When I was an undergraduate, I was a teaching assistant to a new lecturer, Mr. Wyley. Mr. Wyley was in his early 30s at the time and is an ex marine who was still mostly in shape, but with a layer of padding from drinking beer and years of sedentary work, giving him an adorable dad-bod belly and plump rear. He was fairly clean-cut with thick rimmed glasses, had a deep voice with a subtle Texas accent, and normally dressed business casual with a hint of cowboyness (fitted plaid dress shirts, blazers, tight jeans or slacks, cowboy boots, and the occasional cowboy hat). In fact, Mr. Wyley reminds me of a less Hollywood-ized version of Lucas Black’s character from NCIS New Orleans. In case you couldn’t tell from such a description, I had an enormous crush on this man and made it a point to take in every ounce of what I found attractive about him every time I saw him. It also helped that he was a really sweet, funny, and intelligent guy.
I assisted Mr. Wyley during a spring semester, so when the weather warmed up, I began wearing shorts to work. Since the only tattoos I have are below my knees, Mr. Wyley didn’t get to see and admire them until after I wore shorts around him. In his office, he marvelled at the quality and content of the tattoos with a genuine interest, then we went to his class. As we were leaving class that day, without any hesitation, Mr. Wyley remarked on the musculature of my calves and asked if I worked out. Before I had a chance to say anything, one of our students overheard us and catcalled, basically calling out how odd of a conversation that is for two men at work to have. Mr. Wyley kind of stopped short and blushed as he laughed nervously and I chuckled, but responded rather stoicly to avoid making things weird between us. Even though I didn’t want to contribute to his embarrassment because of how much I liked and respected Mr. Wyley, I kind of ate his embarrassment up with a spoon and enjoyed my empowered feeling. I felt empowered 1) because Mr. Wyley, a straight man who I found extremely attractive and who was my boss was openly directing his attention toward my appearance, and 2) because Mr. Wyley was the one who said something to embarrass himself, so I got to step aside in a sense and enjoy seeing a man who sexually intimidated me fumble and have to recompose himself. Not to mention, the ball was kind of dropped into my quart in that moment because I had the choice to address what a weird question that was to ask his male teaching assistant or go along with it to spare him from feeling further awkwardness.
Of course, I chose the latter option because I appreciated Mr. Wyley’s platonic attention to my appearance and I didn’t want him to feel embarrassed for doing that since I liked him and think that men should be more okay with openly talking about those kinds of things with each other. However, I enjoyed witnessing Mr. Wyley’s humiliation. Humiliation, or the act of making someone ashamed or embarrassed for something they did or who they are to the point of reducing their perceived status or position, is a major factor in the fetish world, as well as a necessary component of general sex and romance. To the fetishistic extent, enjoying another person’s humiliation can be downright sadistic because it essentially involves getting pleasure out of someone else’s psychological pain. It can be considered masochistic if you enjoy the sensation of being humiliated and shamed. However, outside of the fetish world, shame and humiliation are valued to a lesser extent for similar reasons: both inside and outside of the fetish world, experiencing humiliation is appealing because it involves a sense of vulnerability and vulnerability indicates a person’s well-roundedness and ability to cope with difficulties. Therefore, my enjoyment of Mr. Wyley’s embarrassment might have been fetishistic to an extent, but it also just added to my attraction to him because it kind of brought him to my level. Seeing a man in a position that was professionally higher than mine, as well as a symbolically higher position over me from the crush I had on him, feel embarrassed brought him down a peg because the capability to be humiliated made him more human and relatable.
Why People Like Humiliation
The most powerful thing about humiliation is its relationship to control. As noted above, humiliation at its most extreme can bring somebody down a few pegs and maybe even lower their socially constructed status, which is a maneuver that people can use to control others. For example, a child can force his parent to buy him a toy by threatening to throw a tantrum and make a scene in the store. If that parent is shy and easy to embarrass, s/he might reluctantly comply with their child to avoid having attention directed at them. In more serious cases, people like prisoners have been exposed and publicly shamed in various ways to make an example to everyone else from having the shackled inmate walk through the village, so the villagers can heckle and throw garbage at them, to broadcasting their ambush and arrest on shows like COPS. Therefore, aside from just making citizens afraid of breaking laws and being incarcerated, these uses of public humiliation are used to make examples of criminals in ways that have deeper, psychological effects on people because there seems to be an ultimate and primitive fear of public shame. However, aside from making people scared of having to endure shame, watching other people’s embarrassment is also alluring.
