\u201cI feel humiliated,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And your first thought on reading that might be: duh<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consensual humiliation is a frequent part of D\/s play. It\u2019s definitely part of what I do. It\u2019s not a surprising sentence in the online spaces we inhabit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But here\u2019s the thing. This time was different. This time I had to pause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because, kittens, I wasn\u2019t humiliating that man<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This wasn\u2019t a humiliation session. I had not said or asked for anything humiliating. There was no SPH. No insults. Not even a hint of gentle teasing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just me asking, \u201chow does that make you feel?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And him: \u201cI feel humiliated.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I paused. I recalibrated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because the thing he was describing as humiliating was this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Simply being himself<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Simply being a submissive man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was the act of submission. It was the fact that he wasn\u2019t trying to dominate me\u2014a woman. This is what was making him feel less<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a world that demands men perform dominance at all costs\u2014especially<\/em> toward women\u2014this man felt humiliated simply by the fact that he was not trying (in what would have been an extremely non-consensual act) to dominate me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kittens, I want to talk about the rage I felt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not toward him, but toward the way society beat into him this message\u2014that his submission was weakness, not gift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And what the actual fuck.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n What has the world done to you, telling you that your desire to serve, to care, to rest, to admire and follow and worship women, is somehow inherently humiliating?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is humiliating about care?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is humiliating about putting your pleasure after another person\u2019s?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is humiliating about the simple act of not<\/em> trying to enforce your will on another person?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of admiring someone else and striving to be more like them, serve them, show up for them, show up like them<\/em> in the world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing. The answer is nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not humiliation. It is a kind of hero\u2019s journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One that requires death of ego, sacrifice, and the ability to grow, change, live in your authenticity, and rest<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To stop pretending to be the smartest person in every room (\u201csmartest person\u201d doesn\u2019t exist anyway, because there are a thousand different types of smarts).<\/p>\n\n\n\n To stop having to perform confidence and hardness and stoicism you don\u2019t feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To stop playing at the specific version of masculinity you\u2019ve had shoved down your throat your whole life until you feel so suffocated that you might just crawl into a corner and cry (out of sight, of course, because performance<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The only reason these things are seen as humiliating is because society has deemed all things feminine humiliating. Which means bowing down to them is humiliating too. And performing anything society has (wrongly<\/em>, it should go without saying) deemed feminine (including submission itself) has been deemed humiliating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shall we say it louder for those in the back: fuck society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fuck all the scripts they force us into based on fake rules that benefit the few while many suffer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The truth is that submission takes strength<\/em>. Especially in a world that doesn\u2019t understand it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It takes strength to take off the mask in the face of that societal scorn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It takes strength to let go<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It takes strength to trust yourself into the hands of another person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It takes strength to live in your authenticity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It takes strength to tell society that it can go fuck it\u2019s stupid gender rules and the ways they hurt us all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It takes strength to tell society that it\u2019s wrong<\/em>. The person you want to admire and serve is a woman. That the characteristics you want to adopt, the way you want to live your life, is led by a woman. And even if your dom is a man, it takes strength to submit there, too. To reveal that there is a part (or the whole) of your soul that longs to not be the one in charge<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is plenty of space to explore humiliation in these dynamics. It is BDSM, after all. But I need us to stop pressing subscribe on the boring, unexamined opinions society has tried to enforce on us all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Submissive men aren\u2019t lesser. Submission isn\u2019t inherently humiliating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s simply another way of being. Another type of strength. Another way a human can feel deeply themselves and deeply connected to another person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re reading this, consider it my love letter to male submission. My fist in the face of the idea that submission is inherently inferior or less than. My righteous anger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are plenty of things I will humiliate you over and laugh at you about. (Laughing at men is, in fact, one of my favorite sports.) But this is not one of them, kitten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your submission is fucking beautiful. And any laugh it inspires in me is one of delight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI feel humiliated,\u201d he said. And your first thought on reading that might be: duh. Consensual humiliation is a frequent part of D\/s play. It\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kink-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yourgoddesspandora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yourgoddesspandora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yourgoddesspandora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yourgoddesspandora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yourgoddesspandora.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yourgoddesspandora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231,"href":"https:\/\/yourgoddesspandora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions\/231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yourgoddesspandora.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yourgoddesspandora.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yourgoddesspandora.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}