kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with shame

Our civilization has a love/hate relationship with children that is currently listing heavily towards hate. Children and their parents take a bad rap for being selfish in an age of overpopulation. Long ago, in a time before the woke revolution, gay men came up with the term "breeder" to label people (typically straight ones) who wanted to conceive and/or successfully bore children. As someone who has never wanted children of my own, I was regularly mystified by people who pitied me for not having children or who asked when I was going to have children of my own. At the tender age of 18 I already felt a great deal of pressure to have children. The pressure did not truly subside until I reached the age of 45 (I was a very young looking 40) and it became patently obvious my husband and I had no designs on creating a child together.

My go-to line was and is "Raising a child is one of the toughest jobs in the world, and I skipped it because I didn't want to do it half-assed". I only say this to parents who I believe are doing an excellent job raising their children. Many people who become parents belatedly discover they don't want to be parents. There are message boards for parents who confess that having one or more children ruined their bond with their spouse or mate. They regale anonymous viewers with horror stories about the aftermath of childbirth-ruined bodies, isolation, depression, and regret. Many wish they could go back in time and make a different decision. Many feel tricked and hoodwinked. Parenthood was glorified and its truths downplayed. Many feel eaten alive by toxic mommy culture and to a lesser but still significant extent, toxic daddy culture. Many suck it up and never let anyone know about their negative feelings, burying the wound deep inside where it festers and burns.

It's a fact that many people have children merely because they are expected to have them. Many more have them by sheer accident. I was an accident; that's why I was adopted at the age of ten days. When parents do regret having children, they are not allowed to say it aloud. They are never allowed to mourn what they have lost in terms of freedom, youthfulness, autonomy, and potential. They are handed a set of unrealistic expectations. Nobody can have it all, yet we are told this all the time with the hackneyed term "limitless possibilities". We are also told we should desire to have it all while being all things to all people. There are many idealized images where one can have kids, career, a perfect house, a killer Instagram, and of course lots of money.

Spoiled Rotten: Is There a Subconscious Backlash Against Children?

Childhood is fetishized. Suburban childhoods like the one I experienced in the late 70s and early 80s became a trend on big and small screens when the TV show Stranger Things resurrected the packs of kids on bikes trope from Stephen Spielberg's ET. Today's über-precious, molly coddled Gen Z child does not know what it is like to be sent outside to play and forgotten about until dinner, or the brief phone call from a friend's house to get permission to eat dinner over there. As generations of children have become more and more materialistic, they have become more feral, either shrinking away in horror from just about everything or boldly bratting it up while posing for a mom-assisted selfie in front of a mountain of unearned toys. As a teen, a healthy amount of my self-hatred came from remembering what an insufferable brat I had been just a few years earlier. Maybe I'm not the only one who hates how spoiled I was.

Instead of raising kids sensibly to do without en masse, I hypothesize that hatred bubbles up as severe and awful post-hoc punishments for children, for instance making them the subjects of mass medical experiments with various vaccines and allowing woke teachers to use them for sexual grooming purposes. In other unsurprising news, the most draconian elements of child punishment have been originated by the most child-hating and overpopulated nation on the planet, China.

It is the worst time in history to be a child. The second you pop out of mom's body, you are pricked and poked with vaccines that cause learning disabilities and auto-immune dysfunction ranging from mild to severe. If you survive, you may end up being told you are insane by the tender age of ten for maintaining an active connection to the spirit world. If you are not a natural conformist, you will be mercilessly bullied, often by your own parents. If your parents have any money, it is highly unlikely you will know what it is to play outside without being in constant danger of being run over by a car, if you are allowed unsupervised play at all. Every parent I knew as a youngster dealt with depression. Psychiatry as a profession only exists because of moms and dads who hate their lives. This begs the question of "What's the use of a gorgeous, comfortable lifestyle if you're depressed as hell all the time?" It's the same sort of conundrum of the very rich and very sick. What good is the $400 bottle of wine when you cannot drink it even with the help of a nurse holding a straw to your lips?

The MRNA vaccines were first billed as a way of keeping grandma safe from her grandchildren. Once the optics fail of children suffering on behalf of their grandparents was perceived for the failure it was, the myth machine churned out propaganda about the vaccines being safe for the youngest of the young. It was always clear they were not safe for anyone paying attention. I'm not sure why it took so many ten year olds keeling over with heart attacks though. My suspicions are that many people who claim to love children actually don't love them at all.