In the context of seeing lawbreakers being shamed and humiliated, audiences are often drawn to the idea of order being restored and “bad people” getting what they deserve. Yet, I believe that this allure extends to more than just watching criminals regret their illegal actions or getting people to do things for others. In somewhat extreme cases, people can be fetishistically drawn to other people’s or their own experiences with humiliation. Since humiliation is often inextricably bound to control, sadistic people might be aroused by the loss of power and status that humiliated people experience as they’re laughed at and exploited. On the other hand, masochistic people might fantasize about situations when they’re in vulnerable positions and being exploited for that vulnerability. However, I believe that there’s another element of humiliation that isn’t really talked about because it isn’t as extreme or explicit. Like the story about Mr. Wyley, there might be a bit of fetishism involved with my adoration of his embarrassment, but the experience isn’t explicitly sexual. Situations like these that involve dealing with or witnessing embarrassment seem to be more about character and relationship building than the sexual exploitation that often comes from humiliation fetishes. Therefore, I intend to distinguish and explain these differences as a way of unpacking the value that humiliation has.
Humiliation in Fetishism
Considering how sex often involves some sort of top and bottom or dominant and submissive, not to mention how euphemisms for sex often involve terms that connote dominating or controlling (fucking, smashing, squashing, scoring, etc.), sex becomes metaphoric for power and control. This appears to be why rape is seen as more detrimental than other acts that make people vulnerable, like beating or robbing people, because sexual domination that isn’t playful cuts deeper into feelings of helplessness. When fetishism comes into play, the control metaphor in sex becomes less analogous and more literal because doing fetishistic acts makes sexual fantasies more tangible.
Many fetishes involve at least one person enduring humiliation whether it involves public nudity or exposure, transvestism, or dressing and acting like a baby. Other qualities probably factor into the appeal of these fetishes, but enduring some kind of role as a spectacle or witnessing someone else being a spectacle appears to be a major element of what makes these fetishes appealing. Specifically, being made a spectacle relates to being tied up because it makes you vulnerable and gives the thrill of feeling helpless in a high stakes situation because it gives the spectators, or the dominant person, an upper hand. Therefore, witnessing some kind of spectacle is appealing because it not only directs attention away from you, but gives you the power to either add to the spectacle's public humiliation or ignore the situation entirely, like I did with Mr. Wyley. I was in a position to either separate myself from him, since he was the current subject of ridicule, or ignore what was happening, allowing myself to be part of the ridicule with Mr. Wyley.
Even though bondage can have an element of spectacle (if you're duct taped naked to the flagpole in front of your high school for example), the humiliation in bondage usually comes from the feeling of helplessness in front of another person, which doesn't always have to be spectacular. For example, if you get tied up during a robbery or home invasion, the humiliation involved would come from the shame of not being able to defend yourself and allowing another person to threaten and get one over on you. If your buddies decide to have a little fun with you and a roll of tape, the humiliation would similarly come from letting others get one over on you, but it would also stem from the fact that your friends thought of you as some sort of target and found your helplessness amusing, which might indicate a lack of respect for your personal boundaries. When you and a significant other decide to play with rope in a safe and intimate setting, humiliation could still set in just because of the change in dynamic between the two of you. At one point, you were two mutual and equal partners, then one becomes a dom and the other becomes a sub once bondage is introduced. Thus, regular social boundaries of politeness and personal space are eliminated when the sub becomes more of an object because s/he is left to endure whatever the dom decides to put him/her through. As the superior species on the planet because of our consciousness, becoming more of an object is the most humiliating thing a person can imagine. A human's reduction to an object is extremely humiliating because it ignores all the consciousness and sentience we have to offer, thus objectified people just become things that can be owned, that can't feel or think, and that are only valued for simple things like how pretty they are to look at or basic functions they have.
