Humiliation is literally the act of being made humble, or reduced in standing or prestige. However, the term has much in common with the emotion of shame. Humiliation is not in general a pleasant experience, as it reduces the ego.

Humiliation of the self

Humiliation need not involve another person; it can be a recognition of one's own standing, and can be a way of casting away false pride. Ascetics have used a number of techniques to humiliate themselves, including mortification of the flesh.

Humiliation of others

Humiliation of one person by another is often used as a way of asserting power over others, and is a common form of oppression or abuse. Humiliation of others is generally motivated by sadism. Many punishments are deliberately designed to be humiliating, e.g. tarring and feathering, pillory, mark of infamy (stigma).

Humiliation, as in the 2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, may include (also in combinations):

• forced nudity
• forced cross-dressing
• rape, other forced sex (including forced masturbation) or forced simulation of sex
• forced watching of nudity and/or sex
• being kept on a dog leash
• being hooded (reason may be the humiliation, but also avoiding that the victim can see and identify the other person and the location)
• being ridiculed

Physical abuse is, in addition to the physical damage, also humiliating, as is intimidation. Rape may, in addition to being humiliating, cause physical damage, including being infected by a sexually-transmitted disease, and also the physical abuse of making a woman pregnant.

Some of the above are forms of sexual humiliation. However, some people find humiliation by others erotic in certain circumstances: see erotic humiliation.

Humiliation in Video Games

The word "Humiliation" is also frequently used in some competitive computer games.

"Humiliation" is also a word spoken when someone obtains a knife kill in the popular online game Counter Strike, when the server is modded with the AMX-Mod. Since obtaining a knife kill in Counter Strike requires a lot of skill to pull off, the person killed with the knife is said to be rightfully humiliated, made humble by the more skilled player.

In addition, in the popular Quake 3, when you got a kill with the Gauntlet, a close combat weapon, the game master would cry out "Humiliation", before adding the kill to a person's statistics as a shiny new icon.

See also

• Self-abasement
• Degradation
• Dehumanization
• Embarrassment
• Self-harm
• Hazing
• Bullying