Misanthropy as a Function of Overpopulation

The Plandemic turned regular people into original sinners who could only get clean one way: by getting repeatedly inseminated with a DNA-modding set of machines in injection form. The baptism rite in question was demanded by the anti-theist powers of Progress. The children were offered up as the ultimate sacrifice on the altar, which is to say children are still the disposable cannon fodder they were in World War I. Though some may claim they believe the children are our future, nobody has any problem with child labor as long as it is done by little Pakistani girls in sweatshops and little boys in the Congo mining cobalt for electric cars. Children were always on the front lines and precious little has actually changed except the flavor of lies we are expected to swallow hook, line, and sinker about how much they are loved and valued.

The reason companies are rushing to get vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule is because it lifts the onerous burdens of liability in case they kill or maim children as they are already doing. Autism is up to 1 in every 30 births. Compare to 1 in every 2500 being diagnosed with autism in 1960. Something is amiss, for sure, but there is no rush to get to the bottom of it. To add insult to injury, autistic people are thrown away by the time they hit their teens. To exact revenge, many of them have become memelords on 4chan.

Commodifying Innocence and Manufacturing Consent

In the Jim Henson fantasy film The Dark Crystal, the evil villains are a race of decrepit bird-creatures called Skeksis who spend their time and resources hunting down the last of a race of mini-people called Gelflings. When they find a Gelfling, they hang him or her in the air and extract his or her life essence until the creature dies. They drink the substance as an elixir and gain an addictive rush along with a temporary stay from aging. Basically Jim Henson had his Skeksis drinking adrenochrome long before it was cool. Right around the same era, Brooke Shields made several soft porn movies and starred in extremely mature photo shoots, many while she was still a pre-teen. 80s kids were pushed into sexuality at age 12. Now that sexy 12 year olds are yesterday's news, mainstream media has moved on to five year olds and toddlers.

There are some teachers of the type displayed on Libs of TikTok who have the sick idea that little kids should be initiated into adult domains to "help" them figure out what they will be in terms of future sexuality. My husband pointed out that anyone with a sexual agenda to "help" a little kid is a pedophile no matter what they believe they are doing. Most kids are unaware of themselves as having sexual feelings until at least a few years before puberty. Most of those feelings can easily be shelved until they grow into semi-adulthood and begin the cycle of puberty. Sexualizing a child, ogling a child as Brooke Shields was ogled, or attempting to influence a gender decision upon a child who has not completed full puberty is sexual abuse and a breach of their human right to privacy and autonomy. If I was Queen of the World, I would enact no punishments for thought crimes. However, those who acted on their pedophilic urges would be put on trial and quickly executed as a matter of course, and that includes teachers who "come out" to their kindergarten classrooms. Communists believe that turning all sex into a robotic, debased free for all is better than the opposite traditional religious obsession with sexual shame and humiliation. Evangelists want an eternal re-run of the opening scenes of The Handmaid's Tale, with any woman who dares have a child outside the confines of marriage literally branded (preferably by cutting off a hand or putting out her eye) for life and her child taken away to be gifted to the deserving and heterosexual faithful. Commies prefer an abyss of perversion and Evangelists delight in a morass of repression and punishment. Either way, kids get thrown under the bus.

In Which I Propose a Ternary

I believe there is a happy medium that neither involves five year olds receiving cartoon masturbation manuals nor a pamphlet of lies about storks and mommy's tummy. De-stigmatizing unmarried teen pregnancy would help countless generations of children from a couple of key angles. Allowing younger people to have children outside of marriage with the expectation of being completely supported and accepted would result in healthier generations of children. The later one waits to have children, the worse one's prospects are for having a healthy, intelligent child. One of the reasons for the high number of autistic births is because of the general age of today's parents, not just the amount of unnecessary and toxic chemicals being shoved into baby's shoulder. A hundred short years ago, teenagers had children on the regular and nobody batted an eye. Women wrapped up childbearing at age 35 if they were not dead from doing it, unlike now when women don't think about having a child until they're having sporadic hot flashes. Healthier attitudes towards unmarried teen pregnancy would mean more children and fewer abortions of the legal or illegal variety. Considering the vaccinated are very likely to face fertility problems in the near to far future, there is haste to be made in accepting parenthood in in forms that were previously considered declassé or embarassing.

Though I am encouraged to see alternative schools springing up in my area in response to the exposé of public schools in 2020-2022, I am dismayed by the surging tide of Christian schools which seek to replace once kind of indoctrination with its equally bad opposite. I believe children should learn that being gay is OK, just not in any graphic detail.