The Dark Side of Vulnerability: Objectification and Degradation
Objectification is typically when a person is reduced to just their body, or even a particular body part, with any deeper human qualities being ignored. It is when people become a sexual fantasy and nothing else with any distinct human qualities being imagined or exaggerated to fit the sexual fantasy. Objectification can be flattering to an extent, but is humiliating because it dehumanizes people into sexual caricatures that have no other purpose or function. Not to minimize the negative impact that objectification has on people, but I believe that most people objectify others and even themselves on a regular basis as far as sexual fantasies go. Objectification becomes an issue when it is normalized and encouraged in media, like promoting the spectacle of naked women on Girls Gone Wild, as well as when people take literal ownership of another non-consenting human body by touching it or calling attention to it as it were the only valuable thing about that person.
Degradation, on the other hand, is a more extreme version of objectification. Degradation is its own fetish because it involves finding desire in being symbolically reduced to something lesser with extreme insults or enduring other kinds of cruel treatment by another person.
While objectification could seem flattering on the surface because it calls attention to something desirable about you while simultaneously devaluing your other attributes, degradation flat-out devalues anything about you to make you feel small and worthless. Therefore, degradation is humiliating because instead of making you out to be an object with one value, it makes you into an object with no value, like garbage or junk. The appeal of degradation seems to come from the liberation of not having to amount to anything. Instead of having to work hard to impress others for validation and accolades, you get attention for being the worst regardless of who you are or what you do, even if the attention is negative and mean-spirited. When you are thought to be utter garbage, the bar is lowered and any expectations that you can be or do better are out of the question, which is quite freeing because any effort to be better won't matter, so you can essentially do what you want. However, I think that on another, darker level, degradation can also be appealing because it forms a somewhat codependent bond between the degraded and the degrader.
At it's best, degradation is a way of freeing people from normative means of acceptance, but at its worst, degradation is a way of trapping those with low self-esteem. Similar to most abusive relationships, social dynamics that involve degradation seem to be held together by bonds that rely on psychological manipulation and a false sense of security with the understanding that the degraded can't find relationships that are better than the one they have with the degrader, which prevents the degraded from moving on. Oftentimes, people blame the victims of abusive relationships for staying with their abusers because it's supposedly so easy to just say "no" and abandon ship, but those people don't understand the complexity of co-dependence and degradation.
When a person is convinced that they are truly worthless, they usually believe that they can't find or don't deserve relationships that will challenge the belief that they are worthless. So, they strive to be with people who will continue to make them feel worthless, while simultaneously believing that their relationship is as good as it's going to get for them, which eliminates any chances of independence or finding better partners or relationships. In spite of how toxic this may be, degraded people find security in this dynamic because even though they might not have hope for something better, they at least know that somebody (their degrader) reluctantly accepts them at their most pitiful. When someone is degraded, they are made extremely vulnerable and powerless from being humiliated and symbolically reduced to very little. So when someone is degraded by a close romantic or sexual partner, that feeling of extreme vulnerability is used to manipulate the degraded into bonding with their degrader because it creates an underlying acceptance of the degraded subject at their most vulnerable and least flattering. The degraded subject’s exposed vulnerability is then used as leverage for the subject’s worthlessness that nobody else would want, so the degrader’s acceptance becomes understood as generosity instead of emotional manipulation.
The Light Side of Vulnerability: Opening Up and Letting In
When I initiated discussion about humiliation on my Instagram page, a user almost immediately jumped to talking about his feelings about degradation. I find it interesting that with almost nothing leading to that, someone immediately got into talking about possibly the most extreme form of humiliation. I guess since my content primarily centers around fetishism and bondage, it would only make sense that I address degradation. However, there seems to be many forms and levels of humiliation with degradation being the most extreme and general embarrassment being the least extreme. For example, I am not a fan of degradation simply because I don't fully understand the appeal behind it. When a sub I was role-playing with wanted me to degrade him, I had trouble with owning the mean things I was saying to him. I found myself chuckling every time an insult came out of my mouth.
