Shame and Humiliation

[voluptuary_manque]

Reminds me of Doris' description of one her johns to Felix in The Owl and the Pussycat. All the john wanted her to do was sit at the end of a long hallway in nothing but a raincaoat while he rolled hard boiled eggs at her. "That's it. 50 bucks." But Doris, asks Felix in horror, "What were you thinking while he rolled hard boiled eggs at you?" Doris quips, "I was thinking about the 50 bucks I was gonna get."

ROFL! I think about all the plot bunnies I get wandering around here.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Voluptuary-Manque has to be one of the most apt self-monikers I've ever run across!

I have a Shakespearean fascination/obsession with words. Isn't English fun? And the varied expressions of sexuality have a . . . well, sometimes morbid . . . fascination, as well.


Ah'm jes' a big chicken, yanno?


Perhaps there really was something in a neurologist's statement that people were either pain avoiders or pleasure seekers. Since the entire BDSM scene is based on what brings certain people pleasure then y'all are in category 2. Us vanillians are then left with category 1.

 

[Corylea]

Voluptuary-Manque has to be one of the most apt self-monikers I've ever run across!

*laugh* Yes!

And there are plenty of folks who are all about the chains and not so much for the whips.

I know, I married one. Jack Spratt would eat no fat, his wife would eat no lean....

BDSM covers a huge acreage of preferences and 'unusualities'

We should make a picture book, like the ones for kids about animals. Y'know, the kind that go, "This is a lion; it lives in the jungle and likes to eat antelope. This is a rabbit; it lives in the forest and eats grass." Only, it'd be, "This is a bondage bottom; he likes to be tied up, but stimulate him very gently. This is a D/S top; she'll tell you what to do, but she's not interested in tying you up or hurting you."

I once met a guy who was into capsicum-- hot peppers. Bondage and hot peppers, and not even particularly genitally focussed. As a bottom, I hasten to say, he didn't want to smush them on other people. And he couldn't stand a flogger, he told me solemnly.

On the subject of hot things, I once saw a top put Tiger Balm on a woman's clit, then watched her howl and scream and beg him to remove it for half an hour. I was feeling sorry for her -- I'm told that it's hard to get that stuff off, once it's on -- when she stopped howling and asked, "More?"

It isn't always clear when people are having a good time.

Not only are there huge differences between people in what folks like, but even very small differences in area of the body or in technique can have hugely different effects on the same person. I used to have a switchy partner who loved to bite my upper back hard enough to draw blood, which usually resulted in my saying "yes, yes, more" but one time when he tried to bite my thigh very lightly, I said, "Ow! Stop that!" He was confused and -- quite understandably -- asked me why there was such a difference. "I just live in this body; I didn't get to design it. I can report how it responds, but not why. Biting, scratching, cutting, etc. feel good from the area just below my earlobe to just above my bra strap but not above or below it, and that's all I know -- WHY isn't available to me" He saw my point.

Endless variety.

 

[reneemyrenee]

this works in the turn mr on in six words

Humiliation is when someone knows your shame.

Humiliation: when someone knows my shame

 

[Stella_Omega]

On the subject of hot things, I once saw a top put Tiger Balm on a woman's clit, then watched her howl and scream and beg him to remove it for half an hour. I was feeling sorry for her -- I'm told that it's hard to get that stuff off, once it's on -- when she stopped howling and asked, "More?"
.

You know, I've never forgotten this little anecdote, and never remembered where it came from.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

You know, I've never forgotten this little anecdote, and never remembered where it came from.

People will find pleasure in the darndest things!

 

[Xelebes]

Shame is realising you're considering breaking a limit of yours, humiliation is breaking that limit of yours.

 

[reneemyrenee]

I think

Shame is how one feels about themselves and value of ones self
my mother used to, "Shame on you! Nasty Nasty".
humiliation is more like embarrassment

but what do I know

When I was 11 I started my period and the hormones, (I guess) wakened my sexual desire and so masturbation began. I thought everyone could tell what I was doing and I was so ashamed of myself. I spent more than twenty years praying to God to deliver me from my fantasies and my several times a day habit.

I was torn inside from perceived unacceptable behavior and desires. I have come to terms with it now. I am writing about it and trying to present it deliciously as possible.
bye

 

[AllardChardon]

Fortunately, my bohemian parents did not inflict shame on me for masturbation, my Dad actually encouraged it. I rarely feel shame.

But, I was completely humiliated when I peed in my panties in my sixth grade class.

 

[master_chay]

Are they the same? What's the difference?