The Professional Managerial Class is desperately trying to keep their Panicdemic and all of its accompanying shutdowns alive. Recently, the mainstream media announced a new 70% more deadly strain of Coronavirus was on the prowl, prompting a new round of closures and cancellations that will shove more tiers of the former middle class into destitution. And for what? Covid kills .03 percent or less for those under the age of 60, so increasing the amount of deaths to a whopping half a percent via a "70% more deadly" strain doesn't exactly make it formidable.

The New Useless Eaters

To protect a sliver of the elderly via dubious methods of solitary confinement in nursing homes and hospitals (a.k.a. forcing them to die alone because the State has clandestinely labelled them as Useless Eaters), the government has collapsed the world economy, driving millions into poverty and causing third world starvation. Back in the first world, suicide and domestic abuse statistics are skyrocketing, crime in the cities is ballooning, businesses like mine are folding, and unemployment is off the charts. The only people who are still doing well are the Professional Managerial Class and their one percent rulers, smugly virtue signaling from on high. They are, for now, still making plenty of money, happily sitting at home as their children muddle through online lessons at school, some more proficiently than others. Jeff Bezos is nearly a trillionaire. In Wuhan, the economy has never been better and they’re partying mask-free like it’s 1999. Nothing to see here, folks, keep moving.

Psychotic Break

Despite a fortune seemingly cemented in place that heavily indicates a few more years of a communist Chinese feeding frenzy disguised as monarchy, the Professional Managerial Class is in the midst of a psychotic break. They are the spoiled children that got everything they wanted for Christmas and then found that none of those toys filled the gaping pit of emptiness inside. They were mentally ill to begin with (I’m not supposed to use that terminology according to the Social Justice movement, because I could hurt the feelings of schizophrenics) and that mental illness is worsening by the hour. The preferred leftist outcome of the 2020 American presidential election was supposed to heal all wounds — Facebook and Twitter still ring with calls for unity while spewing vitriol at anyone who disagrees with shutdowns and masks or is of the wrong skin color — but it is clear to see the wounds are still there, itching and seeping under a thin bandage. The PMC acts no saner than it did in 2016 when the Orange Man played salvage shop and began to drain the swamp. Now, with Orange Man apparently vanquished, the Left is doing what it does best: eating its own. The mainstream media does what it can to stick fingers in the dam of evidence against its drooling, senile, child molesting President Elect, but there’s only so much you can do on a slow news day. The facts on the ground are that the President Elect is easy to loathe, and since the mainstream media has pushed nothing but loathing for the last five years, old patterns die hard. Trump was the goose that laid the Cheeto-colored eggs and he’s no longer laying. Of course all eyes now turn from him to the pathetic travesty about to take the Iron Throne.

Enter Shame

The Professional Managerial Class and its defender aspirants marinated in pure hatred for the last five years and they now hilariously want to skip away to a unicorn fart world of love, light, and non-TERF BIPOC feminism where we can pretend it never happened. If we only accept the Great Reset, coerced inoculations for an impotent nothingburger flu, we can all be happy and the Progressive flying car utopia will arrive on schedule. The PMC have yet to realize you cannot eat, live, and breathe hatred and then turn tail when the consequences of being hateful are plopped on your doorstep. That’s why they’re so triggered when I say the word “shame.”

The PMC have a problem with shame, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not. I know this because I was born and raised as a PMC. I know how they operate underneath the hood.

How Freaking Double Dog Dare You!

The Greta Thunberg phenomenon is meant to shame us all into accepting the young scold's warped vision of green utopia. Thunberg, in her ocean-sailing, vegan convenience food eating, autistic naïveté said "How Dare You!" without the faintest understanding of her own hypocrisy. The trouble with shame is that it cannot be effectively dealt by those who do not live as they preach. Nearly starving yourself to death at age ten because you are a spoiled brat is not the same thing as the ten year old who picks up trash in the forest preserve because he wants to inspire others to conserve its beauty and majesty. If the trash collector kid talks about conservation, I'm willing to listen. If a rich kid who accepted a "free" Tesla who played hooky from school and made her mother quit a once-in-several-lifetimes career of professional opera singing because of whatever piss was infecting her cornflakes that week, I am not inclined to lend such a person my ears.

The Burden and Karma of Responsibility

On one of JMG’s blogs, I had a Covid fearmonger trying to go around with me because I danced around the idea of the s word that rhymes with blame. Her fixation was on the idea of responsibility, how I had better not consider her responsible if I infected grandma with COVID by not self-isolating and wearing a mask until my own natural death. She (or he) displayed a transparent yearning for me to feel shame for being wrongity-wrong, which I would of course feel when my loved ones caught COVID and died horrible failed double lung transplant related deaths. I found this interesting because of the shadow being projected.

