Did this title suck you in? Shame on you.
Like most writers, I hope to eventually increase my reading audience. One of the pieces of initial advice for anyone ‘creating online content’ is to review which material gets the most engagement, and create more of that.
These have been my most read posts so far, by a long shot:
They’re pretty long posts, so I was surprised people slogged all the way through them. Maybe they were relatable, topical subjects. Maybe people enjoyed my writing. Or maybe I just sucked people in with the schadenfreude of my shameful divulgences.
On social media I promoted ‘Pick Me Girl’ with the epithet, ‘Cringe. My most vulnerable post yet!’ My tagline for ‘On Being an Injectable Pincushion’ was ‘a walk inside my body’. Both essays are about facing up to uncomfortable truths.
Personal confessions. Deep dives into difficult emotions. Second-hand embarrassment. Is that what I have to trade in all the time, to suck more readers into my crafty little web?
…Shame?
What topics should I next write about?
That weird sex dream I had about a family member?
(Cringed when I woke up. Ew! No.)
The time I was detained for shoplifting in my teens?
(Couldn’t stop laughing, because serious trouble turns me into Joaquin Phoenix’s The Joker, as mall police marched me through the shopping centre.)
That one night I did a trial serving drinks at a strip club?
(Had to wear a corset and heels. Creepy businessmen. Was offered to try out as a dancer, did not, but was annoyed to feel kinda flattered to be asked.)
Did you like reading about all that? Did you? DID YOU?
Yeah, you did, you disgusting little freak.
It’s all right. Most of us are disgusting little freaks.
We don’t like feeling our own shame, but we sure love combing through other people’s.
So here you go, my little freak. This piece is all about shame - what it means, what it does, and how it manifests in our world.
Shame’s game
I was about to quote Brené Brown,
“I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—that something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”
and then I remembered I kind of hate Brené Brown. She’s right, though.
Shame is the most uncomfortable emotion. It’s about ourselves, but it’s also about what others might think of us if they only knew. Or about their judgement, if they already know. It’s about fearing disconnection.
Some of us rebel, crafting personality traits around ‘not feeling ashamed’ - wearing designed-to-shock clothing, proudly proclaiming our unusual beliefs, or embracing cringe humour. Why do I know so many women who’ve experienced sexual assault, who’ve also gone on to amass huge lists of sexual partners? Ex-Christians who turned into loud goth atheists? People bullied as kids, who turn into ‘class clown’ types?
We often rebel against what’s made us feel shame, as a method of regaining control. But the shame is still lurking deep down, able to be activated by the right insult or situation.
Nobody really likes feeling their own shame. We often aren’t aware that it underlies our negative emotions or illogical decisions. It’s an isolating feeling, so is it any wonder we take a perverse pleasure in hearing about others’ experiences of it? At least then we know we’re not alone.
Guilt, shame, and blame
Sometimes we make out like guilt and shame are the same thing, but according to Scientific American and Psychology Today, they’re not.
Guilt is something we feel after committing an action we know is harmful. It’s linked to empathy. Psychopaths don’t feel it. Guilt has a societal function - keeping community going by preventing us from being total assholes to each other - and can be a helpful motivator to change our behaviour.
Shame is something we feel about who we are. It’s correlated with depression and leads to self punishment - or denial.
A guilty person might feel bad that they ate half of Shellie’s chocolates without telling her, because it’s wrong to steal, and now Shellie’s got less chocolates. They might buy Shellie more chocolates to make up for it. (This is not based on a real situation from my life at all. I’m sorry, Shellie.)
A person feeling shame might think, “I’m a greedy, lazy, gluttonous person. Shellie isn’t going to want to be my friend now. Why would she? I’m disgusting.” They might also be more likely to keep their chocolate-stealing a secret.
Kenneth Walker, the author of I Used to be a Narcissist, believes that unresolved shame is at the root of cluster B personality disorders such as Narcissism.
“Shame…unlike guilt…expresses the agony of a chronic personal fault rather than the wrongdoing…
Recent neurobiological studies have demonstrated that (an) intense experience of shame (at the age when socialisation begins) is not yet ready for the developing brain to process…the absence of an emotionally aware parent at this crucial time can stunt - for life - the growth of the pathways for regulating such profoundly unpleasant emotions.”