I find people get endlessly confused by words. One man's anger isn't another man's, and when it comes to such things as guilt and shame, it becomes easier to say, "Where do you feel that (what you are calling X) in your body? What does it feel like?"

Then you get some answers you can do something with. And it's often very surprising, and mostly nothing like what your own versions of "shame" and "guilt" respectively feel like to you.

It's really the same with pleasure and pain. Go past the words and ask what it really feels like, and you got something to play with.

"Pleasure is a red hot pressure rising in my groin ..."

 

[lovecraft68]

I find people get endlessly confused by words. One man's anger isn't another man's, and when it comes to such things as guilt and shame, it becomes easier to say, "Where do you feel that (what you are calling X) in your body? What does it feel like?"

Then you get some answers you can do something with. And it's often very surprising, and mostly nothing like what your own versions of "shame" and "guilt" respectively feel like to you.

It's really the same with pleasure and pain. Go past the words and ask what it really feels like, and you got something to play with.

"Pleasure is a red hot pressure rising in my groin ..."

I always explain that as good sex should feel good. Great sex should hurt.

 

[Handley_Page]

On the subject of hot things, I once saw a top put Tiger Balm on a woman's clit, then watched her howl and scream and beg him to remove it for half an hour. I was feeling sorry for her -- I'm told that it's hard to get that stuff off, once it's on -- when she stopped howling and asked, "More?"

Endless variety.

Some years ago, my then wife injured herself and decided that good ole' "Horse Liniment" gel would assist in an early recovery. My ministrations got her interested and we got to the making love bit. I'd washed my hands to get the liniment off, but, not seems, not enough. Enough on my fingers to make her very aware of it. And it does take a while to vanish.
She later asked for more . . . . .

I always explain that as good sex should feel good. Great sex should hurt.

I'm not sure about the "hurt" bit.
Exhaustion, perhaps; but for me, not real pain.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

It's an old high school prank to put Ben Gay in a guy's jockstrap.

I once made love without washing my hands after handling hot peppers (forgot!) She didn't enjoy the experience one bit and ended up in the shower for like 20 minutes. Some things go beyond the pale of S&M.

 

[siobhansmut]

My gut response is:

Shame is an internally motivated state in which the person inflicts this feeling on him/herself. Whereas, humiliation is externally motivated...caused by someone else who intentionally inflicts the feeling on the other person.

atleast someones awake.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

atleast someones awake.

The difference between shame and humiliation isn't the externality or internality of the cause.People are perfectly capable of humiliating themselves on their own, as I can quite richly atest.

But you're close. Shame is an internal emotion involving fear-laced inadequacy. It's an awareness of a lack or shortcoming the bearer feels is not socially acceptable or ideal. I'm ashamed I never learned to ride a motorcycle.

Humiliation is what I feel when people watch me take my first motorcycle ride. It's shame made public.

I think I brought this up eons ago because i typically made great use of shame in my stories, especially female shame. Stella and I had had reams of arguments about this, but we use different kinds of characters; hers are usually hard-core, while my heroines are typically straight, up-tight good girls, who keep their sexuality under lock and key. My stories are typically reluctance, where Ms. Two-Shoes is assaulted by a Primal Male, who strips off her good-girl persona along with her clothes, and ends up having her do outrageous perversities which she finds, to her horror, that she likes.

That of course leaves her with this essential struggle between her view of herself as a goody two-shoes, vs. the sensual evidence she now has that suggests she's something less (or more).

You can't do that with a male. You can't have him get up from the ravishment bed and suddenly worry if he might be a male slut or whatever. You can do it with a guy who's just had gay sex, but that's different.

 

[lovecraft68]

You can't do that with a male. You can't have him get up from the ravishment bed and suddenly worry if he might be a male slut or whatever. You can do it with a guy who's just had gay sex, but that's different.

Really?

I beg to differ, but will say that your thought is the prevailing one for your description of your writing where the woman is always quivering and the man is always in control.

men can be shamed, thay can be humiliated, they can feel that later on, but that requires the use of a powerful female figure that the average man is afraid to write about and damn straight is afraid to meet in person. Or perhaps ou have not heard of sissification or transformation. How you think those guys feel during that process?

Strong male dominance in the form that it always has to be that way masks typical male lack of self esteem and the constant need to have their ego stroked.

Just as it takes a straight male who is strong in his own sexuality to joke that he is gay and not worry that his idiot friends might think he is, it takes a strong secure male to let a woman be the top and to admit that one can be.

Those men could fill a thimble here, maybe.

This site is male driven and has all its phobias.

