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On Shame and Its Uses
Feb. 5th, 2020 01:21 pmI’ve always harbored an instinctive reaction to the religious notion of shame: repulsion. Though my perennial endeavor is to process it and deal with it constructively, shame, especially the post-Victorian, largely Protestant Christian shame that permeates US culture has never failed to aggravate me.
Shame can and will be weaponized, and that’s what we see when Social Justice Warrior types attempt to ruin the life of a random person on the internet by doxxing them or when a pedophile’s crimes are outed in prison; that is to say, it can be weaponized for the greater good or for the greater bad, depending on your perspective. One of our culture’s great imbalances — and we have tons of them — is shame. Americans especially have a warped concept of what to be ashamed about and what to be absolutely shameless about.
I’m sure you can guess I’m no fan of the Muslim hijab. To me, wearing one is the epitome of misplaced shame. The hijab is ostensibly worn to prevent men from being overcome with lust when they see a woman’s flowing hair. I think this begs the question “Why can’t Muslim men be counted upon to keep it in their pants?” It’s the ultimate blame the victim scheme. Asking a woman to wear a hijab (and they’re really not asked in most Muslim contexts, they’re forced) is a breach of limits. It’s like making little kids wear chastity belts at all times because a decent percentage of the adults in their lives are pedophiles.
I have a former friend who is a Jewish male in his fifties. He is single, in good shape, and average to good looking. The reason he is my former and not current friend is his addiction to shaming himself. My ex-friend is a talented voice actor and an avid animal rights activist. He’s smart and capable, or at least I used to think this. Nevertheless, I had to amputate our friendship when he went on Twitter raging about how women do not enjoy sex as a result of biological design. Of course the internet rose to meet his challenge with a chorus of “Dude, if you believe that, you’re doing heterosexual sex wrong.” My friend had his five minutes of internet fame. He got what he wanted, which was to be viciously shamed and mocked. He wants to believe in his own inadequacy. He wants to wallow in shame, because if other people believe him to be less than human, then he has solid reasons to remain a scumbag in his own mind. Why aspire to be a better human being at every small opportunity when you can muck around in a self-created puddle of whining, tears, and despair? That’s my ex-friend’s motto, unfortunately. For him, shame is a form of assisted suicide.
On the opposite end of the shame spectrum, we have the shameless. I follow a Millennial blogger named Jennifer with the tag The Daily Connoisseur who rails in the most delightful manner about classy versus trashy behavior. Jennifer, the busy young mother of four children, talks about old fashioned things like decorum and poise, about how it’s not okay to wear your house slippers and stained exercise pants to the grocery store, and how the Superbowl’s half-time show producers might consider making a program that’s actually family friendly instead of populating it with crotch grabbing and stripper pole acts. Though Jennifer gets huge amounts of flack for gently suggesting that we all raise the bar and that we can start by putting on real shoes when we run out and do errands, I think she’s part of a growing movement.
Shame can easily go overboard, but can easily go the other way. For instance, the F word. I used to be a fan and user of the F bomb. When I was twelve years old, using it when I was hanging out with my little friends felt like a release. I felt like an edgy, cool kid. When I wrote my first novel much later at age 33, I wasn’t about to avoid it because it had become part of my environment. My brothers utter the word regularly, so does my husband. All my friends, who range in age from 20 - 70, pepper their speech with it. Yesterday, I saw a bumper sticker that said “F*ck Cancer” which tells me that for some, it’s OK to nearly spell out the entire F word for all ages to read on a bumper sticker as long as it is in the service of battling a dread disease. You know what though? I’m tired of the F bomb. It’s boring. I have an extensive vocabulary and the F bomb is no longer part of it. Perhaps it will make a tiny cameo someday when I drop something heavy on my foot, but hopefully I will be alone at that time.
Another shameless thing I don’t want to emulate is wealth-signaling. For the life of me, I will never understand the Christmas postcard some American families send out of their children standing in front of famous landmarks. This is meant to do two things: show off the children and to display proof of fabulous vacations taken during the year. Though it’s demonstrably less insufferable than the old custom of listing your child’s achievements and virtues in excruciatingly detailed paragraphs (meanwhile, everyone knows the parents have hated each other for years and that the kid most likely has a raging cocaine addiction LOL) it just reeks to me of imbalance. Just send a plain, photo-free card. That said, I’m considering sending my relatives a Christmas photo card with me, my husband, and my cat badly Photoshopped in front of various world landmarks when December arrives.
