SHAME IS LOUD. I AM LOUDER. On Sexuality, Culture, and the Unshakable Choice to Live in Full View

By Kimberly Haddad

Her hand came down so hard my breath caught—and in that split second before the next strike, I realized I was smiling.

It had been nearly five years since my last play party. Five years lived in the daylight—coaching, writing, loving, healing, doing my own work quietly. Then, a few weeks ago, I stepped into a room I knew in my marrow. The air pressed close—warm with breath, restless with wanting—and my body leaned into it instinctively, muscle and skin recognizing something before my mind caught up.

The first thing I saw was the table—six feet of charcuterie laid out like it had been designed for worship. Cheese collapsing under knives, ribbons of cured meat curling at the edges, figs torn open to show their wet, jeweled centers, soft and glistening like a woman opening in trust. People stood in loose knots, voices pitched low, eyes drifting, taking stock. Some looked at me the way you’d look at someone you might want to taste, each glance lingering just a fraction longer than polite.

A play party is a private, consensual gathering where adults explore intimacy, kink, and BDSM in a safe, intentional space. The “play” refers to scenes—structured experiences between partners or groups that might involve impact play, power exchange, sensation play, or other negotiated dynamics. The scenes can be intense or tender, raw or ritualistic, but all of them are deliberate. Some people come to watch, content to be carried by the energy without touching it. Others come to participate—to give, to take—until performer and witness are one and the same. And some simply come to belong, to be surrounded by people who understand desire without translation, to feel held by a community where no apology is required.

Unlike a typical party, there’s structure to the freedom: boundaries discussed, rules honored, consent never in question. There are often house protocols, designated play spaces, and sometimes equipment like spanking benches, St. Andrew’s crosses, or rope rigs. Conversations happen before anything begins—what’s welcome, what’s off-limits, what signals mean stop. The goal isn’t just physical pleasure, but mutual trust, exploration, and self-expression. At its best, a play party is a space where you can bring the parts of yourself the world told you to hide. You can be looked at without being judged. Touched without being taken. Seen without shame. And if you’re lucky, you leave with its trace still mapped on the places your body was claimed.

BENT OVER THE TABLE, FACE TO FACE WITH SHAME

Lately, I’ve been throwing myself—body first—back into the kink community. But that night, I took my time. It’s rare to re-enter a world you once lived in, not as a stranger, but as someone fluent in its customs, its pace, its particular electricity. Later, I was over her lap. The first strike landed without hesitation—her palm, firm and sure, followed by the hairbrush, then the belt. She knew exactly where to aim. At some point, she had me bent over a table, the surface solid beneath my ribs, her body behind me, the sound of leather against skin cutting through the room. People were watching. That was part of the point. I’ve always been an exhibitionist, not in spite of my shame, but because of it. There is a sweetness in being seen in the desires I learned to deny. To be seen in my pleasure only makes it expand.

This scene was unusual for me, not because I’m new to play, but because I almost never enjoy being dominated by women. There’s something about it that’s historically been triggering for me—my mother’s overbearing presence always looming in my nervous system like a shadow. But this woman wasn’t that. Her dominance was steady, grounded, without judgment. She brought out my inner child. She gave me space to be small without being diminished, playful without fear of punishment. She gave me permission to be myself, without condition. In the moment, it felt like healing, my body softening into her, the part of me that braces finally taking a breath. And yet—shame still found a way to be in the room. Not enough to stop me. Just enough to remind me that even in the safest hands, old patterns know the way home.

Coming back into the kink community has been a mirror for this. It asks me to notice the parts of myself I thought I’d already released, the parts of an older self that still whispers you shouldn’t. You can be years into your own healing, and all it takes is one new edge to expose what’s been lying dormant. But shame’s power is in secrecy. It just needs to be seen, acknowledged, and occasionally dressed down until it remembers its place: small, harmless, and never in charge of my pleasure. Best-selling author and vulnerability researcher Brené Brown once said, “If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow into every corner of our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgment. But if you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and you douse it with empathy, you’ve created a hostile environment. The minute you know you’re not alone and that your experience is human and you’re met with empathy, shame just doesn’t survive.”

That night, I felt an almost imperceptible peeling away— thin layers of shame I hadn’t realized were still lodged in me.

