“Shame attends only where we are interested.”
I came across this quote in Failing Desire by Karmen MacKendrick, a book I recently started reading because of my interest in societal shame. The book “draws on theology and queer theory to argue for the power of humiliating pleasures in a culture oriented very strongly to denying any enjoyment that is not about success.” Failing Desire is particularly interesting as it examines shame and argues that it can in itself become a pleasure. This is specifically relevant to kink, which has long been frowned upon by society.
So what does it mean that shame only attends where we are interested? I can offer a rather simple example. I started making Anime Music Videos when I was 13 years old and kept it hidden from most people around me; my parents didn’t care and it wasn’t cool to like anime at school. I didn’t mind that I had to keep it hidden as I felt perfectly happy in my own exclusive online community until the boys in my class found my Youtube Channel and started teasing me about it. I felt so embarrassed and ashamed that I wanted to delete my Youtube as soon as I would get home. Luckily, I didn’t have to as a friend stood up for me, but my shame remained and it only did because the videos mattered to me.
During the research for my dissertation, I found that many people in the kink community have at one point been ashamed of their kink. These feelings of shame are universal and there’s a clear explanation for this. BDSM has long been a taboo and has been stigmatised in society. People who identify as being kinky are people “whose sexual behaviours are outside the mainstream,” and the stigma “marks the boundaries society creates between ‘normals’ and ‘outsiders.’” In other words, the majority of society or the ‘normal’ deem kink practitioners as ‘other’ and therefore ‘outsiders.’ They are rejected by the masses and are pressured into hiding in order to remain accepted as a part of society. The general idea then arrises that if kink is something that needs to be hidden it can’t possibly be good. As a collective, society has learned that kink is something to be ashamed of as it goes in against the norm.
MacKendrick argues that shame and humiliation carry a double meaning in kink. The normal definition of shame is “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour.” Erotic humiliation, on the other hand, is the act of actively pursuing the intention to humiliate for (sexual) pleasure. (And/or can be used to establish roles in kink dynamics). In other words, while shame rests on kink, kinky practitioners may actively seek the feeling of shame.
How come people suddenly seek to feel ashamed when they so desperately try to avoid shame by hiding their desires? This must cause a never-ending conflict. When someone partakes in a scene and is given the humiliating task to kneel and lick her boots, the act will cause embarrassment. When they finish and notice their own arousal, a second wave of humiliation washes over them. MacKendrick explains that this is because “the arousal through humiliation is even more humiliating than the initial shame,” as the arousal indicates pleasure. Finding pleasure in the embarrassment of being degraded, which is deemed ‘inappropriate,’ is shameful and in itself brings additional pleasure.
This raises another question. If shame is regarded so inherently negative that it pressures people to burry their kinky identities, then surely the goal is to overcome that shame. However, if the shame is overcome then interest ceases to exist and a kinky dynamic starts looking very differently. “The masochist or submissive who has ceased to blush will find humiliation at best uninteresting, and this will be uninteresting to the sadist in return.”
A submissive I spoke to mentioned that she has often worried about looking ridiculous when her Dominant made her wear a ball gag, worrying that he would no longer find her attractive enough. In response, her Dominant would say that she looked silly because he wanted her to look silly and it’s the presence of shame that makes a scene like that interesting; it’s the shame of the submissive which pleasures the dominant. Without that shame, wearing a ball gag would be rather boring as it would become just that, an object in your mouth with no meaning. We have to remain interested because shame only attends where we are.