If there’s anything to be taken from these various examples, I hope it’s that shame is not modesty and modesty is not shame. There’s a place for getting rid of shame completely, and ideally I think that place is a bedroom when two consenting adults would like to express their joy for one another. Other than that, it helps to have shame in moderate doses.
Shame can and will be weaponized, and that’s what we see when Social Justice Warrior types attempt to ruin the life of a random person on the internet by doxxing them or when a pedophile’s crimes are outed in prison; that is to say, it can be weaponized for the greater good or for the greater bad, depending on your perspective. One of our culture’s great imbalances — and we have tons of them — is shame. Americans especially have a warped concept of what to be ashamed about and what to be absolutely shameless about.
I’m sure you can guess I’m no fan of the Muslim hijab. To me, wearing one is the epitome of misplaced shame. The hijab is ostensibly worn to prevent men from being overcome with lust when they see a woman’s flowing hair. I think this begs the question “Why can’t Muslim men be counted upon to keep it in their pants?” It’s the ultimate blame the victim scheme. Asking a woman to wear a hijab (and they’re really not asked in most Muslim contexts, they’re forced) is a breach of limits. It’s like making little kids wear chastity belts at all times because a decent percentage of the adults in their lives are pedophiles.
I have a former friend who is a Jewish male in his fifties. He is single, in good shape, and average to good looking. The reason he is my former and not current friend is his addiction to shaming himself. My ex-friend is a talented voice actor and an avid animal rights activist. He’s smart and capable, or at least I used to think this. Nevertheless, I had to amputate our friendship when he went on Twitter raging about how women do not enjoy sex as a result of biological design. Of course the internet rose to meet his challenge with a chorus of “Dude, if you believe that, you’re doing heterosexual sex wrong.” My friend had his five minutes of internet fame. He got what he wanted, which was to be viciously shamed and mocked. He wants to believe in his own inadequacy. He wants to wallow in shame, because if other people believe him to be less than human, then he has solid reasons to remain a scumbag in his own mind. Why aspire to be a better human being at every small opportunity when you can muck around in a self-created puddle of whining, tears, and despair? That’s my ex-friend’s motto, unfortunately. For him, shame is a form of assisted suicide.
On the opposite end of the shame spectrum, we have the shameless. I follow a Millennial blogger named Jennifer with the tag The Daily Connoisseur who rails in the most delightful manner about classy versus trashy behavior. Jennifer, the busy young mother of four children, talks about old fashioned things like decorum and poise, about how it’s not okay to wear your house slippers and stained exercise pants to the grocery store, and how the Superbowl’s half-time show producers might consider making a program that’s actually family friendly instead of populating it with crotch grabbing and stripper pole acts. Though Jennifer gets huge amounts of flack for gently suggesting that we all raise the bar and that we can start by putting on real shoes when we run out and do errands, I think she’s part of a growing movement.
Shame can easily go overboard, but can easily go the other way. For instance, the F word. I used to be a fan and user of the F bomb. When I was twelve years old, using it when I was hanging out with my little friends felt like a release. I felt like an edgy, cool kid. When I wrote my first novel much later at age 33, I wasn’t about to avoid it because it had become part of my environment. My brothers utter the word regularly, so does my husband. All my friends, who range in age from 20 - 70, pepper their speech with it. Yesterday, I saw a bumper sticker that said “F*ck Cancer” which tells me that for some, it’s OK to nearly spell out the entire F word for all ages to read on a bumper sticker as long as it is in the service of battling a dread disease. You know what though? I’m tired of the F bomb. It’s boring. I have an extensive vocabulary and the F bomb is no longer part of it. Perhaps it will make a tiny cameo someday when I drop something heavy on my foot, but hopefully I will be alone at that time.
Another shameless thing I don’t want to emulate is wealth-signaling. For the life of me, I will never understand the Christmas postcard some American families send out of their children standing in front of famous landmarks. This is meant to do two things: show off the children and to display proof of fabulous vacations taken during the year. Though it’s demonstrably less insufferable than the old custom of listing your child’s achievements and virtues in excruciatingly detailed paragraphs (meanwhile, everyone knows the parents have hated each other for years and that the kid most likely has a raging cocaine addiction LOL) it just reeks to me of imbalance. Just send a plain, photo-free card. That said, I’m considering sending my relatives a Christmas photo card with me, my husband, and my cat badly Photoshopped in front of various world landmarks when December arrives.
If there’s anything to be taken from these various examples, I hope it’s that shame is not modesty and modesty is not shame. There’s a place for getting rid of shame completely, and ideally I think that place is a bedroom when two consenting adults would like to express their joy for one another. Other than that, it helps to have shame in moderate doses.