Walker describes some scenarios where parents crush a child’s sense of joy with a shaming response. This reminded me of the way Donald Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, described Trump’s father’s behaviour in her memoir Too Much and Never Enough. Trump’s older brother was ridiculed and ostracised from the family after refusing to follow in his father’s business footsteps.
As The Guardian puts it:
“Mary Trump describes Fred Trump as a “high-functioning sociopath”…that Donald Trump’s character was formed by watching the traumas inflicted on and suffered by his older brother.”
Donald, seeing what had been done to his older brother after he refused to follow in his father’s footsteps, decided to avoid the humiliation and shame his brother was treated to. Instead of facing the source of his shame, he decided to become a worse version of his dad. It could be argued that growing up trying to avoid regular inflictions of shame turned ol’ President Dump into one of the world’s most prominent narcissists.
If you’ve ever met a real narcissist, you’ll understand how selfish they are, how brittle they are under criticism, how often they lie to paint themselves as grandiose, and how unwilling - and eventually unable - they are to admit they’re ever wrong. To face their own shame. And most people who chronically act badly have at least a streak of narcissism in them.
I find it curious that shame isn’t always tied to our own actions. When someone does something bad to someone else - for example, in cases of abuse, narcissistic gaslighting or sexual assault —sometimes the victims are the only ones who feel ashamed. It feels like there’s something wrong with them, like somehow they must have drawn that treatment to themselves. What’s up with that?
It seems to occur especially when the perpetrator doesn’t act ashamed or guilty themselves. Since the person who did the shameful act isn’t feeling it, do victims take on their secondhand shame?
There’s a much bigger minefield here I’m going to gloss over, about victim blaming and abuser manipulation. About why perpetrators of sexual assault often feel pride instead of shame by their own admission (it’s more shameful to be ‘un-masculine’ than to be a disgusting abuser, apparently).
I just think it’s interesting that shame can function via bypass. And it can really stick around. People who’ve experienced secondhand shame are likely to continue to feel bad about themselves throughout their lives, even though they weren’t even the ones who did something horrible - something horrible was done to them. It’s odd that an emotion can function like that.
No wonder societal shame exists.
Original Sin
Our cultural inheritance in the West is pretty Christianity-based. Atonement was private, or perhaps sequestered in a booth with a priest. We especially found sex outside of marriage shameful - in fact, sex in and of itself seems the thing we feel the strongest shame about.
The ‘original sin’ in the Bible, after all, was imbibing the knowledge that we’re naked and that’s bad. This manufactured a sense of guilt about sex, which I’m not sure we would feel if we hadn’t had religious institutions drilling it into us for millennia.
We shuttled unwed mothers to hidey-homes and pretended anything outside the ‘standard norm’, such as homosexuality, didn’t exist. My grandmother was pretty embarrassed by the fact that my mother was single and unwed, for example, and that was only in the late 80s. (Yes, she was a Catholic.) That shame is still hanging around in society, even now.
As Michel Foucalt put it in A History of Sexuality, “The image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality.” He linked sexual taboos not to something inherent within our humanity, but to power systems imposing them on us: “Are prohibition, censorship, and denial…the forms through which power is exercised in a general way?”
There are obviously certain sexual taboos that are unethical and thus justified, but in a general sense, I agree with Foucalt. Some of the things we feel shame about are silly. Sex in and of itself, between two consenting and enthusiastic adults, is not a ‘crime’ to feel guilty about. The world has convinced us that it is, because a population distracted by its own personal transgressions is less likely to care about the genuinely shameful acts of systems of power.
Some non-Western cultures embrace public, collective shaming and atonement for crimes. In Aceh, Indonesia,
“Shame has a social function…Public punishment has long been practised according to adat (customary law), which is designed to allow the community to manage transgressions, while ensuring the reintegration of rule breakers...reintegration is possible because the punishment is finite and locally witnessed…Shame is experienced collectively: by the individual, their family and the broader community.”
