Embarrassment, and the thrill of it

The site has a page on shame and a page on humiliation, and both are heavier words than most people need. The thing a great many are actually describing is smaller, more social and much funnier, and it deserves its own page.

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. This page is about the smallest and most ordinary member of a family the site already covers at shame and arousal and the need for humiliation. Both of those are heavy words. Plenty of people flinch at them, decide none of this is for them, and go away, when what they were actually describing was something considerably lighter.

Three different things that get muddled

Shame is about who you are. It says something is wrong with me, it does not have jokes in it, and it tends to arrive late and stay.

Humiliation is done to you, deliberately, usually with words, by somebody who has agreed to do it. It is a performance you have both signed up to.

Embarrassment is neither. It is situational and social: you have been caught in an undignified moment, and the moment will pass. Nothing about your character is on trial. That is why you can laugh about it in the car afterwards, which is the reliable test between it and the other two.

Most people, when you unpick what they actually want, are describing embarrassment. They use the word humiliation because it is the word they have read, and then they frighten themselves with it.

Why it works at all

It needs a witness, and that is the entire engine. You cannot be embarrassed on your own in an empty house. The thing that produces the effect is being seen, which means the other person is not incidental to it, they are the mechanism.

What follows from that is the useful part. Every time you are seen in an undignified position by somebody who does not then think any less of you, you have run a small experiment and got a reassuring result. Do it forty times and something in you starts to believe it.

That is not a side effect of this activity. For a lot of people it is the whole of what they came for, and it is covered from another angle at what it is actually for.

The other half is that it is involuntary. You cannot decide to blush, you cannot stop, and you cannot hide it. In an activity where almost everything is agreed and performed, the blush is one of the few things that is simply true, and both people know it. Being unable to conceal your own reaction is a form of exposure that no amount of undressing achieves.

Where it actually turns up

Rarely where beginners expect. It is not usually the pain and it is often not the being bare. It is the small social breaches, and the list is remarkably consistent between people.

• Being made to ask, out loud, in a full sentence, in your own voice. This is the big one and it is not close.
• Counting, or thanking, or saying the number back. See counting and ritual.
• Being told to take up a position yourself rather than being put in one, covered at presenting.
• Ordinary language in an ordinary room. A kitchen is more embarrassing than a dungeon, because a dungeon has already declared itself and a kitchen has not.
• Being looked at without anything happening, which is on being bared.
• Buying the thing. Standing in a shop, or taking a parcel from a neighbour, is a form of it that catches people entirely unprepared.
• Being seen to want it, which is the one underneath all the others.

The disproportion nobody warns you about

Here is the thing that confuses people most, and I want to be direct about it, because it makes them think they are broken.

A person can be bent over the arm of a sofa taking a great deal without much trouble, and be completely unable to say eleven words about it at a kitchen table. The strap is easier than the sentence.

That is not a failure of nerve and it is not inconsistency. Taking impact is endurance, and endurance is something that happens to you. Saying it out loud is an act you have to commit, in daylight, while somebody watches, and it makes the wanting undeniable in a way that being on the receiving end never quite does.

Which leads to the most useful diagnostic on this page. The thing you are most reluctant to say during a negotiation is almost always the thing you most want. Reluctance is not a signal to avoid something. It is a map.

Using it deliberately

It is the cheapest effect available and it needs no severity at all. If you are the one running the evening, the whole of the technique is this: ask for something small and specific, then say nothing.

The silence is the instrument. Ask her to say what she wants, and then do not rescue her, do not finish the sentence, and do not fill the gap when it becomes uncomfortable. Not unkindly, and with no hurry. Most people cannot leave a silence alone for four seconds, and four seconds is roughly where this starts to work.

Keep it brief. Embarrassment is a sprint rather than a distance event, and a thing that is funny and excruciating for thirty seconds becomes grinding at ten minutes. Ask, wait, get the answer, move on.

When it stops being fun

The same test as everywhere else on the site. Wanted embarrassment is hot, brief, and funny afterwards. If it is still with you on Thursday, if it has attached itself to something you cannot change, or if you find yourself replaying it with dread rather than heat, it has stopped being embarrassment and become one of the other two.

The commonest way that happens is somebody going too specific. Being embarrassed about the situation is survivable. Being embarrassed about your body, your age or your history is not the same thing at all, and it does not wear off. That line is set out at choosing the words and it matters more here than anywhere, because the lightness of embarrassment makes people careless with it.

If you are the one blushing

Two things worth knowing. It gets easier, and you may find you are slightly sorry about that: the second time you say the sentence it costs less, and people frequently report a small mourning for the version of themselves who could not get it out. That is normal and it is not a loss of anything real.

And the embarrassment is not the price of admission. This is the mistake almost everybody makes at the start, treating it as a tax to be paid on the way to the thing they actually want. For a great many people it is not the tax. It is a substantial part of the goods.