WHERE SHAME SLEEPS

Shame isn’t always born in the room; sometimes it follows you out. It waits until you’re back under bright kitchen lights, passing cake to your aunt while your cousin’s fiancée gushes about their new condo on the water. They ask what’s new, and you give them “same old,” because you can’t exactly say you spent the weekend bent over a table with a leather strap singing down your spine or that you’ve been craving love that doesn’t fit inside a marriage license.

In those moments, I feel suspended between two worlds. Around my family, I default to the safer one. The acceptable one. This world measures worth in milestones— engagements, promotions, predictable next steps. The other measures it in how fully you can inhabit your body, how boldly you’ll let yourself be seen. And beneath both is a question: am I irresponsible for still playing at almost thirty-nine? Too old to want my skin marked in pleasure? There’s an undercurrent that says I should have traded in my curiosity for a ring and a deed by now. That wanting more—more bodies, more flavors, more ways of being loved—is somehow juvenile. It’s not that I’m ashamed of what I do, or who I am in those rooms. But there’s a particular kind of loneliness in knowing that the life that makes you feel most alive might never be understood in the places you still want to belong. That’s when shame isn’t about the act—it’s about the impossible wish to be wholly yourself everywhere, without flinching.

A few weeks ago, my mother and I agreed to split the cost of a birthday gift for my sister. I told her I’d have my half in a couple of days—I just needed to get through a dungeon session that week. As I’ve shared in a previous column, I’m also a BDSM professional, and when I mentioned what I made in three hours, her jaw dropped.

Naturally, she asked what I had done. I told her she already knew, but she insisted she didn’t. So I laid it out: this client had booked myself and another female dominant for a co-topping session that included heavy impact play and the sting of nettles across his skin. Nettles, if you’ve never met them, are covered in fine, stinging hairs that light the skin up with a hot, prickling burn. In kink, they’re used for sensation play that results in pain and pleasure twisted together until you can’t quite tell them apart. She scoffed: “That’s disgusting. And that man is disgusting for wanting that. Something is seriously wrong with him.” I replied, “Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it—so am I disgusting too?” She didn’t answer. Just changed the subject and told me to stop doing that type of work.

And there it was—that sudden, heavy drop in my chest. I can go months feeling fully at peace with who I am and what I like, but then a comment like that pulls up the sediment. The part of me that knows my work is rooted in consent, care, and skill is still tethered to another part—one that grew up with ayb, the Arabic word for shame, stitched into me so tightly it feels like a birthmark. My mother can sit through the conversation, even seem to listen, but then one sentence will slip through and land exactly where old shame sleeps—a place so vast that even when I’m not ashamed of what I do, her voice can still find it.

Shame, I’ve learned, never fully dies. Therapy, self-study, lovers who held me differently—they help, but it still beds down inside of you. You can name it, unpack it, sweat it out under soft hands, and yet it finds a way to stay. It’s not something you outgrow or surgically remove. It’s not a one-and-done purge. It’s more like scar tissue—faded, but always there when you press on it. Shame is patient, but it is not kind. It curls somewhere deep in the folds of your body, mute and watchful, biding its time until it rises. You can work through it, even grow comfortable alongside it, but you have to keep your eyes on it. It’s like a cat that pretends to be asleep until something twitches in its peripheral vision.

For me, it shows up in the breathless second before I say yes to an invitation. In the tightening of my chest when I receive too much attention. In the momentary voice in my head that asks, what will they think of you now? It sleeps between my shoulder blades until some trigger wakes it. Even in pleasure, it can step forward, an uninvited hand on the small of my back, reminding me it’s mine to keep. And it’s not unique to kink; it’s in every bedroom, every unvoiced fantasy, every moment someone swallows the truth of what they want. Shame lives in the body. I think we carry shame the way old buildings hold smoke long after the fire—still, embedded, surfacing again when the air shifts.

But here’s the thing: I won’t shrink so that others can keep their illusions intact. The version of me who kneels at someone’s feet is no less real than the one who smiles respectably at a family gathering. The difference is, one of them gets to be seen. And when shame starts to churn, the only way I know to keep it from owning me is to speak my truth out loud.

THE BODY REMEMBERS

Shame isn’t one thing. It shifts shape. It changes the way it moves through you. There’s unwanted exposure—the sting of being seen before you’re ready, the body or truth revealed without your consent. There’s disappointed expectation—falling short of a standard, whether it’s someone else’s or your own, and feeling the weight of that failure in your bones. Exclusion is quieter but no less bitter—the door that doesn’t open, the party you were never invited to, the table that has no seat for you. And then there’s unrequited love—when the risk you take in showing yourself is met with nothing, the shame of offering something precious without reciprocity.

