If you kink shame them they can change for the better.
Not really, no.
If a person experiences little to no shame, whether about what you’re attempting to shame them for specifically or in general, it’s not going to do much more than make them annoyed at you, or even just laugh at you. Maybe humiliate them if you did it in front of others, but if so that will just turn into righteous anger.
If they experience a lot of shame, then it’s going to backfire. They’re going to engage in whatever you’re shaming them for obsessively (or more obsessively) and in secret if it wasn’t already in secret, all the while feeling horribly guilty about it.
If they’re experiencing an average level of shame, then the result will be a lot more variable, but in general what will happen is that they’ll desire to change out of fear. Fear-motivated personal transformations have a very low rate of success - think of all those people who have said “I can change!” in a desperate attempt to salvage a failed relationship, for example. Even if it does work (despite the very low odds of success, or because they found a better motivation than fear) if it was the symptom of an underlying issue which wasn’t addressed, then that’s just going to cause a different (and potentially “shame-worthy”) problem later.
I’ve heard a theory that shaming exists and is prevalent not to improve or influence the target of it, as this is among the worst ways of doing so, but as a self-affirmation of personal superiority and/or an attempt to influence social standing (by taking the target down a peg and/or keeping them down, and perhaps elevating themselves a peg as well). In other words, virtue signalling combined with ego-feeding, and/or challenging the social pecking order. The fact that many people go out of their way to shame others in front of an audience would seem to be a point towards this. The fact that to most people it doesn’t feel like they’re doing any such thing isn’t necessarily a point against it on its own, because a lot of people are bad at self-awareness.
All this assumes that the shaming is at least partly sincere, and not merely bullying or being purely manipulative for the sake of some personal benefit. Also as a practicing sadist, my general response to the idea of eradicating all kinks is 🖕🏻.
TL;DR the idea that shaming leads to self-improvement is a very common myth, but it’s not how anything works.
