On Punishment and Self-Esteem

I think that for me there is a huge distinction between feeling like Murre is upset with me, and feeling like Murre is objectifying me or belittling me. They are both humiliating, of course. But if she is upset, she wants me to change my behavior: the humiliation is supposed to have a corrective result. If I am her toy, though, the humiliation is just something she wants me to feel, and perhaps internalize as part of my status. But I'm not supposed to do anything about it.

The latter is almost always sexy, and when it isn't sexy, it's only because it's too scary, or I am too tired or stubborn to surrender. It's humiliation-as-correction that I have trouble with, and even then I only have trouble with it sometimes. Murre routinely corrects me for things that both of us perceive to be “real” faults. For instance, I was caned in the middle of one of the aforementioned arguments for my tone of voice. And that was lovely and useful and really cleared the air...it was also humiliating, as punishments always are for me.

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I'm reminded of of an experience I had this summer. Those three months were groundbreaking in a lot of ways for me: somehow I had snagged a pretty prestigious (paid!) internship in one of the coolest cities in the country, when before I hadn't even held a minimum wage job. Of course, the internship in a different city than my parents' home, so I took the housing stipend given by my employers and had to start a new life for myself for three months. In a sink or swim situation, I mostly swam, but of course I made mistakes in my first time paying my own rent, finding my own place to stay, navigating mass transit for the first time to get to work on time, cooking my own food, etc, without having a support network in the huge city. While in retrospect, I think I did a pretty good job seeing how little experience I'd had with such things, it was a sore point for me at the time, and the few mistakes I made galled me.

At the time I was also dating a wonderful dominant guy, and while we hadn't gone as deep into the dom/sub dynamic as I had in the previous relationship, it was there. And he seemed to really enjoy disciplining me for those mistakes of simple competency: being late because I had misread the train schedule or things of that nature. And my thought throughout all that was, "man, I get enough of that shit in my everyday life." The punishment wasn't making me more motivated to improve at such things; it just made me feel bad about myself and reinforced my doubts about being able to hack it as a competent adult. So eventually we talked about it, and it mostly stopped.

This isn't to say that punishment as correction is always negative for me. Later in the summer I had orgasmed without his permission during one of our scenes, and punishment came soon after. And it was amazingly hot. Of course, there are a few reasons why this might appeal more than the former: the tie to sexuality is obvious, it involves a controlling of something far more intimate than my schedule, and we had not explicitly established an orgasm control regimen, so it was hot to think of it as an arbitrary imposition of authority. Most importantly, though, it didn't prey on any of my insecurities. I generally don't beat myself up for not being able to control my sex drive, so rather than punishing me for something I despair of improving at, it was easy to take it as a goad to improvement. And it left me feeling incredibly humble, without feeling self-denigrating, which is basically the point of humiliation.