Degradation

What is degradation?

Degradation (Dutch: degradatie) is consensually and willingly putting someone down during sex or a BDSM scene, with words or acts, until that person briefly feels like a thing instead of a human being. Degradation is the heavier branch of erotic humiliation, and it only works with sharp agreements about which words are allowed.

What degradation looks like in practice

Degradation is almost always verbal, and it is striking how small the acts are that carry the effect.

A common example: a couple agrees in advance on three words that may be used, and two that absolutely may not because they touch on something from her past. He stays within those three. Afterward it turns out that it was not the word that did the most, but the care with which he chose it. That is the pattern: degradation works through precision, not through harshness.

The encyclopedic description of erotic humiliation distinguishes three main forms. Verbal, with mockery aimed at appearance or behavior. Physical, with servitude, worship, discipline, and display. And objectification, where the submissive is treated as an object or as furniture.

De Neef and colleagues place it, in their systematic review in Sexual Medicine, in one of the four clusters of BDSM behavior that Alison and colleagues identified: alongside pain play, physical restriction, and hypermasculinity, humiliation stands as its own cluster, with verbal put-downs as an example.

Why degradation works the way it does

The active ingredient is not in the words but in the agreement around them. That same encyclopedia puts it more sharply than most handbooks: humiliation is not something inherent to an act or an object, but is made meaningful by the shared attitudes and interpretations of the people taking part.

That explains why the same word lands hard one evening and does nothing the next. And why degradation between two people who know each other well can go further than between two strangers: the meaning is built together.

The second active ingredient is the reversal. Someone who carries responsibility in daily life gets to be nothing for an hour. No choices, no status, no name sometimes. For many people that is the pull, not the belittling itself.

Why people find degradation arousing

What degradation gives differs a lot by role, and it is rarely what outsiders assume.

• For the degradee the gain is usually rest. Not having to be anyone for a while frees up more energy than people expect, especially if a lot is asked of you outside the bedroom.
• For the degrader the pleasure is in precision, not in power. Choosing the right word at the right moment takes attention to a person, not contempt.
• For a couple the negotiation about it often yields more than the scene. Few conversations make you name so exactly where you are sensitive.

That desires like these are ordinary is better supported than the reputation suggests. Joyal, Cossette, and Lapierre presented a list of 55 fantasies to 1,516 adults for The Journal of Sexual Medicine. Submission and dominance themes turned out to be common among both men and women, and their advice to clinicians was to look at the effect of a fantasy rather than its content.

Degradation is the form of power play that most quickly touches something that does not belong in the scene. Someone who already feels worthless outside the bedroom gets no antidote there but an amplifier. In that case this is not the game to start with.

How people go about it

The usual order is: the word list first, then the scene, then the aftercare.

The word list is literally a list. Which words may be used, which absolutely may not, and which subjects stay out of view: age, weight, education, something from someone’s past. That last category is the most important one, and the reason degradation between strangers rarely goes far.

What separates the careful execution from the sloppy one is the return. With pain play a scene ends when the pain stops. With degradation it ends only when someone has been called by her name again, and that takes more time than people estimate.

Misconceptions about degradation

“It is just name-calling.” Name-calling is random. Degradation works with a set chosen in advance and an ending agreed in advance, and the meaning arises, according to the encyclopedia, precisely in the shared interpretation of the two people.

“Anyone who likes this has low self-esteem.” There is no support for that in the research. De Neef and colleagues note that 47 percent of the general population has carried out at least one BDSM activity, and another 22 percent has fantasies about it.

“Degradation is the same as objectification.” Objectification is one form of it, alongside verbal and physical humiliation. The page on objectification goes deeper into that one form, and the article on objectification describes how it feels from the inside.

What I see of it myself

I am Victor, gigolo, with twenty-five years of experience in BDSM and a background as a psychotherapist. Degradation is something I do only when the word list is there, and that is no formality.

More interesting is which word people rule out. It is almost never the harshest word. It is usually an innocent word that was once used by someone else, and the only way you find that out is by asking.

And one thing I have learned about the ending. Anyone who asks right afterward whether it was good gets an answer that is not true. I say someone’s name first, a few times just in a sentence, and only then do we talk.

What you can do yourself

• Make the word list before you begin, with what may and what absolutely may not be said.
• Ask about subjects, not only about words. Appearance, education, and past are the areas where it goes wrong.
• Agree on a safeword and keep it separate from the scene language, because within degradation “no” quickly sounds like part of the game.
• Say each other’s name at the wind-down. Coming back from a role takes longer with degradation than with pain play.
• Do not start with degradation if you already feel worthless at that moment. Then the game amplifies something that is already there.
• Plan a debrief a few days later. What a word really did is something you rarely notice on the night itself.

More reading on degradation

On this site the article on types of humiliation women find arousing goes into the forms, and the power of shame describes what happens when you share shame with someone instead of tucking it away.

Beyond this site, the systematic review by De Neef and colleagues is free to read and the best starting point if you want to know what has and has not been researched.

Sources

• Bondage-Discipline, Dominance-Submission and Sadomasochism (BDSM) From an Integrative Biopsychosocial Perspective: A Systematic Review. De Neef, Coppens, Huys & Morrens, Sexual Medicine 7(2), 129–144, 2019. Supplies humiliation as one of the four behavior clusters of Alison and colleagues, with verbal put-downs and gagging as examples, and the figures 47 percent and 22 percent for the general population.
• What exactly is an unusual sexual fantasy?. Joyal, Cossette & Lapierre, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 12(2), 328–340, 2015. A survey of 1,516 adults with 55 fantasies; submission and dominance turned out to be common among both sexes, and the advice to look at the effect of a fantasy rather than its content.
• Erotic humiliation. Wikipedia. Supplies the description as consensual psychological humiliation aimed at arousal, the three forms verbal, physical, and objectification, and the finding that humiliation is not inherent to an act but arises in the shared interpretation of the participants.

Related terms

• Degradee. The role of the one being degraded, as the BDSM test names it.
• Degrader. The counter-role, and what it asks in practice.
• Aftercare. The part that takes longer after degradation than people estimate.
• Debrief. The follow-up talk in which it becomes clear what a word really did.
• Exhibitionism. Being watched, which is sometimes used as a form of degradation.
• Paypig. A role name that is itself already a degradation, and one people choose for themselves.
• Findom. A dynamic in which putting down the giving side is a described element.
• Forced feminization. The role-play in which the humiliation runs through a reversal of roles.
• Sissification. The same reversal of roles, but as a program that runs for weeks or months.
• Golden shower. Often used as degradation, while that is by no means always the motive.
• Watersports. The broader area around it, in which humiliation is only one of four frames.
• Praise kink. The mirror: the same axis, but with appreciation as the engine.
• Spitting. The gesture that occurs most often within degradation, and that lasts one second.
• Humiliation. The umbrella term that degradation is the heaviest branch of, with the emotion literature it borrows its charge from and where the word comes from.
• Verbal humiliation. The branch that works with words alone, with the question of which words exactly are used.