Building humiliation into a scene

The site has a page on why anybody wants this and a page on the words. What it has never had is the assembly instructions: which elements exist, and how to put them together without arriving somewhere neither of you meant to go.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Two adults, both over 18. Why anybody wants this is at the need for humiliation and the vocabulary is at choosing the words. A dozen elements have pages of their own. Nobody has written down how you assemble them. Everything below is the non-verbal half.

The elements come apart

The parts are separable, and most people want two or three and could leave the rest. A woman who will stand bare in a corner for ten minutes can find being made to ask for a spanking unbearable. Others say the sentence readily and go rigid at standing anywhere with nothing on. Different appetites under one word, rather than degrees of the same taste.

When something has stopped producing much, add a different element rather than running the same one harder. Twenty minutes of corner time buys you a cold, bored person with sore feet and no more effect than five would have had.

What each element adds

Exposure and position

Being undressed removes the last thing you could stand behind, and it works before anything has been done to you: being bared, and degrees of undress for which stage does what. Position brings the body into it, and underneath that sits the question of who does the placing: taking up a position on instruction is compliance you manufacture yourself, while being arranged by somebody else is helplessness. The adjustments are at arching and presenting.

Waiting, and corner time

Waiting adds time and removes anything you might do with it. Standing in the hall while the implement is found. Being told it happens at eight, at twenty to. It costs nothing and is the most underrated thing here. Corner time puts a wall in front of it, so attention has nowhere to go except back onto you. That page has the durations and the fainting warning.

Procedure, tasks and the implement

Inspection adds judgement with a number attached, and the coldness does more than displeasure. Tasks add a visible failure condition, so the failure belongs to a book sliding off a head rather than to your opinion of her: balancing books and set tasks, and protocol and deportment for the continuous version. Being sent to fetch the implement bolts onto anything, and being made to choose it is heavier, since what happens next is partly her own choice.

Having to speak

Asking out loud, in a full sentence, gets named as the hardest thing here by people who take heavy impact without complaint. Why that one is the heavy one I do not know, and the best account I have found is at embarrassment, which I am not certain is right.

Counting and thanking are milder forms of it: counting and ritual. Having to report an offence hands over the authorship, since the charge is supplied by the person about to be punished for it: the punishment book, and the reckoning when it is real.

Being watched, and afterwards

A third person who watches and says nothing alters everything else here, and the consent arithmetic triples: being watched. Nobody should meet it early. The aftermath gets planned least of all: being kept undressed while the tea is made, having to say what it was for before you may dress. Agree those like anything else, and read aftercare.

The gradient, and why mine is wrong

My own rough ordering, lightest first: counting and thanking, forms of address, fetching the implement, being placed rather than placing yourself, being made to wait, clothed corner time, degrees of undress, corner time bare or displaced, inspection against a written standard, having to report an offence, having to ask out loud, being watched.

That ordering is mine and it has been wrong about most people I have tried it on, reversed at the ends rather than slightly out of sequence.

So write the elements out and hand the list over, out of role, as part of the ordinary negotiation. Ask for a number against each one, and a mark against anything that is a flat no. The numbers matter less than the conversation they force.

I got this wrong in the obvious way. Somebody I was seeing was comfortable with corner time and with being bare for it, so I built an evening on that and added a small extra: she had to ask for the cane out loud before I would fetch it. The corner time did nothing. The asking took her apart, and I found out on the Thursday.

Add one element per session

Keep everything else identical and introduce one new thing. Then give it a whole session before the next. The reason is diagnostic. Change one thing and a bad evening tells you what did it. Change three and all you know is that something was wrong, so the usual response is to drop the lot, including the two that worked.

Escalating inside a single scene

Adding an element mid-scene is where most of the harm on this page happens. Somebody twenty minutes in cannot weigh a new proposition properly, and refusing costs far more then than agreeing does. Consent given in that state is worth very little, whatever it sounded like.

If you want the option, agree beforehand that it may come up, and agree the exact words for asking: clumsy and out of character, so that the mood breaks when they are said. Rule out the surprise version entirely.

The safety, which is the point of the page

This register works on self-image and impact works on skin. A bruise fades to a schedule you can predict from marks and bruising. A look held a second too long at the wrong part of her has no schedule at all. This is the area most likely to do lasting damage, and it usually fails to show up on the night.

The rule holds across every element here, not only the spoken ones: nothing that touches anything the person cannot change about herself. Easy to keep while talking, easy to break while silent, because a look can do the work of a sentence.

Aiming at the situation rather than the person is set out at choosing the words. Whether the shoes were polished is a situation. An inspection that arrives at her stomach is a claim about her, and it will still be there in a year.

The state I watch for is somebody who has gone quiet and completely obedient. Every instruction is followed at once: no shifting, no complaint, no laugh, no argument. It reads as excellent submission, and sometimes it is.

Often enough it is somebody who has decided the way out is to comply until it stops, and the two look identical from where you are standing. Come out of the role entirely and ask her a plain question. An answer that comes back flat and fast is not reassurance, and safe words are less use here than anywhere.

Then check again on a different day, two or three days later: ask which parts she would want again and which she would drop. That phrasing gets answers that asking whether it was all right never does. Sub drop explains the timing.

Taking something away

Almost nothing written about this mentions subtraction. Drop an element for a session and keep the rest. If the evening is thinner without it, you have found out what that element was doing. If it is no different, you have learned something more useful.

I took corner time out of an arrangement that had used it every time, on the grounds that it had become furniture. Neither of us missed it. An arrangement that only ever adds arrives somewhere neither person chose, by increments, none of which looked wrong at the time.