Hence that absolutely over used, sickeningly tiresome cliche of the uptight good girl who needs to be shown her own sexuality. You described 50 shades of Gray, although she was a young inexperienced virgin which is about all that fraud Gray could have bullied anyway.

Bdsm misogynistic style is popular because some strong women like the fantasy of being submissive and 99% of men will only read if the guy is the top.

men are the weaker sex and it screams it all over this site in the way women are represented and treated here.

I've met women who could make you scream. They exist despite the majority of men claiming they don't.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Females are the strong sex until the lions come calling.

 

[lovecraft68]

Females are the strong sex until the lions come calling.

There are women in my dojo who would kill the lions while their men hid behind them.

Want a sign of the stronger sex? Look at death. In most cases who handles the funerals, the wakes? Who sits by the death bed? Who tends the dying family members.

Hint, it is not the men. Its not the testosterone filled men, its the women. I've seen funerals where some of the men couldn't attend, because it was too much.

Yeah too much....for weaklings.

 

[allamagione]

I'm giddy as a schoolgirl right now.

I think I brought this up eons ago because i typically made great use of shame in my stories, especially female shame. Stella and I had had reams of arguments about this, but we use different kinds of characters; hers are usually hard-core, while my heroines are typically straight, up-tight good girls, who keep their sexuality under lock and key. My stories are typically reluctance, where Ms. Two-Shoes is assaulted by a Primal Male, who strips off her good-girl persona along with her clothes, and ends up having her do outrageous perversities which she finds, to her horror, that she likes.

That of course leaves her with this essential struggle between her view of herself as a goody two-shoes, vs. the sensual evidence she now has that suggests she's something less (or more).

Doc, your stories show so much insight into female shame that I can't read them in one sitting. It took me two months to read Helene Blackmailed in its entirety. Reading your erotica is like lying at the feet of a preacher man, clutching at his robes and sobbing in ecstasy as he absolves me of my sins. Best feeling in the world, but a little frightening in its intensity.

The theme of the reluctant good-girl is clichéd because so many women feel shame over their sexuality.

The distinction for me:

Shame = being told I should be ashamed of my desires
Humiliation = being told I should be ashamed of my desires by a lover as he fulfills them

The former is very upsetting. The latter is guaranteed to send me off like a rocket.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Really?

I beg to differ, but will say that your thought is the prevailing one for your description of your writing where the woman is always quivering and the man is always in control.

men can be shamed, thay can be humiliated, they can feel that later on, but that requires the use of a powerful female figure that the average man is afraid to write about and damn straight is afraid to meet in person. Or perhaps ou have not heard of sissification or transformation. How you think those guys feel during that process?

Strong male dominance in the form that it always has to be that way masks typical male lack of self esteem and the constant need to have their ego stroked.



Just as it takes a straight male who is strong in his own sexuality to joke that he is gay and not worry that his idiot friends might think he is, it takes a strong secure male to let a woman be the top and to admit that one can be.

Those men could fill a thimble here, maybe.

This site is male driven and has all its phobias.

Hence that absolutely over used, sickeningly tiresome cliche of the uptight good girl who needs to be shown her own sexuality. You described 50 shades of Gray, although she was a young inexperienced virgin which is about all that fraud Gray could have bullied anyway.

Bdsm misogynistic style is popular because some strong women like the fantasy of being submissive and 99% of men will only read if the guy is the top.

men are the weaker sex and it screams it all over this site in the way women are represented and treated here.

I've met women who could make you scream. They exist despite the majority of men claiming they don't.

Who's talking about strength and weakness here? Especially of the physical kind? What in the world does that have to do with anything?

You think BDSM is based on strength and muscle power? Really??

What grade are you in again?

I'm afraid I didn't make myself clear. My heroines are the traditional females of my youth (probably everyone's are), who consider sexual modesty and purity to be part of their public image, something they cultivate and value.

Because all of us have sexual desires and fantasies and all, this kind of woman comes with a natural sexual tension built-in: her modest, asexual public persona vs. her private, sexual self. The old virgin-whore dichotomy. Much of the internal drama in my reluctance stories comes from forcing her to confront the fact that she likes some of these "degrading" things the man is doing to her, and then watching her try to reconcile her carnal pleasures with her own understanding of herself as modest and proper and asexual.

Men, aside from TV evangelists and politicians, aren't torn between a good-boy persona and a repressed sexual one, so they don't come with this kind of built in tension. So a guy who's seduced by a sexually aggressive woman usually isn't going to spend time worrying about what kind of man he is, though he might.