Guilt and shame are often confused, but they live on different planes. Guilt says, I did something bad. Shame says, I am bad. Guilt attaches to an action; shame latches onto identity. You can make amends for guilt. Shame demands you question who you are.

And it’s not always personal—it’s cultural, inherited, scripted into you before you have the words to name it. Sexual shame especially. Entire systems have been built on controlling sexuality, particularly women’s. Religion, law, family traditions—they all have ways of planting the idea that pleasure is dangerous, that sexual autonomy is a threat. In some families, shame is passed down like a heirloom, disguised as care or protection.

I grew up in a strict Middle Eastern household where family reputation and appearances often outweighed autonomy, authenticity, even curiosity. My upbringing wasn’t without love, but it came with a long list of rules. I couldn’t talk to boys on the phone, date, or go to school dances—except for my senior prom. We didn’t talk about sex. We didn’t talk about desire. We certainly didn’t talk about kink. Even small acts of self- expression—tattoos, ripped jeans, pink hair—could land me in trouble. And while I learned discipline, respect, and the value of family, I also learned how to conceal the things that felt most like me, decorating my restraint as if it were a virtue because that’s what a good daughter did.

The first time I remember feeling shame in my body, I was three or four years old, tucked under the dining table. I was pressing my palms into myself because it felt good. My mother found me and yelled—loud, scolding, the same tone she used with the dog when she caught her humping her toys. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I understood immediately: this was bad. I was bad. In that moment, my body became a problem to manage.

The Arabic word she might have used is ayb. It translates to shame or shame on you, but also flaw, defect, or disgrace. A word that rolls off the tongue like it’s been waiting for you to mess up. In our home, it was used casually, woven into conversation, tossed at you like a soft slap to the mouth. Your clothes are too tight? Ayb. You curse? Ayb. Touch yourself ? Always ayb. Even in children. The problem with this is simple: if you grow up hearing that the most beautiful parts of you—capable of pleasure, of intimacy, of creating life—are also the source of your disgrace, you learn to fear your own body.

This is what I mean when I say shame is inherited. It’s not born from your own choices or transgressions—it’s handed to you. It travels through bloodlines and dinner tables, carried by the same voices that love you. It might have been a survival tool for one generation, but it becomes a cage for the next. And even when you’ve unlearned the rules, even when you’ve given yourself permission, some part of your body still remembers the cost of breaking them.

Maybe healing isn’t about killing shame. Maybe it’s about walking it back into the light, over and over, until it learns it has no say in the moments that matter most.

SILENT, SYSTEMIC, AND SHARED

We often think of shame as a private burden, some- thing we carry alone. But when you trace its roots, you find it in the rituals of community, the hush of migration, and the margins of identity. It’s not the same in every body, but its weight is undeniable.

According to the International Journal of Sexual Health, nearly half of women (47.5 percent) and over a third of men (36.3 percent) report experiencing sexual shame, yet its texture changes across cultures and individuals. In some religious traditions, sexuality is treated as dangerous or immoral; in many immigrant households, preserving the family’s image is valued above personal truth. For Latina/o communities, vergüenza enforces rigid gender roles; in South Asian communities, izzat—family honor—can dictate everything from how you dress to whom you love. LGBTQ+ people don’t escape it either: shame compounds every time an identity is hidden, rejected, or made unsafe. The 2021 GLSEN National School Climate Survey stated that between 37 percent and 90 percent of LGBTQ+ students have heard homophobic slurs at school.

The statistics show a gut-wrenching reality: sexual shame isn’t uncommon; it’s systemic. But each statistic becomes a point of connection, not isolation. And healing is possible. Empathy, embodiment, and unfiltered expression puncture shame’s hold. Sex therapists deconstruct it by centering agency, plea- sure, and boundaries. Shame-aware educators and sex-positive counselors offer pathways where shame can witness us without consuming us.

The throughline of this piece is simple: shame waits—but compassion, truth, and choice are louder. When shame tries to steal the power to be seen, the work is to show up anyway. Meet it. Speak it. Reclaim it. And that act alone is its own kind of becoming.