Humiliation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (November 2007)

Humiliation is the process of being made humble.

1 Humiliation of the self
2 Humiliation of others
3 Humiliation in sport
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] 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. e.g. willingly driving an hour to work, knowing you are going to have a hard time with the workload, a high possibility that no one else will be coming to work so the workload will increase.

[edit] Humiliation of others

Humiliation of one person by another (humiliator) is often used as a way of asserting power over others, and is a common form of oppression or abuse. However, it can also be consensual, as part of an agreement with a lover of erotic humiliation. In either of these cases, it may be motivated by sadism. In addition, many punishments are deliberately designed to be humiliating, e.g. tarring and feathering, pillory, mark of infamy (stigma).

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 an unwilling woman pregnant.

[edit] Humiliation in sport

Humiliation in sport can be regarded as defeat by a large margin - unless the opposing team has so much better circumstances that such a defeat is seen as unavoidable, such as a national team of a very small country losing against a much larger country. In particular a defeat suffered without some believable effort to prevent it, a defeat suffered by simply refusing to fight back, can cause complete loss of face or dignity by a person or team.