Backcountrykinkster

I wanted to buy this print but last I checked on his site it was sold out. Here’s his shop though:

Also Triangle is one of my favorites

What do I get out of degradation?

I can't really pin it down to just one reason. I enjoy the control it gives me, the emotional sadism I get to inflict, the trust my partner places in me to degrade them, and the headspace of feeling powerful it gives me.

My partner is very much a complimentary piece to me, she enjoys feeling submissive and inferior most of, if not all the time. She likes being degraded because she can hand control and decisionmaking over to me, she gets off to my emotional sadism, she likes knowing she can trust me to 'put her in her place' so to speak and know I won't abuse that responsibility, and she loves the headspace it puts her in where her head is quiet and present in the moment. She actually gets better sleep because of it.

We are two sides of the degradation coin and it's super important to have that level of compatibility and trust with each other to do this, otherwise it just wouldn't work, especially given our power dynamic is 24/7 TPE.

Not everybody plays to the intensity and the depth that we take it and that's okay. We would never judge anyone or think lesser of them because they don't do it all the time like we do. Nor should you feel pressure or obligation to do so, me and her are statistically outliers even amongst fellow kinksters. We are not trying to make people feel like they need to do it all the time.

What do guys mean when they say they like degradation?

In my experience, most guys don't even know what they mean when they say they like degradation because we do not raise our boys to grow up to be men who understand their emotions.

So I feel that you have to be careful when guys say that because so many times I have seen guys lump humiliation, rough sex, name calling, degradation, or the general concept of dominance together as all the same thing. Or they'll say degradation and what they mean is rough sex or name-calling. And while I understand it can all be a little confusing, they're not at all the same thing, and it's important to understand the differences. The most common misunderstanding I see is thinking that humiliation and degradation are the same thing.

They're not:

Humiliating someone would be to cause them to feel shame or hurt their pride or dignity for gratification. The act of making fun of how "easy" someone is in bed and playfully poking at their embarrassment over and over would be humiliation.

Degrading someone frequently makes use of humiliation, but it's fundamentally different. You're not getting off on evoking the feeling of humiliation, you're getting off on putting someone beneath you and making them feel like a lesser and more objectified version of themselves. Degradation isn't one instance of humiliation, it's a constant reinforcement of who is in charge and who is not and using that reinforcement to give the Dom power and to disempower the sub.

You humiliate someone if you want to make them experience shame or embarrassment. You degrade someone if you want to take away their power.

"You're so easy." = Humiliation (usually) because it is emotional sadism focused on evoking shame/embarrassment.

"Kneel and know your place." = Degradation because it's focused on reinforcing the power disparity through emotional sadomasochism.

Now I added "usually" to humiliation in that example because if used in combination with other things it can easily become degradation. It's a real "all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares" type of situation. All degradation is humiliating in some way but not all humiliation is degrading.

If you don't know which one you're doing, ask yourself if what you are doing is primarily focused on reinforcing the existing power dynamic or is it primarily focused on having fun playing with the emotions of shame or embarrassment? Is it heightening the headspace of the dom and the sub or is it temporarily adding spicyness to what's already going on? The answer is not always clear and sometimes it's both.

Typically, if what you are doing consistently winds up focusing on the power dynamic itself, then there is probably some form/level of degradation present.

Both humiliation and degradation are forms of emotional sadomasochism and degradation in particular requires high trust in a play partner. It's not something I would recommend for a one-night stand, pickup play, or a casual hookup. If degradation is something you're into, then you need to remember you would be trusting someone to make you inferior to them during the duration of play. That's an incredibly vulnerable state to be in as a submissive that needs to be handled by a dom with great care and detail.

And not to preach too much, but understanding this difference is really important because a lot of people are into humiliation but are not into degradation. And degradation is an edgeplay kink that can very easily inflict emotional trauma. And someone who doesn't know what they're doing can go from humiliating to degrading and cross a hard limit very quickly. I unfortunately have multiple friends with trauma from this exact scenario, which tells you how common it is.

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.