being a little puritan and shaming shit on the HANNIBAL fandom is quite the audacity, I gotta say. I mean the goddamn source material is dark af. There’s incest there. There’s fucking murder, cannibalism, but GOD FORBID fans explore that as well—oh go fuck yourself, sincerely
Shaming, particularly in the realm of kink or sexuality, is rarely about the object of shame. It is, more often, an act of projection. The individual doing the shaming encounters in another person a quality or expression they have learned to repress within themselves. Rather than confronting this internal conflict, they externalize it. They attempt to regulate their inner world by exerting control over the outer one, by silencing, mocking, or moralizing against the behavior that stirs their own disowned desires.
In psychological terms, this is a mechanism of defense. The shamer projects the unacceptable part of their own psyche onto someone else, and then punishes that person in an effort to distance themselves from the uncomfortable truth. This is not limited to kink; it appears wherever liberation confronts repression. The one who shames is often not disturbed by the act itself, but by the fact that someone else has given themselves permission to express something they themselves have buried. It is an affront not to decency, but to the fragile walls of their own self-containment.
In this dynamic, control becomes the strategy. If the other can be silenced, ridiculed, or coerced into shame, then the shamer does not have to witness the mirror. But what they attack is precisely what they have not integrated. The energy they direct outward is a symptom of an internal split, an unresolved tension between desire and identity. And so, shaming reveals more about the inner state of the shamer than it does about the one being shamed. It is not a statement of morality, but of psychic fragmentation.
Where one is whole, there is no need to shame.