What’s My Name?

At Max’s recent bondage class, Bondage from the Bottom’s Perspective, the subject of hoods came up. Now most experienced folks will tell you that when you totally cover someone’s head with a hood during play it becomes easier to hurt them. The logic is that by removing the bottom’s “face” you remove their identity, thereby making them an object. This disassociation, for good or bad, makes it easier to deliver pain to a faceless object.

So this has got me wondering, if a hood is a physical tool for transforming a person into an object, what about a mental one? How would someone go about masking a person in a mental way such that they are an object? I’m thinking that you would have to take away the bottom’s name. When you remove their identity do you then remove who they are? No longer a person, but a flesh toy, a trinket (if you will) to be played with?

Of course, the converse could be argued that by removing one’s name, you are not making them less a person, but rather someone all together different. It is not they who are now being subjected to all manner of torment, but someone (or something) that does not bear their name. So to that end removing their name is not a form of bondage, but rather a means of freeing them from responsibility for their actions while in the scene.

Perhaps this is one of those “scenes in search of a victim” things that must be played out sometime in order to find out?