There is an extreme level of trust that I have to have with someone to feel comfortable being degraded.
Same.
I never could wrap my head around it at all until I was friends with someone who really had a solid degradation and humiliation kink.
Listening to her talk about it made it a bit more understandable in how it worked for her.
I can get into it in some playful scenarios, where the idea of it is played with but it isn't about
actually being degraded or humiliated, but even that needs lots of trust to work.
I have to have a very strongly grounded belief that you care for me and completely respect me as a person and that this is a role play and you don't actually think those things of me. So like if my partner asked to call me a slut in bed, and yes he would ask first, it would not bother me because I know how much he cares for me and admires who I am as a person. But I also know him well enough to know he would get no enjoyment out of degrading me, we have very similar interests in the bedroom which obviously is a great thing.
For me there is also a version of using slut (or similar) that isn't about degradation at all, but about a sort of transgressive naughtiness and taboo breaking.
That's a very different vibe than degradation dirty talk, even if sometimes you're overlapping with the same vocabulary.
But when clients try that shit without asking, you've just ruined the whole session for yourself because my demeanor will change as now I'm not sure if you actually think I'm a whore or a slut and if you thinking that means you might try to hurt me
Exactly.
All this is EXTREMELY dependent on context, connection, communication and knowing what the fuck the layers of text and subtext are and what's really going on.