This reaction to my own attempt at degrading someone was surprising and odd at first because I really wanted to give my sub what he wanted. I am generally good at dominating because I can just do whatever I want and act on my primal desires, but degrading required something else from me. The only way I could explain chuckling at my own degradation is the fact that I have a fairly mean sense of humor in the sense that I find blatantly mean rhetorts more humorous than hurtful. For example, a norm between my friends and I was to say absurdly mean things about each other that have absolutely no grounding in reality. So, instead of finding humor in putting people down, we laughed at the ironic absurdity of the insults. This became especially apparent when a coworker of ours expressed that she thought my friends and I hated each other because of how we talked to each other, to which one of us remarked "in what world do people who actually hate each other air their grievances towards each other in such an upfront way?" Realistically, when people hate each other, they usually just try to avoid the person they hate and possibly say insulting things behind their back. If insults seem to pour out to the hated person, they would likely be expressed through passive aggression or during the occasional altercation. I'm convinced that if someone really wants to be hurtful, belligerently barking insults at that person isn't the way to do it because it's so over the top and ridiculous. Oftentimes, these types of insults aren't very personal, so they don't cut as deep, so my gut reaction to saying or hearing these types of things is to laugh at the absurdity. Unfortunately, this kind of killed the mood between that sub and I.
However, just because I can't really get into degradation doesn't mean that I don't see the appeal in humiliation. Looking back to my story about Mr. Wyley, I didn't go out of my way to humiliate him or even encourage further humiliation or shame for him in that situation, but relished in his small episode of embarrassment. He was a man of authority to me and I found him extremely attractive, but this instance brought him down to my level and showed a relatable, human quality. This isn't to say that Mr. Wyley needed to be put in his place or humbled, but he was someone I held in high regard and his reaction to being catcalled showed vulnerability. This added to my attraction to him because he didn't seem as untouchable to me after that incident. Even though this incident was fairly PG and innocent, my attraction to Mr. Wyley's vulnerability and humiliation might be related to the fact that I've fantasized about his reaction to being tied up, which also involves seeing Mr. Wyley in a vulnerable and humiliated state. So, maybe I enjoyed what happened because I had been desensitized to the thought of enjoying the sight of my handsome boss in a vulnerable position.
Obviously, when someone is tied up and you aren’t, you’re in a position of power and they’re in a vulnerable position because they can’t control what physically happens to them and you can. But beyond physically having a tied up person at your disposal, you also have a more vulnerable and attainable version of that person as well. When somebody is completely rendered physically helpless, their demeanor tends to change. For example, when someone is tied up, their panic/defense instincts might kick in from their primal fear of helplessness. Not to mention, things usually tend to get awkward when distinct power dynamics are established. Then, the fact that they can't do anything about their situation and/or their heightened emotions might become embarrassing because even if they aren't actually in danger, their body's reaction could be outside of their control. This would further emphasize their feelings of helplessness since they can't seem to control what the dominant person does to them or their body's instinctual response to being tied up. Another reaction to being tied up, which is often seen in movie and TV interrogations, is that bondage opens the person up. I guess since bondage is a way of removing certain social barriers and people aren't usually in such vulnerable positions with other people, all bets are kind of off once a person is rendered helpless. In a sense, bondage can sometimes give someone a bit of the "Dutch courage" that an alcohol buzz gives that makes people more comfortable with opening up because there's nowhere else to hide when you're restrained and confronted. Perhaps the vulnerability from being tied up overpowers the fear of opening up and being honest, which makes it easier to do those things.
So, even if a guy you’re attracted to might be way out of your league, he likely won’t be as intimidating to you once he is rendered helpless, humiliated, and vulnerable. Of course, if you’re into bondage, having a guy you’re attracted to tied up won’t make him less attractive to you, but the fact that he is capable of being made helpless can be enough to make him less intimidating to you. Under usual circumstances, he would hold all the cards and have all the power to reject and hurt you, so holding him captive gives you the power and makes him the vulnerable one. Thus, the vulnerability in bondage, and probably sex and other fetishes, is appealing because it makes people seem more real, approachable, and possible. Instead of idealizing men who are impossible and untouchable, the fantasy of making them embarrassed, thus vulnerable, makes them more human and when their human flaws are exposed, the thought of being with or having them becomes a possibility. Instead of exploiting a person’s vulnerability to take advantage of them, like with degradation, vulnerability makes people relatable and possibly even more attractive because it makes otherwise perfect people seem like you can approach them. With that being said, I think that even non-fetishists enjoy other people's humiliation to different extents.
To be continued...
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