but not without some merit. While it is too easy to tap into a TikTok-esque compulsion to label everything a trauma response in order to seal it neatly away as “bad” or “unhealthy”, it is also true that a very difficult and hurt part of myself does believe there is something fundamentally wrong and shameful about me. I believe many – perhaps most - people live this way, but only some go on to eroticise it.
When shame is eroticised, there is the possibility of it being witnessed and purged. Consider the humiliation scene like a confessional: You are the priest listening my sins, how they torment me, and how I am ashamed of them. You wield the possibility of purification and unconditional love over me - it is your decision whether or not my shame can be absolved. When I am willingly vulnerable and expose myself to you, the eroticism plays out in my act of submission. When I tell you I’m a f*ggot, a whore, a queer, I am asking you to witness my failings and love me despite them.
By exposing what I am ashamed of, the weight of that shame lessens. Dynamics of humiliation scenes vary depending on what the individuals involved are getting out of them, but my experiences have repeatedly led me back to purging. My partner calls me what I am, on some level, ashamed of and suddenly the public humiliation that was out of my control is firmly within my control. The terror that I will be publicly labelled as wrong or bad is being enacted, like a dress rehearsal for my younger self’s greatest fear. My partner ideally knows the boundaries of what is acceptable and where to stop – for example, cis partners cannot use transphobic language on me, as that’s where the line between play and reality begins to blur and the power dynamics become increasingly real. If we’re both f*ggots, however, my partner calling me that is well within the realm of imaginative play – we’re both sinners here, but let’s pretend you’re a priest for a while so we can play at confession.
My partner’s pleasure is also a major factor in this purging scenario. There is a push-pull that occurs during humiliation kink when the dominant partner pretends to be revolted by what turns them on. An example of this is a recurring theme I play out with one particular partner who treats me as though I am stupid and he is very exasperated and annoyed by my ongoing stupidity. It’s fun and I knowingly play into it – being found to be secretly very stupid is a great fear of mine, and to play the fool (and sometimes even just be genuinely quite stupid about certain things) releases this tension. My partner enjoys the dynamic and the sense of intellectual domination over me, and in return I learn that I can be desired and loved despite my deep conviction that perhaps I’m very stupid indeed and everyone in my life has been too polite to say anything until now. Through my partner’s attraction to my apparent stupidity, my fear turns into a desirable part of my whole self that can be named, recognised, and played with. It’s hard to be truly ashamed of something when you are loved for it.
Being loved for my insecurities is where the difference lies between my partner consensually calling me stupid or a slur, and the man I went on the date with revealing that he had a boyfriend. On the date, my insecurity that I am unlovable felt confirmed when it became apparent that the man was not romantically interested in me – the opposite of how a humiliation kink scene makes me feel. Humiliation kink, like most kink, involves letting someone play at hurting me while taking great care of me. It allows me to purge and play with my shame. Without care underpinning the whole dynamic, it is not humiliation play, but simply humiliation, and I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime.
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‘My partner calls me what I am, on some level, ashamed of and suddenly the public humiliation that was out of my control is firmly within my control.’ Perfectly put
I was intrigued by the title of this post in the context of the channel as a whole and wow I was not disappointed. I think I'm going to have to read this several more times to get at all of the layers it contains. Also, my mind was drifting near the end which is often what my brain does when it doesn't want to hear something devastatingly accurate. I see a paid subscription in my future.