It sounds as though, when guilt is dealt with in a group, shame dissipates more easily.
The West (and many other cultures) have just been very…private and prudish about shame for a long time. We’ve internalised a belief that shame is personal, and localised to individuals. Perhaps that’s why shame hits so deeply. It’s harder dealing with something alone than with others’ support.
We were trying to break out of our shame about sex for a while - remember the sixties? Free love, and all that - but the pendulum seems to have swung backwards lately.
There are many now who are calling for a reinstatement of shame around our sexual identities. And they’re getting really loud. A wave of conservatism in America (propelled by Christians) wants a return to taboos on sex positivity, abortions, being LGBTQIA+, being trans - and even on divorce.
You’d think we’d have moved past all this, but the right wants us to turn back the clock to a ‘less shameful’ time of sexual repression.
In addition, to quote myself from earlier, sometimes we rebel against what’s made us feel shame, as a method of regaining control. I see this happening with issues that we, until recently, faced our guilt about and accepted collective responsibility to improve. Environmentalism, sexism and racism come to mind.
At a Virginia school meeting in 2021, for example, parents screamed “Shame on you!” because they thought their children's school was teaching them critical race theory. (Critical race theory, by the way, was not even being taught at this school. Lol.)
But if it was - why would it be shameful to teach children about the shameful acts society has committed in the past? Isn’t it much more shameful to want to hide them - to refer to, for example, African slaves in textbooks as ‘immigrants’ and ‘workers’, or to the reason behind the American Civil War as ‘states rights’ - than to teach future generations history with a truthful, compassionate lens? Lest it…repeat itself?
In tandem to that, there are majority factions rebelling against cultural guilt. Look at America’s current jingoistic rhetoric. Look at worldwide support for deeply misogynistic blowhards like Andrew Tate. Look at Australia’s recent vote of ‘NO’ to give its indigenous population a voice in parliament, a move called ‘unbelievable and appalling’ by the PR firm for the Uluru Dialogue. Look at Germany’s recent embrace of far-right politics.
Apparently, we’re sick of feeling ashamed about things like the Holocaust and slavery, sick of accepting people with different gender expressions to us, sick of condemning authoritarian despots. We want to forget the violence this line of thought has caused in the past. We’re ‘done with shame’.
Never again, indeed.
I say we should feel shame about dehumanising others. That is something we instinctively feel guilty about, because it is morally wrong. Collectively keeping that shame alive illuminates the cruel and fearful elements of our human nature. We should feel that shame, continually, and let it fuel us to become better.
Our efforts to escape shame often lead, ironically, to shameful acts.
Shamesploitation
In the 60s and 70s, exploitation films became popular. Violence, nudity, abuse and gore - sometimes all at the same time - were something we got a kick out of watching.
My take on this is, ‘I’m glad it’s you and not me.’ We can’t help comparing ourselves to others, and if we come off ‘the better’, that’s a satisfying slurp of entertainment. It’s a ‘guilty pleasure’.
These days, we love reality TV. Adults, children, whatever, give it to us. We love to laugh at videos of people losing their dignity in slapstick misfortune. We love true crime. And we especially love porn.
I’d even go so far as to wonder if porn is a form of (s)exploitation cinema. Why do people (mostly men) love watching porn so much? Yeah, it stimulates the visual cortex, which is connected to our brains’ reward systems. And yeah, mirror neurons activate when we see others performing actions, making us partly feel we’re participating in the activity. Yeah, some men just love subjugating women. But maybe part of why porn titillates is because women ‘shouldn’t’ be doing the things in those videos. At least, according to polite society.
The act of being filmed while committing sexual deeds is in itself taboo; in a post-Eden world, being publicly naked and sexual is still not something our society expects a ‘good’ girl to do. It’s ‘shameful’, an act we’d expect her to feel embarrassed about. Does shame get us hot? Is that partly why porn turns so many people on, when it’s widely known that it’s physically and emotionally damaging to most career performers? Maybe they deserve that, whisper the hidden voices in viewer’s minds. They signed up for it.
I have encountered droves of men online scornfully insulting women for having OnlyFans accounts - when they’re predominately the ones who’ve made OnlyFans so successful. They’re the ones who keep throwing money at these creators. They make up 71% of users!
