The name of the author [of The Loving Dominant] is John Warren. Essentially he suggests that female submissives tend to find embarrassment more erotic than humiliation, and that for many male submissives the reverse is true. Not everyone agrees with John on this issue, however
. A lot of female submissives DO find humiliation play very arousing. Yet the term "humiliation" tends to have negative connotations, at least in the female submissive/male dominant scene. Usually the term means to degrade someone, to injure their pride or lower their status. But submissives who are into humiliation scenes often don't FEEL degraded.
An example of erotic humiliation might be the dominant ordering his partner to drop naked to the floor, crawl across the room to his side, and bark like a dog. This might _appear_ humiliating to someone who was observing! But if being ordered to do it turned her on, she probably would not feel any overwhelming sense of psychological humiliation.
Even so, erotic humiliation can be a touchy subject for women who have been degraded in their vanilla lives, and it tends to be an emotional minefield for women who have serious self-esteem issues. Similarly, male doms with deep-seated conflicts towards women (hatred, distrust, disrespect for our sex in general) probably shouldn't be trusted with humiliation scenarios.
Perhaps the reason humiliation has such a negative reputation is that it seems to imply the lack of consent. If the dominant is, purely for his own pleasure and satisfaction, forcing the submissive to experience something that does not turn her on--but rather offends and degrades her--then something is wrong between them. But if she gets down on all fours and barks like a dog because it arouses her, she is NOT being degraded.
--Isobel
© 1997 by Isobel Silkwood. All rights reserved.
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