RIP Jack McGeorge, and the Instinct for Humiliation

Jack McGeorge

This is the last place anyone in the kink community will read it, but Jack McGeorge has died. While I did not agree with everything that he had to say, I always found him a powerful, provocative, and solid presence, and have a great deal of respect for him on many levels. I was proud to be a member of a community that included him. I was proud recently when he positively commented a Fetlife Post I made on Leather History. I admired him and felt he was a role model for living bravely and "out" in the world. I did not know him well, though we spoke several times. I will be the least of those miss his presence at the MsC.

So...I am back down to crossposting my Fetlife Posts again. I was determined to get some new material up before the fall kink events, but the next two weeks of my life are...hectic. I have two posts coming up, but neither is quite ready for prime time.

On the other hand, in answering a question from a newbie on Fetlife, I ended up fully developing a set of ideas I have had congealing in my mind for a while. Attractive word that "congeal." The ideas could stand better polish, but having nothing else to offer, I decided to put them forth here, if nothing else so I don't lose the thoughts.

If nothing else, since the original poster was a foreign language speaker, I tried to use good, simple, English, which is a challenge for me.

The Instinct for Humiliation

My thesis:

Many people think that the motivations behind desiring humiliation are unhealthy. I do not.

• I think humiliation is hard for us because we live in an egalitarian culture, where we are taught that even submission is dirty and wrong, and that self-abasement in submission is doubly wrong. But our emotions did not read the Constitution, and know only that we have deep needs we seek to fill.

• I think that humans desire submission because it brings them a feeling of control in life, safety and acceptance.

• I think that humiliation is a more pro-active form of submission, and in some ways a perfection of it. I think humans crave humiliation when their need for safety and acceptance through submission is very deep.

• I think it is often associated with trauma, because experiencing trauma and the losses associated with it usually provoke a very deep seated craving for control, safety and acceptance.

• I think that the need for humiliation can and does become muddled with trauma if the trauma was sexual in nature. I think that can increase the shame and internal conflict that accompanies humiliation.

• I think that humiliation, like surrender/submission, and most other forms of BDSM is part of a search for psychological wellbeing. Because it is poorly understood, it is often poorly answered.

To go into a bit more detail:

All humans crave control. But we also know that many humans have gotten by through adapting to bad situations. And our need for control is answered in fulfilling our needs for food and shelter, which we abstract as "safety." Our emotional health is governed by how safe we feel. Throughout history populations were captured, enslaved and so forth. Men and Women.

Submission is an act which promotes safety and security under difficult circumstances,whether it is professing to a primitive King who we were born to, or a foreign invader who has taken our lands. Humans tend to band together and serve a leader. We are tribal

Submission is an expression of tribalism, and humiliation is an expression of the desire for tribe.

If you look through history, acts of humiliation are most often seen in four contexts:

• Acts by the defeated and minorities to buy their survival
• Acts of religious devotion
• Acts of devotion to a leader, Lord, Master, King.
• Acts of devotion to a lover

I think that the act of enduring/actively seeking humiliation is tied to the basic instinct of surrender, making it sharper and more powerful. And that the instinct of surrender is an expression of a basic desire for safety and security.

If you look at history, the most extreme acts of humiliation are often performed by those demonstrating their devotion. Religious ascetics. Knights. Those joining secret societies. In all cases the person being humiliated experiences a powerful emotion in response. A sense of rightness and place that is often confusing and often described differently, but always seems tied to some emotional comfort.

The rush that is described in the Chansons de Geste of a knight carrying out humiliating self-deprivation, or casting off his pride and abasing himself at the feet of a lady...the emotions strike me as exactly the same as the rush of excitement and self surrender that a man might describe at the feet of a Domme.

I think we like to believe that the act of a monk being scourged or wearing a hair shirt is different from a girl being spat on and forced to suck cock. We want to believe that the eros-tied rush that the girl experiences is different from the pure burning of shame in the monk. But is it?

Isn't it strange that in old manuscripts even the vague feeling of pride associated with humiliation is the same. In a strange way the girl is actually proud of her actions, while feeling no less burning shame. The monk is at least supposed to feel shame and humiliation yet is proud of them, and time and time again we find the monk cautioned to feel the actual humiliation not the pride that goes with it. In each case I think that if it is not merely play acting, but a true deep experience, the same frantic burn and rush is present.

I think that the instincts are the same. The most powerful love stories often contain the strongest descriptions of humiliation. The...burn...the rush...that comes from letting go and sinking into that state. Is very powerful. Most often girls tell me that they don't know exactly what they get from humiliation but it fulfills a need. If they can say anything they say it makes them "feel in their place." I think that is because a sense of place that relates to comfort and safety is a bit more abstract than most of us can lay a finger on in this day and time.

Because we are capable of thinking in abstractions, a tendency to humiliation does not need to be directly answered by a Master for us to feel some emotional need to perform it and receive some abstract comfort from it. It is better and more perfect if there is an object/recipient, and better still if that object is tied to our safety and wellbeing.

I mete out and inflict humiliation to, and receive reactions from some of those who submit to me and I do not feel in any way conflicted about it. The more strongly humiliated...the more powerfully abased... a girl feels, the more they may become able to accept comfort and safety that is hard for them to experience in any other way.

The Lion the Witch and the Strap-On...

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Gays and the Danger of Going Against your Nature...a provocative finding....

