Humiliation

I have a hard time knowing where the dividing line is. The corner time, scolding, and even witnessed spanking embarrassment is a real positive for me. OTOH I’ve read stories here where a good spanking turns into a brutally humiliating experience with potential psychological damage to the recipient, and I can literally feel my BP rising, and I hope desperately for justice to be done in the end. I think the mark of a good writer is the ability to get the reader emotionally involved, and humiliation does that for me. I don’t particularly like it, but the story works better for me if it’s there.

What does "psychological damage" have to do with getting a fill up at British Petroleum?

All kidding aside, I don't notice my blood pressure rising as much as I get invested in a character's development and journey. If there's any pressure, it's seeing bad plot devices used which undersell the character's intelligence (and mine), but the pressure is going down instead of up, which follows my level of interest. Not saying every character has to be a rocket scientist, just agonizing over the shortcuts sometimes taken to get a character to a certain state.

IMHO, humiliation and embarrassment differ because of the power dynamic involved. One can be empowered and still be embarrassed by a situation or a moment-it becomes a sort of test of mental strength to carry on despite that and rise above it. Humiliation, however, is (as was said upthread) something that is out of your control. It involves the imposition of one person’s will upon another with intent to make it clear to both parties that the dominant one is in complete control and the submissive one is helpless.

This can be something absolutely awful, and in the real world should not be part of any but the most absolutely trusting relationships and only by mutual consent. However, in fiction, we often exceed real life possibilities for the sake of amplification. For me, at least, the occasional story where the spankee is both horrified and unable to prevent the situation from continuing is a positive. However, when I see a photo of someone with a badly bruised or welted backside online, I don’t find that a turn-on at all. To me, the set-up of a story is more appealing than the delivery of the payoff spanking.