Sometimes our desire to assuage our own shame can lead to committing shameful acts. Exploiting other’s ‘shame’ for our own pleasure is, I’d argue, something we could also benefit from feeling a bit guiltier about. And if we’re going to do it, we should at least be kind to the people we’re knowingly exploiting.
Goodbye, shame brick road
When it comes to the shame I’ve felt in my own life, the only healing potion I’ve found is honesty. It’s the antidote to shame. If you can combine that honesty with a dollop of laughter, all the better.
It makes sense, then, that one of the acts we tend to feel the most shame about is lying. We usually lie to avoid disclosing something shameful that we’ve done - but, then, we trap ourselves, because admitting to our lies feels even more shameful. Because telling someone an untruth is a shameful act.
I love watching stories about webs of lies. I loved I Love That For You (a hilarious show about a woman lying on national TV about having cancer). I loved the book Yellowface and the podcast Scamanda. I loved Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix - a true crime drama about an influencer who also lied about having cancer. I can’t resist stories about making up serious things; hey, at least I never did that!
It proves as a sobering reminder to me that I could have grown up to be a person like that, though - had I not had the profound experience of facing my own low self-esteem at age sixteen.
I started to lie a lot at about thirteen. Mostly, my own life just seemed boring, not as interesting as other people’s, or the teens’ I saw on TV. So I made up a funner life for myself and lied about it to my friends. My lies were silly and avoidable - but it was much more exciting to say I was at a party on the weekend, instead of whatever I was really doing (likely writing poems, reading, or dusting off my mineral collection).
I eventually told my friends about my lies after school was over, after a ‘dark night of the soul’. I decided to be honest with them. They didn’t un-friend me, they just laughed. And laughed. And then I laughed, too. “But WHY did you do that?” I remember one friend asking in bewilderment. The answer, I think, is that I’d felt there was something shameful about myself, something I had to conceal. I felt too naked just being myself. Lying was my fig leaf.
When I watch those cringeworthy scammer shows, it’s a reminder for me of how it feels to get lost in a world of one’s own creation, and how difficult it is to dig oneself out of it. I relate to those poor, stupid scammers. They may know the things they’re receiving admiration for aren’t true, but, as I recall, that unearned admiration can still feel good in the moment.
Yet honesty, if chosen wholeheartedly, is rarely as bad as it feels like it’s going to be. It will lead to self-awareness. It will heal you from shame. It will connect you with others, because good people sense when you’re being real (and have likely committed some shameful acts themselves).
Honesty will set you free.
(Unless you’re confessing to a crime. Probably going to jail, then. But with less shame!)
So here I conclude, having written a piece about how I don’t want to be expected to spill embarrassing secrets. A piece in which I ended up spilling embarrassing secrets, anyway.
Face your shame, you disgusting little freak, and if it’s ever bogging you down, you know what to do. Bring that dark mass into the light of your consciousness. Have a laugh. Remember that others feel it too.
Just please don’t let it turn you into a person who does bad things to others.
A timely article, well written. I have some unorganised and half-constructed thoughts on Shame as a useful tool in support of societal cohesion, insofar as curtailing the alienation we experience in the modern social setting. A boss in the office feels no shame firing the worker and making them destitute because there are layers of bureaucracy acting as a shield. The consumer of fast fashion feels no shame because the makers of their garments are far away and the abuse they suffer is obfuscated by corporate PR campaigns. The billionaire feels no shame in exploiting the labour of others to amass a fortune unfathomable to you and I because they are raised in a system where wealth and power are positive attributes unto themselves, instead of a shameful and abhorrent moral disease.
A new application of Shame would do us well. Not to punish and ostracise those that make choices about how they look, how they live or how they love, but to bring shame upon those that do a social and moral harm; that seek to disrupt community cohesion. In my humble opinion, seeking and holding power over others is a moral failing, and deserves to be shamed.
Literally this could make it as a published article in any print or online publication - you write so SO well. Your posts are always so full of insight and relatability that it’s impossible to not enjoy reading it! 💖