Last night I was, ironically, at Trio in Dupont (the stronghold from which we try to watch the Drag Race every year) when I saw the print version of the Washington Post Website (my cute name for Post Express...live with it) proclaim: Psychologists repudiate gay-to-straight therapy. and pointed this out to M. who said "well duh..."

So nobody that I know is very surprised that in a recent APA vote S. worked at APA (American Psychological, not American Psychiatric) for a number of years and the attitudes there were very sane, and generally a lot more progressive than I think the "in the field" point of view. She had the honor of meeting and working around some people like Phil Zimbado, who carried out the famous Stanford Prison Study. She also got to hang out backstage at the APA convention and hear stories about the bad old days when APA board meetings were generally conducted like meetings of the Agrestic City Council (yes, a media reference from me), at least in terms of solubility.

So. Not...shocked...at....all...that

In a resolution adopted on a 125-to-4 vote by the APA's governing council, and in a comprehensive report based on two years of research, the 150,000-member association put itself firmly on record in opposition of so-called "reparative therapy" which seeks to change sexual orientation." Wow must be fun to be one of the four who opposed it.

So it's now official, you can't give people therapy and teach them not to be gay.

This isn't the first time APA has come out against gay-curing therapy, but it's the most scientific and strongest. But that isn't what interested me.

APA went on to say: No solid evidence exists that such change is likely, says the report, and some research suggests that efforts to produce change could be harmful, inducing depression and suicidal tendencies.

Interesting. So, if you try to therapize people to go against their basic sexual nature they might get depressed or suicidal.

Now. I want to stress something. I'm not a scientist, I'm a writer. I understand well that pseudoscience is a thing of "taking real science and running with it." I'm not trying to do that.

But in five years of talking to human beings, reading blogs, and trying to learn how the mind works, I've increasingly come to the personal, radical, opinion that trying to force people to go against their basic sex drives is a bad idea. I have seen more misery, shame and frustration caused by that than almost anything else I've encountered.

And in many cases the sexual behaviors that we are talking about are ones that are either in the DSM-IV or were until recently.

When I started beating girls, it was still a sickness according to the books. Wikipedia (I'm lazy) tells us that: "the American Psychiatric Association modified the criteria of sadism and masochism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV) in 1994 so that consensual sadomasochistic behavior alone is no longer considered to be a sexual disorder. In the DSM-IV TR, published in 2000, sadomasochistic behavior can be diagnosed as a disorder if the patient "has acted on these urges with a non-consenting person" or "the urges, sexual fantasies, or behaviors cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty" [6] [7]. As a result, consensual sadomasochism can no longer be considered a disorder unless it causes severe difficulties in the patient's life.

That was only ten years ago...

But we still have that scary...

the urges, sexual fantasies, or behaviors cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty

Hear that...if your need for fulfilling your sexual desires through beating or being beaten, or any of the other palette of fetishes that drive our deepest inner workings twists you around and makes you change your life...you're sick. According to the DSM.

And so we said about homosexuality until the DSM-II in 1968. "Ego-dystonic Homosexuality" remained on the books in some form until it was finally eliminated from the DSM-III-R in 1987.

So...finally it was not sick if you had to rearrange your personal life and relationships to accomodate the fact that you wanted to fuck men.

Wikipedia goes on to say that:

The results of the newer studies have led to calls to abolish sadism and masochism as disease categories completely, arguing that the truly pathological forms are adequately covered by other diagnoses. The BDSM subculture added another dimension to this drive by highlighting claims of discrimination and its potential, and by referring to the precedent of the previous removal of homosexuality from the list of mental disorders [5].

As of course, I'm doing right now. Not an original thought, but one that bears repeating and reinforcing. But that's not entirely my point.

The DSM-V is due in 2012. I look forward to the hope that things that drive the lives of myself and my friends will cease being considered illness and that one day I can be officially as much of a normal person as Ellen DeGeneres or Harvey Milk. In the meantime, life goes on, I go to Camp, I meet people and understand this on an empiric level.

The thing that I think is most interesting about the recent APA decision is the finding of potential harm.

We know historically that trying to force left handed kids to be right handed fucks them up. We know that trying to force kids not to masturbate fucks them up. But I think it is time to strongly consider going one step further and suggesting that not allowing people to indulge thier sexual instincts fucks them up. Whether the instict is to stick their cock in another man's ass, or be hit.

Human sexual behaviors are complicated and we don't always understand where they come from. We've only been working on the issue with serious tools for about 120 years, and I've only been working on it for five-ten in my personal-empiric way. But it is my prediction that we will someday see a strong indication that trying to force people to simply repudiate their sexual drives is not a very healthy thing. Channel, redistribute, maybe.

In "the smart book with the stupid title" Stumbling on Happiness, which I quote so often that I need to start a series of analytical posts on it, Daniel Gilbert suggests that everyone seeks happiness at all times, even suicides. Everyone is actively engaged in acts they think will make them happier. Acts of self-destruction or self-degradation are often acts that, to the psyche, promise to limit future pain. Animals don't commit suicide because they lack the ability to imagine they'd be in less pain if they would. Humans hurt themselves for a variety of complex reasons, but I firmly believe that very few of them are pathological in any meaningful way.

I think that this particular finding adds fuel to the current call to declassify most paraphilias, but going further I think it suggests that we need real research into just how harmful it is to ignore our "paraphilias" to sweep them under the carpet or attempt to discipline ourselves out of them.