As far as humiliating men, I don't think you have to go so far as a dojo or whatever. A woman's laugh when she sees his erection can be quite sufficient.

 

[oggbashan]

I think there is some confusion in this thread between the nouns and the verbs.

My take on the nouns:

Shame is what a person feels as an individual. What triggers that shame can be personal. Some people are shameless.

Humiliation requires at least two people. One to be humiliated, the other to be the witness.

The verbs:

To shame someone is to make them feel ashamed (of something they have said or done). Of course, the person has to be capable of feeling shame. If they are shameless, they cannot be shamed - for example a prolific thief who has no intention of stopping.

To humiliate someone is to diminish them, to reduce their self-esteem. In my view that requires witnesses, and the larger the number of witnesses, the greater the humiliation. In the World Cup, Germany's 7-1 thrashing of Brazil was a humiliation of the Brazilian football team. But should the Brazilian players be ashamed? They might be, but they were outplayed by a better team.

To add confusion, the participles, shaming, shamed, can be seen as a synonym for humiliation e.g. The shaming of Brazil was emphatic, or The humiliation of Brazil was emphatic.

 

[Aynmair]

Given the definitions provided, is the question ultimately whether either of these are arousing, or tools of arousal? Perhaps for some, but I'd rather be led away from my sexually repressed side, whatever it might be, in ways other than humiliation, and I'd go there willingly.

I freely admit I don't get the appeal of humiliation. It hits the same squick nerve as would golden showers and the like - a psychological equivalent that subsumes the brain in an analogous way to subsuming the body to someone else. (If this means I am absolutely, positively vanilla, so be it, but I am not ashamed to be so... .)

 

[AllardChardon]

Yesterday, I was listening to an interview on PBS by a woman, who described her deep-seated shame of being raised in extremely poor conditions. She expressed feeling inadequate and socially unacceptable as a child. She has spent her life trying to feel worthy.

I was shocked and moved by her story. I was a completely loved and adored child in a perfectly nice middle-class neighborhood. To this day, I feel very little shame about much of anything. I do get embarrassed on occasion, though.

It makes me wonder, how many people feel shame for things they had no control over in the first place, things that happened so long ago, it hardly matters now.

 

[Aynmair]

Great point; my mother grew up the same way, and never got over it, to her death bed. It is painful to watch.

Yesterday, I was listening to an interview on PBS by a woman, who described her deep-seated shame of being raised in extremely poor conditions. She expressed feeling inadequate and socially unacceptable as a child. She has spent her life trying to feel worthy.

I was shocked and moved by her story. I was a completely loved and adored child in a perfectly nice middle-class neighborhood. To this day, I feel very little shame about much of anything. I do get embarrassed on occasion, though.

It makes me wonder, how many people feel shame for things they had no control over in the first place, things that happened so long ago, it hardly matters now.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I'm giddy as a schoolgirl right now.



Doc, your stories show so much insight into female shame that I can't read them in one sitting. It took me two months to read Helene Blackmailed in its entirety. Reading your erotica is like lying at the feet of a preacher man, clutching at his robes and sobbing in ecstasy as he absolves me of my sins. Best feeling in the world, but a little frightening in its intensity.

The theme of the reluctant good-girl is clichéd because so many women feel shame over their sexuality.

The distinction for me:

Shame = being told I should be ashamed of my desires
Humiliation = being told I should be ashamed of my desires by a lover as he fulfills them

The former is very upsetting. The latter is guaranteed to send me off like a rocket.

Allamigone, you're too kind (but I love it! )

Well, I see it kind of like this. The sexiest things in a sex story always happen in the characters' heads. Dick and pussies and tits just don't have that much to say, no matter how they flop, jiggle or roll, and all the thrusting and scratching and moaning and humping are sexy only because they tell us what the characters must be feeling inside. So it's really all internal.

And what's happening inside a woman's head during sex is about surrender, about letting her lover in deeper and deeper. He's already penetrated her body, but now he starts to penetrate her head and heart. He starts to penetrate her soul. That's how sex relates to love: it's a metaphor for accepting you lover into your heart and soul.

But her mind's not just an empty space. She has things in there: her self-image, her concerns, things she's ashamed of, things she wants. When the sex is very good and very intimate and intense, she gives these up. She violates her own strictures and taboos and limits. She gives him everything: her body, her shame, her trust, her former denial.

For men it's different. Men don't have so much ego involved. And take ti from one who knows: being the penetrated one is a whole lot different from being the penetrator, without doubt. That's why every man should be the catcher in a game of strap-on at least once in his life. You'll learn morew about women in that 5 minutes than you will in a year outside.