The thing is, the PMC and all of the fearmongers who still encourage lockdowns and masks are directly responsible for the consequences of the lockdowns. The reason I have not played nicely with lockdowns and masks from the beginning is because I do not want the karma of those who have blindly followed orders all this time. My ill-wisher is already responsible for the death of 11 year old Adan Llanos, who shot himself during a virtual school session. She is responsible for the terror of my elderly neighbor, a kind old man who died surrounded by strangers in a hospital bed a few weeks ago instead of his wife and grown children. She is responsible for the droves of addicts who fell back into addiction, given nothing but idle time and no support groups. She is responsible for the small towns that lost their only profitable company because of lack of demand and all of the families thrown into poverty as a result. She is responsible for a billion missed rites of passage: weddings, proms, funerals, mitzvahs, quinceaneras, graduations, first kisses. She is responsible for her own cowardly escapism into the Petit Trianon of Netflix and takeout food while others literally starved. I believe she will pay for it someday, though it won’t be up to deplorable like me to punish her. Justice for her is up to the gods and I am not privy to viewing their schedules in advance.

Meanwhile, she is a septic tank of PMC mindlessness, a condition I wouldn’t wish on anyone because I used to live there and it sucks. She can only pretend to feel sorry for the disenfranchised because THAT IS HOW SHE IS SUPPOSED TO FEEL. If she were just to admit she doesn’t care because it doesn’t affect her personally (not my circus, not my monkeys) it would make her into a monster. This is why she and her ilk are so quick to accuse anyone suffering from the lockdowns as a grandma-killer: projecting the monstrous shadow. If she were to admit she disliked the idea of my elderly neighbor dying alone and abandoned but also admitted she wasn’t willing to lift a finger to help if it meant sacrificing her own privileges, it would make her guilty. Her guilt might cause her to feel shame.

I know how the PMC mind races at night. I know how full it is of media tidbits, popular jargon, and peccadilloes. In the current climate of fear porn, soon to be declassé Trump Derangement Syndrome, and cognitive dissonance, it’s a thousand times worse than when I called myself a PMC. The PMC are getting plenty of rest these days but they still can’t sleep. When your imagination has been polluted and you are in complete and denial about the ways in which it is polluted, that pollution still must discharge in various ways. Trump was the outlet/target for the steady stream of PMC foulness in the US. Now the sewer has backed up, hence psychotic break, descent into depression, alcoholism, drugs, TikTok, online gaming and Netflix binges.

You Watching Me Watching Me

The PMC woman was, like me, trained to be vain and to simultaneously deny that vanity as a sin. She is always picturing herself from an outsider’s view. We women are cultivated to view ourselves remotely from birth so that we can better compete with other women. The urge to compete is the urge to consume. Grasping why Madison Avenue would want us this way should be obvious.

Postmodern Original Sin

Rich women are saddled with this self-viewing compulsion in the extreme. Being born rich means you will constantly percolate set ideas in your pretty head: that you don’t actually have the right to exist, that you are ugly, that you’re a parasite, a hustler, and a grifter because of the privileges you enjoy. The Korean film about class warfare, Parasite, comes to mind: we are never explicitly told if the real parasites are the rich or the poor.

The more privileges you enjoy, the more shame and guilt you must feel. In order to consume more product to ostensibly better yourself, you are made to feel guilty and worthless, especially while young. Women have different reactions to being conditioned this way; most don’t think about it for one second and would blink at you stupidly if you pointed it out. For some, there is extreme dieting and dysmorphia, starving oneself to become perfect, beautiful, and therefore worthy of your status. For others, angrily inventing a list of oppressions to become a professional victim assuages the feeling of guilt. Some become party girls, attempting to have fun while becoming human tragedies of addiction and codependence. Rarely do they strike at the root, which is of course the way they were conditioned to (not) think.

There are workarounds, of course, but the fearmongering PMC is not willing to look at them at this point. One would be taking a hard look at the toxicity of an exceedingly comfortable life. Another would be admitting that the economic prognosis of living standards for one’s grandchildren is going to be bleak, especially if said grandchildren are under the age of ten. To truly deal with their shame hangups, the PMC would first have to admit that shame is playing a role and second stop projecting the shadow upon others in the form of blame and finger pointing. Mostly I see the PMC clinging onto the privilege raft down the DeNile River until it finally throws them off. They will only be dragged from Versailles kicking and screaming.

I’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.